Toward an Expanded Lexicon
Historically, wildfires were never considered a high-risk incident type within the United Kingdom. In fact, for many years they were simply considered a "rural" fire type, albeit on a potentially very large scale. Although U.K. fire-rescue organizations have a statutory duty to respond to all types of fire — including wildfires — under the Fire and Rescue Service Act of 2004, the country has no specialist agency like the U.S. Forest Service Fire and Aviation Management, the Country Fire Authority of Australia or the Graf Bombers of Spain.
Although wildfires of the intensity and scale of those experienced in the forested regions of the United States, Mediterranean Europe and Australia occur very rarely in the United Kingdom, there are a significant number of wildfires each year and firefighters can respond to many hundreds of outdoor fires each day when conditions are right. From 1995 to 2004, there were nearly 900,000 outdoor fires, with 27,000 of those being attended by four or more fire engines; however, both figures are widely acknowledged to understate the actual scale of the problem.
Traditional U.K. wildfire tactics and suppression methods tend to be resource-intensive, expensive, ineffective and, most worrying, potentially unsafe. There is an over-reliance on direct attack methods without sufficient knowledge of available indirect attack methods, particularly the use of fire as a suppression tool. In fact, many senior fire service operational and risk managers still see this incident type as a growing, yet infrequent, inconvenience rather than something that should be considered a serious threat to the safety of their personnel, communities and the resilience of their service.
In the United Kingdom, fire suppression tactics have been based on direct attack with little understanding of other methods such as indirect attack, parallel attack or the use of fire as a tool. The failure to develop greater understanding of the more advanced suppression techniques in use around the world is compounded by the fact that even those fire-rescue organizations that are looking to address the issue do not have a deep-seated understanding of wildfire and its behavior or real experience with the more effective methods of suppression. Even within the land management sector and private estates, the levels of skills, experience and awareness of the post-ignition wildfire phenomenon and the most effective and safest methods of suppression vary.
Although many countries recognize the value of a strong initial attack, such a response often depends on agencies deploying aerial resources that can attack fires in their very early development while providing targeted support to teams working on the ground. In the United Kingdom, this type of resource is almost nonexistent, and any that does exist can only be deployed during an initial attack phase because the aircraft are not customized for the task, dedicated for the purposes of wildfire fire suppression or immediately available.
In recent years, however, particularly following the 2003 fire season that resulted in a spate of wildfires across the United Kingdom, it became apparent that there was a pressing need to fundamentally change the response to wildfire and develop new and more innovative solutions to this growing problem. Some fire-rescue services developed closer links with rural partners to form Fire Groups. These partnerships of agencies and land owners commonly share knowledge and resources and work closely to develop strategies for fire prevention and firefighting. A number of fire-rescue services worked collaboratively with partners, such as the Forestry Commission, to produce and develop fire plans specific to wildfire risk within their areas.
While the various groups were successful in establishing effective partnerships to ensure that wildfires could be managed collaboratively in the future, they were not actively investigating whether established firefighting methods, particularly those used by fire-rescue services, were as safe, effective and efficient as they could be — or indeed should be.
In November 2007, Mark Jones, then-deputy chief fire officer of Essex Fire and Rescue Service, formed the English Wildfire Forum in response to widespread calls to ensure that wildfire risks were addressed by fire-rescue services to establish a forum for the strategic development of wildfire response and prevention. He had previously been instrumental in the development and constitution of the Scottish Wildfire Forum during his time in the Grampian Fire Service.
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