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Shawna Legarza, a former Hotshot who is now the Director of Fire and Aviation for the U.S. Forest Service’s California Region was interviewed for the CBS evening News.
The subject came up of tracking the location of firefighters. We have written often about what we call the Holy Grail of Wildland Firefighter Safety, a system that could track in real time the location of firefighters on the ground AND the location of the fire, all displayed on one screen — anything from a cell phone or seven-inch tablet to a laptop computer at the Incident Command post. This data should be available in real time to ground and aviation personnel on fires, as well as key supervisors and decision makers in the Operations and Planning Sections. Knowing the positions of personnel relative to the fire would be a massive step in improved situational awareness and could reduce the number of firefighters killed on fires. This information could have saved 24 lives in recent years — 19 on the Yarnell Hill Fire and 5 on the Esperanza Fire. In both cases the firefighters and their supervisors did not know where the firefighters were relative to the location of the fire.
The technology is available right now. The military has been using it for years. Our leaders in wildfire suppression need to make the decision to get it done.
