Situational awareness is a key element in any fire behavior prediction.
Recognizing cues and indicators is simply a starting point.
Understanding what they mean and how they fit into your projection of future events,
that's the big prize.
Experts have identified three levels of situation awareness
Level one is your perception of elements in the current situation.
Level two is your comprehension of those elements.
Level three is how you project from current events to predict future events.
Our goal is to help you make more frequent and intuitive fire behavior predictions.
We hope that this will chip away at the number of times you are surprised by unexpected events.
To help you get this done we sat down with Fire Behavior Analyst Kelly Close.
For fire behavior prediction probably the the key basic elements
are
getting a good feeling for the terrain you're working in, the fuels not just what fuel is out there
but the condition of the fuels dead and live.
Probably more important than anything is the weather because that's the most dynamic of all those components.
Who's responsible for doing that?
Well, I think
obviously the crew boss needs to be doing that because they're responsible for the crew
and they have certain objectives that they need to be carrying out for the day. But really at some level
it's everybody's responsibility to do some kind of ongoing assessment of the fire environment and fire behavior throughout the day.
You come to the fire line at the beginning of the day, at the beginning of the fire with a certain set of
expectations based on what you know about that area, what you may know about the predicted weather,
what the trends have been that you may have heard about in the last couple of days.
So you start out with a certain basic set of
expectations. The real key is to be able to
be perceptive and keep that ongoing sense of situational awareness and be watching for things that may be changing in the fire environment
and either direction. That may be actually subduing fire activity or might be causing the fire intensity and spread to pick up.
A great example I saw last year on the Los Padres was chaparral that was drought stressed to the point
it was actually starting to drop it's leaves. It was dying. Drought stressed chaparral that was so drought stressed
it was dying. You would expect that that would carry fire really really well.
And in fact what was happening in a lot of places it wasn't carrying fire
They would try to get a burnout operation to back off of a ridge, and it would die out.
They couldn't get the stuff to carry fire. As it turned out
when they looked back on it,
you had that marine influence
that was wetting up the fine fuels, the grasses underneath the chaparral that it needed to get fire to carry through the chaparral.
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.
No one would have expected that but you started looking back at why, and
suddenly it made sense.
I've looked back at a number of fatality burn over events
and
in almost every case it's come down to a time frame of about 20 minutes.
From when somebody actually saw the fire do something that they didn't think was right made sense,
to the time that there was a burn over. About 20 minutes typically.
Does that mean that it was almost completely unexpected because we only had 20 minutes?
No.
Because a lot of the things that we're starting to line up previous to that we're in place. In some cases
what seems to be actually happening, especially in steep terrain, very volatile fuels is
that fires rate of spread actually starts to increase. So we're almost seeing an
acceleration of that rate of spread or if you want to call it that an exponential
change in the rate of spread rather than a linear rate of spread and us as humans out on the fireline tend to think
very linearly.
I think there are some situations where we need to be watching for that and we need to be cognizant that that fire behavior
may not play by the rules that we've been taught.
It may be accelerating rather than staying in a steady state, which is what we might have predicted even with perfect information.
I've seen some fire behavior events that were very spectacular that seemed to happen very suddenly. But in reality,
if you're watching the fire environment, if you're watching all those indicators
you can see it start to shape up. So the event itself may seem to happen very suddenly.
A stand of trees explodes into crown fire. Well did that really happen just suddenly with no warning?
Visually what you're seeing might have happened it seemed to happen very quickly,
but the factors that led to that crown fire have probably been developing for a period of time.
And if you know what to be keying in to in the fire environment
you may very well be able to predict that you know what I think we're going to see crown fire,
and I think we're gonna see it fairly quickly. And so you might get that spectacular event
but you predicted it and you expected it.
At that point you really need to be very aware of how things are changing and what's happening.
And a trigger point might be if we start to see the fire
do this? If we start to see a group of trees torch? If the fire starts to make a sustained run
through those brush fields that we didn't think would carry fire? No questions asked, not 30 seconds longer
we're going immediately to a safety zone.
Making fire behavior predictions especially at the fireline level,
I think every firefighter really does have a very good basic set of core tools
for assessing the potential fire behavior during the day.
Just make your own mental assessment of what you think the fire behavior is going to
be that day based on what you know, what you've been told about the weather, and the rest of fire environment.
I don't know that everybody necessarily does that consciously. I think a lot of people do it subconsciously.
At the end of the day, talk about it with other crew members. As a crew Boss get together with your crew and do
basically a fire behavior after-action review. Talk about what did we see today?
Is that what we expected to see? Why or why not? Not a yes or no answer.
Engage the crew members and really discuss what did we see changing out there, and why did that result in the fire behavior
we saw. If you do that enough you start really improving and honing your skills
at more accurately assessing fire behavior because it is part science and part art.
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,
validating those assessments with the rest of your crew, and
trying again the next day. And that's something that can happen from the
most fundamental level ground-pounder all the way up the line to the upper levels of an incident or organization.
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.
Think of an event that you were surprised by and complete the exercise in your student workbook.