 Wildfires are a natural and necessary process for many ecosystems, but wildfires can also be destructive and deadly. Safely managing wildfires is complex, requiring the careful coordination of needs and resources. That's where NIFSI, or the National Interagency Fire Center, comes in. Located in Boise, Idaho, NIFSI is the nation's support center for wildland firefighting. NIFSI doesn't fight fires. That's done by federal, state, local, tribal, and community agencies. What NIFSI does is combine the talents and expertise of eight government agencies to provide the best support system in the world to wildland firefighters and others who serve on the frontline of national emergencies. By making the most efficient use of people, equipment, and information, NIFSI saves tax dollars public and private property and lives. NIFSI's primary mission is to provide cooperative leadership, technical expertise, people and equipment for national and international wildland fire management and emergency assistance. We remind ourselves that that's our primary purpose in being here is to support the firefighter on the ground. So we're looking at the national scene, the national level of activity, prioritizing the resources that are available and the fires that are occurring, and trying to do the best we can at delivering the resources to wherever the need is around the country. And all of that is based on catching fires and supporting the firefighter on the ground. NIFSI got its start in the mid-1960s when resources to cope with natural disasters became scarce. Three federal agencies pooled their wildland fire assets to form the Boise Interagency Fire Center. With its success, additional agencies joined over the years until 1993 when the name changed to the National Interagency Fire Center to reflect the center's national mission. It just makes sense for agencies to cooperate rather than compete for limited resources. That way, areas with the most urgent needs get resources first, whether it be firefighters, special firefighting aircraft, engines, sleeping bags, or handheld radios. Working together collectively, we're able to deal with our larger fire issues very effectively and very efficiently. So it's a tremendous asset to have NIFSI here and have all of us co-located where we can coordinate, collaborate, and do all those things together that we know are much more effective in doing. We can spend less money fighting fire by sharing resources, and we can move a lot of equipment around the country to the highest priority fire. So we can focus our efforts on where the most important action is happening and bring a lot of resources to bear on fire problems that local organizations generally don't have available to them. Any time you have all the players represented at one table that can speak for their agency, obviously you can quickly reach consensus and decisions and therefore provide a more effective wildfire response throughout the country. Wildfire suppression in the U.S. is built on a three-tiered system of support. There are 11 geographic areas in the country. Initially, a fire is reported by the local agency and its firefighting partners respond. If the fire continues to grow, the agency can ask for help from its geographic area. When the geographic area has exhausted its resources, it then calls upon NIFSI's National Interagency Coordination Center, or NIC. NIC is the nerve center of NIFSI and serves as the focal point for coordinating the mobilization of resources like hot-shot wildfire fighting crews, smoke jumpers, and aircraft needed to combat wildfires and other incidents around the country. NICC's morning begins with a daily briefing by predictive services who integrate near-real-time intelligence, weather, fuels, and fire danger data. After this collaborative leadership, along with weekly, monthly, and seasonal outlooks, predictive services provides a proactive approach to anticipating fire activity, allowing decision makers to effectively pre-position vital fire management resources. Predictive services has three components. One of the components is weather, and that's what I'm involved in as a meteorologist, my assistant, and I basically keep track of the weather, what's going on, what's weather going to be like this week, next week, this month, this season, and so on. And basically what we're trying to tell them is, where are the fire problems going to be? Where's the problem going to be? And if we know that, we can move our resources there before we have the lightning or the wind or those type of problems. Typically on a day-by-day basis during the summer, we'll come in early in the morning, download a lot of information. I look primarily at the fuels side of the equation, the meteorologists here will look at the weather side and basically provide a one- to three-day outlook for the fire managers and directors here at the National Interagency Fire Center in terms of where we feel the fire threats are going to be for the week. Any time we can provide a good warning for an emerging situation, whether that's dry lightning, very windy conditions with very dry fuels, possibly in an area with existing fires, and we can give the coordination system a heads up of where that's going to happen, they can allocate and proactively move resources ahead of that situation, have them there in place when that situation emerges. And obviously the faster you can respond to those situations, the more effective you're going to be. And then we have our intel group. An intel group basically keeps track of all the resources. Where are our resources, where are they at, and things like that. So by knowing those three components, we can actually figure out where the problem's going to be and what kind of resources we need to bring to bear on that problem. And it could be a fire, it could be a hurricane, it could be whatever. With this vital information, NICC dispatchers then go to work coordinating personnel, aircraft, equipment, and intelligence. What we do is essentially coordinate and facilitate the movement of resources and the allocation of resources among 11 different geographic areas. And in many cases that also involves prioritization of incidents and geographic areas based on values at risk among those geographic areas. We facilitate contracting a lot of our tactical resources such as heavy and medium helicopters, air tankers, and engines and crews as well. We also are very heavily involved in making sure we know where those resources are. We know what the capability is within each geographic area. So we have a very stringent process by where we track the national resources. So that when we get start getting busy, a geographic area starts escalating in activity, we know exactly which geographic area we're gonna move resources in from. Because we've been keeping our finger on that pulse at all times throughout the day. So we know where those resources are and what their capability is and who's available and who's committed at all times. When the fire situation becomes severe during the height of the season, the National Multi-Agency Coordinating Group, or NMAC, is activated to efficiently coordinate limited resources. NMAC consists of the fire directors of the six federal agencies and the NASF fire director representing the state foresters plus technical specialists. When competition for resources become very critical and we have fires across many areas of the country, then NationalMAC has the job of prioritizing those geographic areas with the resources we have available, whether that's large air tankers, type one crews, incident management teams, whatever it might be. We have to make some decisions about where those go based on priorities. Our highest priority is human life, whether that be firefighters or communities, that is our highest priority. And then from there we try to protect all kinds of resources from natural resources to cultural resources to people's homes. We have a hierarchy of things that we look at to make our decisions. Mostly it's a combination of values at risk. We look at safety of people and communities and critical values, watersheds, endangered species, habitats, things like that. And it's a mix of things. They're all taken into account and waited to give us our final decision as to where we're going to prioritize and how we're going to prioritize. The complete wild end fire program could not be represented without state involvement because the states are aggressive in wild end fire management and response as well. It's critical to have that representative in place here to provide a seamless interagency response because the federal wild end fire partners are dependent upon having state involvement in efforts to suppress fire on our lands as well as states are dependent on having our participation in their suppression efforts. As the role of emergency responders has changed over the years, so has NIFSI. As part of the federally mandated national response plan, NIFSI also responds to all risk or all hazard incidents. NIFSI dispatched resources have been deployed to 9-11. The Space Shuttle Columbia recovery, animal disease outbreaks, and numerous weather-related responses. We have been tasked through the NRP to broaden our scope of responsibilities and so that we're now dealing in an all risk environment where we not only respond to wild end fires but to hurricanes, earthquakes, both natural and man-caused disasters. And we have done that over the past five to ten years, you know, on an increasing basis. Because of our capability for being asked to respond to these all hazard situations, we see that as a growing issue for us because our historical mission has been response to wild end fire. But we see that the importance of being able to respond through the national response plan to meet to homeland security means dealing with all hazard response. So when you're talking about other incidents such as hurricanes, the shuttle disaster, new castle, chicken disease, and those kinds of activities that they've been involved with, it's a different environment to go work in. But the systems that are in place, the management structure which is the incident command system, is very flexible to go in and manage that with other types of incidents. Beyond making decisions on resource management and deployment, NIFSY is also home to a variety of programs that help the national wildland firefighting community do their jobs safer and better. The equipment development program helps design wild firefighting technology like fire engines and pumps. First-hand knowledge allows every piece of equipment to be developed by and for firefighters. The group then engineer specifications for outside contractors to build the new apparatus. This saves taxpayers money and also distributes technology into the public arena. NIFSY's training unit creates and updates classroom and field training courses used by cooperating agencies including incident command, fire suppression, prescribed fire, fire ecology, and leadership development. In the past, our focus has been skills-based training. How do you use a tool? How do you do certain things on the fire ground? That's served us well, except that it has failed to recognize the human element. In other words, every firefighter at one time or another on the fire ground is a leader. So over the last couple years in cooperation with the entire fire and suppression community, we've embarked on an effort to feature leadership. Teaching leadership skills to our very lowest level employees, the folks at the end of the shovel if you will, so that they, when called upon to do that, to exercise that responsibility, have the capability of doing that. It ties directly with our focus on and movement toward principles driven decision-making because only those folks that have those leadership qualities and values will be able to function appropriately under that broader system. The National Weather Service houses a permanent staff at NIFSC to provide vital weather analyses, forecasts, and training to all fire management agencies. We are the organization that supplies daily forecast from over a hundred and twenty offices. Here at NIFSC specifically, we've been involved with briefings for years. We do a lot of the coordination when it comes to fire weather services. We do a lot with predictive services in partnership with them to establish fuels fire weather and fire danger conditions. Over here at Boise, we have four qualified incident meteorologists, two people that are dedicated to sit on the fire weather desks and give out forecasts and they perform a very special function. They relate to this batch. People known by name, they trust them and that's really where it hits the road is developing trust because you're doing more than just a local forecast. You're giving somebody a forecast that they're going to plan on and they want to be able to trust you. So in Boise, Portland, Spokane, you name it where there's a fire problem, there are weather service people trained to handle it. To better forecast fire and all hazard related weather, the National Weather Service has developed the highly portable all hazard meteorological response system. The all hazards meteorological response system has consolidated the time to bring data to a fire from hours or even days down to minutes or even seconds. Saving lives on a fire by bringing thunderstorm warnings, red flag warnings to an incident. And the very nice thing about that is we are able to get near real-time data. We're able to warn folks of impending thunderstorms within minutes, issue warnings on a fire within minutes or even seconds. It has really brought down the time to bring data to the fire. NIFC also employs about eighteen hundred and fifty strategically placed solar powered remote automatic weather stations or RAWS throughout the U.S. Permanent and portable fire RAWS units collect vital climate data on an hourly basis that's uplinked to a satellite then downloaded and interpreted at NIFC. What happens when a team is ordered for a fire they're assigned an incident meteorologist and a fire behavior analyst and normally what happens when they get to the incident they decide whether or not they have sufficient coverage of weather stations in the area of the fire so if they do not have the sufficient coverage or they want additional coverage they will order our remote weather station. All the stations provide air temperature, relative humidity, wind speed, wind direction precipitation and then a solar radiation units which is basically the intensity of the sun in the area and then a fuel temperature. Some of the permanent stations have additional information that can be added such as fuel moisture information visibility sensors, water clarity a number of different things can be added to the station. RAWS units have also been employed for many all hazard events such as nine eleven the Columbia Shuttle Recovery and Hurricane Katrina. The modular airborne firefighting system or MAFs is also based at NIFC delivered by Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve Aircraft. MAFs has the capability of delivering three thousand pressurized gallons of fire retardant per flight. Retardant is a mixture of phosphates, clay and water which slows down a fire buying time for ground-based firefighters to build containment lines. One load of retardant stretches about a quarter mile long and sixty feet wide on the ground. MAFs is a modular system which slides into any what we term slick C-130 so basically it does no modification to the aircraft. We provide airlift or in this case a platform for the U.S. Forest Service owned modular system to slide into and we deploy retardant over a fire line. MAFs have been deployed throughout the continental U.S. from Florida to New York to fifteen western states and we've actually done deployments throughout Italy, Indonesia, Turkey and have been called upon for other areas of the world also. NIFC also responds to State Department requests for international all hazards assistance, training and technology transfer. What we've found over the years is we share a lot of the common methods of doing things but also some of the common problems so it's good to go to a foreign country or for them to come over to give us a new perspective on how things are done. That's one of the most important things that we feel about the international program. Second thing we do is we do assist with some training in firefighting in foreign countries and that's done on an interagency basis. I'm with the Bureau of Land Management. We also work very closely with the Forest Service who usually has the lead on doing the training internationally and we work with them very closely on some of these training efforts. The third thing we do which is a kind of new sense in the new world of post-911 and the all hazard and all risk area is to provide international disaster assistance through actually sending people overseas to help in disaster situations and also even to build kits here that are used by disaster workers throughout the world on disaster situations. Reliable communication equipment can literally save lives during an incident. That's why NIFSI maintains the largest stockpile of emergency communication equipment in the nation. The National Interagency Incident Communications Division's $30 million inventory is available for fires and other natural and human triggered disasters at a moment's notice. Typically what we do is we provide handheld radios, portable repeaters, aircraft radios, satellite communications, anything to be able to communicate on an incident. And when our management teams or the requesting agency orders our equipment it's tracked through a resource order and then our people here track it internally and very efficient system works very well. We have nine technicians here that work on all the radio equipment. Every piece of equipment that goes on an incident and returned is looked at so we're looking in the neighborhood of anywhere from fifty to seventy thousand radios a year. We repair to the component level so it's cost-effective for us to change resistors and capacitors versus throwing a board away. We have an avionics section which takes care of all the electronics for government and contracted aircraft, be it helicopters, air tankers, lead planes, those kinds of things. We also have an engineering group here. The engineering group looks at all the new technology, looks at some of the battery technology. We also have a training section here also that we train technicians from other agencies on repair of our of the radio equipment that we have here. Another highly effective tool to manage wildland fires is aerial infrared imagery. The NIFSI National Infrared Program's aircraft mounted IFR scanners can cover one million acres per hour to locate hot spots in and outside a fire's perimeter. The reason we use infrared line scanners, the ones that we do use, is they have a really wide field of view and they're very, very sensitive. So we can fly high and cover six or seven miles at a time so we can do two or three passes across a fairly large box and detect very small amounts of heat. We can find heat sources that are roughly about a hundred degrees Celsius above the background temperature, mainly about an eight inch spot from 14,000 feet. Then we deliver it to the infrared technician by one of several means. Once they have that information, they need to interpret it and put it on a map to provide it to the Incident Management Team for the briefing in the morning. The largest of eleven federal repositories of firefighting equipment and supplies in the nation is located at NIFSI. The National Grape Basin Cache is an 80,000 square foot facility housing a seventeen million dollar inventory of everything from tools, tents and backpacks to MREs and training materials. The Great Basin Cache can provide enough food, shelter and water to a tent city of ten thousand personnel in less than 24 hours. Roughly seventy-five percent of non-consumable goods issued by the Great Basin Cache are returned, refurbished and repaired at the Returns Warehouse before being restocked. As part of the National Fire Equipment System, the stockpile is a cost-effective way to share resources by recycling rather than buying new equipment throughout the fire season. The Bureau of Land Management Boise Smoke Jumpers are also based at NIFSI. Smoke Jumping's rich and venerable history began in 1939 and in sixty-seven years of smoke jumper operations more than one hundred and forty thousand parachute jumps have been made. Using high-performance aircraft and parachutes the jumpers primary mission is to be first on the scene when fires occur in remote areas. In addition, smoke jumpers can assist land managers with fire suppression, remote area fire monitoring, prescribed fire operations and other hazardous fuels reduction projects. The whole idea is we get the fires quick before they get big before they're a problem. And that's our main mission. We have eighty-four smoke jumpers in the summer when we're at peak. They're all extremely experienced wildland fire fighters. We want that kind of background and knowledge base and it's an intuitive feel you get uh... fighting fire, something you don't actually can't follow all the checklists on. So we hire people with a lot of fire experience and then we teach them to parachute and we can do that real successfully. We can care less if they jump before. The type of person we like to hire is what I call an independent-minded person. We don't want someone that can't be out on their own and not take care of themselves because essentially they are out on a section of the line maybe not within a half a mile or a mile of anybody else. The smoke jumpers, a lot of people view them as these wild daredevils that just go out on their own. Crazy guys for doing the job they do. Well, that isn't true at all. One is we train like mad to do our mission. There's a ton of training every individual does when we do as a group to mitigate all those risks and we can't mitigate them totally but we can mitigate them to where they're at an acceptable level. The other thing is these guys are very service-oriented. They are fulfilling a critical mission out there. They aren't out there just to have fun. They're out there to put out fires before they get big and before hundreds and maybe thousands of other firefighters are exposed to the risk of fighting a fire. So they understand that. It helps fulfill that when we have that common idea. Every smoke jumper learns to sow their first year and it's what we do to fill the the dead time, the off-season, the shoulder seasons. So that's part of it. It's just repairing and maintaining your equipment. We make all the gear except for the canopies themselves right here. When people manufacture gear, the other thing that happens is they become very knowledgeable about the gear. So especially with the parachute items, building a harness, we want extremely experienced and knowledgeable parachutists. Well, they learn a lot about the equipment itself when they make it. Wildland firefighters face numerous challenges and risks to protect our natural resources. In 2000, the Wildlands Firefighters Monument was dedicated to past, present and future men and women who fight wildfires and the people who support them. Located in the heart of Nipsey, the three firefighter statues, native vegetation, waterfall and commemorative markers provides a place for visitors to reflect on the tireless efforts of firefighters who work in smoke and flames season after season to protect the natural beauty of our public lands. We all have the common mission of fire suppression and preparedness, so working together collectively, we're able to deal with our, you know, larger fire issues very effectively and very efficiently. So it's a tremendous asset to have Nipsey here and have all of us co-located where we can coordinate, collaborate and do all those things together that we know were much more effective in doing. I think what has become the heart of this place is our commitment to continue to work together day after day. It's pretty tough because we've got a lot of different agencies here and we represent a lot of interests and a lot of partners out in the field across the nation. But our commitment is to keep coming back to the table every day, talk about what our priorities are, talk about what our differences are and figure out how to work together to get the most work done and to get it done in the most efficient way. I think it's important to note that what we have here at the National Marine Fire Center are folks that have been there and done that. They're folks that have breathed smoke, felt the heat of fire, have been involved in that crucible. Many of us over thirty years, some of them over forty and when we go to the table to discuss these issues while things are changing the field we go there with some knowledge of what they're up against what they're dealing with. I won't say that always do our decisions feel good on the ground but I will say that they're all in deference to the folks that are actually doing the work and so that's why it's a real pleasure to be working at this place with these people.