 The standard firefighting orders, the watch-out situations and LCEs are only a fraction of the fire line references available to us when we're making fire line decisions. In this module, we're going to take a closer look at the difficult task of taking all our rules, regulations and guidelines and molding them into a workable thought process out on the fire line. To do this, we talk to Dr. Patrick Withen. Dr. Withen is a 23-year firefighting veteran. He's currently a McCall smokejumper and is also an associate professor of sociology at the University of Virginia. Dr. Withen has done extensive research on both fire crew dynamics and fire line decision making. We're going to give him the stage for about seven minutes and let him share with you the system that he developed to pull all these references together. He calls them the 10 essential factors in firefighting. As Dr. Withen goes through his explanation, feel free to refer to the material in this module section of your student workbook. Last count, there is 162 fire line regulations, not including the action items from 30 mile or Kramer fire. Of course, the most important ones for these are the 10 and 18 and LCEs. These are the ones that most people follow. I believe that each firefighter basically takes some conglomeration of each of those fire line rules and uses it in their own unique way. What I've done is take the 69 most used fire line regulations, which is the 10 and 18 LCEs, downhill line construction rules, the common denominators and look up, look down and look around and I've consolidated them into what I call the 10 essential factors in wildland firefighting and I've placed them on a small card like this. The 10 essential factors are, and they should be very familiar to you, lookouts, communications, escape routes, safety zones, weather, terrain, fire behavior, firefighting resources, fire status and fuel type. I've placed the 10 factors down one side of the card and then along the side I have what I call a trans matrix and what a firefighter can do is mark on here where they're starting each shifts. Do I have lookouts in place and then you ask yourself, well how good are these lookouts on a 1 to 10 scale, how would I rate them? Are they going to be able to see all the fire all day long or not or are they just kind of a dicey lookout and you can go through each of these factors and rate where they are on a scale of 1 to 10, you know, how good is my safety zone? Hopefully you're somewhere in the middle here in five, it should be an adequate safety zone but this really forces you to analyze it. Yes, is this a safety zone given the expected fire behavior and then I can go yes, you know, right there in the middle of the matrix but if I get greater than expected fire behavior well then maybe I have to go, it's a poor safety zone but still adequate but the point of the trans analysis is number one to make you assess where you actually are on each of these factors on a scale and then the second feature of the trans analysis is to allow you to track the trends as you go on through the day, you know, how is my safety zone now? We know that in many fire situations you'll be working farther away from the safety zone. Well if you're tracking it on here, this will just be a tickler to go, you know, maybe I am too far away from there and what I really like about this trans analysis is it does not give you any one single factor that you'll focus on, it will give you a whole list of things to look at and so you can see where you're at, maybe I'm very good on three of them but all of a sudden I realize that I've kicked up into the extreme zone on four of them so now how comfortable am I using the tactics that I have been using all day? Do I want to switch tactics? And so the third part of the card takes fire line suppression tactics and asks people to try and match those up to the rules, the essential factors of firefighting and to where they think they are in a situational analysis on their trends. Are they doing good or bad as far as a fire behavior goes, terrain, safety zones, etc. And so if those are matched up with tactics then you can go with one of three levels of tactics, are you at the level of full engagement, are you at a level of modified engagement or are you at some level of disengagement. This is a new way of looking at fire line tactics as far as being in attack or retreat and we need to get away from the idea that disengagement or retreat is somehow a negative kind of thing. There are many tactics that we can use to fight a fire that can be very useful for us but are slightly more safe than other tactics that I have before. We should know that direct fire line construction is safer than indirect fire line construction. And so if I can do that, that's what I would always prefer to do. One thing you can, another thing you can do that I have in disengagement is to just try and hold your line closer to the safety zone. So you're going to make sure you're closer to the safety zone. A third tactic that you can use that's less than full engagement is just to consolidate your forces. But the main point of the card is to try and bring out the critical rules that we need to follow, match those to a trends or situational analysis and then match those to tactics. The feedback that I've gotten on the 10 essential factors is that first off people go, gee, I don't need another card. They already feel overwhelmed with rules. Maybe it won't be that useful to a seasoned firefighter because as I said, I think they already have their tools. They've learned all those rules and they know what works for them in situations and so they've pulled out some things that they focus on. For new firefighters, I hope they will find it useful that it is a way to consolidate and organize all these rules because right now we just get these single, like bricks, okay, here's the 10 and we'll focus on that and then, oh, there's the common denominators and they'll have another course on that. But to really bring it all together I think is a challenge for the new firefighter. You have to appreciate the time and effort Dr. Withen put into consolidating the various guidelines that we have at our disposal. For those of you that have noticed, when he consolidated those various references, he was using the old fire orders instead of the standard orders. He's currently updating his paper and you can obtain a current version through the website in the back of your student workbook. As he stated, the TEF card may not be the tool of choice for all of us, but it does have merit and it should be looked at closely. It also forces us to look at how we currently do business and help us identify our own analysis and decision-making processes. Do we strictly adhere to the analytical process in the standard firefighting orders, as John Krebs described to us in the previous module, or do each of us have a unique way of drawing what we need from all the rules and guidelines when we're making fire line decisions? Dr. Gary Klein, a psychologist who's done a lot of research on decision-making, talks about RPD, or Recognition Prime Decision Making, where decision-makers will compare their current situation to previous experiences that were similar and then make decisions based on their memory of the outcomes of those past experiences. To explore your own decision-making process further, let's get into our groups and complete the exercise in your student workbook.