 In this module, we are going to turn the floor over to Scott Anderson. Scott was a smoke jumper for 20 years and now works for the NWCG training unit as a project leader. Scott recently looked into evaluating the effectiveness of safety zones. Always know what your next safety zone will look like. The objective of this unit is to help you develop an intuitive system to always have a safety zone and a plan to use it. Even before you arrive on your fire, you need to visualize the first safety zone you'll look for. How can you do this? And how do you find it once you have formed a mental image of it? Once you have identified a safety zone, how do you develop a plan for its use? It's important to realize how quickly you must be able to do this. As fire increases in intensity, how do assessments of your safety zones evolve? Are you still satisfied with your initial choice? How do you develop a picture of a safety zone before you see it? For those of you with operational backgrounds, compare it with the way you anticipate your tactical plans. Remember, there are three types of safety zones. The black, natural, and man-made. Let's review the safety zone guidelines in the Incident Response Pocket Guide, or IRPG. Get out your IRPGs or find the guidelines in the student workbook. Avoid locations that are downwind from the fire. Avoid locations that are in chimneys, saddles, or narrow canyons. Avoid locations that require a steep uphill escape route. Take advantage of heat barriers such as leaf side of ridges, large rocks, or solid structures. Burnout safety zones prior to flame front approach. For radiant heat only, the distance must be maintained on all sides if the fire has the ability to burn completely around the safety zone. Convective heat from wind and or terrain influences will increase this distance requirement. Can you see how much fire behavior factors into your picture of a safety zone? Next, collect as much situational awareness about the area as possible. Things like fuel types, fire behavior, typical weather patterns, weather forecasts, topography, and where you are in the historical fire behavior graphs. I'm certain you can think of others. Finally, take these inputs and apply them to the safety zone guidelines along with the time of day, and you should have a pretty accurate picture of what you are looking for. Now, how do you find it? A good pilot will always scan the terrain below for a landing area in the event of an engine failure. Firefighters should take a similar approach and include safety zones in their scan of the area. You should have a safe place to go at all times on a fire. This can be especially challenging if you are a single resource firefighter on the move or you are rapidly digging hotline on initial attack. This means that you must include it as a hazard control in your risk management process. How do you determine when you should go to your safety zone? Do you want to let the fire chase you into your safety zone or do you have a plan for its use? Do you establish a trigger point? For example, if the fire crosses the ridge above us on the right flank, we go to the safety zone. As the fire increases in intensity, how do assessments of your safety zones evolve? Are you still satisfied with your choice? Remember that the parameters for your safety zones will change as the conditions on your fire change. As the day progresses and the fire intensity increases, what is now a safety zone may become a deployment zone. This is why a constant scan of your environment is critical. What about escape routes to your safety zone? Do you time it? Or as some have suggested, be certain that you can always throw a rock into a safety zone. The recognition of safety zones needs to become intuitive. At first you'll be reliant on the formula provided in the IRPG. However, the more you practice selecting safety zones, the more automatic or intuitive it will become. Now it's time to practice what we've been talking about. I'm going to brief you on conditions for a simulated dispatch. Based on the conditions that I describe and the picture that you are seeing of the train and fuel type, you will be expected to form an image of your next safety zone. We'll do a flyover and show you locations of possible safety zones along with stills of them. You will then rate these safety zones by giving them a grade of A, B, C, D, or F. It is August 10th, the time is 1100. The fuel type is grass and sage brush transitioning into mixed conifer. The temperature is currently 89 degrees, relative humidity is 28%. Winds are 8 to 10 miles an hour. The forecast calls for highs in the upper 90s and relative humidities in the high teens. There is a possibility of afternoon thunderstorms with gusty winds. Now pay close attention and be ready to grade the safety zones. Safety zone 1, safety zone 2, safety zone 3, safety zone 4, safety zone 5, safety zone 6. We will now develop a plan for the use of safety zone number 3 utilizing trigger points, step 1. As we are flying over, each of you needs to check the elements of the safety zone guidelines in the IRPG to determine how it applies. Step 2. At the conclusion of this flyover, you will break into groups and develop a plan for its use. Your facilitator will then randomly select one of you from each group to communicate the plan in the form of instructions to the class. Thank you.