SUDDENLY, IT’S ALL AROUND YOU, UNDER YOU, above you! You’ve trained, you’ve drilled, and you’re ready for whatever this monster throws at you. The “monster” is the fire in the wildland/urban interface (WUI) or the I-Zone. If you live or work where manmade improvements are in proximity to forested, brush-covered, or grass lands, it’s probably a good idea to read on, even if only to refresh your already perfect competence.
If you have been cultivating cobwebs in the I-Zone section of your brain, this may help clean out some of them. We’ll look at the aspects of safety, actions, and considerations en route to and at the incident, resources, attack modes, and the generally accepted criteria for throwing in the towel on a structure you’ve chosen to defend.
One pet peeve of mine is to have the concept of “safety first” buried somewhere in the back pages, or approached as an afterthought. Here, we will begin with safety, first, (a novel idea) with the acknowledgement that you need to be thinking safety before, during, and after an incident-including one in the I-Zone. It is also assumed that you trained to be safe as well as to recognize behaviors that are not safe.
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