It's a good one to watch being it has a lot of good this to know about.

Just an idea; what if wind awareness (W) was added to the LCES basics, (LCESW)? In particular, W for awareness of regional wind patterns. In seems like with wild fires, if people know what is happening with the wind, they have a reasonable ability to predict fire behavior. Maybe it's just me, but I find LCES isn't very memorable to civilians. How about Lo-Co-SEW? Lookouts-Communications-Safety zones, Escape routes, Wind awareness. It could be taught to the 1988 song Ko-ko-mo by The Beach Boys. Wacky, but memorable. So when people are in severely stressful fire situations, they remember the relaxing song and remember the basics.

Where I am working in the woods now, an extreme heavy snow event a month ago, caused a lot of trees to topple on BLM and PVT timberland. Thousands of trees came down, and I was trapped here for 11 days. They need to salvage these down trees. If left in place, they will be a fire danger. Also will breed bark beetles, causing more mortality.

5:00 At first I thought "What is 'stop tape', and how is it used to fight fires?"

As a former wildland fire fighter. Use your sense oh hearing. It's not good to hear that freight train sound. Esp if you are on a ridge. A running crown fire sound. It happened to me once.

04:35 "failure to have a lookout." No, that is incorrect. Failure to understand that high wind speeds will cause a fire to run, and you need to get out of that area mediately. This is never discussed, and people continue to die due to this oversight in training. Failure to stop work at 3pm, and pull everyone off the mountain due to the repetitive nature of burn over fires. 4pm is the burn over time of day. All major catastrophic events where dozens have lost their life (Yarnell, AZ. Storm King Mt, Colorado) as well as others had their burn overs occur at 4pm. Change the protocols & procedures to halt the activities for the day at 3pm, and pull everyone off the fire. Give a two hour window to sharpen chainsaws, rest up. This window between 3 and 4 is being neglected in all wildfire training, and this is going to eventually lead to more catastrophic tragedies. Posting wind vanes in valleys & up on ridges is also a safety tool that is too simple & effective to NOT install, especially in areas when you are in a wild fire confined space. A wildfire confined space is where the safety zone, Hotshots & fire head are all within a 1 square mile area. Such confined spaces need to be equipped with extremely tight tolerances to safety. The language used is also lacking greatly. The phrase: "confined space" relative to wildfire fighting is something (amount several other terms) that should be included in the training. 11:05 Wow, no wonder people continue to get killed in these wildfires. The root cause of this tragedy (11:05) was the failure to read the change in wind & fire behavior, and get to safety in a RUN FOR YOUR LIFE! situational awareness reaction. Had they done as this instructional video suggested and verbally acknowledge a designated safety spot, it would have done nothing to save them. If they don't when the fire behavior is telling you to RUN FOR YOUR LIFE! No safety zone is going to save you if you don't get to it in time, so this video is useless in giving a Hotshot the foreknowledge needed to save their life. I've recognized this as a common theme in several fatal fire events. Hotshots working away like nothing is wrong while a fire, smoke & wind are giving warning signs to RUN FOR YOUR LIFE! The comment: "The fire swept up the canyon in less than a minute." This tone is another miss representation of fire behavior. Nothing mystical is occurring when a fire blows up a hill in under a minute. Fires spread at 10 miles per hour, and the crew both failed to read the fire behavior as well as the training materials fail to teach the Hotshots HOW the fire behavior is giving indications that it has a high probability of burning over your present location at any second. I'm sure the fire fighters knew the fire was crossing them from down bellow. The smoke would have been visible, and I will assume they knew all along it was bellow their location. They were never taught that certain conditions must be treated with a RUN FOR YOUR LIFE reaction. Failure for training manuals, training videos, lessons learned producers to NOT cover these details? 19:48 "Repeating these same mistakes," Yes, the educational materials keep overlooking the root causes: 1) Failure to teach fire crews how to read the fire behavior properly. 2) Failure of the educational manuals/instructors to teach how to properly react when both wind & fire behavior meet a certain criteria where the only correct reaction is to DROP EVERYTHING AND RUN FOR YOUR LIFE! That statement I just made is never included in any manuals, and is what causes such a complacent "It came out of nowhere" response in the firefighters. 3) Failure of the training team/manuals to teach the student how to read the change in smoke volume, change in color of smoke and/or volume. Fore example, when smoke changes from white to black it is at that point moving at a rate of 10 miles per hour. When smoke changes from a wispy fog to four freight train smoke stacks wide, that the fire is moving at a rate of 10mph. 4) Failure to recognize that many Hotshots are university students who are only doing this type of work in the summer, and to act accordingly with them. Never allowing them to have confined work areas where the fire head, the safety zone, and crew are without fast escape tactic briefings. 5) In the case of the Storm King catastrophe, the crew bosses were negligent, but defended by gov. coverup. They had these young university students doing their crap work. The time it takes to exit that above fire trail was 20 minutes. The time it takes for the flame to run up the hill is 880 feet per minute, they barely began to walk out. Failure of the supervisors at the Storm King mountain fire to read the fire behavior and get off that mountain in time. The column of smoke was a freight train smoke stack for 45 minutes before they began to move. The smoke turned black a good 30 minutes before they began to move. The supervisors are not being trained properly. Supervisors should be given quizzes on these critical concepts, and demoted when they fail to answer properly. Supervisors should be audited for their knowledge. 6) Failure of the training and research officials to recognize that 4pm is an extreme high probability for burn over. The 4pm and 1 hour prior should be designated a break and regroup policy time. You break and evacuate the fire line at 3pm, moving to the safest spot available. What makes it even more critical of a policy to implement is that if you are in a confined and restricted movement environment, you need extra margin of error time. To only allow the distance between yourself and the fire to be just over 880feet (distance fire can travel in 1 minute) juxtaposed to ignoring obvious fire, smoke & wind warnings??? As crew leaders, Storm King mountain leadership should have all been terminated. Investigators who are unable to connect the lack of fire, smoke, wind behavior in order to anticipate what the fire is going to do next? They should return the money they received for writing those research papers.

does anyone have access to good a powerpoint or summary of LCES?

Hi it's tag this

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