#29 - Maneuver to Safety, Part 1: Divert and Experiment
In Post #27, we looked at the story of Jess and Jamie’s survival on the 2011 Pagami Creek Fire. Now we dive back into the Boundary Waters. We will go step by step through Jess and Jamie’s actions, and how they maneuvered to safety in an extremely Dynamic, Ambiguous, Risky and Complex (DARC) environment.
This is a story of resilient decision-making: As the fire changed, they updated their situational awareness and their actions. But they didn’t just change what they were doing, they changed how they made decisions. As the situation became increasingly extreme and bizarre, they actually had to go outside their training—even against their training in this unique case—in order to survive. In a matter of minutes, their decision style moved from plan-following to innovation.
Just following the plan
Most of the morning, Jess and Jamie were following the plan, closing campsites at the southwest end of the lake. For the first hours of work, the day was relatively Stable, Straightforward, Safe, and Simple (4S).
Changing course to a commonsense, obvious alternative
By late morning, their situation was growing more Dynamic, Ambiguous, Risky, and Complex (DARC). There was a roar in the distance that might be the fire. Smoke was settling on the lake. They started to get “concerned, but not too concerned.” (Pagami Report, p. 11)
As they paddled east toward campsite 8 (see map above, it’s near the bottom), Jess was scanning the shore, searching for a clearing in case they needed to beach and be safe from the fire. She didn’t see a good clearing, so she made a snap decision to paddle for the middle of the lake.
I can’t overstate the significance this decision, and its timing. It set the stage for all the other successful decisions that followed. If they had delayed, they may have missed their chance. This whole story could have ended very differently.
The pitfall they avoided: In firefighter accidents, what often goes wrong is people’s perceptions and actions stay fixed, even as their environment changes (see Post #25 and The 2&7 Tool). When you have a job to do, it’s easy to stay task-focused and miss changing conditions and early warning signs. Or avoid them until it’s too late to change course. But Jess and Jamie didn’t fall into that trap. They caught the change and responded decisively.
Show the map above to any firefighter, and ask where they’d go if they were trying to escape a fire. They would point to that lake—exactly what Jess and Jamie went for. Lakes don’t burn. So if you are trying to get away from fire, lakes are safety zones.
… except this time.
Experimenting with the familiar
The photo above gives you a sense of what conditions were like, early in the story. It only got more extreme from there. Jess and Jamie didn’t know what they were in for.
When they changed course and went for the middle of the lake, they were diverting to an pre-defined alternative. But as they approached the obvious safety zone… they realized, it wasn’t a safety zone.
Why? Because the wind grew so fierce, the smoke and ember showers so violent, that sitting in a canoe in the middle of a lake was not a safe or stable option. So a lake is normally a safety zone, but not in these conditions. These conditions were more extreme than any in the area for over a century. Nobody alive had ever seen fire behavior like this before. Neither had their grandparents. Jess and Jamie were no longer in familiar territory. Concepts of “normal” didn’t apply.
The pitfall they avoided: This is another place where people tend to get into trouble during emergencies. It’s natural to try to find your way back to normal. To actually block out the chaos and warning signs that you don’t want to deal with, so you can believe the situation is how you want it to be, how you think it’s supposed to be. I got lost on a hike one time, and my friend and I had a map and a compass. And as we walked deeper and deeper into the brush in the wrong direction, we kept joking about how wrong the map was, how it needed to be updated, how maybe we got the declination wrong on the compass because things weren’t where they were supposed to be. We did everything but face the fact that we were lost. Despite the obvious facts in front of us, we worked hard to believe we were in control. Humans tend to avoid reality and revert to a familiar course of action. You see this all the time in firefighter fatalities.
But Jess didn’t do that; she realized it was time to take a new approach. They had to get out of the canoe. Her initial thought was to invert the canoe and stay under it for safety. I asked her where that idea came from, she told me:
After the 1999 blowdown storm, fire people on the Forest were saying the best safety zone would be to jump in the lake, turn the canoe and use it as refuge.
(Pagami Report, p. 11)
But she saw the canoe was unstable—unsafe even to be around. So they ditched it entirely, and Jamie shoved it away. I asked Jess how she made that decision. She said:
[I] didn’t think hiding under the canoe seemed like a good idea. A canoe would not be safe in big waves—it would catch wind and go flying and probably take you places you didn’t want to go. It seemed better to just whip out a fire shelter.
(Pagami Report, p. 11)
This was a high-stakes move. To give you a little context, I talked to another firefighter who was also on the lake during the blowup, and I asked him why the prospect of ditching his canoe was such a big deal. Here’s how he explained it:
Why ditching is a terrible option: If they ditch, some of the concerns are: They’re going to get pushed around by waves and strong winds. They’ll have to swim or tread water and try to stay far from the burning shore, in thick smoke and embers—how long will that last? How cold is the water, will they get hypothermic? Where are they going to end up? If there’s a strong enough in-draft, they’ll get pushed back toward the flame front, and they won’t be able to outswim it. Even if they survive, their canoes will be blown away and probably destroyed, and they will lose their radios and food, stranded in the wilderness with no way to communicate: “Ditching is not the most cheerful option.”
(Pagami Report, p. 8)
Experimenting with the unfamiliar
Having ditched the canoe, Jess and Jamie’s new plan was: deploy fire shelters in the middle of the lake.
Most firefighters have looked at a body of water and thought to themselves that in a pinch, they could hop in the water and deploy a fire shelter above their heads. This has been done before. But never in water too deep to stand in.
Jess and Jamie were about to attempt the first deep water deployment.
So at this point, they were deep in unfamiliar territory. And they were adrift.
Then things got worse.
To be continued…