#34 - How Operational Learning Saves Lives (At The Sharp End)
Operational Learning was a root cause of their survival. They learned from their close calls on Saturday, and prevented something much worse on Monday.
This shows the power and impact of Operational Learning.
And it shows you the essential relationship between Operational Learning, and winning in the DARC.
The Wilderness
If you like to canoe, camp, hike--or just enjoy a little solitude--the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW) is a dream. It’s a 1.1 million acre network of lakes, rivers, campsites and trails in northern Minnesota, managed by the Superior National Forest (SUF). On a given day, there may be thousands of visitors spread out through the area, in parties no larger than nine. Huge swaths of it are only accessible if you paddle in by canoe, hike, or get dropped off by a floatplane.
Nature needs fire. It’s good for the ecosystem. That’s especially true in the Boundary Waters. In 1999, powerful storms blew through, knocking down trees and leaving the ground thick with dead timber. So small, benign fires were welcome in a way, because they cleared out the dead and down trees and helped renew the ecosystem.
Fires in the area didn’t need much human intervention. Fires here spread gradually. That’s the norm. Historically, SUF leaders would allow them to spread on their own terms, but monitor them and keep them from getting out of control. Sooner or later the rains came and the relatively small fires went out naturally.
Leaders on the SUF had a system where they allowed fires to run their natural course as much as possible. At the same time, they kept open as many campsites, trails and waterways as possible, so the public could enjoy them for recreation. A hundred years before this, the founders of the U. S. Forest Service said local leaders should make decisions based on the greatest good, for the greatest number, in the long run. That’s what this system was trying to do.
To keep the public out of harm’s way, two-person teams of firefighters traveled the area, communicating with the public, and keeping them out of the vicinity of fires.
The system worked great… until it didn’t.
18 August 2011, lightning started the Pagami Creek Fire. In the weeks that followed, the predicted rains kept getting postponed. The fire kept growing. Not out of control, but enough that Forest leaders brought in additional firefighting resources, including an incident management team to manage the fire and make sure it didn’t threaten private property.
So far, so good.
Hello DARCness
By Friday, 9 September 2011, fire managers recognized that the fire might get even more aggressive. They had been keeping the public out of the immediate vicinity of the fire, but now their approach changed. They calculated their worst case scenario for how far the fire could spread in a day, drew a line on a map there, and started clearing people out of the area and closing off larger chunks of the BWCAW.
Saturday, 10 September, while firefighters were closing sections of the Forest and warning the public to leave, the fire picked up, as expected. But the speed and intensity caught them off guard.
One firefighter told me a about hiking the Pow Wow Trail to clear visitors from the area. The canopy over the trail was so thick it blocked his view of the smoke column from the fire in the distance. When the canopy opened up, and he saw the column, he realized it was much closer than it was supposed to be. It was rotating, and moving his direction. At that point, he and his partner were out still some distance from the lake that was their safety zone (Lake Three)—and they were in the middle of unburned trees. They hustled for the lake. They made it and were safe, but when they paddled out in their canoe they looked back to see the fire ripping toward the trail they just came from, with embers blowing over it.
That same day, firefighters working out on the lakes received an order to do emergency evacuations of a high risk area. One team told me about clearing a campsite, then “as they’re paddling away, there’s a shower of embers and they see fire blanketing the area they just left.” (Pagami Report, p. 18)
“Fire was nipping at their heels,” they said.
Here’s what another team saw:
[T]hey paddle over to check campsite 7 [Lake Three] and make sure public is clear before the fire gets there, but as they turn the corner, they find the campsite is already burning. They make radio contact with the teams who just finished on the Pow Wow Trail — no one expected this kind of fire behavior. (Pagami Report, p. 18)
So fire behavior on Saturday was not normal for this area. It was more Dynamic, Ambiguous, Risky, and Complex (DARC). Firefighters had a number of close scrapes.
But then Sunday, 11 September 2011, was great: the weather and fire were in their favor all day. As an added precaution, they cleared Lake Hudson of campers and visitors, moving nearly a hundred people away from that lake, which was already a good distance from the fire itself.
Extreme DARCness
Early Monday morning, 12 September 2011, the weather was favorable again. At least, it was supposed to be. Out of caution, fire management directed firefighters to start alerting campers and visitors on the south end of Lake Insula that they may need to clear out soon. The absolute worst case scenario was that the fire might move north and get within a mile of Lake Insula. But that was just the worst case scenario; the fire was actually supposed to move in the other direction.
Mid-morning, conditions started changing, and soon the fire was indeed racing right at Lake Insula where firefighters were working. By the end of the day, the fire had run 12 - 15 miles (see Map A, below). It blew through the most extreme worst case fire prediction, exceeding it by many miles.
The last time this area had seen anything like that was the Peshtigo fires from 1871. So, no living person had ever seen fire like that in the area, nor had their parents, grandparents or great-grandparents.
The fire was so extreme that normal dynamics were flipped on their head. Any firefighter would look at the lakes and consider them a safety zone. And they were—except under conditions like 12 September. On that day, the water was so turbulent you couldn’t stay stable in a canoe. And the fire itself was so intense it created in-drafts. Meaning that as you struggled to stay upright in your canoe, you could feel the fire sucking you back toward the burning shore. At that point there were no guaranteed safe options.
Every move was risky.
The extreme fire behavior created other problems that compounded with one another like when ripples in a pond interact and interfere, creating new troubles. That’s complexity.
For example, radio communication became a problem. The area is mostly flat, so it takes a lot of repeaters to get good coverage over a fire. As a fire grows, you have to keep setting up new repeaters. This is different from fires in the West (like what most of us are used to) where a few well-placed repeaters on high peaks will give pretty good coverage. Pagami moved faster than repeaters could get set up, creating gaps in radio coverage. Without reliable communications from the front line, managers at the Incident Command Post (ICP) made decisions based on the information they had. But the information they had was incomplete, and didn’t make sense—because the fire was doing things that didn’t make sense. Here’s a glimpse of the confusion in the ICP during the blow up:
It’s a blur. A chaotic blur of not knowing who’s where, not being able to reach people, and the ones you do reach are in the middle of their own emergency and don’t know what’s going on, don’t know what the fire’s doing. Or else they can’t believe it. Dylan phones someone who couldn’t believe at first that the fire could be headed their way so fast. At some point, a report reaches ICP that people are seeing flames all the way out at Sawbill Lake—that’s 16 miles from where they thought the fire’s edge was this morning. Not believable. Maybe it’s a spot fire, or maybe somebody’s misreporting. (Pagami Report, p. 14)
Since the fire was doing things that didn’t make sense, the warning signs were ambiguous. Firefighters on the lakes saw and heard warning signs, but it wasn’t clear what they meant. That roar in the distance, for example, that you think could be the fire, but at the same time you think it can’t be the fire.
That’s ambiguity.
Somehow, within this extremely Dynamic, Ambiguous, Risky, Complex (DARC) situation, firefighters maneuvered and survived. I’ve shared accounts of their maneuvers in posts #27, 29, 30, and 33.
So now we dive in deeper, and try to discern the causes of their survival, and what equipped them to succeed when the odds were against them.
How To Succeed In The DARC
The surprising truth I discovered was this: The reason they survived on Monday, 12 September, was because they learned from the close calls two days earlier.
Here’s what I mean.
Compare decision-making on Monday 12 Sept vs. Saturday 10 Sept and here’s what you see. When the fire started blowing up Monday, firefighters were more assertive in their communications, and quicker to speak up when a plan didn’t make sense to them. They noticed warning signs earlier, and they were quicker to ditch a bad plan and change course.
This demonstrates that they learned from Saturday’s close calls.
We can parse the technical definition of “learning” some other time. My point here is: There were close calls on Saturday. Firefighters adapted and adjusted because of that experience. Then they performed differently on Monday. Distilled down to its bare essentials, that’s Operational Learning.
How much of an impact did this have?
To answer that, just consider how close the margins were on Monday. Consider what would have happened…
If Jess and Jamie paddled down into campsite 8, or if they had delayed longer going to their safety zone…
Or, if the four firefighers at the Hudson/Insula portage dallied any longer or went back for their camping gear as they thought about doing…
Or, if any of the firefighters on the lake underestimated the warning signs, or communicated less assertively, or pressed their luck in the ways they did Saturday…
… if any of those had happened, there may have been a different outcome on Monday.
Note too, all the actions and attitudes I just mentioned were normal and safe enough on just about any other fire in that area ever in history. Even on Saturday, those actions and attitudes didn’t produce an accident. But the same mindset would have been disastrous on Monday. And why did they perform differently on Monday? Because they learned from the close calls on Saturday.
The only conclusion is that Operational Learning was a root cause of their survival. They learned from their close calls on Saturday, and prevented something much worse on Monday.
This shows the power and impact of Operational Learning. And it shows you the essential relationship between Operational Learning, and winning in the DARC.
In the next post we will dive deeper and ask: What caused the learning? How did the learning actually take place, which led to these good decisions?
Reference Maps
Map A - Vicinity Map
Map B - Fire Growth 18 August - 10 September 2011
