Advances in Wildland Firefighting Chuck

Advances in Wildland Firefighting

Chuck Bushey should know a lot about advances in wildland firefighting dynamics. He's been part of firefighting efforts in wildlands for many years, and in fact he was out there in 1983 when "…we first moved from using TI-59 hand calculators for making fire behavior predictions," and he recalls the "early version of the BEHAVE program, that linked data from landlines to a general computer terminal "at an actual live wildland fire" (Bushey, 2008, p. 1). Today, Bushey notes that "computers are everywhere" and manufacturers have made "tremendous strides with fire-resistant PPE (personal protection equipment), and moreover, the use of satellite imagery, thermal imaging, unmanned aerial vehicles, and modeling by computers, all these technologies are now used in firefighting in the wildlands, Bushey reports.

One specific advancement in wildland firefighting, according to Blair Watson (writing in the magazine Firefighting in Canada), is the improvement of the "helibucket" -- the big buckets that scoop water out of a lake or out of the ocean and drop the water payload on a wildland fire. These buckets are not new at all, in fact they have been used to fight all kinds of fires for many years. But the new "FAST bucket" offers ingenious features that make it simpler for helicopters to scoop up water and douse flames.

Fresh water scooped by a helibucket weighs 1,000 kilograms per cubic meter; saltwater is slightly heavier (three percent heavier). A helibucket can carry up to 9,840 liters, and when a helicopter pilot is filling up his helibucket with water, he needs to ensure that "the water in the helibucket does not exceed the aircraft's payload capacity for a given altitude, temperature and fuel load," Watson writes on page 1. Given the importance of not overloading his capacity to dump water on a wildland fire, the pilot in the past had to use a "heli-bucket cinch belt." That meant that if he wanted to increase the amount of water carried in his bucket, he had to "…land and adjust the cinch belt," which was "time-consuming" and was rarely employed near fire zones.

However, with the FAST Bucket's "cockpit controller" the pilot doesn't have to land his helicopter and adjust the cinch belt. Now he can "pre-set the amount of water taken at each fill," which "substantially increases the total quantity carried and dropped for a given fuel load," Watson continues on page 1. In addition, a drawback of the old conventional helibucket was the lack of an ability to make "multiple drops" on the wildland fire. In the old system once the pilot had hit the release valve, all the water was "discharged in one concentrated salvo," whether or not the entire amount was needed on one particular hot spot.

Hence, the pilot would drop his load and fly back to the source of water for another load. Time and fuel were wasted in this process, especially when the fire was a "low-intensity" wildland fire like a grass fire, or a cleanup of a large wildland fire (putting out hot spots). However, with FAST Bucket has a "multiple-drop capacity" that allows the pilot to "up to seven split drops" using the technologies built into the advanced bucket, Watson explains.

It is interesting the way in which the FAST Bucket works. It employs the actual water weight to create the hydraulic pressure that is required to actuate the release of each drop. "The pressure is measured via a transducer, which creates the electrical power required by the cockpit controller." Moreover, the weight of the water in the bucket "…creates a hydraulic force within an actuator -- a manifold containing five cylinders" -- and no matter how much water is picked up in the FAST bucket, only 1.4 amps is required to release the load of water on the fire. With the conventional buckets, about 60 amps of power is generally required to actuate the water drop, Watson points out (p. 1).

Meanwhile, the Forest Service operates the Missoula Technology and Development Center (MTDC), and along with the University of Montana, these two groups have been working on how to keep firefighters safe and healthy while they battle wildland fires. The Incident Management Teams (IMT) that fight fires have been providing data to MTDC about the human responses to the fighting of wildland fires for several years -- regarding the stress and pressure on the health of the men and women who battle those blazes.

In the journal Wildfire (Sharkey, et al., 2008, p. 10), the writer points out that the MTDC and the University of Montana researchers have measured the aerobic fitness of IMT members, checked they physically and have identified the "presence of risk factors for coronary artery disease and inflammatory markers in blood samples," Sharkey points out. Clearly, if a firefighter is a risk to have a heart attack, it makes sense to either help improve his health, or prevent him from engaging in the stressful work that firefighting entails.

For example, of the 56 IMT members that were surveyed in 2007, thirty percent of them reported that "above average or severe stress was associated with their IMT position," according to Sharkey. The job of the Forest Service and managers at the regional level is to work towards reducing the risks that come IMT members are taking every time they go into a wildland fire situation.

"Firefighters, especially those in supervisory and Incident Management Team positions, often have problems with stress, fatigue, and mental overload," according to Phase III of the Wildland Firefighter Safety Awareness Study, and quoted by Sharkey. The report / study goes on to assert that there is "little training or advice given on how to mentally prepare oneself for what is ahead" and how to prevent the impact of fatigue from becoming overwhelming while in the line of duty (Sharkey, p. 11).

The point here is that up until recently, the Forest Service and other agencies have not had a good preventative policy to address the stress that firefighters face. It seems remarkable that this aspect of the job hasn't received the attention it deserves, and Sharkey explains that the MTDC and other support systems for the Forest Service will pay more attention to the psychological distress that results from stress. This is certainly an advance for firefighters, especially if the program is carried out nationally and all firefighters in the wildlands are carefully screened before they launch themselves into a battle against a blaze.

In the process of their work, firefighters often come into contact -- or nearly so -- with downed power lines. The Wildfire magazine points out that one of the recent advances is a "AC voltage detector" that gives the firefighter a warning "in the presence of open electrical fields from down power lines" (Wildfire, 2008). The firefighter wears the detector on the outside of his protective clothing, and it warns him when there is dangerous electricity nearby.