Around the 20th of this month, not more than a couple of weeks after the flames came down from the tree tops in Kelowna, the MOF released this “flash” on its' website.
www.for.gov.bc.ca/protect/Flash/presentation.swf This promotional commercial gives us some valuable insight into the Protection Branches self image. The flash begins with a John D Rockerfeller quote; “
The success of each is dependant upon the success of the other”, and the presentation is created from there.
* BC represents 14% of the forested land in Canada
* The forest industry contributes 15 billion to the economy of BC
* With global warming and increased population there are more fires
* 50 percent of all fires are caused by humans…
* 50 percent of all fires are caused by lightening…
“
One of the most important aspects of successful fire management is a focused and committed organization..”
Okay, stop the “Moby” music right there for a minute.
The Protection Branch of the BCFS takes the lead role in urban interface fires in British Columbia. Incident Management teams from within the Forest Service fill the Incident Command positions in the interface and there’s some valuable insight offered in this frame of the presentation. Have you ever noticed, as you focus tighter on one aspect of a picture, the rest of that picture blurs and fades into the background? With that in mind take a good look at this frame… you’ve got helicopters, you got guys dressed in red marching single file, you’ve got a Pulaski… hmm… “a focused and committed organization”… perhaps that focus is too committed to the organization?
Next frame, “90 years of fire management experience has lead to a highly coordinated organization” and the graphic brought to the forefront is of a helicopter with a rap attack firefighter. Hmm, my thoughts… the graphics depict a “highly mobile” organization.
The flash carries on and we come to the “
operating objectives” of the Protection Branch.
1 *"prevent person caused fires"
2 *"reduce the area burned"
3 *"aggressively action fires"
4 *"provide effective fire management"
5 *"pursue revenue opportunities"Here we have some fairly basic operating objectives and I’ll take a moment and expound upon them. The first objective is to prevent person caused fires… hmm… so this organizations primary objective is to have some influence over the ignition of less than 50 percent of the overall fires in BC. Not a very ambitious primary objective, in my opinion, but fair enough.
The second objective is to reduce the area burned and the third is to aggressively action fires. Don’t these two objectives go against everything we’ve learned about living in a fire based eco system? Isn’t the new collective understanding something to the effect of our aggressive actioning of these fires is increasing the overall fuel load and the intensity of these fires?
The final two operating objectives “provide effective fire management” and “pursue revenue opportunities” seem to conflict with one another. "Fire Management" suggests the ability to coordinate and organize all the resources required to fight an interface fire and the pursuit of revenue opportunities seems to be hindering this organizations ability to do that. Fire training should not be viewed as a revenue opportunity, but as an important aspect of life safety within the interface communities of British Columbia.
I’m afraid at this point in the presentation I’m literally left scratching my head wondering what’s wrong with this picture. The operating objectives of this organization are distinctly British Columbian in that every other fire management organization in the world shares two primary objectives;
the protection of life and the protection of property are the very founding principals of the fire service. And yet here in BC our lead organization in urban interface fires has developed it’s own set of operating objectives that avoids those two principals.
The protection of life and property is dealt with at a procedures and policy level within the Forest Service and not an overall objective of the organization. Shocking and yet, it’s been this way for over 90 years, who are we to question the experts?
The flash carries on detailing the gallivanting around the globe that our fire managers do and suggesting that our training programs are delivered around the globe as well. I’m left wondering one thing… if our fire suppression training programs are so good and our fire suppression trainers are such experts, how did we exhaust all our local resources in early July? A full month before the situation in this province turned explosive and we were already drawing on mutual aid resources out of CIFFC? Where were those expert training programs and please don’t tell me that our managers were too busy fighting fires… Wouldn’t that be like a restaurant manager sending the busboys out to take orders and serve tables? It’s only a matter of time before you run out of plates and cutlery… What kind of expert management is that?
The term “fire management” implies the ability to manage all the resources required to deal with the worse case scenario. The Province couldn’t possibly keep all the resources required to fight all the fires on the government payroll and yet, there just wasn’t a contingency in place draw on those resources when they were required.
Take a look at the flash again… where are the water tankers, the fire trucks, the loggers, the machine operators…etc? The flash doesn’t suggest we have an expert fire management team in BC, it suggests we have an organization that manages highly trained and motivated firefighters, as part of a global fire suppression service.
And that, I would argue, is a fairly accurate depiction of the situation we have.
“The success of each is dependant upon the success of the other”
Nice selection for the musical score...
Please take a moment and watch both videos... there are some striking and uncanny parallels...
"Porcelain" Music Video
launch.yahoo.com/musicvideos/player/default.asp?videoID=172473