Firefighter Safety
Webinar recording.
With increases in the severity and duration of fire seasons, wildland firefighters are working longer shifts all across the west and are experiencing increased fatigue. In this webinar, Randy Brooks will present results from a survey of more than 400 wildland firefighters and a pilot study assessing sleep, fatigue, and body composition of nine wildland firefighters.
Dr. Brooks and environmental science doctoral student Callie Collins outfitted firefighters with Readibands – motion monitors that keep detailed data on sleep and activity. They report firefighters working in impaired conditions more than 42 percent of one month, and a slight gain in body fat and slight loss of muscle mass over the course of the season. Brooks will discuss the implications of these data and their application to helping make the wildland firefighting profession safer.
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Is the risk of death the same when implementing “planned events”? What do the numbers we have as well as some specific events have say about that? Travis Dotson will provide prescribed fire practitioners a few specific elements to consider related to this topic and lessons available from both planned and unplanned fire events.
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In this study, we aim to advance the optimization of daily large fire containment strategies for ground-based suppression resources by leveraging fire risk assessment results commonly used by fire managers in the western USA. We begin from an existing decision framework that spatially overlays fire risk assessment results with pre-identified potential wildland fire operational delineations (PODs), and then clusters PODs into a response POD (rPOD) using a mixed integer program (MIP) model to minimize expected loss. We improve and expand upon this decision framework through enhanced fire modeling integration and refined analysis of probabilistic and time-sensitive information. Specifically, we expand the set of data inputs to include raster layers of simulated burn probability, flame length probability, fire arrival time, and expected net value change, all calculated using a common set of stochastic weather forecasts and landscape data.
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Wildland firefighters are exposed to wood smoke, which contains hazardous air pollutants, during wildland fire management assignments across the U.S. each year. In this webinar, Kathleen Navarro, PhD, presented on a recent Joint Fire Science Program study estimating the lifetime risk of lung cancer and cardiovascular disease from exposure to particulate matter (PM) from smoke. This analysis combined measured PM exposures on wildfires, estimated wildland firefighter breathing rates, and an exposure disease relationship for PM to estimate mortality of lung cancer and cardiovascular disease mortality from lifetime exposure to PM. In addition, Zone Fuels AFMO, Megan Martinez, reviewed previous smoke research, as well as field-based experiences with successes and challenges of implementing smoke exposure mitigations.
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New fire management paradigms are emerging that recognize fire is inevitable, and in many cases desirable. During this webinar you will be introduced to a new process for spatial fire planning using tools such as Potential Control Line atlases (PCLs), Quantitative wildfire Risk Assessments (QRAs), and Suppression Difficulty Index (SDI). Chris Dunn, Oregon State Univ, will demonstrate how these tools can align wildfire management decisions and actions, from the development of strategic wildfire response zones to in situ wildfire response decisions that balance operational success, firefighter safety and values at risk.
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This collection of essays—divided into three key categories: Risk, Culture, and Operations—daylights qualities and practices in the wildland fire service across a broad spectrum, from outdated and unwarranted to honorable and profound. We must acknowledge our current culture and its shortcomings while using its strengths to lead change.
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This study found that emergency managers exhibit some of the same decision biases, sensitivity to framing, and heuristics found in studies of the general public, even when making decisions in their area of expertise. A national survey of county-level emergency managers finds that managers appear more risk averse when the outcomes of actions are framed as gains than when equivalent outcomes are framed as losses, a finding that is consistent with prospect theory. The study also found that the perceived actions of emergency managers in neighboring jurisdictions affect the choices a manager makes. In addition, our managers show evidence of attribution bias, outcome bias, and difficulties processing numerical information, particularly probabilities compared to frequencies. Each of these departures from perfect rationality points to potential shortfalls in public managers’ decision making. There are opportunities to improve decision making through reframing problems, providing training in structured decision-making processes, and employing different choice architectures to nudge behavior in a beneficial direction
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This collection represents collective insight into how we operate and why we must alter some of our most ingrained practices and perspectives.
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ALERTWildfire is a consortium of three universities — The University of Nevada, Reno (UNR), University of California San Diego (UCSD), and the University of Oregon (UO) — providing access to state-of-the-art Pan-Tilt-Zoom (PTZ) fire cameras and associated tools to help firefighters and first responders: (1) discover/locate/confirm fire ignition, (2) quickly scale fire resources up or down appropriately, (3) monitor fire behavior through containment, (4) during firestorms, help evacuations through enhanced situational awareness, and (5) ensure contained fires are monitored appropriately through their demise.
Webinar recording.
Unmanned Aircraft, commonly called “Drones,” are being used more and more for public safety, research, etc. Falling prices, rising capabilities, and a favorable regulatory framework are all fueling this growth. This webinar looks at actual, real-world, Wildfire missions where these aircraft are being used successfully, and diver into their advantages and limitations.