 In many parts of the country, where urban development have encroached upon the wildland areas, we have a long history of working with neighboring agencies and local cooperators during our fire responses. In other parts of the country, we're still building these relationships. This last fire season marked the 10-year anniversary of a tragic fire that took the lives of two volunteer firefighters near Cuna, Idaho, just outside of Boise. When the 1995 Point Fire started, resources from the local volunteer fire department and federal agencies responded. Tragedy struck when one of the volunteer engines left the fire line and became disabled in front of the fire in green flashy fuels. Winds increased in the fire escape containment lines and eventually burned over the disabled engine. Both the victims were found inside the cab of their engine. The Point Fire was significant because it solidified the need for, among other things, mutual aid agreements, outlining incident command and control procedures, and communications between interagency cooperators. To hear about how this incident changed the way we do business, we talked to Mike Ellsworth from the BLM Boise district. In the past, most of the fires in the Boise foothills because of all the agencies going together and converging at the same time, usually resources were engaging at different aspects of the fire. When the IC and Unified Command became established, their biggest headaches were getting the span of control and accountability for all the resources that were on scene. By setting up a staging area, now the ICs and operations can hold the pulse of the fire and determine when those resources are going and have accountability for them after the resources get the proper briefing, the frequencies, and their assignments. It's been a process of getting together with the local cooperators. We've developed an Aida County Steering Committee where all agencies are represented. The North Aida County Fire Department, Boise City, Eagle, and all federal agencies and state agencies are represented. Through the Aida County Steering Committee, we've been able to develop the frequency plan, get together each year, and we do cross-training where we do, whether it's scenario-based, using sand tables. We've actually utilized this fire particularly for staff rides where the local agencies come out with us, and we go through lessons learned for all these. But the biggest thing is just getting people in the same room and learning what each other can do, having to face with the cooperators, and just getting to know each other and what the capabilities are, as long with the limitations for each other. One of the best things we've been able to draw out of the Aida County Steering Committee is the pre-programmed frequency plan. And what that's been able to let us do is when we arrive on scene, it doesn't matter if you're a city, county, state, or federal agency, Channel 10, for example, is Channel 10 throughout. Instead of arriving on scene and trying to program your radio, it's already established. So everyone has a common knowledge of what that specific channel is. The aftermath of the Point Fire revealed the necessity for interagency cooperation, mutual aid agreements, operational plans in the wildland urban interface areas, training and qualification standards for rural fire departments, unified command structures, and common communication channels. All of these items can and should be reviewed on an annual basis in your local areas pre-planning efforts. Fortunately, many of the lessons learned from the Point Fire have not been lost. In the last 10 years, tremendous efforts have been made to bring together federal, state, and local cooperators and pre-plan for wildland fire incidents in wildland urban interface areas. Emergency response plans, cross-training, and common radio frequency communication plans continue to be established in all parts of the country. This last year, we talked to some folks in Wisconsin that have extensive knowledge and experience in pre-planning. In a previous module, we mentioned that they have mapped out their jurisdiction into zones to help alleviate some possible problems they might encounter on an interagency response. They've also worked out a system which enables them to mobilize a fully functioning interagency type 2 incident management team in under two hours. Let's listen as they explain their zone concept and how it works during incident management operations. The project class type players, the expectation or what we try to accomplish is to have a type 2 team up and running within two hours to help organize and manage the incident from a large magnitude of resources, both being LE, structural protection, and wildland protection resources, utilizing air resources as well. Rough season, obviously non-fire type season, winter time conditions. We are doing extensive amount of training within the local communities as well as exercising what we have as our incident management teams. We promote that aspect and the communication is critical, obviously, in any large organization, and we pre-plan the communication plan and the communications, how we're going to notify people and how is that going to all come together when the time is needed. When those conditions exist and we kind of give an all call type scenario that we may put it out on the local county dispatch offices that the conditions are right for a large scale fire that tunes up our local fire departments, our law enforcement officials that conditions will be right so if we do get a fire in the right place, right time, the expectation is that it's going to be an all agency type fire. I would explain the zone concept as we use it here in Wisconsin, because it's basically a pre-determined geographical area cluster of structures that has been pre-mapped, tallied on how many structures it's been named with a unique name convention. And the idea is that very similar to like a division concept, it's a geographical place on the ground, a group of structures that in the event of a forest fire we would expect that structural protection would be occurring in that zone. It's a way and a means to communicate and be able to organize our volunteer firefighters to be able to provide structural protection. Everybody has those maps from the wildland firefighting resources to the volunteer fire departments, our law enforcement services also have those maps. The maps were designed with the idea that they would be able to be used as an all risk type of tool. It's primarily a communication device, it's a pre-planned effort to be able to group structures because we have so many structures that in the first hour a person would be overwhelmed without having this pre-determined organizational tool. And with the idea of trying to keep communication as concise and clear as possible, we've designed the zones to meet that objective so that now all we need to do is say you need to go to this particular zone with its unique name, identify somebody that would be the supervisor of that zone and allocate resources to that supervisor. And through the process of training, we have a zone supervisor training package that we would have done beforehand for that individual that would have been named the zone supervisor. They would have the idea and understanding what their objectives and what their duties are to fulfill in that zone in a wildland fire environment. Additionally on the map, the structure maps we call them, our incident command posts are posted on there, water sites are posted on there and also the quality of site. If it's an A site means that they can pull right up to the water and fill two or three trucks at a time right off the road, whereas a C site would be something where you might have to put a portable pump in and maybe fill up one. So the fire departments play a big role in the overall fire program, but especially when we get to a larger fire where the urban interface is a big problem. To take a closer look at your own local areas efforts in pre-planning with cooperators, let's get into your groups and complete the next exercise in the student workbook.