Wildfire Today

Suggestions for a medical program on a hand crew

BillMay 8, 2021May 7, 2021Uncategorizedmedical8 Comments

File photo of wildfire in Alaska. BLM Alaska Fire Service.

Crew Medical Program — Structure and Guidelines

By Liam DiZio, Pioneer Peak Interagency Hotshot Crew

Lacking from documents outlining wildland fire crew structure are guidelines for a crew medical program. With 20+ crewmembers, crews are often their own best resource for coordinating patient care and extraction. Crew medical programs, then, must be based on this principle of self-sufficiency. This document aims to outline a sample crew medical program structure defining personnel structure, training, equipment, and standard operating procedures (SOPs) to support a strong crew medical program. The goal of this document is to serve as a resource for crew medics and further the goal of standardizing robust crew medical programs in wildland fire. This document applies to any regularly organized wildland fire crew.

Medical Program Personnel Structure

Structuring a crew’s medical personnel ensures a consistent product of patient care and equipment accountability year to year. The suggested structure looks as follows:

Lead Medic
Assistant Medic
Line Medic Line Medic

Duties of above personnel are described below.

Lead Medic

The lead medic is the top of the accountability hierarchy for crew medical equipment and care. The lead medic begins the season by coordinating early season medical training and supply logistics. They then then maintain and inventory crew medical equipment and ensure the correct complement of crew medical gear makes it to the fireline daily. The lead is also responsible for patient care and associated medical paperwork. Lastly, the lead medic maintains a relationship with support personnel, taking advantage of training opportunities and organizing seasonal medical supply orders. Success in this position requires daily effort and expertise in a side of fire unknown to most. This role is most appropriate for senior firefighter or below.

Assistant Medic

The assistant medic is responsible for assisting the lead in all duties. The assistant serves as an additional point of contact for crewmembers and assumes lead’s function in their absence or in split squad configuration. Assistant medics should be familiar with all crew medical equipment, medical paperwork, medical supply logistics, and training needs. This role is most appropriate for senior firefighter or below.

Line Medic

Line medics are additional designated medical personnel on the crew. Having two additional line medics ensures that medical knowledge is spread throughout squads and tool/saw teams. Line medics are accountable for crew medical gear on the fireline and patient care in a trauma scenario. Line medics are familiar with contents and function of crew medical equipment. This role is most appropriate for senior firefighter or below.

All four designated medics should hold current EMT-B qualifications or above, ideally supplemented with real world experience. Successful crew medics come from various backgrounds such as civilian EMS, military medicine, and ski patrol. Further qualifications and endorsements allow the crew to carry additional equipment such as IV/IO fluids, various drugs, and advanced airway products.

Training

At the beginning of each season, all crewmembers require some form of medical refresher. This training can occur over one or more days of critical training. Training evolutions should include lecture, hands on skills practice, CPR certification, and medical scenarios.

Lecture

Taught by the lead and assistant, a medical lecture should include information on the crew’s medical equipment, medical mentality, medical incident SOPs, basic trauma care, common fireline medical emergencies, and minor fireline medical issues. Crewmembers should also be briefed on who their lead/assistant/line medics are and the crew SOP for calling out a medical incident on the radio.

Skills Practice

Following the lecture, crewmembers cycle through skills stations learning hemorrhage control and crew extraction platform procedures. These are the skills non medically trained crewmembers are most likely to perform in the field. The hemorrhage control station should include hands on tourniquet and wound packing training. The extraction platform station should include simulated carries and lessons on proper platform set-up and storage.

CPR

Professional CPR training can fit anywhere in the crew’s critical training and can be taught by outside resources or qualified crewmembers.

Scenario

Continue reading “Suggestions for a medical program on a hand crew”

Copper Canyon Fire forces closure of Hwy 60 north of Globe, AZ

Bill GabbertMay 7, 2021May 10, 2021WildfireArizona, Copper Canyon Fire

Over 2,500 acres have burned

Updated at 12:28 p.m. MDT May 9, 2021

The Copper Canyon Fire north of Globe, Arizona has burned 2,560 acres. Here is the latest information from the Incident Management Team at 10:24 p.m. MDT May 8 2021:

“Overnight firing operations were successful and firefighters were able to tie in the Copper Canyon Fire to the 2020 Griffin Burn scar on the northeastern edge. A pocket of unburned fuel remains on that side, and within the interior of the fire, and may produce visible smoke when afternoon winds pick up. Today, crews will monitor the southern and western edges of the fire and begin mop up. While fire activity has significantly decreased, Sunday’s afternoon winds are of concern as gusts up to 30 miles per hour are forecasted in the area. No change in acreage or containment has been reported as of Sunday morning.

“US 60 remains closed in both directions outside of Globe as the Arizona Department of Transportation evaluates the damage to the guardrails near mile marker 253. Call 511 or check ADOT’s social media channels for traffic and road closure information.”

8:55 a.m. MDT May 8, 2021

map Copper Canyon Fire — Map showing the approximate location of the Copper Canyon Fire 11:30 p.m. MDT May 7, 2021. A portion of it appears to have burned into the Griffin Fire of August, 2020.

The Copper Canyon Fire that started in dry vegetation at about 12:30 p.m. Friday was pushed northeast by strong winds. Eleven hours later it was mapped at 2,500 acres. A portion of the fire has burned into the footprint of the Griffin Fire that blackened over 61,800 acres in August of 2020. It has been running roughly parallel to Highway 60, which is now closed. There are about seven miles of open country ahead of it until the north and east sides become trapped in the area burned last year.

The Copper Canyon Fire is spreading toward ranches, mines, utility infrastructure, and local grazing allotments. Crews are actively engaged in structure protection for the potentially impacted properties. As of 1:52 a.m. on Saturday there were no evacuations in effect.

Aircraft including a Very Large Air Tanker (VLAT), a Large Air Tanker, Single Engine Air Tankers (SEATs), and Air Attack are assisting an estimated 100 fire personnel on the ground.

Friday night a weather station south of Globe detected 5 to 10 mph winds gusting out of the south and southwest at 10 to 15 mph. At 7:06 a.m. on Saturday it recorded 67 degrees, 14 percent relative humidity, and winds out of the east at 7 mph gusting to 13 mph. West to southwest winds are expected to become breezy to very breezy again during the afternoons on Saturday and Sunday with gusts generally reaching upwards of 20-25 mph. Minimum RH values will generally remain around 9-15%.

Copper Canyon Fire, May 7, 2020. AZ State Forestry photo.

7 p.m. MDT May 7, 2021

The Copper Canyon Fire about 3 miles north of Globe, Arizona has forced the closure of Highway 60 north of the Highway 70 intersection. The fire is about 60 air miles east of Mesa.

At 5:58 p.m. MDT the Arizona Department of Forestry and Fire Management reported the fire had burned about 1,300 acres and had crossed Highway 60, forcing its closure.

Single engine air tankers and two larger air tankers, a DC-10 and an RJ85, have been seen working on the fire.

Copper Canyon Fire map — Aircraft over the Copper Canyon Fire at about 6:12 p.m. MDT May 7, 2021.

Progression of the drought during a 35-day period

Bill GabbertMay 6, 2021Uncategorizeddrought, weather

Drought worsens in California

A Drought Monitor update: During the 5-week period between March 31 and May 4, the “Extreme Drought” areas grew in California, Oregon, Montana, Wyoming, and North Dakota.

Drought Monitor, created March 31, 2021 — Drought Monitor, March 31, 2021. NOAA.

Below are the temperature and precipitation outlooks for May, 2021.

Temperature and precipitation outlook for May — Temperature and precipitation outlooks for May, created April 30, 2021.

The Oregon Supreme Court ruled in favor of beavers — in 1939

Bill GabbertMay 6, 2021May 6, 2021Uncategorizedbeavers, Oregon, water3 Comments

A lawsuit between two landowners

Beaver Dam — Beaver dam. Wyoming Game and Fish Department photo.

When Paul Stewart bought his rangeland in Eastern Oregon in 1884 it included a meadow with “stirrup-high native grasses”. The sub-irrigation provided by Crane Creek was amplified by several families of industrious beavers who had built numerous dams across the stream to form ponds for their homes.

In 1924 he left his farm for a year and upon returning found that poachers had trapped and removed the beavers. The dams had washed out and over the next 12 years the meadow and the creek was transformed. Uncontrolled flood waters eroded the banks, cutting into his valuable crop land. The stream was flowing 15 feet below its original level and the water table had dropped. The meadow was drying up and a well was barely producing any water.

Mr. Stewart arranged for the Oregon State Game Commission to bring him sixteen of nature’s hydraulic engineers — native beavers.

Below is an excerpt from a document written in 1941 by Paul W. Schaffer, the Regional Biologist for the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Region.

“The beavers began their reclamation work at once. They erected strong dams almost overnight; they sent huge cottonwoods and aspen crashing into the gully; they built more and more dams.

“When the heavy spring run-off came, water that for the past twelve years had rushed through the stream channel to be lost in the river below was caught behind the beaver dams and stored in large ponds which acted as settling basins for the silt-laden waters. At each flood stage of the stream, inches of soil were added to the bottom of the deepened channel. As the ponds were filled, excess water flowed over well-designed spillways and continued down the stream.”

The average summer streamflow of the preceding twelve years was increased considerably by the water escaping from storage. Water from the ponds percolated into the banks to the adjacent fields. Hay production in the meadows improved. The well again supplied ample stock water. The ugly erosion scar through the meadow was healing.

To make a long story shorter, Mr. Stewart’s downstream neighbor, Lloyd Johnson, urged Mr. Stewart to remove the beaver dams thinking it would improve the condition of his own eroded land. He did not realize that if the dams were blown up that the water would simply flow through his land, unimpeded by any structures, resulting in little if any change in his water table.

Mr. Johnson filed a lawsuit to have the beaver dams removed. He won. The judge ordered Mr. Stewart to within five days ask the State Game Commission to remove the beavers and the dams. He was also ordered to pay a $300 contempt fine and was threatened with three months in jail if he did not comply.

Mr. Stewart appealed to the Oregon Supreme Court which ruled in his favor, writing in part:

“To deny our water users the right to control such streams and prevent the erosion that would soon take place would mean the utter destruction of much of our most valuable lands throughout the state.”

Below is Mr. Schaffer’s nine-page beautifully written and typed description of Mr. Stewart’s experience with the beavers, crafted in 1941. It even includes an epilogue. Notice how both the right and left margins are justified, a long and tedious process when done on a typewriter. (You may also download the document.)

[pdf-embedder url=”https://wildfiretoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Beaver-On-Trial-by-Paul-Schaffer-1941.pdf”]

It would be very interesting to know the present condition of Mr. Stewart’s former property, which he sold shortly after the 1939 court cases.

The Wyoming Game and Fish Department has a helpful guide to the beaver’s role in riparian habitat management.

In case you missed it, check out our May 5, 2021 article about how beavers can affect wildfires.

If you’re still starving for more information about beavers, Heidi Perryman, Co-Chair of last month’s California Beaver Summit, tells us that their website has information about presentations made at the conference, including the effects on wildfires, managing the challenges beavers can cause for landowners, and the value beaver engineering can have for the drying state of California. She said two of the researchers mentioned in our May 5 article, Dr. Emily Fairfax and Dr. Joe Wheaton, gave keynote talks at the conference. There were also speakers from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, US Forest Service, and Bureau of Land Management.

Thanks and a tip of the hat go out to Kelly for letting us know about this case.

Beavers can affect wildfires

Bill GabbertMay 5, 2021Uncategorizedbeavers7 Comments

Their dams create wetlands affecting vegetation type, fuel moisture, and local humidity

American Beaver. Photo by Steve from Washington.

The job of a beaver is to build a dam and lodge across creeks using tree branches, vegetation, rocks, and mud. They chew down trees for building material. Dams impound water and lodges serve as shelters. Their infrastructure raises the water table and creates wetlands used by many other species, and because of their effect on other organisms in the ecosystem, they are considered a keystone species.

This storage of water can change the vegetation type as well as the moisture content in the live and dead fuel. Wetlands usually do not burn in a wildfire and they can serve a barrier to its spread.

However, beavers can also be a nuisance and can damage crops, timber, roads, ditches, gardens, and pastures by cutting trees, burrowing, or flooding areas.

Wetland created by beavers Sharps Fire — Wetland created by beavers in Baugh Creek in Idaho, part of the Sharps Fire.

The BeaversandBrush.com website is a not-for-profit publication, “Created by Californians seeking to protect California from wildfire. We can help one another to safety by welcoming back native beavers and traditional prescribed burning of brush.”

Photos from their website show the change in a creek after beavers moved in.

Beaver dams at Susie Creek, from BeaversAndBrush.com

An article by Lucy Sherriff at the Sierra Club’s website explores how beavers can change the landscape, including their effects on wildland fires.

[Dr. Emily] Fairfax began to carry out the scientific research that she had hoped to find. Using satellite images, she mapped vegetation around beaver territories before, after, and during wildfires (footage of wildfires in progress can show how a fire moves through a landscape). She visited field sites in California, Colorado, Idaho, Oregon, and Wyoming and found sections of creek that did not have beavers were on average more than three times as affected by fire—burning a bigger area—than areas where beavers had built dams.

“I expected some of the time beaver dams would work,” says Fairfax. Instead, she found the presence of beavers had significant effects. “It didn’t matter if it was one pond or 55 ponds in a row. If there were beaver dams, the land was protected from fire. It was incredible.”

Fairfax hopes her research will help change California’s strict rules around beaver relocation, the way policy is already changing in Washington, especially as wildfires in California have reached record-breaking levels over the past several years.

Meanwhile, Fairfax’s research on beavers and wildfires is only beginning. “I set out to ask a question: Do beavers keep the land green during fires, yes or no?” she says. “The answer was yes. But that’s not the end of the story. Why? How? Does this happen everywhere? What if you have a tight canyon? I’m digging into the specifics now, so people can implement this and actually use beavers for fire prevention. I would love to be able to call someone up and tell them how many beaver dams they need in their creek.

“Right now I have so little advice on how to do it. But at least I can now say it works.”

The two-minute video below is a brief introduction to beavers. It appears to be an excerpt from an episode of “Nature”, titled, “Leave it to Beavers.”

Two women killed in I-15 accident as smoke obscured the highway

Bill GabbertMay 4, 2021May 4, 2021UncategorizedMontana, smoke5 Comments

In Northern Montana north of Conrad

I-15 North of Conrad, MT fire — Heat from a fire detected by a satellite near I-15 north of Conrad, MT, May 3, 2021 near the site of the fatal crash as reported by the Montana Highway Patrol.

A tractor-trailer that slowed as it traveled through a cloud of smoke from a controlled burn near the highway led to a chain-reaction crash on Interstate 15 near Conrad May 3, killing two young women from Columbia Falls.

A chain reaction series of crashes began when a tractor trailer slowed to 25 mph as it entered the smoke according to the Montana Highway Patrol (MHP). A second tractor trailer plowed into the first, then a sedan with the two women hit the second truck and a fourth vehicle, a sedan, hit the vehicle with the two women, who died at the scene. Four people in the fourth vehicle were injured.

The crash occurred at approximately 1:15 p.m. on I-15 at mile marker 344, about five miles north of Conrad, 0.78 mile south of Ledger Road (MT 366).

During a 2:54 p.m. MDT overflight on the day of the crash a satellite detected heat from a fire just west of the location of the crash reported by the MHP. According to Google Earth imagery virtually everything within a mile of the site, other than roads, is agricultural fields, including the location of the detected fire. It appears likely that the controlled burn was from agricultural or debris burning, rather than a prescribed burn used by land managers to reduce hazardous fuels or restore fire to a fire dependent ecosystem.

Thanks and a tip of the hat go out to Dick.

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