#27 - Operational Resilience on the Boundary Waters
In the Summer of 2011, eight firefighters were entrapped on the Pagami Creek Fire in northern Minnesota. The fire behavior exceeded anything in the area since the 1800s (around the time of the Peshtigo and the Great Chicago Fires in 1871). Pagami burned through the Boundary Waters1, a vast network of lakes and rivers managed by the Superior National Forest, near the U.S. border with Canada. The entrapments involved canoes, floatplanes and a surprise island. You might notice the last sentence said entrapments (plural), because actually it was two clusters of close calls spread out over several days and several miles.
Doing the investigation, I had a chance to listen to firefighters who survived the blow-ups. I learned a lot about Operational Resilience, and how to survive and succeed in a Dynamic, Ambiguous, Risky, and Complex (DARC) environment.
Pagami was so extreme, and so different from what I had experienced, studied and investigated before—I was forced to take a fresh look at things I thought I already understood. I’m looking forward to sharing some of these insights over the next few posts.
Let’s focus on the story of two firefighters (Jess and Jamie) and how they survived September 12, 2011 on the Pagami Creek Fire, and we will see what their story has to tell us about Operational Resilience in the DARC.
Monday, September 12, 2011: The Pagami Creek Fire had been burning about three weeks. Four two-person teams were on Lake Insula, one of the lakes in the fire’s potential path. Their job was to direct the visiting public out of the area and expand the clearance radius ahead of the fire.
Quoting the report2:
Jess and Jamie start at the southwest end of the lake, sending public north, and closing campsites… Soon the wind starts picking up, and smoke starts settling on the lake. They keep moving. The sky keeps getting darker, and they hear a roar in the distance.
They close campsite 7 quickly and paddle toward campsite 8, which is at the end of a long narrow bay at the southern edge of the lake. Jess has been uneasy with the thought of heading all the way in there and getting stuck. There’s probably nobody at that campsite. She’s concerned, but not too concerned: They’ll do site 8 real quick and then head north and break for lunch. That’s the plan. But soon as they reach the tip of the point to turn south, Jess decides “No this is not worth it. We need to get out of here.”
She turns the canoe toward what she thinks is middle of the lake, and tells Jamie to paddle fast. The smoke gets thicker, and they start preparing for the possibility of fire. They get their shelters out, and Jess radios the other teams they’re going in the water and warns them of the approaching fire. Alex [one of the other firefighters working on the lake] on keeps trying to call over the radio, but right now time is critical. Now it’s black and loud. A few more strokes and Jess feels a wave of heat and embers. They yell or hear yelling,3 but through the smoke they can’t make out where anyone is, and they can’t see their headlamps and aren’t sure which direction is which.
They’re alone. The fire’s coming. It’s pitch black like night. Jess pulls off her rubber boots, and shouts over the wind to Jamie, “It’s time to go in!” Jamie: “You mean, now?” They straddle the side of the canoe, lean, and slip into the cold whitecaps and darkness. The canoe swings around and hits Jess in the head. She goes underwater for a while. Jamie shoves the canoe away, and it disappears with their gear. Their shelters are partly unfolded, but in the wind and waves, it’s hard to get them open all the way. They decide to let a shelter go—they’ll share one and stick together.
They’re drifting north, holding on to each other with one hand, trying to hold the shelter down with the other. But the waves are chaotic, and hard to time, and under the shelter they can’t see them coming. The shelter keeps almost wrapping around their heads. With each breath, they don’t know when it’s going to hit them in the face and block their airway. They struggle to keep their heads above water, and Jamie’s life jacket is riding up and choking her. The water is cold, and the waves are big, and they think they are going to drown.
Within minutes, it’s suddenly hard to breathe. They hesitate to lift the shelter: will the air outside sear our lungs? They need breathable air; they open it a crack. It’s black outside, except for huge sparks of flying fire like someone’s shooting machine guns at them.
Inside the shelter, it goes from pitch black to bright orange, over and over. They think they’re going to die, and it feels like they’ve been in the water forever. They lift the shelter for air and see a shoreline engulfed in huge flames, and the waves are pushing them toward it. They try to kick out into open water. But they’re tired of being blindly tossed around.
Barely through the haze, they think they see some rocks. They kick over and struggle against the waves to get hand- and foot- holds, while hanging on to the shelter and each other. Jess is shivering uncontrollably, and her leg is spasming painfully, and she can’t stop it flapping around. The fire is picking up just inland from them.
They stay close under the shelter, trying to keep warm. Once the fire front has passed, they get up out of the water and use the shelter to shield from flying embers. They stay here on this rocky tip of land, away from vegetation, and eying the cedars behind them in case they start to burn. They try to figure out how long they were in the water—it must have been 45 minutes or so.
They take turns standing in the hot dry wind, and huddling together with the shelter. Then there’s rain, and thunder, lightning and hail, and they cover themselves with the shelter again, but can’t help getting soaked. And it’s the kind of hail that hurts. At this point they think it’s a little humorous, too: What other disaster could befall us? They chuckle, knowing at least they aren’t going to die after everything else.4
DARC (Dynamic, Ambiguous, Risky and Compex):
This was a Dynamic, Ambiguous, Risky and Complex (DARC) environment.
In the beginning, Jess and Jamie’s assignment was to go to campsites around the lake to clear campers out. But, conditions changed, and they changed quickly (Dynamic). The fire started picking up and was roaring in the distance. But they weren’t sure it was the fire. It shouldn’t have been the fire, fire doesn’t move like that in the Boundary Waters. So, it had to be something else. Then again, the fire blew through all predictions a couple days earlier… so it maybe could be the fire? The point is: The distant roar was ambiguous at first (Ambiguous).
The environment was inherently Risky. Jess and Jamie didn’t have any perfectly “safe” options. Ditching the canoe, for example, was not a “safe” option. It meant giving up their only transportation and putting themselves at the mercy of the waves and currents, risking hypothermia, and losing their radios (which were a communication link with other firefighters or rescuers). No, this wasn’t “safe,” but it was safer than staying in an unstable canoe in big waves and wind, where they could be blown toward a burning shoreline.
Their environment was also Complex. One hallmark of complexity is that you can’t see the full picture. You see what you are immersed in. Yet, what you see is caused by multiple factors interacting with eachother, and you can’t quite disentangle what’s going on, what’s causing what, and how it all goes together. The firefighters on Pagami were at the mercy of complexity. These events were the convergence of extreme weather phenomena, rare fire behavior and radio tech issues in that specific area. Those are just a few of the factors that came together that day.
So how did these two firefighters survive and succeed in that DARC environment? They did it through Operational Resilience.
Operational Resilience (OpRes):
Jess and Jamie’s story is a perfect illustration of Operational Resilience. The fire kept changing, they kept adapting. When their tactics didn’t work, they tried a new approach. Through it all, they stayed anchored in their mission and intent.
If they had stuck to the original assignment without being resilient—they would have been trapped. If they had followed the rules … well, there were no rules for a time like that. How do you write policy or training for this sort of thing?
Note how this is different from the ordinary meaning of “resilience.” Normally, that word means something like: merely bouncing back on task, or not letting bad circumstances keep you down, or keeping your head up. It’s fine to think of resilience that way, so long as your environment is Stable, Straightforward, Safe and Simple (or 4S).
But this not a stable, safe environment. And these women were not merely bouncing back, they were adapting and asserting themselves relentlessly, to carry out their mission. That’s Operational Resilience. And that’s the key to surviving and succeeding when times are DARC.
The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW) is a 1.1 million acre network of lakes and rivers in northern Minnesota, managed by the Superior National Forest. On a given day, there may be thousands of visitors spread out through the area, in parties no larger than nine. During the summer, Wilderness Rangers patrol the area by canoe and do much of the front-line work of public interface, campsite maintenance, and permit enforcement. During fires, the Forest utilizes them in a Public Safety function. The purpose is to manage public access and movement in the vicinity of the fire. Fires typically spread gradually, and the Forest seeks to reduce residual risk by keeping public a day or more ahead of worst-case potential fire spread. (Pagami Report, pp. 3 and 6)
Overview of the Pagami Creek Fire (Pagami Report, p. 3):
The Pagami Creek Fire was a natural ignition fire in the BWCAW on 18 August 2011. Objectives focused on keeping the fire from moving outside the wilderness and threatening human developments.
Over the first few weeks, the fire grew from a small, smoldering lightning strike to just over 100 acres. As the fire grew, the unit brought in additional resources including Incident Management Teams, took actions to keep the fire from threatening communities outside the wilderness, and used Public Safety crews to notify recreating public well before the fire might threaten their safety. Again and again, the near-term forecast for rain was postponed, and fire conditions worsened.
On 9 September 2011, the Forest issued closure orders for sites thought to be a day or more ahead of potential fire spread. On 10 September, the fire grew faster than expected, leading to emergency evacuations. Field personnel considered the day a close call. The Forest aggressively expanded its closure area, and on 11 September, 95 visitors were moved from lakes around the fire.
Morning of 12 September, the Forest expanded its closure area again. Several miles ahead of the fire, Public Safety crews were assigned to restrict traffic, close campsites, and order recreating public to leave the area. Shortly before noon, eight personnel were fleeing from fire. Two abandoned their canoe and sought refuge in the lake, sharing a single fire shelter. Four others deployed fire shelters on a small island. Two others were picked up by floatplane, just as the approaching fire changed course. All survived without major injury. Fire intensity was unprecedented for this area for generations of firefighters and land managers—in a single day, the fire ran 12 to 15 miles.
In this style of investigation, the intent is to show events from the perspectives of people involved, showing some of their assessments, expectations and doubts. The judgments you read in the text are not from the investigation team, they are from people on scene. The tone is conversational and attempts to stay as close as possible to the original voices. Some quotes are approximate and not exact. All names are fictitious and gender neutral. (See Pagami Report, p. 6)
This is an example of the real chaos of the moment. Imagine a time so turbulent you can’t tell whether the yelling you hear is from your partner in the canoe, or from someone else hidden in the smoke.
Pagami Report, pp. 10, 11.