KAKE television station and FirefighterCloseCalls.com are reporting that a Peru, Kansas firefighter was killed on a vegetation fire on Sunday, April 11. Harold D. Reed Sr, 74 years of age, was overcome by smoke while working on a fire west of Peru and died in the line of duty. Firefighter Reed was transported to Sedan City Hospital where efforts to revive him were unsuccessful. He had been a longtime member of the fire district and was a current board member.
A man in Mitchell County, North Carolina died after he tried to put out a fire that escaped from his trash burning project. The unidentified man died as firefighters arrived at the scene. Few other details about the incident, which happened on Friday, April 1, are available.
A second fatality
Fire officials still have not released the name of the individual that was found on Wednesday, March 30, dead in the middle of a 2-acre fire 15 km north of Kingston, Ontario, Canada. When firefighters first arrived at the fire, they were told by a neighbor that the owner of the property was missing.
UPDATE at 2:20 p.m. April 3:
A third fatality
Geeze–what’s going on? A third fatality of a civilian on a vegetation fire has been reported by WSB TV in Georgia:
FORSYTH COUNTY, Ga. — A body was found in a brush fire in Forsyth County Saturday, investigators said. Forsyth County Police Capt. Jason Shivers confirmed to Channel 2 that a body was found as firefighters battled a brush and structure fire near Chamblee Gap Road.
Channel 2 Action News reporter Tony Thomas said that one home was destroyed in the fire.
The Forsyth County Fire Department and the Georgia Forestry were both fighting the fire that covers 5- 8 acres.
When Andrew Palmer was killed in a tree felling accident on a fire in northern California July 25, 2008, and especially when the report on the accident was released on November 2, 2009, it shook the wildland firefighter community. Not only was one of our own lost, but after reading the report, a person has to wonder how it would have turned out if Mr. Palmer had been transported to an appropriate medical facility during the “golden hour”, as opposed to the three hours and 20 minutes it took to transport him from the accident site to the Redding, California airport where he was pronounced dead.
The coroner determined the cause of death to be “blood loss due to blunt force trauma to the left leg”. He bled to death.
We offered an opinion about it last November, but we recently discovered that in January, 2009, Andrew Palmer’s brother, Robert, wrote a very well researched and very reasoned paper about the accident and what we could do to reduce the number of fatalities that occur on the fireline. The first two pages of the eight-page document are excerpted below with his permission; the entire document is HERE.
=================================================
2009 National Wildland Fire Reform, “The Palmer Perspective”
January 29, 2009
by Robert Palmer
Short History
My world changed on July 25, 2008. I lost faith in the “fire world’s ability to help one of their own”.
I had just returned from a 14-day wildland fire assignment in Northern California, when my Fire Management Officer meet me in the parking lot to tell me about my younger brother, also a member of a wildland fire staff; “Rob, Andy was hit by a tree this afternoon and isn’t doing well. I’m going to drive you to the airport and fly you back down to California.” I made it to the airport, 15 minutes away, when I received a call informing me that Andy had died en route to the hospital.
He was 18 years old, a recent high school graduate, enrolled in college for the fall, and lived a vigorous life. After a couple of weeks of training, this was his first fire assignment and first day of real work when he died. Andy’s incident provided me with a very raw and a very distinct perspective considering my experiences. I now understand what it means to lose a loved one tragically. I know what it is like to watch a falling tree kill a fellow crewmember and the frustration of not being able to change anything. I also know how Fire Management operates after serving over 10 seasons in fire and as a crew supervisor with the National Park Service (NPS).
Problem
I have protected our national lands, I have lead some of the finest employees in this country, and I have fought for their interests. I now need your support as I fight for my brother’s; we have a National Fire Management Program that cannot provide for the safety of its most important resource, its employees. Several weakness’s and human factors contributed to Andy’s death, but Andy is not alone. One would be naïve to attempt to focus corrective actions on one factor, for we have a much larger problem. We aggressively engage too many fires. We need to ask the questions, “Why are we doing this? and Why are we here?”
Objective: Golden Hour Response
Determine response and engagement based on the capability to deliver any injured fire personnel to an appropriate medical facility in less than 60 minutes. This will:
Decrease engagement to SAFELY mitigate risks during response
Establish Emergency Medical Standards on an Incident
Dramatically decrease costs associated with wildland fire
Decrease impacts to the ecosystem
We must decrease our engagement because we do not have the capacity to evacuate injured fire staff safely.
Necessary Actions
Given a lack of rescue and prompt evacuation capacity, we must decrease our engagement until our emergency evacuation capacity complements our engagement. In the short term, we will therefore limit our exposure until we have the capacity to rescue any fire personnel to an appropriate medical facility within 60 minutes, the golden hour. The “golden hour” of trauma defines that if one suffers massive life-threatening injuries reaches an appropriate receiving hospital within 60 minutes, the individual has the greatest survival rate. “Historically, wound data and casualty rates indicate that more than 90% of all casualties die within the first hour of severe wounding without advanced trauma life support.” Instead of reacting and floundering through an emergency within an incident, we will determine future wildland fire response tactics based on the principles of the golden hour, invoking the first radical change in the history of wildland fire.
Three volunteer firefighters died in Japan on Saturday when they were conducting a prescribed fire on a military base training area in Gotemba, Shizuoka Prefecture (map). The three local residents, all in their 30s and members of the fire department, became trapped by flames driven by strong winds.
The Japan Meteorological Agency said winds in the area on Saturday morning were around 18 mph and became stronger in the afternoon. The prescribed fire started at 10 a.m.
Briefly, Mr. Packer, a Division Supervisor (DIVS), was scouting the fire with another Division Supervisor DIVS the day before their incoming Type 1 Incident Management Team was scheduled to assume command of the fire. When the fire behavior increased as predicted, the other fireline personnel withdrew to safety zones, but the two DIVSs did not. As the fire overtook their position, one of them escaped downhill through very thick vegetation, but Mr. Packer deployed his new generation fire shelter. However, the intense heat of the fire and its residence time exceeded the capability of the fire shelter.
Here are the recommendations from the report:
====================================
Recommendations
1. Submit the task of evaluation of the Safety Management System (SMS) to the National Safety Council and to Research and Development with respect to the following:
a. Forest Service Wide implementation of SMS
b. Just Culture
c. Inclusion of standard HF analysis in all accident investigations
d. Establishment of Doctrine (Leader‟s Intent) in Forest Service Manual Systems
e. System Safety
f. Organizational Risk Management
(Findings 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9)
2. Solicit Forest Managers to develop a safety briefing procedure for newly arriving personnel that personalizes the safety briefings used in high risk operations. Establish a working group to assess the current forms of communication of safety information transmitted through briefings. This group should produce guidance to reflect actual conditions facing the firefighters on the line and prepare them for the hazards unique to the specific conditions that crews are likely to encounter. The briefings should address safety considerations and procedures unique to the assignment, based on thorough risk assessment.
(Findings 2, 7, 8, 9)
3. Develop a policy to fully evaluate and, if indicated, develop a system which standardizes communication of safety critical information and Crew or Team Resource Management for ground firefighters. If indicated, include this language and CRM training for personnel engaged in high risk operations.
High Reliability Organizations know that odd things can occur and want their people to be on the lookout for these odd or unusual things instead of assuming that they don’t matter or are not important. They train their people to look for anomalies and recognize decoys and most importantly to decouple systems when problems are discovered and then empower employees to act. This was absent as evidenced by the assumptive behavior observed on this fire and common to many fire and aviation accident investigations. Recent investigations have identified this as the “Need for upward voice”. An example of a successful briefing used the phrase, “Let me know if you see anything Dumb, Different or Dangerous.”
(Findings 3, 7, 9, 10)
ALTAMONT —A Fredonia woman was found dead after a field fire trapped her in rural Labette County Saturday.
According to Labette County Sheriff William Blundell, sheriff’s deputies were called at 2:19 p.m. Saturday to 852 1000 Road near Edna.
When deputies arrived, they found that numerous people had been conducting a controlled burn on a grassy field and that a woman had become trapped by the fire and died.
The victim was identified as Celia K. Harris, 64 of Fredonia, and was pronounced dead at the scene by the Labette County Deputy Coroner.
Blundell said in a release that Harris was attempting to assist in controlling the fire and became trapped between the fire and a fence row where she could not escape from the “flames and intense smoke.”
