Story 1: We're Not Going

When I was a strike team leader on the Glacier Peak Fire in ‘85 in eastern Oregon, we had a strike team, a strike team trainee, and we had three crews underneath us. And we had fire that was burning on a slope, north slope, dry year, drought year, so everything was burning and the fire had slopped over down below, it was maybe 50 feet at the most. We brought them all up, all three crews up to where the slopover was, we said we want you guys to go around, we need you to tactically, you know tactic wise, to go ahead and just cut this thing off, however you want to do that. And he just, I remember he just stepped back and sat down and goes, "We're not going." It wasn't a, "Nah I don't feel comfortable," it was like, "No, we're not going. I'm not going to put my crew down there." I said, "Okay." But what the crew had seen, it was a very new crew, what the crew had seen was all this fire going up the hill so they had that perception that we were going to put them in danger if we put them down below the road without an anchor point.

The strike team leader trainee that was with me, we sat down, like I said, and talked with him, trying to find out why he was feeling that way. And also talked to him, talking to his crew; finding out what they thought and working through—I think in his mind, I could be wrong, I think in his mind he was playing the "what if" situation. He was saying, "Okay, what if this doesn't go like they say it does? What if it goes bad?" That's when he said, "You know, what am I going to tell the parents of these kids, you know, if we die?" Like I said, he was fairly new; he had only been in fire for 3 or 4 years so he was still seeing, you know, big fire.

And what we tried to do was, we asked him questions on what was it that was making him feel uncomfortable. In other words, what was—was it a fear of being burned up? Was it a fear of not knowing where his crew was? What was it that was making him fearful? And it turned out that he had been working for a gentleman that had had a crew have to run from a fire that was down below. So he had this training from this gentleman that he had been told, never let your crew go below a road with fire below you on that.

We said, "Okay, what, how would you go about this? Here is the fire; just look at it as that's just your fire. Don't look up above, don't look at the big fire up above, look at the fire down below and what would make you feel comfortable." And he thought about it for a while and he walked and he talked with his crewmembers, which I thought was real good and asked them their opinions. And he said, "Well I feel comfortable if I make sure that my crew is together, I know where they're at and I can see everything." And I said, "Well, see everything on the fire?" He goes, "Yes, see everything on this fire and also see not just the fire but also where it came from." He said, "Because that's probably the way we're going out if we have to leave." On that, he says, "I want to make sure that I know every area around that fire." And so we had the crew look at all the upper part where the road was, looking down on the fire, looking around, pointing out things. We're looking at it and saying, "Okay if you come in to that area, what can you see?" He would sit there and he'd look and go, "Well, I can see that but I can't see around that little ridge, this little spur ridge." I said, "Oh, what if you get up on the spur ridge?" He said, "Well I feel better about that." And so we just talked about placement of where he could work on his crews, just making him feel more comfortable with his environment at least to the point where he could feel comfortable leading that crew. But we also made sure that they knew that we understood. You know, we didn't—I think that helped with getting the person to feel comfortable is we didn't say, "Well what do you know, sort of thing? You're going to go down there and do it because I'm the strike team leader and you're the crew boss." So I think, in that instance they felt comfortable that they weren't going to be entrapped because they were able to take the time, to look at the fire environment and say, "Okay, here's the good spots, here's the bad spots and we're going to use this good spot but we also have a back up."

Story 2: Should We Be Here?

They had a burnout operation that was going on just up the ridge from us. Intended line that we were going to be holding was midslope. It was an old cat road, pretty much surrounded on the lower part by a reprod unit. I was going to be a dozer boss. The dozer that I was with, he was on standby there, had him parked off to the side. Didn't have a whole lot of time to talk with him up unto that point. I just met with him, exchanged names, and pretty much just glanced at his equipment as I had been relieving somebody else and it had already been inspected.

We were getting a little bit more active fire behavior. I noticed that some embers were getting down in the reprod area. We had some type II and some type I helicopters with large buckets to come in there and help us suppress that a little bit, pretreat it to make sure nothing had caught. Air attack was also over the fire and was concentrated on our area since it was the most active. Noticed that we were starting to pick up some spot fires down there in the reprod. Pretty much weren't real visible to where we were at, because the smoke was laying over in there. Every once in a while, the smoke would peel off and we'd get a view, and could see them.

I stayed with the dozer, and that's pretty much all we had. After a few minutes of trying to catch a few spots, the dozer operator dropped his blade and yelled, "Should we be here?" I noticed a definite sense of panic that he was starting to seize up a little bit. I can't recall the exact question I asked him, but I realized that this was his first fire that he'd ever been on. He was relief for the previous dozer operator. This was his first fire, and it was a going fire, but he did have a pretty good excavation background from talking to him for about 30 seconds I realized that he knew how to operate the dozer, he just didn't know how to operate the dozer in this environment. Didn't have a whole lot of time to talk to him, since he was pretty much our only resource. And the only thing I could think of at the time was asking if he trusted me, so I asked him, "Do you trust me?" He paused momentarily, and said, "Yeah." I don't know why he'd say that, but he said "Yeah," so I went with it. I was confident. As long as he knew how to run that dozer, I thought we made a pretty good team with what we'd been given. His eyes were the size of saucers, but he raised his blade and we bailed off down into the reprod with me leading him.

I don't know how needed it was that I actually would physically lead him into an area that I knew that he could get in there and be effective, and I could stand off to the side, but I kind of felt it was my duty that I asked this fella if he trusted me, because I was definitely going to be out in front of him the whole time. But I definitely wanted to make more of a concerted effort to be really close, go slow, make sure we kept in perfect sight, and try to direct him down there instead of just going ahead and flagging some line and coming back out the other side way ahead of him, which is what I would normally do with an experienced dozer operator who had been on a lot of fires. I'd have just flagged a perimeter and got out of the way. But I think we went a little bit slower, a little bit more deliberate, just to try and reinforce that trust issue that I asked. So we managed to surround some spots, the smoke finally lifted as the fire died down.