The Florida Wildfires

Related Article: Oak Head Fire Assignment

Photographs: (select thumbnail to view detail image)

Flames and fire trucks surround a house on International Speedway Blvd., near Daytona Beach, Florida, as wildfires burned the area in June and July, 1998. Brian Cleary

Marco Island, Florida, firefighter Jerry Adams sprays down hot spots while Volusia County firefighter Art Riegle holds the hose in one of the fires in Daytona Beach. Brian Cleary

This article can be found on page 124 of the Nov/Dec 1998 issue of  9-1-1 Magazine.

Different regional hazards and communications snafus illustrate the give-and-take and mutual learning process possible when fires become so big and so numerous that they overwhelm local and even regional resources and require back-up assistance from other areas of the country. Firefighters and fire managers, both those in Florida and those who came to help, learned a lot from each other during this summer's Florida fire siege.

Western fire crews who did Florida tours found plenty of creepy-crawlies, including bugs that bit, spiders that spit, armadillos and alligators, poison ivy, and humidity that will lay a strong man right out on the ground. Then there's the vegetation - Florida's terrain is thick with melaleuca trees, which were imported to Florida from Australia early in the century, and with dense sawgrass, often eight feet tall or more. It's not called sawgrass for nothing, either it'll cut right through your skin. And then there are the bays.

Standard operating procedure on Florida fires is to sic a few strike teams of tractor plows after the flanks, and herd the fire into a bay a swampy area with thick brush under old pines and cypress, over a deep and mucky bed of dozer-swallowing peat.

"Typically they'll run their dozer lines elliptically to converge on a bay," says Gene Rogers, a fire behavior analyst with the Forest Service in Oregon, who responded to Florida. "They run the fire in there and stop it. Once you run the head in there, it's not coming back out. But in Florida this summer, their standard tactic wasn't working." Rogers, a fire behavior analyst on one of the Pacific Northwest's Type I national Incident Management teams, arrived in Florida the third week of June for a 21-day tour. He says the record-breaking drought in the South this summer made standard operating procedures ineffective in dealing with the onslaught of fire that Florida faced.

"The bays were drying out," adds Randy Herrin, situation unit leader on the same team. "You could see a foot or two up the boles of the trees where the water was supposed to be, and it wasn't there. We generally think of wet areas in the West as safety zones, but that's one of the first things they told us in Florida: Don't go in there. The wet areas had receded so much that they were now concentrated beds of snakes and alligators death pits. They were definitely non-safety zones."

"Usually, they run the line right in there and it works well," explains Rogers. "But that tactic was history, and in Florida they're not structured with hand crews like we are in the West. This season, though, they had a need for someone to be out there tucking things in and pulling hose lays stuff that's not traditional for them. They joked with us that we had introduced a new technique; we taught them a new term called mop-up. We'd laugh together that we weren't in Kansas anymore."

Other terminology caused some difficulty for mutual aid responders from the west. Pretty much anyone who knows anything about fire west of the Rockies knows what a fire pot looks like. Anyone on a hot shot crew has used one. They just don't know what it is when you call it a fire pot, because in the West it's called a driptorch.

Trying to set up communications was even tougher than dealing with regional language differences. The state is flat as a sheet of paper, and presented nearly insurmountable challenges to those trying to establish communications for what had become a major war with wildfire.

When you show up with national radio kits, the normal procedure is to look for mountaintops to set up the repeaters. There weren't any mountains to be had. When the team that included Rogers and Herrin arrived in Florida, they set up a staging area in Ocala for the State Department of Forestry, then moved to the Suwanee Complex. The Oak Head Fire (see related story page 128) was just across the highway from the Suwanee Complex. "We were covering an area that surrounded the fire," says Rogers. "We were initially attacking five or six new fires a day, and we usually had a dozen going at a time. Our situation unit was updating fires and maps every day."

"We were covering five or six separate counties the protection district that the state of Florida had set up," says Herrin. "We'd have initial starts from one end of the district to the other. Most of the time we'd catch them at less than an acre, so mapping them was really different from what the situation unit usually does. We were just mapping the fire locations with dots on the map. We had one fire that was 12,000 acres the Swift Creek Fire but we had a half dozen or a dozen in the 100- to 200-acre size, and then another dozen or more that were bigger than 10 or 20 acres. I think we ended up with 46 separate fires we were tracking."

Herrin explains that communications was extremely difficult because of a combination of problems. "It was tricky because the ground is so flat; our radio range was real limited, and the area was so large that we had problems with the radios. Most of the people who needed to be in communications, like Division Supervisors, ended up carrying cell phones. That worked pretty well, but it was really different from how it usually goes on a complex like that. But we worked around it. We had some problems with communications between the incident management team and the state department of forestry, and our responsibilities on the fires shifted over time as a result."

The Oregon team was brought in to manage the Swift Creek Fire, but then the decision was made that the state would do initial attack on new fires before handing them over to the team. They'd generally catch them at less than an acre. "Then they'd record the fire's location and we'd get this legal address," says Herrin. "Well, we were told the fire is in this section, but if it wasn't smoking then we couldn't find it. That was a communications breakdown that resulted in a lot of problems. I had to establish real close communications with the dispatch office, so when they dispatched a unit to a new start, they'd contact me and let me know where it was."

And if Florida finds itself in a similar situation next spring, staring another volatile fire season in the face, what would Herrin plan for? "I suspect that there was a lot more GIS capability than what we were able to put our hands on there," he says. "We were able to get good GPS data, but we had no GIS system to lay that over onto. Even digital quad maps would have been helpful. I suspect we could have found a GIS shop there or the capability. But expectations are important too, and the state didn't seem to have great expectations from us in terms of doing any refined mapping. They simply didn't want it or feel like they needed it at least not on that complex so we didn't get into a lot of detail in mapping the exact fire perimeter. But that's the whole point, dealing with the expectations of the host agency. They have the lead on determining standards, and it didn't seem to me a wise use of resources trying to get information that no one really wanted."

Firefighters and fire departments and agencies in Florida were not dealing with a "situation as usual" this year, and neither were the teams and crews who came from other areas of the country. "This was so far away from their normal fire year," says Herrin, "that the tactics they use very successfully in a normal year were just no longer appropriate. They do a good job there, and they take a lot of pride in that. But their usual strategy just wasn't working. Then all us damn yankees show up, and in a way they're glad we're there, but in a way they don't really want us there either. We also had some hot shot crews there who didn't really like doing all that extensive mop-up. They got frustrated sometimes, but they too were in a learning situation and they began to see that it was important. We'd get six new starts a day, but the starts weren't going anywhere, whereas in other parts of the state they had big fires taking off. We didn't have the problems they had in other areas because of the mop-up. So there were some expectations on both sides that had to be changed, and we all learned through it."

"We were doing initial attack (IA) support for the state normally with a national team we would take over IA with the agreement of the local officer," says Rogers. "The state DOF isn't used to handing that over to anyone, though, so normal procedure was impossible. They maintained that they were in charge of IA and we were in charge of extended attack. We'd get a request from them saying, "We've got a new start down here, can you bump that hotshot crew to us,' and at the end of the day we'd know what new fires we had responsibility for. They were quick to reassert that they were in charge, but then we'd go down the road and see smoke. We'd call air attack, and they'd say, `Yup, that's a new start all right.' It was a constant juggle, but it was a friendly juggle, too. I was afraid sometimes it would get a little touchy, but they had some good people there who enjoyed all the extra help."

Rogers says dealing with a major fire siege really put the lie to the old myth about friction when a federal team comes in to take over from the locals. "They joked with us about it," he says. "Suppression strategy and techniques that seemed intuitive to us were new to them, but we were all doing business together and having a good time. You often hear people say something like "foreigners can't fight fire where we are." But what happened in Florida really dispelled that.

It was like maybe what they needed in their peanut butter was a little chocolate."