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Situational awareness is a key element in any fire behavior prediction.

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Recognizing cues and indicators is simply a starting point.

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Understanding what they mean and how they fit into your projection of future events,

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that's the big prize.

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Experts have identified three levels of situation awareness

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Level one is your perception of elements in the current situation.

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Level two is your comprehension of those elements.

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Level three is how you project from current events to predict future events.

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Our goal is to help you make more frequent and intuitive fire behavior predictions.

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We hope that this will chip away at the number of times you are surprised by unexpected events.

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To help you get this done we sat down with Fire Behavior Analyst Kelly Close.

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For fire behavior prediction probably the the key basic elements

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are

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getting a good feeling for the terrain you're working in, the fuels not just what fuel is out there

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but the condition of the fuels dead and live.

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Probably more important than anything is the weather because that's the most dynamic of all those components.

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Who's responsible for doing that?

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Well, I think

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obviously the crew boss needs to be doing that because they're responsible for the crew

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and they have certain objectives that they need to be carrying out for the day. But really at some level

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it's everybody's responsibility to do some kind of ongoing assessment of the fire environment and fire behavior throughout the day.

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You come to the fire line at the beginning of the day, at the beginning of the fire with a certain set of

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expectations based on what you know about that area, what you may know about the predicted weather,

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what the trends have been that you may have heard about in the last couple of days.

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So you start out with a certain basic set of

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expectations. The real key is to be able to

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be perceptive and keep that ongoing sense of situational awareness and be watching for things that may be changing in the fire environment

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and either direction. That may be actually subduing fire activity or might be causing the fire intensity and spread to pick up.

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A great example I saw last year on the Los Padres was chaparral that was drought stressed to the point

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it was actually starting to drop it's leaves. It was dying. Drought stressed chaparral that was so drought stressed

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it was dying. You would expect that that would carry fire really really well.

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And in fact what was happening in a lot of places it wasn't carrying fire

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They would try to get a burnout operation to back off of a ridge, and it would die out.

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They couldn't get the stuff to carry fire. As it turned out

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when they looked back on it,

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you had that marine influence

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that was wetting up the fine fuels, the grasses underneath the chaparral that it needed to get fire to carry through the chaparral.

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So as dry as the chaparral was, it wasn't carrying fire at least backing fire and burn out operations in an incredibly extreme year.

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No one would have expected that but you started looking back at why, and

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suddenly it made sense.

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I've looked back at a number of fatality burn over events

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and

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in almost every case it's come down to a time frame of about 20 minutes.

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From when somebody actually saw the fire do something that they didn't think was right made sense,

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to the time that there was a burn over. About 20 minutes typically.

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Does that mean that it was almost completely unexpected because we only had 20 minutes?

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No.

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Because a lot of the things that we're starting to line up previous to that we're in place. In some cases

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what seems to be actually happening, especially in steep terrain, very volatile fuels is

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that fires rate of spread actually starts to increase. So we're almost seeing an

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acceleration of that rate of spread or if you want to call it that an exponential

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change in the rate of spread rather than a linear rate of spread and us as humans out on the fireline tend to think

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very linearly.

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I think there are some situations where we need to be watching for that and we need to be cognizant that that fire behavior

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may not play by the rules that we've been taught.

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It may be accelerating rather than staying in a steady state, which is what we might have predicted even with perfect information.

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I've seen some fire behavior events that were very spectacular that seemed to happen very suddenly. But in reality,

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if you're watching the fire environment, if you're watching all those indicators

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you can see it start to shape up. So the event itself may seem to happen very suddenly.

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A stand of trees explodes into crown fire. Well did that really happen just suddenly with no warning?

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Visually what you're seeing might have happened it seemed to happen very quickly,

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but the factors that led to that crown fire have probably been developing for a period of time.

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And if you know what to be keying in to in the fire environment

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you may very well be able to predict that you know what I think we're going to see crown fire,

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and I think we're gonna see it fairly quickly. And so you might get that spectacular event

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but you predicted it and you expected it.

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At that point you really need to be very aware of how things are changing and what's happening.

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And a trigger point might be if we start to see the fire

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do this? If we start to see a group of trees torch? If the fire starts to make a sustained run

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through those brush fields that we didn't think would carry fire? No questions asked, not 30 seconds longer

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we're going immediately to a safety zone.

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Making fire behavior predictions especially at the fireline level,

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I think every firefighter really does have a very good basic set of core tools

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for assessing the potential fire behavior during the day.

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Just make your own mental assessment of what you think the fire behavior is going to

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be that day based on what you know, what you've been told about the weather, and the rest of fire environment.

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I don't know that everybody necessarily does that consciously. I think a lot of people do it subconsciously.

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At the end of the day, talk about it with other crew members. As a crew Boss get together with your crew and do

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basically a fire behavior after-action review. Talk about what did we see today?

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Is that what we expected to see? Why or why not? Not a yes or no answer.

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Engage the crew members and really discuss what did we see changing out there, and why did that result in the fire behavior

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we saw. If you do that enough you start really improving and honing your skills

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at more accurately assessing fire behavior because it is part science and part art.

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The science is fairly straightforward. You've got charts and graphs in the fireline handbook, but the art is getting out and observing, making assessments,

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validating those assessments with the rest of your crew, and

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trying again the next day. And that's something that can happen from the

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most fundamental level ground-pounder all the way up the line to the upper levels of an incident or organization.

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Regardless of how long you've been fighting fire, at some point you've probably been caught off guard by some sort of fire behavior.

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Think of an event that you were surprised by and complete the exercise in your student workbook.