Familiarizing the Unfamiliar
Although wildland fires are not a major threat in Germany, the country does face numerous grass and crop field fires, as well as about 2,000 forest fires per year. However, its urban and rural fire departments have little or no training for fighting these fires.
Because German firefighters aren't used to writing things off, they tend to fight for acres of lost ground instead of looking for opportunities to safely attack the fire. They also have a tendency to use deck guns for a 1-foot-wide fire flank and perform pump-and-roll operations with 2½-inch lines, only to run out of water within several minutes. This lack of training led to several near misses in 2009, including the loss of one engine and the hospitalization of 17 firefighters.
Volunteer firefighters from a local strike team using fire swatters during initial attack training on a stubble field.
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It was obvious that German firefighters needed help. The forest service in Germany is involved only in planning and assisting the command structure of forest fires as an adviser — it does not fight fires directly. Ideally, fire departments, forestry and the national park service would work together and learn to rely on each other for fire suppression. The team of @fire, a nongovernmental operation experienced in disaster response, decided to use its experience with National Wildfire Coordination Group training standards — as well as 70 volunteers trained from Firefighter 2 to the Crew Boss level — to address this need.
The @fire team was formed after the devastating wildfires of 2000 in southern Europe. Several German firefighters gathered to form a team to help those in need during that crisis, creating a hand crew from scratch following the NWCG standards. The team consists of firefighters (both professional and volunteer), EMS personnel, forestry members and others. Training led the team to Los Angeles and several other parts of the United States to learn the ropes as well as undertake advanced training. The team's scope was widened to include urban search and rescue after some medically trained @fire members assisted another team in rescue efforts following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
Today the team can set up one Type 2 IA hand crew and a helitac team for deployment anywhere they're needed in about 12 hours, depending on the availability of volunteer members. The USAR team was deployed to Haiti and was the first German team on-site. The team is financed solely by donations and the membership fees of those involved.
The @fire team created a PowerPoint presentation to share its knowledge of wildland fire, breaking down that information to address the circumstances faced by German firefighters. The team explained environmental issues and the differences between structure and wildland fire behavior, including the effects of fuel, weather and topography, as well as the use of the Campbell Prediction System. The major part of the presentation focuses on fireline safety, pump-and-roll tactics, basic structure protection and the use of hand and power tools such as chainsaws and blowers. Personal protective equipment is emphasized, as most firefighters are only familiar with structure PPE — rescue PPE is Germany's closest equivalent to U.S. wildland gear.
This classroom training needed to break many of the habits that German firefighters had developed over the years by using structure firefighting tactics to battle grass and crop fires. For example, German fire departments had wasted a lot of time training on long hose relays that delivered about 250gpm over 2 kilometers — much too static for grass fires. Instead, @fire recommends this tactic for long-duration forest fires or mop-up when water resources are within this range. In addition, efficient water use is addressed, from using tankers with 1- or 1½-inch hoses to the use of hand tools and backpack pumps. A lot of knowledge is transferred during the classroom exercise, and many firefighters easily accept it.
Of course, classroom training is not the perfect tool for wildland firefighting, so the @fire team brings participants to designated fields to apply their knowledge during live-fire training. Fields may have straw dispersed in a certain area, or be mown crop areas with foot-high straw stands.
To prepare for the live-fire training, the @fire team uses the NWCG's Incident Response Pocket Guide in its pre-fire briefing. The team ensures that the conditions fit the training needs and that sufficient backup resources are on the scene. A contingency plan and a full Incident Command System plan are mandatory; these requirements are absolutely new to German fire departments, which use a different command and training system. The @fire team receives a lot of strange looks and questions — how do we do it? — but most firefighters are convinced of the positive results of fighting these German "wildfires" safely.
The training team starts by firing safety areas around the designated field area to ensure that an escaped training fire doesn't run into other fuels. This first fire prepares the trainees for the heat and fire behavior on the ground — they don't do any firefighting, but instead just watch how the fire burns and become accustomed to the heat flux.
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