Collaboration: Local Fire District, U.S. Forest Service and DNR

Nothing was on fire, so it was unusual to see a dozen U.S. Forest Service (USFS), Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and local fire department apparatus parked and 50 firefighters gathered around the engines. The Saturday drill that combined the agencies was the first in a series of training situations by which firefighters and command staff could familiarize each other with personnel, equipment, communications and firefighting capabilities.

“Collaboration is going to be our greatest source of improved effectiveness in the future,” Chief Alan Baird of the Naches, WA, Volunteer Fire Department says.

Baird points out that, with drought conditions and current weather patterns, wildfires are getting bigger with more complexity, fire behavior is more intense and there are more wildland urban interface fires.

“Each agency has a finite amount of resources to work with in these increasingly difficult circumstances,” Baird states. “In the past, everyone would be in their separate backyards waiting for the fire to cross boundaries. Now, we have to take steps to prepare for our joint response before the fire is raging across our lands.”

So, Baird, USFS Fire Management Officer Jason Emhoff and Washington State Department of Natural Resources Fire Unit Manager Miles Pollack gathered their wildland firefighters for pre-fire training at the start of the 2021 fire season.

It never was done before.

Increasing initial response efficiency

The 25 volunteers of Naches Fire, which is located at the Y between two forested mountain passes in the Cascade Mountains, responded to 110 fires and 264 EMS, motor-vehicle accident and technical/water rescue calls in 2020. When a brush fire breaks out, the 9-1-1 system alerts Naches Fire in the little town that has a population of 846. The town siren goes off. Radios crackle. Phone pagers beep in the pockets and purses of the volunteers who leave their job and responsibilities and respond to the station.

As the off-duty cop and the part-time accountant firefighters jump on the brush truck and head to the fire, they note the location and calculate which agencies also should be notified. It’s common for a wildland fire in Naches to be a 30–40-minute drive up a winding mountain pass. The 250 square miles of the Naches Fire District include and are surrounded by USFS and DNR lands, and during fire season, those agency firefighting assets are available for local response.

In the past, the Naches Fire officer would get on scene and do a scene size-up to report to the county dispatch. If the fire was on or threatened USFS or DNR lands, the officer asked the county dispatcher to contact the Central Washington Interagency Communication Center (CWICC) to provide assets for the fire. CWICC evaluated the information and contacted USFS or DNR managers, who evaluated the situation and contacted their command staff, who evaluated the situation and contacted their personnel. During this process, the fire continued to grow, with no assets yet on the way.

“We were just wasting too much time with inefficient communications between agencies before we got assets moving,” Baird explains.

So, the Baird arranged for key management personnel in USFS and DNR to connect to the iSPY fire CAD dispatch system that’s used in Yakima County.

The first step of collaboration brings all three agencies into the communications loop from the very first minutes of the fire.

“Now, the USFS fire management officer and battalion chief and the DNR fire management officers and command staff, including truck captains in charge of assembling their crews, are all receiving information about the fire in real time on their cellphones from the very beginning, as our local volunteer firefighters radio it in to iSPY,” Baird says.

With this information, the USFS and DNR managers can monitor the progress of the fire as they evaluate weather conditions and prepare crews for response.

“I saw the value of tying into the local dispatch system when we had a guy on our crew who was also a volunteer firefighter with the local department,” Pollack says.

Previously, Pollacks explains, he wouldn’t know there was a fire yet, despite the fact that one of his firefighters, who also was a Naches Fire volunteer, would get paged by his volunteer department.

“He was looking at his iSPY dispatch notes on his cellphone and telling us the location, size and responding apparatus while we were still waiting to hear from our communications center,” Pollack continues. “Now that we’re tied into the local fire department CAD system, we’re all on board from the very first tone-out.”

Emhoff recalls recently seeing the tone-out on his phone from the county iSPY dispatch system for a fire that he recognized was on USFS land.

“I called the Naches Fire Department officer, who had just arrived on scene, and then I called Miles Pollack with DNR,” Emhoff says. “Because of our collaboration, they’re all in my favorites list now. Within minutes, all three agencies developed a plan without having to go through two dispatching centers.”

Training together

Collaboration at the first moments of a fire is dramatically improving the effectiveness of the initial firefighting response for Naches Fire’s area of central Washington. However, that’s only the beginning of improvements that are coming out of the interagency teamwork.

“Regularly scheduled interagency training can only improve firefighting responses for all of us,” Emhoff says. “My vision is not only agencies having an open door policy, where our training schedules are posted and anyone from the other agencies can join us—this is part of it—but each agency will also host combined training designed for all three agencies in areas like communications, rig capabilities, mapping and, especially, wildland and urban interface, where our agencies will show up together.”

“Clarifying roles in structure protection situations would be helpful to us,”

Pollack agrees, adding that getting to know personnel before an incident is valuable. “There’s a comfort and ease of conversation in a unified command situation when there are positive relationships that have already been built.”

All three leaders want to see their firefighters cross-train in areas where different practices and perspectives can strengthen their teams. For example, DNR does more hose lays, USFS is experienced in timber, and the Naches Fire members are most familiar with medium fuel in sagebrush shrub-steppe.

“Just like you get to know the strengths and weaknesses of individual crew members on our departments when we train together, we can learn the strengths and limitations of the agencies we work with through coming together for training sessions,” Pollack points out.

Baird adds that having the crews drill together, so they have practiced how to be efficient and safe using their combined assets, prevents arriving at a critical incident in the middle of the night and hearing the time- and morale-busting phrase, “But that’s not how we do it.”

Training together is an essential piece of the new collaboration.

Collaboration is the future of wildland response

“Our new, current model of interagency collaboration in communications and training is very similar to our mutual-aid agreements with neighboring fire departments,” Baird explains.

The departments that are adjacent to the Naches Fire District regularly join together for training with extrication tools, EMS, mass-casualty incidents (MCI), and structure and wildland firefighting. In addition, each firefighter monitors new incidents in surrounding departments on iSPY.

“When Naches is responding to a structure or wildland fire or a possible MCI, we know that firefighters on the other departments in the county are hearing the dispatch, listening to our size-up and preparing their response even before their station is toned out,” Baird says. “Now, with USFS and DNR staff monitoring local fire comms, they can get in touch with us and prepare their people without waiting for notification of the fire to travel through separate agency channels.”

Emhoff has a vision for the future of interagency collaboration down the road. “Eventually, I would like to see a South Central Interagency Fire program that might also include the Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Yakima U.S. Army Training Center, where we are housed together, train together and respond together.”

With the dedication, goals and teamwork of these leaders, that just might be possible.

Ten Steps to Developing Interagency Collaboration

You already have too much work to complete in the hours that you have to do it. However, you understand that interagency collaboration will bring greater efficiency to your organization, and the thought of pulling major agencies together seems daunting. Look no further. Here are simple steps that you can take toward increasing your department’s efficiency through interagency collaboration.

1) Identify the agencies with which you would like to collaborate and ask whether they would like to meet to discuss possible ways that your agencies could collaborate.

2) Schedule an initial exploration meeting. Invite a note-taker to attend, so the leaders can concentrate on the discussion instead of taking accurate notes.

3) Create an agenda for the meeting. Possible agenda topics: initial communication systems and efficiency; initial response efficiency; each agency’s strengths and limitations; joint training opportunities within existing current training schedules; joint training opportunities to be planned in the future; and communications.

4) At the end of the meeting, have the note-taker provide a list of tasks that were agreed on. Email the minutes, a list of future tasks and the dates of upcoming meetings or events to all participants.

5) Schedule a simple “Meet and Greet,” where each agency brings apparatus and personnel. Introduce all personnel by asking each member to state agency, role and hometown. Divide into mixed small groups that will rotate through apparatus of other agencies. Pre-assign a guide to explain each apparatus. For example, the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and fire department members of the small groups rotate through U.S. Forest Service (USFS) apparatus as a USFS guide explains each truck. Then, USFS and DNR members of small groups rotate through fire department apparatus as fire department guides explain. Finally, fire department and USFS members of small groups rotate through DNR trucks as DNR guides explain. Meet back as a large group and ask all of the participants to state something that they learned about an agency, role or rig.

6) Schedule a meeting for training officers from each agency to create and schedule current and future training opportunities. Topics of training to consider: rigs and pumps; hose lays; urban interface equipment, strategies and roles; radio communications; and successful experiences and lessons learned.

7) Post and promote the calendar of combined training exercises. Post and promote each agency’s in-house training opportunities that are open to other agencies.

8) Put your best leaders to work designing a real-world scenario of interagency collaboration, including initial response, communications, rig assignments and fire strategies. Build trouble into the exercise, where several “watch-outs” are ignored. Assign roles to all of the participants and run the scenario either as a tabletop exercise or with rigs in the backcountry. Do this before joint training sessions as a method of identifying areas of difficulty, or do it after joint training sessions to practice the skills that were learned in training and to evaluate improvement.

9) Build in evaluation opportunities for your new collaboration activities. Provide a three-minute evaluation form for all members to complete at the end of each training to ask what was most helpful, what was missing and what could be done to improve the experience. Routinely schedule an after-action review after each joint training or joint event, so leaders can review evaluation forms and, combined with their observations, identify areas of success and components that need improvement.

10) Consider using a short team-building activity at the beginning of interagency trainings to strengthen interagency ties and to build camaraderie. Research shows that when people get to know each other better and make connections their performance improves.

Easy, No-Prep Team-Building Exercises

Who Is It? All of the participants write something unique or unexpected about themselves on a piece of paper. For example, the author of this article could write “regularly jumped from a tugboat to a rope ladder on a cargo vessel in rough waters at the mouth of the Columbia River while carrying a laptop.” Suddenly, the author seems a little more human and maybe even a little more credible. Put the pieces of paper in a hat, mix them up and pull one out. Have the crews guess who it might be. Then have the person who wrote it identify him/herself and add any details.

One Word. In mixed small groups, have each person choose one word that describes him/herself and explain why. As interagency crew members get to know each other, they can ask individuals in a small group to choose positive words to describe their teammates.

Best/worst. In mixed small groups, answer the questions, “What’s the best experience that you spent fighting fire, and what’s the worst?” For new crew members: “What’s the best experience of training and the worst?” or “What’s the best and worst life adventure?”