On October 20 we published our Top 10 List: Reasons Why You Can’t Do That, which explores a culture that abhors risk taking. Dilbert gets into it frequently. Here is an example from October 16, 2011 (click on it to see a slightly larger version):
Continuing with that theme, here are two interviews posted on YouTube by the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center that further dissect the issue. They feature Bill Palleck, the former superintendent of North Cascades National Park. During one of them, Mr. Palleck gets into a wildland fire issue — the various, changing, stupid names for what we used to call “let burn” fires.
The Bastrop County Sheriff’s Department has released hours of videos that were recorded by the dash-mounted video cameras in the patrol units as they desperately evacuated residents during the Labor Day wildfires in Texas. In spite of their best efforts, nearly 1,600 homes burned and two lives were lost.
The draft All-Hazard Position Task Books for Type 3 Incident Management Teams are available for review. They were developed by the Incident Management Working Group for FEMA to assist personnel achieve qualifications in the All-Hazard Incident Command System positions.
Comments must be submitted via regulations.gov by 11:59 p.m. ET, November 3, 2011.
The regulations.gov web site is a nightmare to navigate through, but I have done that for you:
Keep in mind that all submissions will be posted, without change, to the Federal eRulemaking Portal at http://www.regulations.gov, and will include any personal information you provide.
Tanker 00 drops on the Last Chance fire; photo by Joel Arnwine
A 29-year-old man faces up to six months in jail after he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of leaving a fire unattended in the Lincoln National Forest in New Mexico in April. Rodrigo Ulloa-Esquivel of El Paso admitted that he lit toilet paper on fire after relieving himself. He explained that he did not want to leave litter behind. The Last Chance fire burned 53,342 acres.
Fires started by campers burning toilet paper is not as uncommon as you may think. I recall one or possibly two fires that were started this way by volunteers in Anza Borrego Desert State Park in California during the annual Bighorn Sheep Count.
Pagami Creek fire September 11, 2011. Photo: Superior National Forest
The latest update on the Pagami Creek fire which has burned over 92,000 acres in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness was on October 22. At that time it was described as 93 percent contained and unstaffed. The federal government has spent $22.3 million dollars on suppression as of October 22.
Map of the Pagami Creek fire at 8:00 a.m. CT, August 30, 2011. Credit: Superior National Forest and Google Earth
When lightning ignited the fire on August 18, the Superior National Forest made a decision to not suppress it, but to herd it around as necessary to keep it within a reasonable maximum management area while allowing natural processes to do their thing. After 12 days it had only grown to approximately 130 acres, and fire management officials may have thought things were going well — until September 12 when everything went to hell. Strong winds gusting up to 35 mph spread the fire 16 miles to the east. HERE are some of the posts on Wildfire Today that mention the Pagami fire.
The StarTribune has a probing article written by Tony Kennedy that explores some of the decisions that were made during the early stages of the fire. It’s worth a read. Here is an excerpt:
Records show the federal agency repeatedly underestimated the fire’s strength and volatility.
ELY, MINN. — A series of internal reports show that the U.S. Forest Service repeatedly underestimated the explosiveness of the Pagami Creek Fire during a critical 18-day stretch of late August and early September, allowing a half-acre burn to grow into a massive firestorm that left eight people fighting for their lives inside the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.
[…]
“We felt like we were being very proactive,” said Mark Van Every, head of the Kawishiwi Ranger District in Ely, where the fire command is based. “It just happened faster and further than we expected.”
In the future, he said, the Forest Service might order faster and wider evacuations. “I will make those closure areas broader if I feel there is any potential at all that the fire could get there,” Van Every said. He said officials will also recalibrate the tools used to judge how fast a BWCA fire can move.
Meanwhile, two public reviews are underway. One is focused on an incident that endangered six crew members trapped by fire on Lake Insula. Two female crew members were forced to abandon their canoe while paddling in a lake channel that became choked by fire, Van Every said. Four others beached their canoes on an island and took cover under life-saving gear and later rescued their freezing crewmates from a nearby shore.
[…]
The half-acre burn didn’t budge much for seven days. The U.S. Drought Monitor, produced by the National Weather Service, showed the area to be in the first stage of drought, known as “abnormally dry.” But Van Every and Tim Sexton, a forest ranger based in Cook, Minn., said other indicators didn’t suggest rapid rates of spread. The fire’s early behavior supported that thesis, they said.
Then, on Aug. 26, with Sexton covering for a vacationing Van Every, the humidity level dipped abnormally to 18 percent and winds blew from the northwest. What had been a slow-creeping fire with flames 6 inches high in the morning picked up and ran in a narrow band to the southeast.
[…]
Strategic burn
The Sept. 4 decision reflected firefighters’ growing concern about dry forest conditions. “Weather forecasts indicate that September will experience dry, windy weather with occasional frosts (which will cause leaf fall and add to the hazardous fuel loading),” the WFDSS report said. In addition, drought conditions would worsen to the “severe” level by Sept. 6.
Above: Firefighter on the Shep Canyon fire in South Dakota, September 6, 2011. Photo: Bill Gabbert/Wildfire Today.
After reading our excerpt and later the full document from the the Serious Accident Investigation Factual Report for the hyperthermia fatality on the CR 337 fire in Texas, we heard from Dr. Brent Ruby, who has completed studies on this exact issue, even having studied wildland firefighters while they were working on fires. In one of his studies he was monitoring a wildland firefighter outfitted with a core temperature monitor, an ambient temperature sensor, and a special Camelback hydration system that monitored his water intake. This firefighter experienced a heat-related illness, heat exhaustion, and had to be evacuated off the fireline by a helicopter. That was a terrible thing to happen to a firefighter, and I’m sure the researchers thought the same thing, but it was probably a once in a lifetime cornucopia of incredibly useful data. Dr. Ruby sent us this message, reprinted here with his permission:
I was bothered by the findings of the CR337 fatality report from the investigation team. There are issues within this case that are very similar to a published heat exhaustion case study we published recently (Wilderness and Environmental Medicine 22, 122-125, 2011, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21664560). In this report, we document drinking behavior, activity patterns, skin and core temperatures in a subject that suffered heat exhaustion and required evacuation. The lessons learned from this research clearly indicate that the best protection against a heat injury is reducing work rate. [*the abstract from the study is below]
Aggressive hydration strategies are over-preached and may provide a false sense of protection. It should be emphasized that the autopsy report as described in the fatality report indicated no signs of dehydration or electrolyte imbalance. I have tried to push these concepts to crews and safety officers when I get a chance to speak to them at meetings. I was bothered by this fatality knowing that it is seemingly directly linked to some of our research findings. I have tried to emphasize this to anyone that will listen in the world of wildfire.
You can certainly review our website to gain a better understanding of the publications we have done from research with the WLFF http://www.umt.edu/wpem. We have a great deal of physiological data, hydration, energy demands of the job, importance of supplemental feedings, etc. from all our work over the years. This peer reviewed research provides objective, scientific evidence that can be used to to change or influence policy to enhance safety on the line.
Let me know if you have any questions.
Regards, Brent Ruby
Brent C. Ruby, Ph.D., FACSM
Director, Montana Center for Work Physiology and Exercise Metabolism, The University of Montana
High work output combined with high ambient temperatures caused heat exhaustion in a wildland firefighter despite high fluid intake.
Cuddy JS, Ruby BC.
Montana Center for Work Physiology and Exercise Metabolism, The University of Montana, Missoula, MT 59812-1825, USA.
The purpose of this case study is to examine the physiological/behavioral factors leading up to heat exhaustion in a male wildland firefighter during wildland fire suppression. The participant (24 years old, 173 cm, 70 kg, and 3 years firefighting experience) experienced heat exhaustion following 7 hours of high ambient temperatures and arduous work on the fire line during the month of August. At the time of the heat-related incident (HRI), core temperature was 40.1 °C (104.2 °F) and skin temperature was 34.4 °C (93.9 °F). His work output averaged 1067 counts·min(-1) (arbitrary units for measuring activity) for the 7 hours prior to the HRI, a very high rate of work over an extended time period during wildfire suppression.
In the 2.5 hours leading up to the heat incident, he was exposed to a mean ambient temperature of 44.6 °C (112.3 °F), with a maximum temperature of 59.7 °C (139.5 °F). He consumed an average of 840 mL·h(-1) in the 7 hours leading up to the incident and took an average of 24 ± 11 drinks·h(-1) (total of 170 drinks). The combined effects of a high work rate and high ambient temperatures resulted in an elevated core temperature and a higher volume and frequency of drinking than typically seen in this population, ultimately ending in heat exhaustion and removal from the fire line.
The data demonstrate that heat-related incidents can occur even with aggressive fluid intake during wildland fire suppression.
Unfortunately, even though Dr. Ruby’s research is funded by taxpayers through the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Defense, taxpayers are blocked from seeing the full results unless they pay a fee to the privately owned company that published the paper. We have written before about the results of taxpayer-funded wildfire-related research being held hostage by private companies. Dr. Ruby told Wildfire Today that he will send a copy of his paper to individuals that write to him at brent dot ruby at mso dot umt dot edu
The combined information about the fatality of Caleb Hamm on the CR 337 fire and Dr. Ruby’s study on wildland firefighters, is shocking. From the abstract, again:
The data demonstrate that heat-related incidents can occur even with aggressive fluid intake during wildland fire suppression.
Working on a wildfire on a hot day can lead to heat exhaustion and hyperthermia, and can be fatal EVEN IF a person drinks plenty of water and is not dehydrated.
Symptoms and prevention
We asked Dr. Ruby for more information:
Exertional hyperthermia occurs when the metabolic heat production from hard work overwhelms the bodies ability to off load it to the environment. This unloading can be blocked by clothing and/or slowed due to high radiant heat from the sun or an adjacent fire.
The basic symptoms of heat exhaustion are commonplace and can include profuse sweating, weakness, nausea, sometimes vomiting, lightheadedness, headache and sometimes mild muscle cramps.
The best approach [to prevent heat exhaustion and hyperthermia] is to know thyself and thy physical limits. Establishing a pace schedule that allows temperature to come back down in between periods of work that result in a rise in temperature. The factors of importance are pace, fitness level for the task at hand, hydration behaviors and simultaneously electrolyte concentrations in the blood.
It is important for wildland firefighters to drink plenty of water, but this will not, by itself, totally eliminate all chances of heat-related illness.
Be careful out there.
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UPDATE October 27, 2011:
Dr. Ruby sent us the following list of other publications on similar topics that are in peer reviewed journals. I assume that most of them are not available to the public (don’t get me started on that again!) unless you pay the ransom fees at the private companies, or send a message to Dr. Ruby: brent dot ruby at mso dot umt dot edu
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UPDATE October 28, 2011:
The U.S. National Library of Medicine has an excellent article about heatstroke, which can follow heat cramps and heat exhaustion and is life-threatening. The article includes causes, symptoms, first aid, what not to do, when to call 911, and prevention (including “avoid exercise or strenuous physical activity outside during hot or humid weather”. Good luck with that one, firefighters.)
