One of the most important pieces of information that should be included in a Report on Conditions during the initial attack of a wildfire is the POTENTIAL. What is the fire expected to do in the next hour or the next several hours?
This carries through for the duration of the fire. Dispatchers, agency administrators, incident commanders, Geographic Areas, and Multi-Agency Coordination Groups need this information so that they can prioritize incidents and move resources around as needed. It could also be useful for Incident Information Officers and the media, making it possible for them to identify and devote more attention to fires that are potentially disastrous, rather than fires that are of little consequence, even if they are large. The public and law enforcement could be better informed, enhancing the effectiveness of evacuations should it become necessary.
But to our knowledge, there is no quick and objective metric, or a way to quantify and describe the relative potential of multiple fires.
The genesis of this concept came from an article written by Miles Muzio, a meteorologist who writes the Weatherwhys Blog. Here is an excerpt of what he wrote on the topic yesterday:
…My draft concept has the implied goal of achieving a meaningful Wildfire Threat Magnitude classification that can be both observed (current state of the fire) and forecast (expected condition in the upcoming 6 hours).
Here is how it works: Once a wildfire develops in Kern County (or anywhere else in the US), the nearest firefighting agency arrives on scene and sets up a staging area from which to manage the conflagration. An incident team is assembled with a commander who directs the firefighting effort. After assessing the situation, a control line is established in order to ultimately surround the fire with defensible space that lacks fuel for the fire to progress. It is in this initial stage that the Incident Commander would give the fire a name and make the appropriate declaration, usually a category 1 or 2 wildfire. It also gets a color code- yellow, orange or red.
The domain of wildfire ratings goes from category 1 (incipient- initial), to category 2 (growing and threatening), to category 3 (major aggressive fires), to category 4 (major aggressive fire of at least 5,000 acres expanding at 400 acres per hour), to category 5 (major very aggressive fire of at least 16,000 acres expanding at 1000 acres per hour or more).
Contributing factors to how an incident commander would rate these fires include: the state of ground (burnable fuel), topography (fire enhancement potential), weather (short term forecast of temperature, humidity, wind and lightning) and downwind structures (threatened property)…
I modified Mr. Muzio’s concept, removing the color code and specifying five levels of potential in eight criteria. Adding the points assigned in each criteria provides a total which will fall into one of five Fire Potential categories, with level five being the highest. If this system is going to be communicated to the public, level five should be the highest, since we have been trained that way through monitoring hurricanes, even though a Type One Complexity fire is the most complex.
This process, which should only take a minute to complete if the information was available, could be built into the Incident Status Summary, the ICS-209. Then the computer whizzes at the Geographic Area Coordination Centers or NIFC could write some computer code that would scrape this off the submitted electronic forms and produce a summary for the decision makers, listing the fires, ranked by potential.
The Wildfire Potential Analysis should not be confused with the Complexity Analysis, which deals primarily with the management of the fire organization, as opposed to predicting what the fire will do in the next 24 hours. The goal of the Complexity Analysis is to determine what type of incident management team should run a fire, while the Wildfire Potential Analysis makes it possible to quantify and compare the potential of multiple fires.
There could easily be debate about which categories should be used in the Wildfire Potential Analysis, how many points to assign to the various levels, and how to define the levels, but I believe this is a workable draft of concept that has value, not only to fire managers but also for the public.
If you would like an electronic copy of the Excel 2007 version of the Wildfire Complexity Analysis, let us know through our Contact Us page and we will email it to you.
