It would be refreshing to see more funds put toward projects that would enhance the science, safety, and effectiveness of firefighting.
Judging from the descriptions of the current funding opportunities it appears that the JFSP is moving away from awarding 72 percent of the awards to vegetation studies.
It could be argued that fire suppression skill is not the most critical characteristic of an Incident Commander (IC) on a large fire. Complex emergency incidents involve large numbers of employees working long hours under arduous conditions for an extended period of days while meeting critical deadlines and attempting to achieve difficult objectives under the watchful eyes of local residents, politicians, and the media. Sure, it is very beneficial for an IC to know the basics of how to plan and execute a “big box” strategy of containing a wildfire, but if they do not have advanced levels of emotional and social intelligence they may not be successful in the overall management of the incident. They could stop the fire, but at what cost to Incident Management Team cohesion, interpersonal relationships, property, safety, reputation of the agency within the local community, and the desire of personnel to continue to be a member of the team.
Emotional intelligence is informally defined as the ability to manage your own and other’s emotions. Social intelligence has been described as the ability to manage other’s emotions and build and maintain healthy relationships with others. These concepts have been written about for decades.
Using funding from the U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station, four researchers attempted to determine which emotional and social intelligence (ESI) skills were possessed by the most effective ICs. Their findings are in a paper published in 2017, “Emotional and Social Intelligence Competencies of Incident Team Commanders Fighting Wildfires“, by Richard E. Boyatzis, Kiko Thiel, Kylie Rochford, and Anne Black.
To begin, they contacted by email all of the Type 1 and Type 2 ICs and Operations Section Chiefs that were active and eligible at the time, asking them to go to a web site and “write in the name of any Incident Commander whom you think is an outstanding leader. You can write in as many or as few names as you feel appropriate.” The 17 ICs that were nominated by multiple people were then labeled “outstanding performers” by the researchers. Then, an additional sample of 17 “average performers” was randomly selected from those who were not nominated as outstanding by anyone. Difficulties in contacting the ICs and their willingness to respond to e-mails and phone calls resulted in a sample of eight outstanding and seven average ICs being interviewed.
The 15 ICs were asked, “Tell me about a time, recently, in which you felt effective as an Incident Commander.” The interviewer attempted to extract as behaviorally detailed a description of the event as possible. After one “effective” incident was obtained, the interviewer asked about an event in which they felt ineffective. This sequence was repeated, yielding a total of four critical incidents per interview. All interviews were recorded and transcribed.
The 60 incidents in the 15 interviews were coded for ESI competencies with criteria that has been used for decades: emotional self-awareness, emotional self-control, adaptability, achievement orientation, positive outlook, empathy, organizational awareness, coach and mentor, inspirational leadership, influence, conflict management, teamwork (social intelligence competencies); and systems thinking and pattern recognition (cognitive competencies).
While it might seem like a sample size of 15 ICs is small, the results showed striking and statistically significant differences between the Outstanding and Average ICs in some categories.
From the study
Five competencies distinguished the Outstanding ICs:
Emotional self-control
Adaptability
Empathy
Coach and mentor, and
Inspirational leadership
Five other competencies appeared often enough in both outstanding and average performing groups to be considered necessary for average performance but not sufficient alone for outstanding performance:
Achievement orientation
Organizational awareness
Influence
Conflict management, and
Teamwork
Below are some excerpts from the study.
Emergent Themes
The inductive portion of the study seeking to address the Research Question 2 (i.e., which was Are there other perspectives or capabilities that differentiate the more effective ICs from less effective ones?) revealed two emergent themes: appreciation of interpersonal dynamics and humanizing versus dehumanizing ways of thinking about others. The outstanding ICs showed an appreciation of the interpersonal dynamics of incident teams by using time in advance of wildfire season to build trust among possible team members. They also used this time to build relationships and educate agency staff and administrators. This theme was coded in five of the eight outstanding ICs compared with only one of the seven average ICs. The presence of this theme was indicated talking explicitly about using of time before wildfire season to build understanding, expertise, and trust within the teams. In one case, the IC created simplified handouts for all team members involved in an incident to highlight the key people involved, their role, experience, and contact details. This was used for their own teams but also widely distributed to those from other agencies, local administrators, and community members.
The second emergent theme—humanizing versus dehumanizing ways of thinking about others—was evidenced by the use (or lack of use) of humanizing language. Examples of humanizing language included references to “family, kids, community.” For example, one IC said, “I’ve got kids out there on the ground . . . ” Another said, “there are families in the line that we have to protect . . . ” Examples of dehumanizing language included language that it turned people into categories, with words like, “stakeholders, employees.” One IC said, “Our personnel are key resources . . . ” After coding the number of humanizing versus dehumanizing words used across the four incidents, we subtracted the dehumanizing word count from the humanizing word count. Seven of the eight outstanding ICs had a positive score, compared with only one of the seven average ICs (six of the seven average ICs had a negative score, while none of the outstanding ICs had a negative score).
A prescribed burn at the U.S. Air Force’s Warren Grove Bombing Range in Ocean County, NJ. Photo: Trevor Raynor
Michael Achey and Marie Cook of the New Jersey Forest Fire Service (NJFFS) wrote this article about their prescribed fire program, which is entering its 84th year in the state.
The NJFFS is the agency responsible for protecting life, property, and New Jersey’s natural resources from wildfire. One of the ways we accomplish our mission is by an aggressive hazardous fuel mitigation program, specifically using prescribed fire.
History and Purpose of Prescribed Fire in New Jersey
NJFFS has been using prescribed fire on state lands since 1936, primarily to reduce hazardous fuel accumulations. Other beneficial effects of these treatments include providing high quality wildlife habitat and resilience in forest health. While reducing the threat to public safety posed by hazardous fuels is always the primary mission, this year’s signing of the New Jersey Prescribed Burning Act has given fire management officers additional latitude for using prescribed fire as a tool to achieve several other ecological objectives. While prescribed burning takes place statewide across all ownerships, much of the activity is concentrated on state lands in fire-adapted Pine Barrens communities.
The state has proposed over 30,000 acres to be treated by prescribed burning this season, a seemingly ambitious goal having come off one of the wettest years current fire managers have ever experienced through the course of their careers. Prior to treatment, all proposed prescribed burn units are approved through a Departmental review process that considers natural resource, historical and ecological concerns, after which burn plans are prepared by local fire managers for each unit. At the time this article was written, towards the culmination of NJ’s prescribed burn season, approximately 15,000 acres of public and private land had been treated.
Students from the 2019 Prescribed Fire Exchange work on prescribed burns in New Jersey’s Pinelands region. Photo: Michael AcheyStudents from the 2019 Prescribed Fire Exchange work on prescribed burns in New Jersey’s Pinelands region. Photo: Michael Achey
Education and Outreach
The 2019 burn season marks the second formalized annual Prescribed Fire Exchange, a program created to provide opportunities for students and practitioners outside NJFFS for training and exposure to prescribed fire techniques utilized in New Jersey. Students from Northern Arizona University, University of Idaho, and Utah State University have received training so far, as well as professional staff from the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, New York’s Central Pine Barrens Commission, and the Montana Department of Natural Resources. NJFFS is extremely proud of this budding program which continues to receive praise from past and current participants. While our roots hold firm to tradition, we are continually seeking ways to improve our programs and expand the scope of their benefits. Anyone interested in participating in future exchanges should contact NJFFS state headquarters located in Trenton, NJ.
Research
Beginning in 1926, the USDA Forest Service Northern Research Station’s program in the NJ Pinelands has served as a regional hotspot for research of fire and forest management practices. Over time, the development of a landscape-scale approach of creating a mosaic with prescribed fire each year has resulted in fuel hazard reduction and promotion of forest health and regeneration.
Today, this program capitalizes on the constantly emerging breadth of new knowledge and technology including satellites and laser-based sensors, to drive research on aspects of fire that were once impossible to study. With topics such as fire spread through ember showers, fire effects, physics-based modeling of fire spread, and technological approaches to assessing hazardous fuels at the wildland-urban interface, this research contributes to the evolution of universally applicable fire science knowledge. Most importantly, the work strives to meet a balance of risk and ecosystem service needs with growing populations and changing forest and climate conditions.
2019 NJ Prescribed Burning Statistics as of March 21, 2019; “Other” denotes government land not in state ownership.
Yesterday firefighters from the Albuquerque Fire Rescue Wildland Division dealt with a wildfire on an island in the Rio Grande River. They used an airboat to access the 1/4-acre Bosque fire.
Photos are from @abqfire
The first LARGE wildfire I was on was the Safety Harbor fire in Washington when I was with the El Cariso Hotshots. After flying from Southern California we loaded onto a chartered bus which dropped us off near an apple orchard. From there we took a boat across Lake Chelan to the fire. We were actually initial attack on the blaze. It grew much larger than seen in the photo below; we spent two or three weeks there at a spike camp. They fed us Continental Cuisine — frozen meals in plastic hairnet bags that were heated in large tubs of water, seen in the second photo below. Sometimes the frozen food was thoroughly heated; other times, there were still-frozen chunks.
El Cariso Hotshots and other firefighters took a boat across Lake Chelan to the Safety Harbor Fire in 1970. Photo by Bill Gabbert.El Cariso Hotshots at a spike camp on the Safety Harbor Fire in Washington, 1970. This picture was taken after one of the times we got chased out. The fire blew up almost every day in the mid-afternoon and we would have to hike back up a steep slope, sometimes at a brisk pace. Photo by Bill Gabbert.
Firefighters — tell us YOUR story about using a boat to get to a fire.
Last week the Northern Rockies Fire Science Network conducted a live webinar titled, “Smoke Exposure Health Effects and Mitigations for Wildland Fire Personnel: Current Research and Recommendations.” The one-hour presentation was very informative and heavily emphasized how smoke from burning vegetation can be hazardous to your health, especially for firefighters. Below is the recorded version, and following that is a list of resources identified in the webinar that provide more information about the effects of wildland fire smoke. I suggest that firefighters make the video a part of their annual refresher training.
We have written dozens of times about smoke and the research efforts directed toward evaluating the effects on humans. Articles that describe the effects are all tagged “smoke & health” on Wildfire Today. At this writing there are 17 of them. This article is the 18th.
In addition to those resources, here are others that were listed in last week’s webinar. Where possible, we downloaded them to the Wildfire Today web site in order to preserve the documents.
Wildland Fire Refresher Training, 2014. Smoke: Knowing the Risks (it is the video below; I think they could have found a better photo to be the static image of the video).
The operator was working for a prescribed fire contractor
Map showing the area around Gonzalez, Florida. The red and yellow dots represent heat detected by a satellite on March 21 and 22, 2019.
A man operating a dozer was killed October 9 while working on a prescribed fire in northwest Florida.
Daryl Bradley Holland, 38, was pronounced dead at the scene of the project that was being conducted east of Gonzalez, Florida about 25 air miles northwest of Eglin Air Force Base, and 12 miles north of Pensacola.
Below is an excerpt from an article at NorthEscambia.com:
“He got off in an attempt to remove a tree or large limb lodged in the tracks,” Maj. Andrew Hobbs said Monday afternoon. “The bulldozer wasn’t all the way out of gear. When it was un-jammed, the bulldozer lurched forward.”
Holland was working for HHH Construction of NWF, which was a subcontractor of Munroe Forest & Wildlife Management on the burn, according to Nathalie Bowers, public information officer for the Emerald Coast Utilities Authority.
The prescribed fire occurred on land administered by the Emerald Coast Utilities Authority (ECUA), a government organization. Their plan, in a March 6 press release, was to conduct the 940-acre burn in the vicinity of the Central Water Reclamation Facility March 7 through March 9. A “burn-certified contractor” was scheduled to conduct the burn operations as part of ECUA’s management plan for the ecological restoration of forest lands at the site. The property is in the Gonzalez community mostly south of Becks Lake Road, west of the Escambia River.
The map at the top of this article shows heat detected by a satellite in the area described on March 21 and 22. Heat from the burn operation March 7 through 9 would not show up on the map.
Below is an announcement about the project the ECUA posted on Facebook on March 6.
Our sincere condolences go out to the family, friends, and coworkers of Mr. Holland.
Thanks and a tip of the hat go out to Brent. Typos or errors, report them HERE.