National Fire Plan Success Story
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Firefighters Lead Interagency Staff Ride
Southwest Region, Arizona
National Fire Plan - Firefighting
2009
Fire Manager Chris Wilcox addresses staff ride participants at the site of the Dude Fire fatalities as the group begins the integration phase of the training experience. Photo courtesy USFWS.
In 2008, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service fire manager Chris Wilcox and five other FWS fire personnel from the Southwest Region worked with two firefighters from U.S. Forest Service and Sedona Fire Department to lead two groups through a staff ride of the Dude Fire (Arizona, 1990), which killed six firefighters. Participants included Bureau of Indian Affairs employees from the Western Region and the U.S. Forest Service Risk Management Council.
During a staff ride, participants conduct a preliminary study of an incident, visit the actual site to gain a perspective of the situation that occurred, and then integrate the lessons learned into current operations. Fire managers who worked on the actual incident are often present to share the information they had and their thinking process at the time that led to specific decisions. In the final “integration” phase, participants reflect upon the lessons which can be applied to ensure mistakes on these incidents are not made again.
“Chris and his group did an excellent job facilitating the staff ride,” said Forest Service Risk Management Specialist Larry Sutton. “Even though I had read the reports of the fire and been to the site before, retracing the steps of the crew and studying the details gave me a deeper understanding of what actually happened that day.”
Wilcox, Fire Management Officer at the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico, serves as the Service’s representative and co-chair of the Wildland Fire Leadership Committee, a national group chartered under the National Wildfire Coordinating Group to develop and manage the leadership curriculum for the interagency wildland fire community.
The use of experiential learning tools are an important part of the curriculum. To learn from the successes and failures of the past, in particular events which were of national significance to fire policy, the group has developed and conducted staff rides for such well known fires as Mann Gulch (Montana, 1949), South Canyon (Colorado, 1994), and Cerro Grande (New Mexico, 2000).