[Intro music] From one moment to the next our
environment is changing; most changes are small and seem insignificant but each
change sets off a ripple which intersects with other ripples and so on.
As they build and intersect with one another they can develop into one
unexpected dramatic change. Many of these changes go unnoticed by us until they
intersect, building enough momentum to get our attention.
Consider that our environment is more than just the fire environment. It
includes humans and equipment all setting off ripples, so it isn't hard to
believe that perceptional blind spots and degraded situation awareness will
happen. With that said you can safely conclude that the organization will
eventually be surprised. When that happens it is imperative for us to
respond and bounce back swiftly and effectively. This is what happened on the
Indians fire in central California last summer. A giant fire whirl worked its way
over the top of a group of firefighters, creating an environment of complete
disarray. While we can look back at what happened and identify firefighter
oversights; the outcome could have been much worse.
Despite the chaos, firefighters demonstrated resilience and ability to
adapt quickly to an unforeseen event. On June 11th, 2008 at approximately 1630,
members of the Fulton Hotshots and Los Padres Engine 71 found themselves
standing on Milpitas Road in disbelief at the fire behavior event they had just
experienced. No one could explain how the fury of the giant fire whirl had
dissipated to nothing just as quickly as it had overrun them. The day of the fire
whirl, temperatures warmed quickly into the 90s and relative humidity dropped to
single digits. Firefighters were told to expect spotting and sustained runs that
would test containment lines. No red flag watches or warnings were issued for the
area. The fire had grown to five thousand acres. Jim Smith's Type 2 Incident
Management Team was in place. By 0800 Division Charlie was fully staffed. At
approximately 0900 crews began a burnout operation to establish a
safety zone near the Charlie Delta Division break. By 1100 they were done.
One of their incident objectives was-to keep the fire north of the San Antonio
River. To ensure this, crews were instructed to burn east along Milpitas
Road. This is where we'll pick up the stories
of the Fulton Hotshots and Engine 71. OK, the resources that were in our
division on June 11th, we've worked with before in prior years so we all knew
each other. We all, we -all the captains knew each other, the Sups knew each
other. Our fuel, our vegetation types were much like you see here. This grass
component right here- knee-high. We're actually in part of the fire area. Across
the road here is one of our contingency lines- has the same fuel type. Same kind
of oak overstory canopy and then as you get higher up we we get into a brush
component- some thicker chaparral chamise is scattered throughout here but
predominantly what you see here is our fuel type that we're conducting the
firing operation in. We understood the plan was to take fire from the crews
that are working up the road here and had it pick it up from them and head east
along the Milpitas road. We started off with briefing the guys. We're gonna use
the black as we as we went for our safety zone. I personally contacted
Division Sup., Air Attack, and -and Division Sup. I contacted Operations and
everything was- was a go on on firing. at At approximately 1200 the Fulton Hotshots
initiated their section of the burnout operation, with the main objective to
carry fire east along the Milpitas Road, staying ahead of the fire. The burnout
was to be supervised by Louie Orosco and Josh Acosta, both foreman with Fulton. Josh
has the main fire -now the firing heading off in this direction- the main activity
still up on the slope and it's moving this way right along parallel with our
operation. We stayed even with it and somewhat just a little bit ahead of it
if we could and just kept the firing going down the road. It was going pretty
good for us- we had winds at our back and we had pretty good communications
with Ron on what was going on out in front of us.
We got Fulton bringing fire down the road here- try to get out in front of
this. This is coming to hit the road but we're dragging fire
this way towards us to try to get from it
and slow it down. (Radio traffic) "yeah- light you know, light for an aerial
platform- just to be eyes in the sky can tell us where some spots are if they're
gonna end up farther than we can see them." "Okay I understand.
very good I can do that." During this whole operation I never really felt in a
unsafe situation and when I started; when I took the fire and show from Josh I
know I saw the activity was increasing. "It's one of the biggest fire whirls I've
seen. Look at it turning on itself. This goes way up, way up." The
Engine 71 crew are now just west of the corrals. Louie drags fire by them moving
east on Milpitas Road, still out flanking the column. Josh and his squad
are further west, holding on the road- (Radio traffic) "Trying to get out ahead of it." (Sounds of wind) "The wind and the column creating it is unreal. Probably 20 mph winds." We had another- another spot initiate
about 150 yards down the road here. Engine 71 Captain Roberto, and me were
standing here. His engine was facing this way and we made eye contact. I mean, right
next to each other. We knew what needed to be done. He knew, he rounded up his
guys and he went to going games. We had a spot down the road about 300 feet and I
took three of my firefighters with me. First I had one of the firefighters back
the engine up and from there the firefighter caught up to us. The engine
falls behind us --it was a ten by ten spot right off the road- very easy to handle.
Just squirt a little water on it and would have been done with it.
Got about 150 to 200 feet from the engine but no further than that and
that's when everything just came at us. So we went to turn the truck around.
Frankie and I turned the truck around.I look forward to I was gonna pull up and get
behind Frankie and the wind's just just laid over. The smoke just laid over and
all of it just start just pulling in towards where the guys were and so I
finally got straightened out in the road and this is within seconds. All this
stuff just happened so fast on the road. There's a big limb that pretty much got
plucked right off the tree laying in the road and threw little spots right off
the road and then as I was going towards where the guys were I got on a radio and
tried to get a hold of Bert and say, "hey there's you know there's a spot behind you
and I couldn't really hear at that time. I couldn't even hear myself talk, you
know, so windy-- was shaking the truck. Rocks and limbs flying around. Was
hitting the truck and I mean it was so powerful. You know you couldn't even hear
the engine behind us. It just got dark all of
a sudden then and windy and hot. My concern was to try to get out
of there. I looked to the left of Alan. This field here, and I mean within
seconds it literally was area ignition. I've only seen that once before and that
was a long ways away then. So I proceeded past the limb into the smoke. I couldn't
see anything it was so black dark. I couldn't hear anything besides all the
rumbling, stuff flying around hitting truck. Chaos in there. I wasn't getting
any response back from Burt and all them so I didn't know exactly where they were.
So I went on trying to try to get him because it
wasn't -the flames weren't big and we're touching the truck they weren't going
across the road. It's just all radiant heat- convection- whatever you want to
call it. It was it was hot. The giant fire whirl has reached wind speeds of an F1
tornado. It's smoke and heat filled center lays over the top of the Engine
71 guys as they struggled to escape. The two Fulton Hotshot squads
were experiencing the effects of the fire whirl in an entirely different way,
dodging debris and fighting to get back to their trucks. Once the winds picked up
- to what I guess to be 80 miles an hour, we had branches of oaks, you know, 10 to15
DBH branches flying off of- coming off the trees, and flying across the road. We
had a couple of my guys on the crew out ahead of me about 40, 50 yards. I'd
walk back to tie on to one of our guys and well as they were coming back to us.
I remember telling them to hurry. I was yelling at him to hurry up and come back
to walk towards me and get by the trucks and they were trying to run and they
couldn't even run because the wind was so strong. At that point. I immediately
from directly due east, it's crystal clear I'm in unburned fuel and I'm
getting a hit by I'm not sure what it is-- it feels like it feels like a thousand
bees hitting, yeah- not stinging but just getting pelted by dime size or quarter
sized stuff and I'm going I'm looking straight into
the blue sky and I'm going, what in the heck?
Everything's back here and all of a sudden I get hit and I'm getting hit
with thousands of them. All the sudden one goes down my shirt and I go, oh
that's hot embers. So the column was- it appeared to me to be sucking for more
oxygen it was pulling itself out of this drainage back behind us- pulling
everything out- coming back through here and then drawing back into itself. At that
point in time I looked- I looked up and the column was now starting to lean. As I
tried to work my way back to the truck, I had to bend down and hang on and go
because I'm in the green here -40 feet from the truck. I'm thinking I gotta get to
the truck because I don't want to be in the green -especially with hot embers
going everywhere. I'm telling you limbs are blowing off- it's 80 mile an hour
winds and I said- it's in the report, if a cow flew by it wouldn't have surprised
me- I am dead serious. It wouldn't even have fazed me. I mean. big
things were in the air. Yeah, the smoke was, you know, real hard to see. We're
blind- couldn't see anything. The heat was extreme. You know, hard to breathe. Yeah,
just trying to figure out a way out. huh You know, yeah, how to breathe in there.
You know it was it was tough, it was um yeah, there was you know we thought that
was IT. There you know because it was so hard to breathe. I thought there I'll pick us up
off the ground there off the pavement. I mean, you know, hands were burnt
Hands were burnt, you know-- felt embers on my neck, just yeah. I looked at
the pavement and thought,you know, I guess this is it. This is it for us, you
know. What a present to the family, you know and after
that I just, yeah, just remembered my training , fire shelter training and
you know, started breathing calmly and taking short breaths and we couldn't
hear anything so I I just, I pulled my shelter, showed the guys the shelter, so
they followed after me- what I did so we decided to
wrap them around ourselves and and walk out with with them, put them over
ourselves, over our heads, and that was a big big relief. At that time
I was able to breathe and it was it was cool underneath the fire shelters so
so we just turned around and just started walking back with it. And the
same time I was I was looking back looking for my other firefighter that
that wasn't around. As the crew is caught in the chaos of the fire whirl, Engine
71crew member, Chris Lyons, finds himself separated from the group and
runs back down the road, struggling to open his fire shelter. I finally got to a point, it was probably 50 to 60 feet after the the limb that was down and that's where I picked up
back here and that's where I picked up Chris Lyons and I couldn't see him I
almost ran him over- I couldn't see him. He was running out of the smoke -because some
reason I got a break in the smoke at that time and he was running out and he
pretty much ran into the bumper. Looked at me I, I can see him he- drool everywhere
just couldn't barely breathe and he ran to the passenger passenger door and swung it open and jumped in and as soon as he opened that door it
felt like someone just turned the oven on- it was so hot I couldn't even explain. I
told him- shut that door and lay down -and first thing out of his mouth is - get
us out of here and I just kind of looked at him and said , where's the guys and he's
all, I don't know -they're back there and I go- how far? He's all- I don't know!
So where'd you leave them at- I don't know -just get out of here.
I was like, where's the guys? He didn't want to answer me after that and so I just
I pause there for a second and kind of looked in front of me. It was like
driving through tule fog -can't see nothing so I couldn't I didn't know what
to do. I had another guy with me. I don't know what's in front of me. I
wanted nothing to land behind me and get me stuck or burns the truck up and I can't
see the guys. I don't know if they went the opposite way that Chris did- I had no
clue so I just made a decision to back out.
Meanwhile the Division Supervisor has a .compelling urge to drive east on
Milpitas Road. As he drives through the fire whirl, he finds it difficult to see
in the dense smoke and flying debris. He sees a flash of light from his
headlights reflecting off a fire shelter. He pulls alongside Roberto and his guys
and yells at them to get in. And Division Sup. called -asked me how many people I
had and I said one and myself and and I seen them come out of the smoke and I
was just, I was total relief by then because I seen all three of them sitting
in there. What scared me most is uh when they came around the truck and I can see
that they were burned I didn't say anything. I didn't
want to make them freak and a couple of them jumped in the truck and then I see
Burt kind of walk off a little bit and then he asked me to take his uh
gear off so I took his gear off and that's it. We went to the medic and we went to the line medic that was right down the road here about a half-mile and then he told
us to get to the ICP and we went down there and they got treated and they took
down took them away in an ambulance. And that was pretty much it. The fire
whirl quickly lost energy as it moved from the higher brush field slopes into
the grassy flats- it dissipated rapidly. The fire behavior and spread dropped to
nearly nothing. The camera doesn't do it justice It came like a tornado came through here
which it did- it shredded huge limbs like that one just dropping out of the trees. I mean it was so short a time span that it all happened from the time that I
walked from my truck. Walked 40 feet out; walked back- that's how much time that
took for everything here to unfold in in that-in that precise moment. So probably my time span would say for everything to unfold- two minutes? Well, what I was thinking at that point was, my main thought is, I it's not just me no more. I
got, I got Chris in the truck and by going further I don't know what else is
gonna happen you know. I back out and try to save one person
at least and get out of there or just try to go in and get get the rest of the
guys and not knowing which direction they went it's kind of hard to make a
decision like that but it was I mean one point it was pretty easy to back out and
as I was backing out it was it was it was getting pretty hard until I heard
Division call me on the radio. And that made me feel a little better once I
knew they're okay. A lot of people are wondering whether I would do
anything different. I would have to say No. You're saying, Why? Well, because I had
communication set up. I only had one other person that I was
talking to. He had a radio; I had a radio. I was his lookout. We had the escape route, safety zone was in black we were pulling with us, we got our truck with
us -so we had everything set up to meet the objective. Continuous meeting
objective safely. We came up here- we came up with a plan to fire off the horseshoe
and the Milpitas Road and it was supporting the objective we got from the
Division and we were doing it safely. We had black with us; we had good
communications; we had good weather for us to be burning in that
situation-- I look back and I've tried to look at it from a bunch of different
angles and I can't come up with anything that would make me change tactics. It just it just brought home the fact that the closer I have our my module together
in that situation, the better off we are. What we witnessed here and what I saw if
I was to encounter that again. Plan for worst case -really make sure your your
resources are tactically positioned, and ready for engagement, and, and everybody's
aware of the deteriorating conditions. We're probably about a hundred feet away
from the spot down here. We never never made it to the spot. It could have been
real easy to let them go down and take care of that by themselves- at a
first-year firefighter-- the other two had two seasons but I decided to go jump in
there with them. Not sure what the outcome would have been if I would have sent them by themselves. This story was intended as an
opportunity for you to learn from the experiences of others. We hope that
you're able to place yourself in their boots and think, "what would I have done?"
Using the talking points in your student workbook, discuss your perceptions of the
Indians Fire.
