The Missoula Technology Development Center is producing a new supplemental training video for the use of fire shelters. Tentatively titled “Fire Shelter Deployments — Lessons Learned”, it will be a collection of stories of recent fire shelter deployments. One of those stories will be the Alabaugh Fire, of July 7, 2007, near Hot Springs, South Dakota in which two firefighters shared one shelter as they were burned over.
The Alabaugh fire has become rather infamous, and has been featured in the 2008 wildland fire refresher training, a staff ride, and a recently released book “Cascade of Flames”.
Some of the 65 photos we took during the early stages of the fire will be incorporated into the new training video when it is released in the next two to three months.
The folks from MTDC will be doing a special introduction of this new trainining package at the IAWF Wildland Fire Safety Summit in Missoula on Monday, April 4th. They’ll also be doing an in-depth session on their “Firefighter Cohesion and Entrapment Avoidance” series that same day. For more info, check out: http://www.iawfonline.org/missoula2011