Catagories Of Wildland Fires

[Daniel Joubert]

I'm interested to know if you guys catagorize your wildland and prairie fires. If you dont, how do you describe the extent of the fire to mutual-aid responders? I've tried to do this here in South Africa (in our area) and it works well. We now have 3 catagories, each with a specific response in terms of vehicles and crews, and depend upon factors such as wind strength,speed of flame front and type of vegitation. Waiting to hear from you.

[medford]

With my agency we don't categorize or seperate the difference between a brush fire or timber fire. The way things are broken down are the size of the incident ranking from Type I which is the largest and most complex of a fire to manage, long duration, controlled by a national management team.

Type II fires are simailar to Type I but not as complex to manage and duration of active fire. National teams are also used in the management of these fires often. As well as Regional teams of overhead.

Type III fire smaller verision of type II but not as complex as a TII, typically managed by district qualified personel. Again the terrain, fire behaivor aren't as complicated. Multliple shifts...

Type IV fires very simple fires to manage usually controlled with the intiall attack forces, fires not run into multiple shifts to control/contain.

Type V fires are even smaller than a IV, still kinda new, for small abandoned campfires and such.

for Mutual aid systems the county I live in has a predetermined call out for each department for mutal aid. They've broken it down into catageories for structure, wildland/brush, tender(water trucks), EMS and Hazmat. Within these groups are a level of alerts, each alert you call for 1-5 gets you a set amount of equipment from certain districts.(start with the close districts and move out. for exapmle a
first brush alert you will get say 3 brush rigs from surrounding districts, maybe a command response. A second brush alert you will get what was in the first alert and then an additional 3 brush trucks plus maybe a couple tenders. The nice thing is that you can call for more brush units by calling your dispatch and say you want a second brush alert and frist tender alert, with a first structure alert for structual engines to provide strutural protection to threatened houses. your breif to dispatcher and they know what to tap out to the other districts.

Hopefully this helps your answer your question.