Overcoming Obstacles, Online
To protect homes in the wildland urban interface, much research has suggested that homeowners ultimately must take precautions to protect their own homes prior to a fire event. While homeowner responsibility is critical in reducing wildland fire losses, it does not completely eliminate firefighter response.
During a wildland fire event, people still expect firefighters to show up and fight their fires regardless of their mission, the color of their uniform, their compensation (paid or volunteer), their agency affiliation, or their rank or title. As Jack Cohen put it in Reducing the Wildland Fire Threat to Homes: Where and How Much?, "Public reaction to wildfire suggests that many Americans want competent professionals to manage fire flawlessly, reducing risks to life, property and public lands to nil."
While expected to perform wildland fire suppression, structural firefighters do not receive consistent training in the wildland or urban interface environment throughout the United States, a problem that has been recognized by many. "Our nation's firefighters already have the necessary skills for fighting fires in all structures in a community," says U.S. Fire Administrator Greg Cade. "Structural training does not, however, always address the critical wildland fire suppression techniques, which differ from structural firefighting techniques."
Rather than train structural firefighters in wildland fire tactics, however, many fire departments elect to perform no training at all. This situation complicates a wildland fire because structural firefighters, while needed for structural protection, may not have the necessary training to perform safely on the fireground in the face of an advancing wildland fire.
During the summer of 2002, in the White Mountains of Arizona, two wildland fires merged to form the dramatic Rodeo-Chediski fire. By the time it was contained, the fire had burned more than 460,000 acres and destroyed nearly 500 homes; 32,000 residents were evacuated from 10 communities.
Post-fire research in the communities affected by the Rodeo-Chediski fire indicates that one of the negative responses from the local fire department was based on an outsider-insider status. In the article, "Fire as a Galvanizing and Fragmenting Influence on Communities: The Case of the Rodeo-Chediski Fire," a responder said, "We played with the fire for two or three days; then when the Type I came in, they wouldn't let my people participate. We had 30 volunteers at the time down there with their homes burning."
This fragmenting of efforts during an incident is unfortunate and leads to poor management of fire resources. Confrontations, conflicts and disagreements need to be solved long before a fire incident. Unfortunately, as reported, these cultural differences can escalate to an altercation level. According to that same article, "In Pioneertown and Forestville, [within the burn area of the Rodeo-Chedeski fire] this conflict reached the point that homeowners and local volunteer firefighters rebelled against the Incident Command System for a time and earned the moniker of 'renegades' in the local press."
Conflicts and confrontations do not have to occur. If local fire agencies and officials plan ahead, educate their firefighters, and prepare with state or federal agencies through training, outcomes of fires might be different.
In structural fire departments across the United States where there is a significant amount of wildland-urban interface, firefighters are expected to perform both structural and wildland firefighting duties. The city of Pigeon Forge in east Tennessee borders the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and there is a significant amount of hardwood and timber-litter-fuel model types in the wildland-urban interface areas. Unfortunately, wildland fire training for the Pigeon Forge (Tenn.) Fire Department and this entire region has always been minimal, haphazard and sporadic. Simply put, the U.S. Fire Administration has never stressed the importance of structural firefighters learning wildland firefighting tactics, and our department typically has followed USFA recommendations.
In 2008, the USFA and National Wildfire Coordinating Group began speaking with a unified message related to the need for improved wildland fire training for structural firefighters. For the first time, the base-level wildland fire suppression (S-130 and S-190) training courses became available online through the National Fire Academy. These courses are the minimum educational standards related to wildland firefighting and can be integrated into structural fire department training curriculums to improve the relationships between structural firefighters and their neighboring wildland resources.
The courses are meant to bridge the gaps between structural fire and wildland fire training by introducing structural firefighters to the concepts of wildland fuels, weather and topography. At present, the wide variation in training materials that separates the two types of firefighters is generally overcome during an incident by the agreement to accept each other's standards — even if the structural fire department has no formal standards for wildland fire training.
For example, our fire department has an existing memorandum of understanding with the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. This MOU allows us to share resources when the park boundaries are threatened by wildland fire, but it says nothing about the training level of the firefighters responding to such an incident. The lack of uniform training is dangerous, ineffective and confusing for firefighters and incident managers. Without question, the two types of firefighters will continue to interact in the interface, and we will need to find solutions to the incident management barriers.
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