Stu Hoyt - Looking into the crystal ball

The biggest thing was, as a fire use manager, I knew what my role was. I was the IC of a long-term event. And as the SOPL, I came in and am now working for the plans chief in a completely new role for the position and so it, it really took a while to understand how it integrated with the team. And I don't, last year I would have succeeded like we did this year with that position. It had taken awhile to understand my role as the SOPL is to be gazing into the crystal ball, basically being, looking for where we're gonna fail and where we're gonna have problems, and try to develop a plan that hopefully we never have to implement but at least addresses when the fire does this, we are ready to do something and it's developing those management action points. You wanna make sure that they're prepared in a manner that they are well thought out so you're not reacting; you're proactive to the fire behavior. You already know that when the fire reaches this point or does this or we reach a date, you already have a plan that you're gonna implement. And so that you can stay in front of the fire and be ready for, be ready for the next what if. I don't think it's, I said it is a failure, but it's more where we weren't able to reach the point with our operations. We weren't able to get a line in, or the fire breached our containment line before we were ready for it. And so just having that plan ready for you, your next step. It's more managing the unexpected, being preoccupied with failure. But I came to, I came to this realization working there on the Bitterroot, when we're protecting places that, fires, a lot of times people try to put a line around a structure or circle around a value at risk and say, when the fire gets to this point, we're gonna do this. A lot of times they make that circle too close, and so you're reacting to what the fire does instead of putting your line in the sand well thought out and in front of that so that you can be ready to implement when the incident triggers that spot. In some respects, they are contingency plans, but in other respects, it's just the next step in your, in your planning period. By looking 48 to 72 hours out in advance at what the fire's gonna be doing, you can be helping ops so they can be focused more on today and the next 24 hours' burning periods and what they're gonna do, and you can be, you can see what's happening and where they're being successful and then focus where there might be a little bit of hole in the dam. But I was at, I was at the 1400 operational planning meeting and provide input to that and then I was part of the 1800 planning period where both the LTAN and, and the SOPL were able to give our crystal ball look of 48 to 72 hours out in the future so that, then operations knew that if they had to be thinking about what was gonna happen, I could then prefeed him, but if we needed to do any resource ordering, I could have a resource order pretty much prebuilt if we needed to bring new resources into the incident or let them, let them know that we could move some resources from a, a less important division over to the, where we anticipate the need to be. What's so important about the SOPL position and your development of management action points is to be able to recognize the fire movement and how the fire behaves and to know today the dog's got the bone, and you aren't gonna take that bone away from the dog, but tomorrow, we can recognize and we can see that there's gonna be places we can work on that fire and really do a lot of good and save a lot of resources, do a lot less impact to the ground You have to keep a real close pulse on what all your fires are doing and recognizing that, if we get a certain wind event, some fires might become a problem, and so you need to be able to work with your forest FMO and operations folks there to let them know that we're gonna need some resources well in advance. And if you have those plans built, it's just a matter of pulling the paperwork out and hopefully can get the resources when you need 'em. With, without the operations background, I think you would have a lot harder time being credible with your operations groups and the other FMOs. If you have a good, strong operations background, you can bring that side into it and say, well, we're always just watching a fire and letting it meander around the woods. But you need to know when to take action on what, on portions of it or the whole thing. Managing fire appropriately, that's old terms, is that you still need to suppress the fire and put it out when it needs to be, where it needs to be put to bed. Always looking forward into the future and recognizing that you need to be proactive to fire, and if you can see that the fire is gonna start breaching a management action point, don't wait for it to happen. Be proactive; take advantage of the time. The decision triangle, the more time in space you have before the event happens is to your advantage. If you have to do structure protection, have all the structure protection material in place and ready to go, and if you think it's gonna be needed, go ahead and take the time and do the destruction protection properly and timely.