 This section was written and produced by the Lessons Learn Center. It contains an interview with an inmate hand crew superintendent who was forced to deploy his fire shelter on the Tarquio fire, which was part of the I-90 complex in Montana. On August 10, 2005, Mike Friend was functioning as a dozer boss when fire behavior increased and the order on his division was to back off to the safety zone. As everyone else made their way quickly, Mike caravanned with a slow-moving dozer. Before he could reach the safety zone, his escape route was compromised and they parked the dozer in the safest spot available. Although there were no injuries, let's listen to Mike explain the lessons he learned from this experience. Fighting fire is dangerous. It's gonna be dangerous. No matter what happens, no matter what we do in the world, from the moment that you step off of a piece of equipment and you put a tool in your hand or a hose in your hand or whatever, you step off that piece of equipment and you go to fight that beast, it's a dangerous job. People are gonna get hurt. I don't care what fire environment that you're in. You're dragging a hose laying into a burning building or I'm taking a shovel and throwing some dirt on a piece of sagebrush. Our job is inherently dangerous going to always be dangerous. There are risks that are gonna be taking. No matter how many thousands of checklists that are thrown at us, we still have a job to do. We still have to go out there and cut the brush and drag the hose and put the fire out and it's still gotta be done that way, regardless if you have 100 checklists or not. It's still going to be dangerous. Open your mind. I use that as a stressful situation, you know? Another stressful situation in my life was I was in the first Gulf War and if you ever hear an air raid siren goes off it makes your asshole slam shut, I'm gonna let you know. And the first night the air raid siren went off and oh my God, that's incoming to kill me. That's all I thought. And I looked through that tunnel like this and all 20 of us in the same tent did. We saw the same tunnel and all we could think about was that bunker right there. Well, in the process of us all trying to rush into the bunker my best friend got trampled because everybody was trying to go out the same door. He got trampled, got his arm broken in about 14 different places and crushed all of the fingers on his hands. And that point in my life, along with this Tarkio, I just said, whoa, life changing situations for me. Those two situations, life changing. Wow, you need to open your eyes when you get stressed. And I've made myself, made myself. When I start getting to, I know myself at that point, I just know, because of my two, I've attributed it to two situations, Tarkio and then the Gulf War, hey, you need to calm down, dude. You need to open your eyes and not let this happen again. All of a sudden we all felt the wind and I distinctly remember all of us, hey, look, there was this wind coming up and it was up canyon, it was coming right at us. It was like, somebody turned a light switch on at that point and that spot fire came active. I can still vividly remember sustained crown run fire just sheeting across the top of this mountain. Well, the column lifted all right and we started looking around and down drainage of us. We watched it basically start and in a minute, two minutes max, that thing was five acres and it was just spreading out through the pine litter actively as it spread out through the pine litter right behind the flaming front, the trees were torching up and it was starting to sustain group torching and it was going. We had spots all around us, hey, let's go. I remember division saying, let's go. I remember ops saying, let's go. We bug out. There's fire behind us now. It's moving. As we made that turn, I got a call from Robert Barrett and he asked me, he said, Mike, where are you at? I said, I'm below the alternate escape route. I'm at that big first hairpin turn and he said, well, you can't come to the upper safety zone because I just drove through fire to get here. He said, I advise that you use the alternate escape route. So we got to that intersection of the switchback roads and the alternate escape route and we waited on our dozer again. As we're sitting at this intersection, if you will, we're facing south. The dozer operator standing by my door. I'm sitting in the passenger seat, John's driving and I'm looking up the windshield in the direction. I'm looking at the map and seeing where this alternate escape route goes and here's division delta and there's a nuclear column coming off of division delta also and there's a nuclear column behind us. So I said, you know, we both looked at each, John Hubbard and I looked at each other and said, ooh, wait a minute, wait a minute. Never been on this, don't know what it's like. Air attack couldn't see it there. Too smoky. So I call operations. I said, do we have anybody that is on that alternate escape route that can tell me what it's like? Is it compromised? Because there's a big column coming off of delta. I told friend that he was definitely cut off. And I said, hey, you got the alternate escape route. Copy that. We'd identified it ahead of time. You know where it's at? Yep, got it. And heading there. He's heading there. Minutes later, division gets word that that might be compromised. Relays that to those are boss friend. He's not happy. I'm not going down an escape route that might be compromised. There's 20 miles of winding dirt road. And I'm building a safety zone. I'm like, you got a spot? Yep. We got a spot. We looked that on the way up. And I'm like, go for it. And that was it. Kind of a sinking feeling. Couple of sinking feelings for me. Feeling pretty responsible for these guys. We got a bomber safety zone. This is a good one. Okay. I trusted the guy. He's pretty darn sharp. And he did. He made a good, quick decision there. There was no hesitation. He'd already scoped out of place on his own and went right to it. So our primary up the canyon where the spot fire was at's gone. Our secondary to the safety route, the safety zone that I had punched in the day, actually two days before, was done. And our alternate's done. Come on, Dick. Step into it. Let's get to a spot that I'd found myself and John Hubbard had identified the day before. A parking area is what I really looked at it for, because I was thinking about the fire each day, jumping each our line. So we're going to start stacking engines in here. It's one way to switch back roads. Let's make a little parking area if we need to. There was a good spot just to park engines there without doing any work. When we determined that we couldn't take the alternate escape route, that we were pickled, if you will, we really weren't worried at that point. But John and I looked at him and I said, right there at the knife point at the first switch back, so we'd take that dozer and I'll knock that line of trees out, push it off the side, and that's going to make a huge safety zone. And he looked at me and I could see, yeah, that is a good spot. Let's go. The fire was coming up canyon at us, but it was still going up canyon, but it was burning up drainage. It would shoot up the drainage, crest over the little ridge line, back down, it'd get established in the drainage bottom and it'd shoot back up. And that's kind of what it was doing. It'd just roll a little bit and then make a big run uphill. I can remember hearing it get established in that bottom of that drainage in the Mote Creek. It just, everything changed. It just came to life. All of its energy focused right in the bottom of that drainage and it came to life. Another huge column come up. It just went massive. Don and I talked about burning. We talked about, hey, let's get some fire going on the ground here. We dismissed that really quick after we thought, no, no, no, we're not going to light. At that point, we were standing at the edge of the safety zone. We talked our thoughts where if we don't want to light any fire down here, get something really hot and ripping and draw that fire that's on top of us down. So we dismissed that. We don't, no, no, let's not mess with anything on that. Let's just see. We got a good safety zone. We reassured ourselves. We got a good safety zone. It's going to be cool. We moved the pickup around to right where the front of the dozer and where the pickup was parked before we had all of our gear in the back of our truck, every bit of thing, everything I owned for fighting fire. That went away on single resource stuff. It was my red bag, my tent, my cell phone, my camera, my towels, the underwear, everything, everything, everything, everything. We threw it out of the back, cordura burns. How many times I've heard people, yeah, my bag burned up in the back of the truck and that mindset got to save the equipment, throw everything out. So we threw everything out of the back of the pickup. We threw it out on the ground at the far back edge of the safety zone. Then we pulled the pickup right in front of the dozer plate. So the rear of the dozer was pointing to the south, if you will. We pulled them together like this and we kind of flitted around and we started getting buffers of fire coming in on us. Little stuff, animals running through the safety zone. We had a couple of bears run through. We had a deer run through. We had some raccoons, a saucekunk run through. They're all coming out of that riparian, the exclusion zone and that Namoti Creek and it was getting closer, it was getting closer. I was getting a little nervous. I know everybody was too. It was getting hot. The winds were howling. They were coming in on us as fire was eating. It was close enough to know we weren't feeling the end drafts anymore from it. We were just feeling the erratic fire winds off of it and living in a convicted column of fuel. We were within the winds of a convicted column. Division got on a radar and said, well, I'm going to order up a Type 3 helicopter to fly in and land you because I think you could land them there. I told them no. You're not bringing a Type 3 in here because now we're going to have an aircraft mishap. I mean, my thoughts were you got the smoke. I've second guessed myself about bringing in a helicopter and again, the smoke, the fire conditions, where do I put the equipment? If I had to pull the equipment to get out of the way to get that Type 3 helicopter to land on an uneven surface, I don't know if I could have brought a Type 3 in there in those conditions. We all kind of pulled into the front of the dozer. All three of us did. We pulled all our gear out. I had pulled my IAPAC out, thrown it down. We'd taken a case of water, put it right there, thrown our packs right against the edge of the dozer blade. And it was loud. I remember it was extremely loud at that point because the fire that was below us was just thunder and it was jet aircraft on the tarmac screaming. I remember seeing just a big wall of fire hit the edge of our safety zone. I ducked down and looked up. It's just, it's sheeted. The sheet of fire just cascaded over the top of us and it can still hear it to this day. But boy, right after that, that radiant heat hit us. And it was just like, yow! And it was to the point of, it wasn't really, really wasn't skin-serene hot. I don't know what skin-serene hot is, but I can imagine. But it was hot like you're doing a burnout and in the middle of the day, you're burning out and oh, I gotta get away from that and you just back off a little bit, but we had nowhere to back off to and the winds just really hit us at that point. I was actually one to say, hey, it's time, let's deploy our shelters. It was getting hot. I was on my knees behind the dozer blade and my back was just really, really hot like that. Hot, I can't get away from. If I was out on the line or something, I would just turn my body and walk away from it. I couldn't. I had nowhere to go. I was pinned to the ground. I was on my hands and knees and my back was just arched up. I remember it was hot. It was getting real warm. I remember to the point I could smell my Nomex. I've been doing this long enough now. I know when I smelled my Nomex starting to heat up, you could smell when it's warm and that's where I was at. I was warm. And at that point, well, three deployed our shelters. In the shelter, I remember it getting hot like sauna hot, if you will. I remember the air temperature getting, it just sauna hot. I remember I got into it and thinking of what you do now, thinking of training, made sure all my ground flaps were down and the new shelters, we can't not have a ground flap down there. It's almost like encapsulated, if you will, compared to the old ones. Got in it and spread out. We were talking and yelling, we were yelling back and forth with each other. We were right next to laying on top of each other, but yet it was loud. And it was starting to get some smoke. And I was talking, I'm really smoky in here, real smoky. And I think John said, I'm not too smoky, it's not too bad or something. And I couldn't figure out why I was so smoky. For some reason I did this, I looked and there were embers that were blowing underneath. The wind was howling. Embers were blowing in underneath my ground flap. So I was actually putting embers out that were inside. And that's what was creating all the smoke inside my shelter, was burning chunks of wood that were just smoldering in there and just filling it up. And I remember putting those out and shooting them to the side. Layed in the shelter, did the old, actually put the face down in the dirt. I was breathing like this for a few because of the smoke that was in there and not wanting to lift it up. You know, thinking about all that stuff. And I remember my back getting hot again. My back and my right shoulder really is what it was. So what I had to do to accommodate that, I had to get on my left side and actually had to pull my feet in in kind of the semi-fetal position. And I had to pop the shelter off my back with my elbow. And my elbow would get hot and I'd pull it down and the shelter would lay back on me and I'd pop it back up. And that actually seemed like an eternity. It really did. It seemed like a long time but it wasn't. I remember John saying, hey, the truck's burning. I peeked, I looked and I was laying with my back to the truck. So I didn't want to move because I had that shelter that kept laying down on top of me and was getting hot. And John says, I can look at it. The rear tires are burning on it. I was like, oh no. I'm thinking I'm not in a good spot right here. John got up, he said I'm going to get up and see if I can put it out real quick. He says, my shelter, I watched the heat and he says, no, I've already had my shelter. Lift your flap up, it gets cooler. I went, what? And I reached up and I lifted the flap at the edge of the shelter. I just lifted up about that far and just felt the cooler air come in versus that just hot air inside that shelter. Popped it open and I was like, ooh. And John then came right back. He says, it's not the truck, it's our gear. I was like, oh, the gear, really? At that point I wasn't caring about the gear. He laid down and laid back down and crawled back in it and passed some water bottles back and forth to each other. Drank some water, that was refreshing inside the shelter for sure. Some cool water. I had my canteen with me, again training, but what I had done is I'd kicked that sucker down when I got in there. It's not perfect world by any means. I'd kicked it down, it was at my feet and I couldn't get it. And when I did get it, I pulled it up to me. It was hotter than Hades. John and I both got up. Left the shelter draped over us a couple times. Got a big buff of the wind. That stand-alark again did this. Snap. Started snapping off. The winds were still heavy there. Layed back down. I remember rocks rolling through the deployment site. The biggest lessons learned for me, really, is weather directly related to the fuels. Five days of red flag warning. It took five days of single-digit RHs for those 1,000 hours of fuels to react. On a fifth day, it succumbed to it. Five days. That's a big, big, big lesson learned for me. I pulled the trigger a little bit earlier for me, too, now. My trigger points have moved. And people ask me all the time, well, how do you move your trigger points? And it's all situation-dependent. And I pulled the trigger earlier a couple of times now. None of them have really, nothing ever happened, but I still pulled the trigger. I still got out of the way of something. Two RHs instead of one RH, if you will. Another big lesson learned for me is the thought of equipment versus the safety. I'm going to ride off a piece of equipment again. Plain and simple. That chunk of iron can be replaced with my situation that I have right now under my belt, with the tarkey over and over on my belt. If I'm ever around and have a crazy situation, I'll deal with the ride off of equipment. I'll front that battle whatever comes to me. I honestly will. Fire Shelter is just another tool of PPE to be utilized. And don't let the stigma of, oh, my God, the fire shelter come out. That's honest. That's a lesson learned, too. Don't be afraid if you feel that you need to use that fire shelter because you have nothing else, no other avenues to... That's the last use. I used the last used fire... Last used that chunk of PPE on my back and it worked. It worked like it was supposed to work. I'm here to talk about it.