It can be enlightning to see wildland firefighting described through the eyes of someone else. The Arizona Daily Sun has an article describing the Incident Command Post at the 14,800-acre Schultz fire north of Flagstaff, Arizona which burned about 5,000 acres in the first 8 hours. It is a well written story and is worth reading, but I could not help but notice two minor errors in this excerpt. Can you find them?

When the Schultz fire exploded into a raging wildfire Sunday afternoon and garnered the highest level of firefighting priority in the nation, hundreds of firefighters rushed to northern Arizona to battle the fast-moving blaze.

Behind that initial attack, and in just a matter of 24 hours, a mini-city of support assembled at Cromer Elementary School.

Welcome to ICC, or incident command center, where firefighters can eat scrambled eggs with green chili, reload on sunscreen and bug repellent, get a medical checkup, take a shower and shave, fill up on cookies and ice cream, check out the fire-tracking maps and then find a cot to crash on.

The command center serves as a base camp for the personnel — more than 950 strong (including up to 800 firefighters) — assigned to the Schultz fire. That total includes “overhead” or supervisory workers who support the firefighting effort mostly from the ground.

“There’s a tremendous amount of infrastructure to put in place,” said Troy Waskey, who is on staff with recreation, lands and minerals at the Tonto National Forest. “That’s the beauty of the ICC structure: You can put a team in place with the resources that are needed within 24 hours.”

AN ACTION PLAN

Run as tightly as a military operation, the world of wildfire fighting is full of acronyms and abbreviations, specific uniform requirements, and lots of rules and orders, many spelled out daily in the IAP, or incident action plan, passed out in booklet form to all concerned personnel during the morning briefing.