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Hello, and welcome to this year's Annual Fireline Safety Refresher Training.
This program is broken into various modules and
is designed to refresh your memory on the basic
fireline safety principles.
You'll be asked to study some real-life fire
scenarios and complete a few group exercises.
The modules are all stand-alone lessons, and
by no means are required to complete them all.
It's up to your facilitator to choose the modules that
are most appropriate for your audience and introduce
some local concerns or case studies as well.
The video provides your facilitator with the basic
framework needed to develop a more localized training program.
Further refresher training material can also be found
by visiting the Wildland Fire Safety Training
Annual Refresher or WFSTAR website.
The main objective of this training is to get you
thinking in terms of fireline safety again and
to help keep you safety-conscious throughout season.
To get us started, we're going to look at the Cart
Creek Fire that occurred nearly 30 years ago in
Northern Utah on the Ashley National Forest.
This scenario is similar to many recent fires in
that the firefighters found themselves on an
escape route that proved to be ineffective or too
far from the safety zone, given the unexpected and
drastic change in fire behavior that actually occurred.
As we look at this scenario, and throughout
the rest of this training, keep in mind that most
entrapments and burnovers are directly related to
the difference between your expected fire
behavior and the actual fire behavior.
Virtually all fireground decisions are based on
your expectations of what that fire is going to do.
It is incumbent on all firefighters, regardless
of our experience to continuously improve
our ability to predict fire behavior, given the conditions we observe.
Let's go to Utah a a look at the Cart Creek Fire.
At 12 o'clock noon on July 16th, 1977, a lightning
fire started just south of the confluence of Cart
Creek and Spruce Creek on the Ashley National Forest.
The fire was burning in extremely flashy fuels,
mainly grass and sagebrush, with scattered
junipers, ponderosa pines, and clumps of bitterbrush.
The elevation at the top of the bluffs to the west
is 6700 feet and 6000 feet at the creek junction,
which is about one-half mile away.
The weather forecast for the day called for partly cloudy skies
with scattered afternoon showers and thunderstorms;
winds, light and variable out of the southeast, driven by topography,
with considerable gustiness in the late afternoon.
High temperatures were forecasted at 90 to 95 degrees
in the valley bottoms and 80 to 85 degrees on the ridgetops.
Minimum relative humidity 15 to 20 percent.
At 1210 the District FMO was on-scene, estimated
the fire at less than one acre and ordered a helitack crew to respond.
The local helicopter had just returned from a
previous assignment and many of the crew members
were still en route, driving back to station.
Only two available personnel were loaded and delivered to H1, about 1235.
The helicopter then picked up the District FMO and
one other firefighter and delivered them to H1,
where they met the first two helitack crew members.
The FMO ordered a retardant drop and 20
additional firefighters.
The fire was spreading slowly uphill against the
ground winds to the northwest and more rapidly
with the wind, downhill and west towards Cart Creek Canyon.
One person was left to manage the helispot, and
the other three walked to the fire and began an
unanchored line the south.
Other district personnel were attending a local
rodeo when the call came in.
They were to report to Cedar Springs Lagoon about
one mile north of the fire and would be picked up by helicopter.
At 1300 two more firefighters arrived
on-scene and joined Squad 1.
The strategy was to continue line construction
south uphill and swing west to cut off the
fire before it reached the ridgetop.
They were working close to the fire and could knock it down quite easily.
Meanwhile, the fire continued to move
easterly, downhill, causing them to relocate what was H1 to H2.
At 1340 two more firefighters arrived by helicopter.
While circling the area, they recognized the
desirability of cutting off the fire at the
ridgetop, and they unloaded on the ridge.
They made contact with the FMO, and then started
cutting a second, unanchored section of line
along the ridgetop toward the squad below.
The FMO sent two members of his squad up to help
the squad on the ridge.
The helicopter unloaded three more firefighters on
H2, and they began toward Squad 1.
When they arrived, the FMO sent them to join in with
Squad 2, but two members were called back when the
fire became more than Squad 1 could handle.
There was now four members on Squad 2, plus the squad leader,
and four members in Squad 1, plus the FMO who was also the IC.
The helicopter delivered more firefighters to H2.
Another squad of 4 people, Squad 3, was formed and instructed to
proceed from H2 to a point east of the initial attack point.
They began a third segment of unanchored line.
The fire, by this time had burned east and out
flanked Squad 1's line.
Squad 3 was trying to cut off that segment of fire
and tie it back into Squad 1's fireline.
As the fire approached H2, the pilot requested
another helispot further east away from the fire's edge.
A fourth squad was delivered to H3 and were
instructed to begin at the low end of Squad 3's line
and build line downhill to the north.
Squad 4 started walking to the fire.
And I remember when we flew in, we flew
basically over the fire, down in this drainage here.
And our thought at that time was, Wow, this is
just a little fire, very little fire activity.
It was just kind of creeping on the edges.
And our first thought was, Man, we'll have this out
and be back to the rodeo in Manila tonight.
Dave proceeded to line us out and said basically
that we're going to hike up across the edge of the
fire here, up over to where they had started
building line up above.
And so we had no problem with that.
And we could see the fire just below us, and at that
time it was probably 10 acres, maybe a little bit
more, but the flame length was minimal, a foot,
foot-and-a-half flame length.
And so we were I guess what I would call complacent.
And so we were lined out to hike up to where we
were going to tie into the other line.
And so we proceeded to hike across the toe of
this steeper slope right here, over to where we
were told that the other crew had built line.
And at that time we had no -- we weren't even
thinking about the fire basically because there
was just so minimal fire activity.
So we proceeded to hike up through there.
And as we were hiking, Gene Campbell was ahead of me, and
then myself and then Annette Rogers and then Dave Noel.
And I remember Gene just ahead of me, he said,
"Damn it, somebody left a plaskey leaning against a
cedar tree down there."
And he says, "I better go in and get it," and that
was towards the edge of the fire.
And Dave said, "You guys go ahead and I'll wait for Gene
to go get that, and a then we'll come up behind you."
And so we proceeded to hike on up there,
and Dave and Gene stayed behind.
We need to remember that in 1977, fire shelters
were optional piece of equipment.
All the firefighters on this fire had fire shirts
and hard hats but NOMEX pants and fire shelters were not provided.
Let's get into our groups and complete the first exercise in the student workbook.