Reflections on the Selma and Nuttall Staff Rides

As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, time is neutral. It ticks by inexorably whether we are moved to act or not. The challenges we see ahead of us in our organizations, whether our organization is a crew or a fire program or a fire agency, can seem vast like those sky islands of the Arizona desert. It seems unfair by comparison, but the actions of people are almost always familiarly and stiflingly small. And yet that is the scale where we live and most often have the freedom to act.

We Didn’t Always Cut Line This Way

I find it useful to learn how thoroughly everything we do had to be theorized, experimented with, before they were adopted -- down to the way we dig fireline. To me there is freedom knowing that everything we do is a choice, that we can experiment to do it better, down to these core fundamentals. Assignment length? Prescribed fire risk tolerance? PPE technology? Fire crew size? Nothing is set in stone.

Pump Danger

I just read an RLS about a scalding injury from the suction hose blowing off of a Mark-3 pump. I had a similar incident in 2003. At the time, it seemed to me like a freak occurrence. However, after looking through the various reports in the LLC’s IRDB, I now think this type of pump incident may not be quite as rare as I had assumed.