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- Our objective is to get the army
back to training as soon as possible.
So if we can go out,
put fire on the ground,
and blacken an area to allow it to not start fires again,
by training munitions,
now they can train for several more months on in
before we have to worry about it.
'Cause our number one thing,
and the reason that we're here as a fire department
and as an installation,
is to make sure that the soldiers get trained.
Is to make sure that they have the training they need,
to go over and fight overseas,
to keep all of us safe.
They're the ones that are out fighting for our freedom.
So for us, our number one goal is to make sure
that they get every ounce and
every minute of training that they can,
to ensure that they are successful
in their missions overseas.
- We are an active training installation
that has heavy equipment here,
we have impact areas that even if it's on fire,
you're not going into that area.
There are certain areas we will burn
and certain areas we won't burn and will let burn
- Well, an fire managements role
on an on an installation is
to basically support the warfighter.
We're there to provide them a safe training area,
so they can meet their training objectives,
their training mission.
We don't always know whether or not
is that unit deploying into leaks
or are they doing their regular qualifications.
We may not know what has to happen right now,
but we have to interact with them.
We have to support them.
So if there's a fire on the ground
or pieces of that nature,
I wanna make it fire safe for them.
So they can go back to training
in a timely manner and meet their objective.
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So we're doing in briefings,
we start obviously by falling
through the IRPG briefing checklist,
but we have to cover
some of the other more unique
pieces of installation life.
We have to be talking about UXL.
We start with the don't kick it,
don't pick it up,
don't take it home,
don't put it in your pocket,
speech.
And a lot of them have already heard it
'cause they've been here before,
or we've done pre-season training with them,
but we want to absolutely reinforce
what we're talking about on the ground.
There's lots of neat things out there
People are curious,
that is not the time to be curious
and pick something up and take it home.
And then we talked a lot about driving,
where you're driving,
how you're driving.
The road conditions can change in just a few minutes.
There may be heavy armored vehicles on the same roads
that you're sharing with them.
Those drivers may not see you.
Their scope and vision can be very limited.
If you are walking at night,
you may be walking down range with troops on the ground
that are wearing night vision devices.
They don't want to see your headlights coming down the road.
So you have to be very cautious
when you're walking down range at night,
are there troops on the ground?
There may be troops walking down that road.
There's nothing about them,
that you're gonna recognize
until all of a sudden you see them.
- Next piece have to be clear on
is what are your routes of travel?
And with a map.
So they may be giving you route numbers
that don't correspond.
If you have a GPS in your truck,
they may have road names on them
that don't correspond with route numbers.
What do you do when you run into closed gates?
How do you address those?
Is it closed,
is it really closed
or did it just blow close because nobody pinned it open.
And what is your interface gonna be with troops in the area?
What's the process?
So are they there?
Are they supposed to be there?
Do you need to talk to them?
Not talk to them, report it up.
what's that gonna look like?
when you're involved in the briefing coming in,
you may need to make sure that you're clear
in your understanding
of what the communication methods are gonna be.
They may say trunked radios,
but was that a 400 megahertz trunk radio
or a 800 megahertz trunk radio.
Voter repeaters VHF.
What does that system really look like?
And then if you're not sure,
and you're not clear
ask to have a training
so that you get the method of how this is going to work.
- That briefing is gonna entail,
this is the environment you're in.
This is what You need to do to mitigate it.
And if you feel unsafe,
then you need to say something.
- If you have a question,
ask somebody that's familiar with the installation
and what's going on.
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- UXO and wildland fire operations
is number one thing that we brief
our guys on all the time.
Every time we do a refresh,
every time we do a wild line class,
that is something we're discussing every single time.
If you see something on the ground
that does not look like it should normally be there
and is not any natural vegetation that you would see,
stay away from it.
Everything that they do from shooting,
the M16 to 50 cals
to bombing ranges,
mortars all of that stuff.
UXO is gonna be number one for us every single time.
- On installation,
again we have to look at those routes of travel
and we have to know what's going on.
Are there areas within that fire perimeter
that has posed a significant hazard
that we've already identified
that we're going to stay out of?
We are working in an impact area
where there's unexploded ammunitions
or there are ranges here at Fort Carson
that have been around since world war II.
We may or may not know where everything is on those ranges.
So we have to avoid those areas.
So it may not be a matter of just easily walking the line
and starting to put boots on the ground and dig in line.
I may have to go in direct
and have to go parallel
simply to avoid any area that's potentially
a much higher hazard area.
- The constant presence of UXO
or the possibility of it
existing on the ranges is ever present.
It can be on the ranges,
it can be anywhere.
To include the proximity to the base.
So once you're off of the base,
doesn't mean it's not there.
There's lots of ways for it to migrate,
not necessarily just missing
or missing the target or getting it out,
but it can exist on the fringes as well.
So you always have to be cautious of UXO
and have it in your mind
as you're responding on post
or in the vicinity of the post.
As it relates to wild land fire,
some of it's reactive with fire,
some of it's not reactive with fire.
Some of it, the fire doesn't hurt it
but it burned away the structure that's holding it in place.
It falls and it shocks instantly.
So you have to be present,
You have to be mindful wherever you're going,
even on roadways,
that that product exists out there.
Some of it won't do anything.
Some of it can be very old.
There are areas that are absolutely no go's.
When it says it's a no go or it's a no admittance area,
it's for a reason.
There is stuff out there
that when they use it in war
is meant to remove life from the surface of the earth.
And it's not discriminate,
it will see you the same way.
- I go back to with UXL,
same briefing I do all the time.
Don't pick it up,
don't drive on it.
Don't kick it.
Don't take it home.
There's lots of pretty interesting things on the ground.
Leave them on the ground.
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Installations of a lot of heavy equipment
there's tanks,
there's armored personnel carriers,
strikers, many different types of equipment out there.
You need to be aware of where they're at.
They may be on the road with you.
They're obviously bigger and heavier than we are,
so give them the right of way.
The drivers have got maybe a limited field of vision.
So be sure that you can see that driver.
And he is aware that you're there
before you start to make a move around them or across them.
So particularly at night,
if you're working down a road
or you're working across country,
you may come across a tank
or a Bradley sitting there in a hide
that you haven't even seen.
They camouflage
they're they're down in a high pit.
Something like that,
and you're not even aware that they're there.
They may not see you.
Occasionally we'll come across a military vehicle.
That's involved in a fire.
whether the fire was started by the vehicle
or an accident or another incident.
And now we have essentially
a wild land fire outside of the other incident.
Need to be aware that there may be ordinance on that vehicle
that we have to deal with.
There's hazardous materials with those vehicles,
whether it's oil, fuel, hydraulic liquid,
any of those pieces that can go on,
just like any other normal vehicle fire.
Because they're training in the Wildlands,
they're probably gonna have a wildland fire extending
off of a vehicle fire.
So we wanna make sure that we're dealing
mitigating that those hazardous materials directly,
and taking care of that.
- So the hazards with
working with military vehicles in general,
with wild land firefighting.
Number one, they can't always see you.
That's the biggest thing
they don't have great turning radiuses.
They don't have a lot of 360 visibility.
Sometimes they'll have someone,
depending on how the vehicle is.
Have someone in the top hatch sitting above it.
But they may not be able to see you.
So if we get a fire at night,
they're down they're using night vision goggles.
So they don't even have headlights on
and even on like a Humvee or something like that.
So they will be driving with night vision goggles,
and we may not see them at all.
So if we don't see them,
and then all of a sudden,
you have vehicles start coming past you.
That's always a concern.
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- Social media and being able to take pictures
and share your experiences of what you're doing,
is not okay here.
And it's not okay on a lot of federal installations.
We have a very robust social media
and OPSEC policy that we train on annually for this.
So when we're bringing in outside agencies
and our own people that we train with us,
we tell them
this is not for public consumption.
We can not put this for public release.
- Information security is
really kind of an overarching item,
thus even in the briefings in the morning,
we'll make sure to pass on that you don't have
to be taking pictures of things
that you don't know or you think is cool
and putting it on your personal Facebook
or your Instagram page or whatever.
'Cause you are on a military installation.
We try to control that at that level.
- We don't take photos of UXL.
We don't take photos of any type of structures
around the facility.
And that's a commitment we made as a cooperator.
And that allows us to have a good working relationship.
It's kind of like going into somebody's house,
you go around and take photos of all their family photos,
or you just look at them,
experience it and move on.
It's their home,
wanna respect that,
- But if you're an outside resource coming in,
you've got your laptop.
You want to sit down and you want to start work on your IEP
for the next operational part,
you wanna get onto some new maps.
You wanna start working on a better map
for what's going on.
You have to be aware that,
there's that network port sitting over there on the wall,
don't plug into it.
All of these are controlled.
They're they're monitored.
You don't have a DOD computer,
don't plug into it.
If you have a question,
ask somebody that's familiar with the installation
and what's going on.
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