Wildland fire is a coalition effort. Your safety, success and resilience depend on your cooperators, and your working relationships with them. Trust is essential.
Trust is a key factor in many accidents, successes and close calls, but its full impact is often missed.
Traditional approaches to safety focus on compliance and prevention, which have helped the fire service make great strides. However, fire is inherently dangerous and dynamic. Not all hazards can be eliminated. Not all events can be predicted. There is always the potential for sudden chaos and complexity. How do you prepare? It comes down to resilience, the ability to adapt to change and trouble. This article uses two case studies to show why trust is essential and how to build it. Case Study 1: The Coal Canyon Fire (South Dakota, 2011) - On Aug. 11, 2011, federal, state and volunteer firefighters responded to a fire on the Black Hills National Forest, near Hot Springs, SD. Less than two hours into initial attack, fire behavior changed suddenly and entrapped two firefighters in an engine