BAY AREA URBAN WILDFIRE TRAINING
In the aftermath of the Oakland Hills wildfire of 1991, many Bay area fire departments strengthened their wildland training programs to give their members more advanced exposure to wildland firefighting. Two key elements of preseason 1992 training included “Wildland ’92,” the annual wildfire orientation drill coordinated by the California Department of Forestry (CDF) and a multicounty livefire burn exercise hosted by the United Technologies Corporation (UTC) Fire Department. Both exercises emphasized mutual aid and strike-team simulation and benefited from the formation of the “Bay Area Wildfire Forum,” an independent organization comprised of agencies from six Bay area counties intent on sharing training ideas and working together on wildland fire issues.
Coordinated by the CDF in conjunction with local fire agencies, the wildfire drill has been a popular training exercise in the southern Bay area for several years. The 1992 drill was hosted by the Redwood City Fire Department and took place May 19-20 in rural Woodside, an area much like the Oakland/Berkeley hills with its high-density housing in the midst of thickly forested hillsides. The daylong exercise was conducted twice on consecutive weekdays to allow more than one shift from each agency to attend. As in past years, the drill was designed to be more educational than interactive. The 1992 drill included instruction in the incident command system, hoselays, hand-tool operation, structure protection, safety, and helicopter operations
Deputy Chief Ben Lopes of Santa Clara County’s Central Fire Protection District coordinated much of the county’s mutual-aid response to the drill. The exercise included, in addition to the individual elements of fireresponse, the dispatch function as well as some of the logistics and support elements.
“Exercising the system,” as Lopes terms it, turned out to be even more valuable than the firefighting techniques taught in each of the divisions. Departments from five Bay area counties, from San Francisco to Santa Cruz, participated. Each strike team was called out in turn to simulate an actual strike team request and response. All attendees were checked in and tracked just as they would be during an actual wildfire base camp. Communications were coordinated in California’s State Office of Emergency Services Support-4, a well-equipped command vehicle designed as a remote communications and command post. The more than 100 firefighters were well-fed from one of the CDF’s new mobile kitchen trailers. Each of the elements was tested operationally during the course of the drill.
One of the goals when planning the exercise, Lopes explains, was to work on the discipline of a strike team moving from area to area. Among the objectives were to manage the team as it moved from assignment to assignment and incorporate the educational elements.
Dave Moore, a captain in the San Jose Fire Department who served as check-in and demobilization officer tor the drill, adds that the exercise helped participants become familiar with the mutual-aid capacities of Santa Clara county and surrounding counties.
One of the major lessons learned from an incident-management standpoint was how to use a T-card accountability system, which worked very well during the drill, to check in and account for all personnel at the incident scene. Traditionally, only the planning section has used T-cards at the scene, Lopes explains. Now, he continues, it has been proposed that units in the multicounty area fill out T-cards before responding, making it possible to track resources and personnel quickly, right at the check-in function.
The cards went from check-in personnel to plans personnel; and as soon as the plans section got the information it needed from them, the T-cards were sent to the finance section. The finance function of billing for meals on an individual basis was completed by early afternoon on each day, so the system moved more quickly than it would have routinely . Lopes explains.
Participants gave positive feedback on the 1992 drill; they welcomed the refresher course in wildland operations. Everyone from our department thought it was well planned and well carried out and would like to see this kind of training available for more individuals, Moore says.
Even firefighters who have taken part in this drill several times over the years say there’s a direct benefit in that it gets them to think about response to wildland again, Lopes observes. The participants, he notes, are not only those who have a direct responsibility for wildland in their day-to-day activities but also some of the primarily urban or municipal departments that don’t have a great wildland responsibility.
LIVE-FIRE DRILL
The logical progression to the techniques demonstrated at Wildland ’92 was to have them become hands-on experiences. Bay area firefighters had this opportunity on June 27, 1992, when the California Department of Forestry hosted a live-fire drill in south San Jose. Crews from three counties actively experienced the techniques taught to them at Wildland ’92.
The live-fire drill was hosted by the UTC Fire Department, on whose property the drill was conducted. With more than 5,200 acres, much of it wildland, the UTC set aside a hundred acres to be burned in sequential evolutions. Divisions were set up to allow hands-on training in four key areas: progressive hoselay, mobile attack, handline construction, and fire shelter deployment —all under livefire conditions. In addition, an area was set aside for arson investigators to test-activate several incendiary devices under live conditions and examine their effects. Coordinated by Captain John MacDonnell, UTC Fire’s training officer, in conjuction with Captain Jesse Garza, training officer for the CDF’s Morgan Hill division, the drill was a direct response to the Oakland Hills conflagration.
“The Oakland Hills fire was the first time a number of Bay area agencies took part in massive strike teams,” reports MacDonnell. “That presented me with some unique training situations for working with outside agencies. Our department successfully participated in that incident, but it indicated the need to train on a larger scale. The CDF also wanted to develop a large-scale training exercise, so we met and identified our training needs and planned what we were going to do.”
“Everybody was interested in wildland fire after Oakland,” observes Garza. “That’s what finally woke the local guys up to the fact that it could happen downtown under the right conditions. The UTC had some property we could, well, abuse; so we incorporated a live-fire drill with our own annual simulation exercise.”
A lot of planning and forethought went into the exercise. CDF crews cut breaks to protect outlying areas, and the burn area was sectioned into 11 divisions for planned live-fire training.
According to MacDonnell, the following approach was used:
- Firebreaks were cut around strategic areas, such as groves of trees, so
- that the fire would not burn any heavy fuels.
- A safety buffer was burned out so that the exercise fire wouldn’t burn into adjacent private property if the wind shifted.
- A site was selected. It was adjacent to the picnic area, was out of the way, and had the geographic layout of
- a fiat area as well as a slight slope and small hills. The site also was near a water supply.
The drill brought together strike teams from Alameda, San Mateo, and Santa Clara counties, as well as from the CDF—some 200 firefighters in all. Organizationally, the drill was broken down into four divisions set up in line with the incident command system: planning, operations, incident command, and logistics. Within those divisions, firefighters were assigned various responsibilities, including group supervision, lighting the fire, and coordinating the safety of the fire. The entire drill was live fire, stresses CDF Battalion Chief Mike Martin: “If you were doing a handline or a progressive hoselay, it was on live fire. With regard to the fire shelter, we actually had the fire burn over it, while a firefighter was inside. That proved to be interesting training!”
Feedback after the drill was extremely positive. “We took some of our brand new firefighters up there with us, and they had a great time,” says San Jose Fire Battalion Chief Bill Garringer, one of the strike team leaders for the drill. “You can’t get better training than that. We must do more of it.”
Evaluation sheets were distributed after the drill, anti participants provided significant feedback with regard to this exercise and the kinds of exercises they’d like to see offered in the future. “We ran into a time crunch on this drill,” CDF Chief Martin notes “Maybe next time it should be a multiple-day event.”
UTC’s Captain MacDonnell stresses that the program is not in competition with other training programs. “We had identified training areas that had to be addressed in an actual event,” he explains. What made this training scenario different, he adds, is the live burn and the fact that it involved an industrial fire department’s working with municipal agencies and striketeams.
Captain Kevin Conant, wildland instructor for the San Jose Fire Department, emphasizes the importance of live drills: “This was the first live-fire training for wildland firefighting our department has seen in a couple of decades. There really is only one way to learn wildland firefighting, and that’s by doing it at a burn like this, in a controlled environment. That way, you’re able to teach people the techniques needed to control the elements they’re going to be called to fight someday —just as we do with structural firefighting.”
(top, photo by author; bottom left, photo by Kevin
Conant)
(top, photo by Kevin Conant; bottom, photo by author).
The Bay Area Wildfire Forum, created in March 1992 as a multicounty, nonprofit organization devoted to sharing wildland firefighting techniques among local fire departments, encourages and sponsors this kind of training exercise. Currently, 27 fire agencies from six Bay area counties meet on a monthly basis. The Forum—a networking and wildland advocacy group—was born out of the Oakland Hills wildfire, notes Conant. “Every Bay area county has a Chief
Officer’s Association, a Training Officer’s Association, and a Prevention Officer’s Association, but there was no vehicle that made it possible for these associations to talk together with a unified voice and address the wildland problem specifically.” Meetings rotate among the member departments, and the host agency gives a presentation on its own wildland program.
The thing to keep in mind, Garza adds, is that if the CDF or another agency needs help on a wildfire, 90 percent of the engines responding will be Type 1 engines, not Type III wildland rigs. “The idea is to get these responders to use their equipment and improvise. I’ve seen some great improvising in wildfire situations.” He recalls a wildfire up against the beach during which a hardline running 1,500 gpm was dropped right into the Pacific Ocean. All the trucks were lined up with their deck guns and washed the wildland fire right off the hill. They had all the water in the world. On another occasion in Tuolomne County a few years ago, Garza relates, San Francisco City brought a hose wagon and laid a ton of five-inch hose down an old dirt road and pumped out of a river.
With memories of the 1985 Lexington Fire and the 1991 Oakland Hills wildfire still vivid —not to mention those of the plentiful localized conflagrations—Bay area fire agencies are responding to threats against their urban/wildland interface with increased training. The effective mixture of the demonstration provided in Wildland ’92 and the active hands-on participation available in the UTC live-fire burn is allowing these firefighters to better prepare themselves for actual wildfires.
Conant describes the training as “a pretty full circle,” which encompasses the individual department training programs, the multiagency large-scale drill training, and the actual live-fire training experience linked together by the Bay Area Wildfire Forum, which he says is going to be the vehicle that helps encourage communication among all the agencies.
