Acceptable risk in wildland fire

General Discussion
#1

I was thinking about the direction and content of some of the posts here recently, and I began asking myself the following questions;

What is acceptable risk in wildland fire fighting? How do we quantify that risk?

I know we refer to the 10 and 18, but when in the role of an IC what is your risk assessment process?

The 10 and the 18 are about mitigating risk. A recent post about a fire on the SQF made me think about the IC who made the decision to not engage late in the day, but to wait until first light and engage. This thought process is exactly one of the 18 situations that shout watch out. Watch out #2 In country not seen in daylight. It appears that this IC conducted a risk analysis, and identified the threat verses the risk and decided to mitigate the risk by waiting to engage until time (day light) was in their favor.

I would like to hear peoples thoughts on risk management, and what is an acceptable level of risk when engaging a wildland fire, and how you quantify that risk. I don’t want this to turn into a discussion on what agency did what wrong, that’s for another thread. I don’t want anyone bashing agencies either.

Lets talk risk, how we identify it, how we quantify it, how we mitigate that risk, and finally how we communicate that to our personnel, our stake holders, politicians and finally the public, the people we all ultimately work for.

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#2

Agree on terrain not seen at night, however now you have the chance of the fire getting bigger what the risk now?

You now need a Copter more risk with air craft involved etc.

The bottom line it’s the IC’s call and we don’t know what they are seeing or thinking etc.

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#3

Risk analysis is really driven by what the reward is. It is also driven by what risk mitigation strategies can be put in place. In the SQF case, what would they be losing by waiting till the day, maybe a few acres? The big hazards sound like the terrain and the daylight. They couldn’t change the terrain to their favor, but they could wait for daylight to mitigate that risk.

If there were no critical life or infrastructure threats, I think it is absolutely the right call to make. I would be interested in knowing what the potential of the fire was computed out to be, which could also play a huge role in that decision. We all know that those are just projections, not hard and fast facts, but at least they give you some data to base your decisions on.

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#4

Risk is on the forefront of every incident. Risk is driven by so much more than the IRPG, agency practice, culture, standards, rules, checklists, experience or even past success. I can say with honesty that I am more risk adverse today than I was 30 years ago. I see things through a different lens, but not everything. It truly depends on you, the person making the decisions. I have made decisions that I was uncomfortable with, but knew they could be pulled off with the right personnel, with the right mental attitude, with the right support at the right time. Change any of those things and you can have a problem. The players in the game are pivotal to the outcomes. Weak players that are lacking skills and sound judgment drive some decisions. I have had this discussion when people can’t believe we put people in harm’s way; We pay our folks well, train them, equip them with the best equipment, test them, repeatedly hold them accountable through standards and expectations in their positions. We have skill sets and expect solid judgement…With that, we will put them in places where THEY MAY have to rely on 1 if not all of the support items listed above with an administration and leadership that understands the RISKS of mistakes and supports their efforts knowing full well it can go wrong. Most of the decisions above deals with my experiences in an all risk agency, but I have had success in applying a lot of this to my role in Wildliand fire from CRWB,DIVS,OPBD,&OPS. Figure out your players, human factors play the largest role in risk, the variables are astounding…MY 2-Cents

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#10

As simple as I know how to put it: Taking great risks to protect human life. Taking calculated risks to protect valuable property. Minimizing any and all routine risks to provide a buffer for extraordinary events. Wear your seat belt! Oh, and use sunscreen.

A little more complicated:

I’ve heard Gordon Graham speak. He is one of the better voices with respect to risk out there: https://www.lexipol.com/resources/blog/high-risk-low-frequency-events-in-public-safety/

He puts it better, but it is the high risk, low frequency events that organizations fail at. If you do something high risk all the time, you get good at it and you mitigate the risks. If you don’t do something high risk very often and also you don’t practice it often, you don’t rise to the occasion, you sink to the level of your actual competence.

Swiss cheese theory is also very powerful.

swiss cheese theory australian bushfire
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The good news and the bad news is the same. Any one particular risk is unlikely to cause a tragedy. (How often are the 10 and 18 violated on a fire?) But if you line up enough ‘holes’ in your risk management strategies, you will have a bad outcome sooner or later.

Think of your luck as the last layer of swiss cheese. And California’s been pushing our luck hard these last few years…

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#11

Two things about risk:

  1. Hindsight is always 20/20 and we love to arm chair quarterback…

  2. There might not be a threat to life and property in this moment but down the line? Tamarack is a good current example.

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#12

Cdfff, can you explain what you mean about “down the line?”

#13

He meant that the fire might be only up on some desolate ridge right now, not near any resources.

But if not contained up there, it might burn into Markleeville next week and cause all sorts of risk that might have been avoided.

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#14

Add to that threat a major bike race with riders spread out over the area. What if the fire had moved Saturday with the race underway?

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#15

Birken_Vogt, I thought so, but that can be a very slippery slope from a risk management perspective. How far do you take it? It is a multi-variable sliding scale, and many of those variables fire managers do not have control nor input on (i.e. topography, weather) except choosing where to draw the line. Do you send folks up that desolate ridge now and blow out some kids knee resulting in a career ending injury or incurring a tree strike on a possibility? Look at the weather and the fire activity now? That is what makes risk management in the wildland so complex and why we have always “struggled” with it. The older and more “tenured” I got, and the more times I wound up literally on the same piece of ground, using the east lines on a fire I was on 10 years ago as the west lines on this one, you become more risk averse.

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#16

Birken and Staydirect: that is exactly what I meant.

IMT_Geek: Which is why I prefaced it with the whole hindsight idea. We never know what will happen in the future. Maybe something, maybe nothing. We can never fully gauge risk either, something crazy can always happen even in the most mundane situation, I’ve seen those career ending injuries in PT. Now I’m not saying throw caution to the wind, farthest from it, but recognize this is a physically and mentally dangerous job that cannot possibly have risk eliminated. The public has an expectation that we perform this service and I don’t think they care that a week or two ago it posed no threat. It’s a hard thing to balance and a problem that will never be perfectly solved.

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#17

Over the years I have found out that even public expectations are hard to manage. I remember my son telling me about a NorCal fire he was on (PIO2) where at a public meeting a couple of guys stood up and were yelling that firefighters should be willing to die to save their homes (unoccupied). As far as Objectives>Strategy>Tactics;

The Principle of Security & Safety however, does not imply undue caution and avoidance of calculated risk. It is impossible to avoid every risk present because risk is common in both action and inaction. Security & Safety is achieved by establishing and continuing measures to protect personnel from undue risk. It is achieved by developing a tactical plan that avoids any unnecessary risks and mitigates risk related to the objectives. It is achieved by developing a tactical plan that recognizes and communicates the risks inherent in the operation to all responsible fireline supervisors and to make sure they are maintaining their situational awareness and completing their own Risk Management Process (RMP).

I completely agree that it can never be completely or perfectly solved. As long as we have humans on both sides of the equation (both the management side and the public side) there are going to be issues and occasional accidents.

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#18

I think another issue in CA is the different process of Cal Fire and the Fed agencies. Myself representing the state am not going to be able to put a fire in monitor status and try to hold all fires to 10 acres or less. I’m not going to pretend to be an expert in Fed decision making and totally recognize the benefit of a naturally caused fire doing it’s thing. However could there be a process of looking at this fire with IMETs and FBANs to come up with a finished size that would be reasonable to meet. Example, we have a ¼ acre fire caused by lighting. Looking out over the next week based on weather, fire behavior, topographical features we can have a successful 500 acre fire using a limited amount of resources?

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