Command center processes data, cares for firefighters

Leland Hermes traveled from his home on the Navajo Indian Reservation to help fight the Track Fire. In the background is one of the two tent villages offering shelter and rest to the firefighters at the incident command center in Raton.

Posted 21 June 2011, by Steve Block, The Trinidad Times, trinidad-times.com

RATON — Bringing together firefighters from all over the West to fight the Track Fire in northeast New Mexico and southeast Colorado is one thing. Providing them with the tools they need and a place to live is something else again.

Raton’s Rodeo Grounds has been the temporary home for more than 800 firefighters who work long hours in brutal conditions to battle and contain the blaze. The logistical, planning and communications teams also used the rodeo grounds as their incident command center.

Private contractors brought in vast stores of food, beverages and other necessities. A tent village sprang up on the grounds, where windy conditions sent clouds of dust whirling through the air, requiring water trucks to spray the grounds daily to keep them livable.

A visit to the site on Saturday showed what it’s like to live in and work at an incident command center. This is a 24-hour operation, with much of the information filtering and operations planning being done late at night. A long trailer filled with sophisticated equipment serves as the situation room. From here the situation unit leader will debrief with operations leaders and field observers. They examine aerial photography, including infrared photos showing where the hot spots in a fire are located. All this information from the ground and the air is then compiled and sent to Jim Eaton.

“We take all the data from the field that we can, including the guys in the field with their GPS’s, or whatever they mark up on a map,” said Eaton, a geographic information system (GIS) specialist. “We also take what we call an infrared flight at night, and the infrared flight maps out the heat of the fire. With all of those combined, we kind of merge all of those things together, and for the next day it will give us a map with all of that intelligence brought together. Basically, what we do is provide another tool for the firefighters. It’s a 24-hour-a-day operation.”

Two GIS techs, a situation unit leader and a trainee work in the trailer. The crew staggers schedules so they can each get a little rest, but nobody gets very much.

With a total firefighting crew of more than 800 people at the Track Fire, many copies of different types of maps must be made. In the rear of the trailer is the clerical support unit. Separate maps for each area of the fire are made, so those working a particular part of the fire have maps specific to their area. Bennie Rogers and his wife, Julie Cresips, are responsible for making copies of the maps and daily action plans.

“We can crank out 8,700 copies an hour,” Rogers said. “That is needed a lot of times on these big fires, cause we’re going to need 500 copies of these action plans. I think one night we ran 20,000 pages. That’s what my wife does all the time.”

A central hub supplies all the computers in the situation command unit, and also feeds information from the command center to the Internet. The hub supplies four fax lines and 16 phone lines.

A chart showing the different sizes of maps required hangs on one wall of the clerical center. Getting all the right maps to all the right people is no easy task.

“When a fire is really going like that, we were rolling through 33 linear feet, or pretty close to 1,000 square feet of paper a night, just to get all that information out. They might require different sizes of maps for different things, and we produce them, all the way up to the situation map that’s in the briefing room,” Rogers said.

The private contractors who supply the firefighters with food and beverages also have a huge daily task. Al Koss, a public information officer for the incident command center, described the work the contractors do for the firefighters.

“They provide three meals a day, breakfast lunch and dinner,” Koss said. “They usually start feeding about 5 o’clock in the morning, and go until 9 a.m. Then they provide all the to-go lunches for the firefighters and lunches for the people who work here. Then they start feeding again at 6 p.m. for dinner and it will often go until 10 or 11 p.m., depending on how the crews are coming in and out.”

Spike camps, set up where fires are at their hottest, must be supplied with to-go meals in large buckets. Nutritional standards are high, with meals having to have a mixture of meat, potatoes, vegetables and snacks. Some firefighters are vegetarians or have other special dietary requirements that the contractors have to supply.

The mess hall at the incident command center is the great gathering place for firefighters, who are limited to 14 days of constant action, in order to avoid exhaustion. Shower units, cleaning stations and a relaxation area are also among the services at the incident command center.

Most of the work done at the command center is done in support of the firefighters, getting things planned and ready so the folks in the field know what to do in the difficult and dangerous work of suppressing the fire.

The communications center is located in the main rodeo grounds building, which also hosts the briefing room, planning center and training area.

The communications center takes care of all the different radio frequencies, making sure that when the crews go out, they have the right frequencies, so they can effectively communicate with each other. A crew worked to assemble a mobile repeater at the command center, readying it to go into the field and help with the challenging communications effort in the far-flung fire.

Emily Garber of Phoenix was working at the communications center Saturday. A Bureau of Land Management (BLM) employee, her job is to disseminate information about the fire to all parties who need it.

“The information is both external, for the public, and internal, for the team,” Garber said. “Our primary goal is public information, so we do a lot of different things. We work with journalists, trying to get the word out that way, but we also do things with the public, trying to be face-to-face with people. We run what we call trap-lines, which take us out into the communities, posting information and talking to people. We hold public meetings, like the ones we had at Raton High School. We try to anticipate needs, so that if something might happen, we’re prepared to address those issues when they occur. When I-25 was closed, when evacuations start, our role is pretty critical in telling people where they can get further information about their situation. We try to guide them to the right sources of information if we don’t have them. Answering phones is a big part of it, as is posting on websites.”

A safety officer is on hand to identify safety issues, working to mitigate possible safety hazards and posting a daily safety message for the firefighters.

Training specialists are part of the scene. Those trying to learn new skills or advance to a higher level of firefighting can come in as trainees and have their training documented, so when they return home they can prove their qualifications for a higher level, based on the training they received at the Track Fire.

Planning is central to the work done at the incident command center. Planners make sure they know how many people are on the fire, where they are going to go, and assemble all of this information in a daily incident action plan. Each firefighter is assigned to a specific division of the fire and knows exactly whom he is to report to. Weather reports and fire behavior patterns are included in the daily plan, along with daily objectives, an air operations summary, important phone numbers and emergency medical information.

A finance section gathers time sheets from firefighters, tracks them, then gives firefighters a slip at the end of the firefight, which they can then take home to local timekeepers to ensure they will get paid by their home units.

Firefighters have come to the Track Fire from many different states. When they come on to the fire incident, they are tracked through a computer database and assigned an order number. The order number tells each firefighter where to go, where to report, and what their job is going to be on the fire. The firefighters are tracked from their arrival on the fire to their demobilization, allowing the incident command center to know exactly who is working the fire, where they are and what their jobs are.

The grandstand of the rodeo grounds is a local institution representing generations of excitement and good times for the people of the area. For the Track Fire, they are the scene of morning meetings where the daily incident action plan is discussed. Before any firefighter goes out into the field, they know what their jobs are going to be and who they are going to see. Each part of the fire incident is examined, then the meeting is broken down into the separate fire crews for detailed discussion of the objectives and potential problems expected to be faced that day.

Below the grandstand, a tent city has sprung up as a place for the exhausted, but often exhilarated, firefighters to rest, regroup and get ready to go out and fight the good fight in the battle against the Track Fire.

The last remaining evacuation orders were lifted as of 10 a.m. Saturday and residents were able to return to their homes without incident. The fire was 90-percent contained as of Monday morning.

Investigators have announced they found “strong evidence” leading them to believe the nearly 28,000-acre fire was ignited by exhaust particles from an ATV that had trespassed onto Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway property just north of Raton’s city limits. The fire started June 12 near the railroad tracks on the west side on Interstate 25 before spreading north and west.

On Monday, management of the Track Fire was to begin being downgraded, with the current command team to turn over management to two smaller teams this Wednesday, meaning the incident command center at the rodeo grounds will see its final days this week. The two smaller management teams will operate from different locations.

Incident Commander John Pierson spoke Saturday about the progress of the two-state firefight and the response of local firefighters and citizens.

“The cooperation of the people has been great,” Pierson said. “I think the best thing is that it has probably brought the two communities, Raton and Trinidad, closer together to resolve a problem. We appreciate everyone’s coordination and support. Things are going very well in the fight against this fire.”

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