Story 1: Grab People Off Districts

I guess dealing with the aspect of cohesion, when we put together crews—because there's kind of a difference between crews like a 20-man crew, say a shot crew, and a crew that we put together on a forest. That 20-man crew, the type 1 crew, is going to be together all season and then our forest crews, we just grab people off districts and put them on. And those are, I don't know, there's aspects of each that are hard to deal with but the forest crews are extremely hard in the sense that you don't know what you're getting. Real good crews, but you just don't know the people. You don't work with them for, say, 4 years like we do here.

So we have all these people coming together, a lot of them new, some second or third year, but basically people that didn't really know each other, maybe worked together once or twice. And so I guess that's kind of where the teambuilding stuff starts. They came in at different intervals and so those people that I knew, I'd go up and talk to. Like, if I knew you, I'd go up and talk to you. And whoever I didn't know, it's the kind of thing where you introduce yourself and shake hands. It's a meet and greet at the beginning there.

At that point, people are standoffish and what not, so you get your little groups of people here, groups of people there, usually the people that know each other. We try to get people working and doing things, getting a manifest together, checking gear, pairing up different people with different people.

Before we headed out, we all gathered up and did a briefing to tell the crew where we were going, had a roster already made up of who was going to be the squad bosses, who was going to be crewmember type thing. And so everybody introduced themselves, said where they're from. We went around, the assistant and I, and gave people their position, which was really, you know looking back, a good thing because I guess that is the main icebreaker for that whole crew because everybody's name gets out on the table.

Yeah, anyway, we gathered up and had our briefing, you know, people got to talking. We loaded up and headed out. We took, I think, five different trucks just to accommodate all the gear and the people. And since we're not a crew that's permanently together, we just kind of have to piece together trucks or what not. So anyway, we had five different trucks. And we tried to load up our squads that we had determined earlier, load them up together. And that was a real good thing because the way we picked out the squad members was, you know, trying to pick people off of different districts. Because you don't know what combination is going to work and what's not. So on the ride to Denver, say a 12-hour ride, you might as well have people that don't know each other talking together, right? And that's a good thing, usually it works. It worked in this case. So that was, that was good.

Story 2: Resources I Hadn't Worked With Before

I know just thinking back to last summer, coming in with a number of different resources that I hadn't worked with before. The first day's operation, that kind of transition day, I just relied upon the person that I was replacing to kind of, to brief me on who was doing what and how they were doing, who was putting in the best work or what kind of work each engine was doing and then looking at their equipment and seeing what their capabilities were. Some of them, every one of them was different. So getting a good briefing from that person, that I was replacing, but then, you know, not making an assumption because I didn't know that person at all either, it was all new to me.

The next day, when I took over, it was just kind of scaling back, stepping back. Not being maybe as aggressive as we could have been until I got a good feel of who I had working for me, what their capabilities were, you know, how they communicated back to me in critical times. Whether or not they just left me hanging out there on the radio or they could tell me, you know, confidently that they had it or whatever the situation might have been. And then going over to them, not just sitting there and watching them, going over and looking at their equipment, looking at what, how they were doing, helping them out, because some of them were pretty inexperienced people. And just kind of letting them know again what I expected of them, because it was going to be different than the person that was in charge before me. Not that I didn't trust them or anything, it was just a matter of getting comfortable with the situation and who I had and what we had going on with the fire.

Story 3: Crew Straggling In

This was the Brushy Fire, this is a fire in pretty much just pinyon-juniper and it was about 20 acres when we got there, maybe 10, something like that, it had a little bit of size to it. It turned out this was just one of those fires where there was no access to the heel of the fire. This was one of those where you had to go in on a road that was above the fire. It was late afternoon when we initial attacked it. We brought in a five person IA squad that was stationed from our station. So I knew all of them. We brought them in and we started suppression on the fire.

So at that point we got them there, we decided that there wasn't going to be enough, we'd need at least a 10-person crew. We called in a 10-person crew, IA crew to support the people that we had there. A lot of these people were folks that I hadn't worked with before. They have no cohesion whatsoever because they're coming from different parts of the district and then coming together at the fire. It was one of those things where they couldn't really get everybody together at a predetermined location. People kind of straggled in from this 10-person crew so two people would show up and then three more people would show up. And, so it was one of those things where every time—I remember this really good because it was pretty steep, but every time they showed up, I'd hike up to the top of the fire, tie in with them, give them the briefing, which I had memorized by this point and, you know, then say, "Okay let's go back down." So, then I'd go back down and then three more people would show up, so I'd hike back up to the top of the hill, brief them, tell them what was going on, give them that whole spiel and then bring them down the hill, tie them in with the squad boss that was running the IA crew, the IA foreman, and then they would become a part of that crew down there.

You know, basic, just introductions, introductions like you would do if you were introducing somebody to your dad. Hey, this is so and so and they're from whatever forest and they're here with a 10-person crew and we're still waiting for some of them so we're going to have these guys work with you for a while and you're responsible for them, and basically had one crew down at the bottom.

Story 4: They Welcomed Us In

A good contract crew and a good agency crew—the differences are very minimal. The training is virtually the same, the equipment is virtually the same, and they're all human, so the makeup of the crew is virtually the same. The biggest thing is a contract crew at times maybe won't be treated the same when they're on an incident as another crew. People have a problem before they meet me, and before they see our crew perform they have a preconceived notion of what they're getting. And for some reason, it's extremely negative. Should at least be given a chance to either fail or succeed, that's all I ask.

It was an experience I've had this year, actually in northern Idaho. The fire had been jumped earlier that day. There was quite a few jumpers. I think they put out six jumpers, at least. So they had assumed the overhead responsibilities for that smaller fire. And, you know, we got there—and they welcomed us in. We got briefed. There was a very lengthy discussion with the jumper in charge and he gave me every piece of information I would ever want to know and then some, and gave me his idea of what he would want me to do with my crew, but then gave me enough respect to allow me to make the decision of how to do it, and how to go about working my crew. He didn't tell me how to split my crew up and how to dig line, I mean, he gave me the respect that I would normally anticipate getting, that I know how to fight fire. You know, allowed us to go out the next day and to take on more responsibility, and to take a portion of the fire as our own. They would work with us; they wouldn't segregate themselves. They integrated themselves into the firefighting process in our area. They were pulling my crew numerous times on the early stages of that fire to go assist them, to catch the fire. I haven't worked with a lot of smokejumpers, it's just a handful of fires in my experience, but it seems like every time I do, they waited to see what we were going to do before they made their decisions about how to judge us and how to treat us, or what responsibilities to give us on the fire.

It does stand out in my mind as one of the rare times that I felt like I was on a team other than my crew while I was fighting fire. And that no matter what happened, we would, as a team fighting the fire, we would adjust whatever was needed to make it happen safely.