 Welcome back. I hope you had a good break and I hope you had some fruitful conversations with your classmates. As you know, there's an awful lot to remember here. There's no way that panel or myself are going to be able to mention everything there is to mention on the 10 and 18. So your breaks, I'm hoping, are productive conversation pieces for you. The 10 and 18 consist of, think about, 28 things to keep track of. In the heat of a firefighting battle when we're asked to make decisions in an ever-changing, dynamic environment, this can be overwhelming. To help us simplify the use of these 28 items, Paul Gleason, a renowned hotshot superintendent who recently retired from the Park Service, came up with another helpful tool or process to help us with fire line safety. He called this process LCES, and it has become a very, very popular tool which is used by, I mean, virtually every wildland firefighter today. Hopefully you'll still remember that LCES stands for Lookouts, Communications, Escape Routes and Safety Zones. To give you a historical perspective on the LCES concept, we recently sat down and talked with Paul. After sharing about two hours of fire line war stories, Paul's, of course, were much more interesting than mine, and swapping hotshot smoke jumper jokes, which, by the way, according to Paul, there's only one real smoke jumper joke. He said the rest of them are all true. In response, of course, I told him about the one hotshot crewman that was so dumb that even the other hotshots noticed him. Anyway, after some laughs, Paul told me about the creation of LCES, its underlying concepts, and its original purpose. Let's listen to what this hotshot firefighter, which I'm sure is the title that he's most proud of, has to say. Yeah, I was real fortunate in the 1960s to work with some excellent, excellent fire people. And I guess I first started seeing them, not as LCES, but I started seeing the practice by working with these firemen. And it was right around the mid-80s, I believe it was the winter of 1985 after doing some heavy firefight in Idaho with the crew. I was getting even more so concerned about their safety. You know, it's never taken me too much to be interested in being aggressive. I like getting in and mixing with it. But I started to really worry if I had all the bases covered. And, you know, I'd memorize the fire orders and everything else, but it seemed to me that I needed a little bit simpler for me to be with my crew to make sure the bases were covered. In the winter of 1985, what I did to take a look at everything again is to get the fatality reports I could get my hands on, starting with the Innehaw Fire. And just reread those reports, try to put myself in a situation. And I took a pen and started circling keywords that came up in those reports and reflect them back on an active fire year. Trying to see what made sense. And as it turned out, I did this over the course of a Saturday one weekend. As it turned out, lookouts, communications, escape routes, and safety zones are the words that kept on appearing time and time again. At the same time, I was studying mathematics and thinking about a systems approach to things. And so that had influence. Plus, I was reading a mountaineering freedom of the hills where they talked about objective hazards being in a mountaineering environment as well as subjective hazards. And it just, L C E S, it kind of came from that one exercise on Saturday. What I did with L C E S and as I practiced it, the next summer I practiced it with my people any time I went into a situation. I took a look at it as a safety system and made sure it was in place where objective hazards were present in the fire environment. The next year I was asked to present something, anything, in a three-hour divisions hub course. And I took a look at L C E S presented that as well as some concepts on minimum impact firefighting. And people started to want to use that and think about it themselves. So I got a little radical on that one, too, as I got a custom-made license plate with L C E S on it. As if anybody would know what that was. But then there was a couple of opportunities later on. The dude fire is one time that I felt maybe, you know, I should mention this a little bit louder as well. As there is a regenerated interest in 1994 after South Canyon. I guess a couple closing thoughts on L C E S is one I think it's a valuable tool. It was valuable to me. It's helped me organize my thoughts and when I would engage in a good serious firefight. I think there's value in L C E S. But something that may have been talked about at this time but is the idea of a student of fire. Is to always feel like there's some unanswered questions about safety. And always to think of a situation or of safety or a particular firefight that you're engaged with. Always try to find out the safest way to do it and not rely on just four letters out of the alphabet to hold it together. And don't even just rely on the fire orders or the 18 situations. But to develop a situational awareness to keep thinking about the hazards that are present in any given time. You know it's always interesting to listen to Paul Gleason. That guy is a well read well rounded all around good firefighter. And it's just always fun to sit down and talk with him. A couple of things he said that stick out in my mind still is being a student of fire. And of course that's what we're trying to do. This is refresher training but we still want you to try to gain some more knowledge. Something additional that you haven't learned before. And to do that let's go ahead and just pick things up a little bit by breaking down L C E S. The L is for lookouts. Now lookouts do more than just look. Think about what a lookout actually does for you on the fire line. And so think about this. What does a lookout do other than visually observe? Obviously there's a number of right answers to this question. To name just a few, if you thought of taking weather observations, analyzing fire behavior, communicating fire behavior changes to the line personnel, of course you would have been on the right track. But now to help us answer this question let's go back to our panel. Anybody? Well Ted, as an aerial delivered firefighter I have the distinct advantage of getting a bird's eye view of the fire before actually landing and getting out on the fire. Oftentimes we utilize our pilot or aerial observer as our lookout. However I want to caution that a fixed wing or a helicopter may not be there at all times for you. So you still need to establish a designated lookout from someone that you trust. A lookout is your safety net. They're your checks and balances. They make sure that if you don't see something that's happening they relay that to you and you just have that safety net in place. Well when you're assigning a lookout to serve as a lookout on your operation, what kind of qualities are you looking for or what type of person do you want to have doing that? Is it somebody that's just got a dinged up ankle on your hot shot crew Lamar or is it a jumper that twisted his ankle on a jump or something like that? Who do you pick? Well I hope not. I think a lot of times we use somebody who has more experienced personnel on the crew and you know that lookout is more of a liaison between conditions and myself, other members of the crew. And so you know sometimes we might use a guy who's got a bad ankle or whatever but hopefully he's got some great fire experience and background and fire. So he can give us some good knowledge of what's happening. And a lot of times we get down in the hold and we can't actually see what's happening. You know we're trying to deal with what's on the ground. And we not only use just people from our crew, we might use five behavior analysts. We use anybody. We could use the vision soup also. And I think in a lot of scenarios that will be coming up later that you'll see that we use a lot of different person. We utilize that position very well. You know just kind of expanding on what Lamar said, you know me running an engine I may not have as many people to use in certain situations but I'm always going to you know especially moving in on you know initial attack or something like that. I'm going to pick probably my most experienced person at the time. And that can sometimes be hard because they are my most experienced but I do want them up there because I trust them. And they're going to you know they're my eyes and ears. They're relaying to me you know they're relaying information whether fire behavior possibly you know having enough knowledge in the future or you know knowing that they're going to possibly foresee what the actual fire is going to do ahead of it before it actually happens. You know and I know we all like to get down and get dirty, get in the fire but you know don't look at it as a punishment if you're you know chosen to be a lookout. Look at it as an honor. When I'm serving as a lookout I like to I think it's important to do more than here's what's happening when you're relaying that information. Here's what I'm seeing but try to relay here's what I think could happen or here's the possibilities of where this thing could go you know and try to stay ahead of the game rather than just observing present time observations. Anything Hector? Yeah you know I think there's several different kinds of lookouts too if I can elaborate a little bit. Brad made a good point earlier about having an eye in the sky and not solely relying on those in the event that they are going to have to refuel or be reassigned etc. However you know there can be a situation where maybe a critical burnout operation is going to take place that it would be good to have not only a lookout on the ground but also an aerial observer up ahead you know just to make sure you're covering all the bases. On a smaller scale it may be something as simple as a crew or a small squad is dropping a technical tree and you need a couple of lookouts to you know make sure nobody's going to walk in the way or some big widow makers aren't going to come out and clip somebody. So just remember that there's different levels of lookouts and post them as needed. Good comments. Well next I think we'll look at the C in LCES which is communications. I once heard an old jumper say no monocomo that's what he told us in our briefing I thought he was talking in Latin but it really wasn't that what he meant made sense and that is share information. Don't talk to yourself if you observe something don't just keep that information to yourself don't have a conversation with yourself tell other people. For communication to be effective you know you have to share it. It must be at least a two-way communication or conversation so that the message given is the message received and they're the same. My response however to this jumper was you know what are you talking about? But anyways that's the side of the point. The point is communications is the key component to any successful firefighting operation and so we want you to think about personally what do you think is the most important element of good communication? So what did you come up with? Well really there's no single answer to that question yet we've all dealt with communication problems before. So panel do you guys have any thoughts? Nicole? Well Ted I kind of like to break down communication into two areas the technical area being you know that we're all on the same frequencies you know we're using the right repeaters we're talking to dispatch we're talking to our local cooperators maybe the jumpers that are flying up ahead of you know above us but I also like to break down into the human the human factor also and as the old saying goes just because you're speaking doesn't mean you're actually communicating so you got to make sure like for me being a supervisor I got to make sure when I'm briefing my crews that they understand but it's also their responsibility to make sure that they're actually understanding that they're asking the questions. Don't be afraid to ask questions no matter you know what your experience is and you know just just make sure that we're not in such a hurry that when we're giving those briefings that they're actually understood because if they're not understood we're gonna get ourselves in a whole heap of trouble. If you don't have proper communications to me that's a red flag and it's a no-go situation until that's resolved you shouldn't proceed any further. It's a fact that without communications you're jeopardizing your people yourself and operations as a whole you're just setting yourself up. Can we go ahead? Exactly right you know you get to some fires and if you can't talk to division or whoever is in charge of that fire you're not there you know what I mean it's plain and simple you should hold up and wait until you can talk to somebody and they can talk back get those frequencies together before proceeding on. And just follow up on what these guys have all said is you know it's one of the key components in LCS you knock the C out of LCS you get less. You know we interviewed a lot of people this this last winter and preparing for this panel and that was one of the questions that I asked is is any one of those more important than the other and it was surprising how many people thought communications you know without that one component everything else can really fall apart. Now communications we have to you know realize here is there's on the fire, fire line communication and then there's communication with dispatch and we all know that there's dead spots all over the place where we fight fire where you're not going to have commo with dispatch at all times but I think what we're getting at here is the vital communication and that is between tactical resources that are operating on the fire line correct? And to go along with that when you're dealing with different resources from different regions different you know backgrounds you got to make sure your terminology is the same people are understanding what the goals are you know that's another aspect of communications that may get overlooked. That's true that goes back to what John Krebs was actually talking about it's the supervisors responsibility to share the information but it's also right down to the last grunt firefighters responsibility to ask and to make sure that that message was clear. Lamar you were telling me didn't you have a crew soup once that made you repeat every message or something like that? And I hated it. I didn't know why I did it. You know you would say he'd tell you what he wanted you to hear and then he wanted you to repeat it back to him. Well it took some years to realize that man he's right because a lot of things change you know I might hear it totally different than what you're actually trying to tell me you know what I mean so it's important to repeat it but at that point and I think when you're young and you're actually starting out kind of getting out there and somebody tells you to do something and they're waiting for that reply and you just can't just click and say okay gotcha copy just that word. Anything else? Okay and always remember if you're dealing with Hector to say things two three times sometimes to make sure that that message got across. I learned that from Ted. Okay I think we're ready to move on. Now we're ready to move on let's examine the E and the S together in LCES and that's going to be escape routes and safety zones. Here's another important think point for you and that is escape routes and safety zones. Can you ever have one without the other? If you said yes to that question then you're probably sharper than Hector. Identifying and using adequate escape routes and safety zones is easier said than done. Nonetheless they are essential for every fire operation. Lamar perhaps you could talk about this a little bit. You're right Ted you can have one without the other but what you want to. I don't think you would. I think they go hand in hand. And you want to make sure that everybody knows what those safety zones and escape routes are. We're fortunate being a 20 person crew or a hotshot crew or any 20 person crew that you have enough personnel hopefully to you can assign a solid team and a group of individuals to make sure that those escape routes are out and we improve on those safety zones. And that goes hand in hand and we need to make sure that everybody along the line is aware of where the safety zones are and the escape routes are. We tend a lot of times I feel that we get spread out along the line. I think you guys can say the same thing. You kind of get spread out and all of a sudden you got one guy that's way down on the other end of the line and you make it there. And that's really important. Can he actually make it to the safety zone? And is that safety zone adequately marked or flagged that he can get there and actually get into the safety zones? We get in situations that that safety zone is inadequate. Today it might be but tomorrow it might not be. So we got to reevaluate and look at those things. Kind of expanding on what Lamar is talking about being on a mechanized piece of equipment and engine we can cover a lot of ground 10 miles away from where I originally started and I've got to make sure that I'm continually updating our escape routes our safety zones. If I'm not doing it then my crew members I've got one person who's assigned to do that. We've got to make sure especially working on these engines I've seen it in the past and it's really bitten some people they're relying on those engines to be their escape route and their safety zone. But again we run into problems with that whether it be mechanical we blow a tire. But our escape route they don't work. So smoke can cause problems shut down our engines for us and we're stuck. So we've always got to be making sure that working that we're assigning those people to do it and making sure that they're known throughout the shift not just at the beginning and at the end but throughout the whole time. And that goes hand in hand to Nicole and saying that we need to make sure that other crews know what those safety zones are. Any crew that might be coming in the following day on another shift if we can relay that message on to the division or whoever is over that division that there is a safety zone there and as adequate you might have to go in there and take a look at and reassess it. But there's one there. Anything to add? How about helicopters? I mean is there special problems in your operations dealing with escape routes and safety zones? Well typically you're going to be dropped off at the highest point if you can on a fire remote access or what not. If you identify a safety zone escape route you have to remember that they're more than likely going to change throughout this fire. So if that's the case you've got to make sure your people are informed and they know the changes and they know where they need to go in the event something happens. I know one thing that's been happening a lot and I think this is pretty awesome with the GPS units we tend to with GPS it a lot now and I think Hector you guys get in that situation a lot too right? Another thing on safety zones these are real good comments that we've had right here is remember what the definition by definition what a safety zone is. It's not a deployment zone. You can go stand right in the middle of that thing when that fire goes around you and get by just fine without a shelter and be realistic about size let's say for instance by guidelines they tell you that you got 75 foot flame lengths gosh in the book that says that's a six and a half acre safety zone that's pretty big stop what you're doing reassess maybe you got it back off to that next ridge another thing that seems to happen a lot is you'll have an adequate safety zone scheduled you can do everything right you can time it you can flag it but additional resources show up and a lot of times it's real easy to overlook that all of a sudden now that safety zone we're going to have to accommodate a lot more people than what we originally thought when we were designating it as a safety zone so yeah there's a lot of things to think about when you consider both of them anybody else well to summarize our look at LCS let's just remember then that in the heat of the battle LCS principles provide us with an easy to remember way to maintain a safe operation they were never intended to replace the 10 and 18 but they're a valuable tool to utilize in the fire line you may also have heard LCS referred to as LASES L-A-C-E-S or clues C-L-U-E-S in LASES there's lookouts and then the A stands for awareness meaning awareness of ongoing activity lookouts awareness communication escape routes and safety zones LASES I don't know why that's possibly easier for some people to remember because you have LASES on your boots clues to a safe operation in this one it's communications lookouts and then the U stands for unified or you know meaning everyone unified understanding of the plan and that's basically part of communication but if the plan that was communicated the message wasn't received and it was unclear you got a safety problem so it's communications lookouts unified understanding escape routes and safety zones anyways to wrap this topic up let's go back and hear from some folks in the field I think L-C-E-S is excellent it goes back to being to being fatigued and under pressure on fire lines you know that the more stressed you are and the tireter you get the less you can remember in tight situations and I think what Gleason did with L-C-E-S was just to consolidate everything that we know about the fire orders and fire behavior in the watch out situations and kind of chunk it into a lookouts communications escape route safety zone something that you can fall back on in just really stressful situations I like L-C-E-S I think it is a good tool it is easy to remember and you can't have one without the other in this situation but I still think you should have the 10 and 18 you don't have to necessarily remember the 18 as much as the 10 but I think it's a great reinforcement for the 10 and 18 when I approach a fire assignment L-C-E-S stands out in my mind is one of the first things that need to be put in place on any kind of incident and generally how we do it and I do it is I will sit down with the people that are on the incident with me and we will agree on these things and if it takes a while to see if this escape route is adequate or not we will test it out we will try it and once we implement all L-C-E-S then we will continue on the fire but not until we have L-C-E-S in place do we really take action on the fire and we make sure that it is known by everybody all perspectives we just heard are great but of course it is worthless and we will not be able to use it in real life situations Hector was kind enough to share with us a scenario from this past season where he utilized L-C-E-S he will set up this scenario by telling us a little bit about his situation and then we will let you work with in your groups to determine the next course of action keeping in mind the L-C-E-S principles then Hector will tell us what really happened Hector why don't you tell us like you were there we often revisit fatality fires or a lot of close calls I thought it would be time maybe a good opportunity here to revisit a fire that things went right, fire didn't make headline news, it was just one of thousands that most firefighters every year used to going on the reason this fire came to mind it occurred in an area where two fatality fires were not very far away being the battlement Creek fire of 1976 fatalities and South Canyon fire of 1994, which happened just in recent years. The day we arrived on this fire, the current situation was some pretty erratic fire behavior and the fire, of course, of small magnitude at that time, showed a lot of the same characteristics of what I remembered about South Canyon in 94. Looking back at this fire, it's no wonder that we took such precautionary measures and we did what we did. So why don't we take a look at this video and see what we think? The Gibson Bench Fire was located in western Colorado, approximately 10 nautical miles south-southwest of South Canyon fire of 1994, and roughly 12 nautical miles east of Battlement Mesa. The fuel in this area is comprised mostly of gamble oak and pineon juniper. Topography is steep mountainous terrain with many converging canyons. The winds in this area can be very strong and at times it is not uncommon to see temperatures in the mid-80s, lower 90s, with R.H.'s in the teens to single digits. Our wind streamers indicated 450 to 500 yards of wind drift or wind speeds of roughly 15 miles per hour. Flame links near the head of the fire were in the range of 10 to 75 feet in length. A small district crew of five personnel was en route to this fire. The sequence of events that took place on September 9th at 1700 was that a fire call came into the jump shack at Grand Junction, Colorado. In recent weeks we had been jumping quite a few fires, most of which were small docile 2 to 4 person fires. Upon loading the jump ship, no one expected that we would be going to a fire with this kind of behavior. Within 20 minutes we were overhead. We orbited the fire for about 10 minutes to evaluate the situation at hand and allowed the spotter to give a size-up to dispatch and the FMO on the ground. Dialogue amongst the jumpers in the plane was as follows. First of all we recognized a potentially dangerous situation. Fuels were comprised of Gamble Oak and Pinon Juniper. Flame links were up to 75 feet. Strong winds, steep terrain with converging canyons. No vehicle access directly to the fire. No dip sites in the near vicinity. In addition we developed a plan for LCES. Lookout locations identified from the aircraft were a couple of high points near the fire. One was across the main drainage on a road and the other was above the fire on the north side and some sparse fuels. Communications, as we were all familiar with the local frequencies and repeater sites used in this area. It was not necessary to rehearse any of the commo. The spotter did however reconfirm these frequencies and gave us contacts on the scene. As for escape routes, the old two-track road and a large washed out gully adjacent to the road. These would be possible access and egress to the fire as well as possible escape routes if the fire should get larger. Safety zones. There was an open south facing slope with sparse fuels and also there was some clean burn black that had no potential of reburn. These would be our predetermined safety zones. Soon all of us would jump into a jump spot located approximately half a mile to the west of the fire. Shortly after we landed, the jumper in charge tied with the local FMO who met us at the jump spot. The FMO inquired if we had an IC type 3 with the crew. At this time I was appointed IC type 3. I discussed strategy and tactics with the fire management officer. We also discussed ordering additional resources. He was very supportive. I suggested that two more crews would be needed in addition to the five person squad and the smoke jumpers on scene. I also asked for a retardant at first light the next day as well as a helicopter with a bucket. At this time the FMO informed me that he would drive across the canyon to that high vantage point to oversee the fire operation and serve as a temporary lookout. We utilized him as a lookout until dark. The jumper in charge and his crew of smoke jumpers began to hike to the fire and they were going to tie in with the five person crew at the anchor point of the fire. Also at this time the spotter on the jump ship mentioned to us that two spots across the ravine ahead of the fire had occurred. LCES would be discussed with the crew as well as what the smoke jumpers saw from the air. I would eventually tie into the crew as well. A size up upon arrival was that the fire was still active. The winds had died down some but the fire still made some occasional runs. We felt as though we could hook the fire before morning somewhere between 10 and 15 acres. It would be slow going in the dense Pinot Juniper and Gamble Oak. About 1930 I received a call from the additional hand crew. I tied in with them at the southeast corner of the fire. One of the crew members inquired about maybe lining the spots across the small ravine before they would grow larger. We'll stop at this point and have you work with your facilitator to talk about Hector's LCES exercise. There's information on this fire situation in your workbook on page 12 that you should look at. Try to identify what course of action you would take if you were in this situation. Think about how LCES is being utilized to make sound fire line decisions. We'll be back after a bit.