The Work Never Ends

By Kelly Woods, Director Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center

t has been a decade since the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center (LLC) set out to produce a quarterly publication to highlight thought-provoking topics from and for the field. This issue of Two More Chains marks its ten-year anniversary.

In the decade that has passed, this publication has informed the wildland fire community, striving to foster a learning culture at its core. Two More Chains has shared lessons, told stories, and prompted dialogue across the globe.

The ten-year mark is an opportunity to reflect on what we have done and where we are headed. We must evolve to stay relevant and serve not only as a reflection of the wildland fire culture, but as an influence as well.

The title Two More Chains was a PT run induced moment of brilliance by former LLC Director Brit Rosso. The phrase “Two More Chains!” is part of our common language. When those of us within the wildland fire culture hear the phrase, we are immediately aware of a shared experience. It’s a phrase that unites firefighters from across the nation in a sense of being part of a powerful community that knows how to work hard, get the job done, and generally have a good time doing it.

[Continued on Page 3]

Siberian Smoke The Power of Zooming Out

By Erik Apland, Field Operations Specialist (Acting) Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center

s the 2021 western fire season begins, have you had the chance zoom out and put 2020 into its full context? Have you been able to revisit what happened, and with some distance, make sense of it?

The summer of my first fire season in 2005, I went on a road trip to visit Crater Lake National Park, located just a few hours from my station on the Lassen National Forest. On the way, I took a Forest road off Highway 97 that wound up to the Herd Peak Fire Lookout, hoping to break-up my drive and stretch my legs.

At the summit, I climbed the lookout stairs and stood with the lookout herself, taking in a stunning, unobstructed view of the north face of Mount Shasta, 15 miles due south. Most of the conversation that we had I have forgotten in the intervening 16 years. But I do remember her saying this, in my mind, almost verbatim: “The storms here always build to the west. But as they come closer, they split, and this area doesn’t really get much lightning. Except in August 1987. They didn’t split in 1987.”

I

A

Spring 2021 ▲ Vol. 10 Issue 1 ▲ Produced and distributed quarterly by the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center

This first issue of Two More Chains was released ten years

ago in April 2011.

Also in this Issue:

Travis Dotson’s “Ground Truths”

Page 2

“One of Our Own” featuring Anna Graves,

Assistant Engine Module Leader, U.S. Fish and

Wildlife Service

Page 6

[Continued on Page 4]

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Ground

Truths

Dirt Currency

ave you recently been part of a who’s gonna get that job discussion? It amazes me how much we love this particular prattle. We spend many

minutes gaming out the probable outcome of various vacancies and the double secret down-low that everyone knows.

Of course, this seemingly innocent info exchange often leads right into a full-on rumor rodeo. More than a few of us have polished this practice into spectacular performance art we use to project prominence through an unceasing supply of scuttlebutt. It’s our own little talk market made to trade dirt dollars for status and clout. Most will claim it’s harmless. But let’s at least call it what it is: Gossip.

Yepper. No two ways about it. All that who’s-whoing is just a hearsay party. You can dress it up with all the chew spit and profanity you want. It’s still gossip.

I am aware that the informal information network is an inevitable outcome of humans in herds. I also know there are times it is indeed just information sharing. But it often slips right past the info stage into the cheap seats chatter with a simple raise of an eyebrow—and the facts disappear real quick.

Guess who always shows up to the dirty laundry session in full party mode? Assumptions.

Certainty does exist, but it’s rare. We are pretty good at acknowledging our lack of certainty when predicting fire behavior and estimating acreage. But we tend to embellish our level of certainty when deciphering the motives and intentions of others.

We often don’t hesitate to emphatically declare “they think . . .” or “they are trying to . . .” This is often just conjecture fueled by hurt feelings and fear—acrid

assumptions. This practice will destroy relationships. And guess what our collective success is built on?

Making up stories about the motives of others will eat teams of any size—squad, crew, district, IMT, region, agency, nation . . . This self-inflicted wound will fester and completely erode effectiveness. You may be nodding your head while thinking about someone else. But this is about you.

Every so often we all need somebody to give it to us straight to help reveal a blind spot.

Have you ever had a performance eval that wasn’t so great? I have had more than a few. I needed every one of them. It is not an enjoyable experience, but when the

feedback has even an ounce of accuracy, it can be the greatest gift you never wanted but always needed.

Ready for some next level stuff? You can give that gift to yourself, but only if you are willing to do some honest accounting.

We all know there is always more work, you know: Two More Chains. But sometimes the work is not “out there”. It’s more of an “inside job”. Taking on that kind of work requires a deep dive to evaluate areas you haven’t put much thought into—like gossip and assumptions.

Maybe those are not the specific areas you need to work on, but I guarantee you have some “inside” work to whittle on.

Try self-righteousness, negativity, or ill will. Once you find it, you know what to do.

We find the work and we get started swinging because, you know: Two More Chains.

Swing on, Toolswingers.

H

By Travis Dotson Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center Analyst travis_dotson@nps.gov

We find the work and we get started swinging because,

you know: Two More Chains.

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Our Work as Students of Fire is Never Done

[Continued from Page 1]

In the first issue of Two More Chains, LLC staff asked a cross-section of the wildland fire community what the saying “Two More Chains!” meant to them. The general consensus was that it often meant some version of: “Shut up and dig!” or “Don’t worry about it, we’ll get there when we get there, so please keep swinging that tool!”—all depending on the micro-culture of that particular crew.

As with most things in our business, the phrase “Two More Chains!” has traceable lineage. It is said to have been coined by storied Horseshoe Meadow Interagency Hotshot Crew Superintendent Ben Charley as a motivational mantra to keep his crew laughing and digging during the roughest of shifts. This expression and its multiple meanings obviously strike a chord within our ranks, evidenced by its ubiquitous and unwavering use.

We are all in this together, keep working, and don’t forget to laugh. These are the key elements of this axiom we reflect upon in this ten-year anniversary issue of Two More Chains. Learning is part of the never-ending work required for growth, we all have a part in it, and it’s not always fun . . . but there will be laughter.

We are all in this together, keep working, and don’t forget to laugh.

These are the key elements of this axiom we reflect upon

in this ten-year anniversary issue of Two More Chains.

Learning is action. We must all do our part to keep grounded in fundamentals, support innovation, and reveal the complexity and risk in the wildland fire environment.

Each of us, at all levels, in every agency and fire organization play a part in being learners, sharing lessons, and exchanging ideas. Whether we are seeking to understand why something happened or creating opportunities for ourselves and those around us to learn from our collective experiences, our work as students of fire is never done. There is no crew working toward us and we cannot hear their saws. We will not tie in. And yet, we will keep working. And we will laugh.

Whether this publication sees ten more years or not, there will always be “Two More Chains”.

Ben Charley coined the phrase “Two More Chains!” as a motivational

mantra when he was the Horseshoe Meadow IHC Superintendent.

Listen. www.wildfirelessons.podbean.com

Read. Write. https://wildfirelessons.wordpress.com/

4

What the Black Dragon Fire can Teach Us Today

[Continued from Page 1] The senior captains and chief officers on the Lassen talked about 1987. My trip to Herd Peak was just a few years before the 2008 fire season blew 1987 out of the water. For years, 2008 was the marker, the big siege. But then came 2020 and the North Complex, a new fire siege nearly triple the size of 2008—and almost seven times the size of 1987. A nearly 30-mile fire run in the Sierras, and across the Central Valley, the first one-million-acre fire in California history.

The Black Dragon Fire – That I Never Knew Existed But there was a single fire, back in 1987, almost twice as large as the entire 2020 U.S. fire season. The Black Dragon Fire, allegedly started by a worker refueling a brush cutter, ripped through three million acres of forest in Northeast China before jumping the Black Dragon River and burning an additional 15 million acres in the then-Soviet Union. Tens of thousands of volunteers, forestry workers, and soldiers worked for 26 days to contain the fire. A total of 211 people were killed.

Scrolling back through the decades of Landsat 5 satellite data, you can find a few clear shots that show the fire actively burning. (A continuation of the Landsat Program, Landsat 5 was jointly managed by the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.)

Between the broken clouds and patchy smoke, snakes of orange fire are visible everywhere—flaming fronts miles wide looping around, converging, marching across seas of green. You can see a vast interior island burning out in a lake of continuous fire half-a-mile deep and two-miles wide.

Here, in the aftermath of the foehn North Wind event of September 8-9 in 2020, I thought that there hadn’t been a fire season like this since 1910.

Black Dragon was there my entire career, not commemorated but just as contemporary as my captain’s Siege of ‘87 lapel pin. Not a factor because I didn’t even know it existed.

In my little world—southwestern North America—there really hadn’t been fires like this for a while. But it was only my ignorance and focus on this tiny world that made 2020 seem such a departure from the norm.

Fire is a natural process native to nearly every (non-ice) landscape on earth. What happened in Heilongjiang on May 6, 1987, could happen in Northern California on September 8, 2020.

The fact that an 18-million-acre wildfire burned Northern Hemisphere conifer forests (about the same latitude as central British Columbia) within my lifetime gives me pause. Not the fluke, almost mythical fire season of the distant past like 1910, Black Dragon was there my entire career, not commemorated but just as contemporary as my captain’s Siege of ‘87 lapel pin. Not a factor because I didn’t even know it existed.

‘The Fate of the Earth’ Reading a Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center (LLC) blog post titled “Writing Wrongs,” I was intrigued to learn of a large tragedy fire that occurred in China at the end of March 2020 that killed 18 firefighters and a local who was acting as a guide. In the few media reports I then found on this 2020 burnover, another larger incident in China the previous year is also mentioned. That fire, burning at 13,000 feet elevation (!) trapped 30 firefighters, including an official of the region’s forestry bureau.

Two flaming fronts converging on the Black Dragon Fire in northeast China on May 23, 1987. Image from NASA/USGS Landsat 5.

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Even though Black Dragon ravaged far eastern Siberia at the very end of the Soviet era, the Cold War and internal politics meant that information was scarce on this disaster (think Chernobyl). In the journalist Harrison Salisbury’s account of the Black Dragon Fire, he describes surveying the burned area in the months afterward with “deep foreboding. I feIt I was participating in an inquest on the fate of the earth.”

I admit to feeling something like this, myself, in the aftermath of the North Complex.

We Can’t Stay Myopic for Long We have a lot on our plates, with the impacts of climate change and effects of past wildland management in the American West. So, what is my point here?

Some of it is just the natural empathy I have with anyone who goes into the woods to fight a fire. As Norman Maclean says in Young Men and Fire: “. . . I can express my gratitude for still being around on the oxygen-side of the earth's crust only by not standing pat on what I have hitherto known and loved. While oxygen lasts, there are still new things to love, especially if compassion is a form of love.”

But beyond the sentimental, you can’t learn from what you never even knew existed or transpired. The Missoula smokejumpers who jumped into Mann Gulch 72 years ago are surely further removed from us than 18 firefighters in another country last year. Yet Dodge and his crew have been with me—to the extent I can conjure them—every year when I think about hiking into a lightning fire with thunderstorms overhead.

Zooming out like Landsat, and scrolling through the years, you can imagine a globe, with swirling clouds and sweeps of fire appearing and propagating at random, as it spins on its axis. These flashes of orange cross political boundaries at will, they jump rivers and imaginary map lines with nearly equal facility.

There will always be two more chains to go, but perspective is required to advance with the right compliment of tools.

Like climate, fire is global. No matter the country, the effects on human societies of unwanted fires are the same—the destruction of homes and farms and forests; and the injuries and deaths to animals and humans, including firefighters, be they federal or local, paid or volunteer.

There are times we need to zoom in to the task at hand, sometimes all the way down to the next swing of the tool because it is simply all we are capable of for a variety of reasons. But we can’t stay myopic for long. We must always remember to take a tactical pause, gain some elevation, and assess our scenario relative to the available scale.

There are pieces of line you never tie-in because you work to the top of the ridge only to find new smokes on every horizon. What you do in that moment matters. You can bury your head in the minutia and get back to digging while fervently whispering “Two More Chains!” as a way to avoid the enormity of the situation. Or you can embrace the vastness of your plight and take a moment to recalibrate. There will always be two more chains to go, but perspective is required to advance with the right compliment of tools.

What’s happening in California and the West is a brushstroke that increasingly I had come to confuse for the entire painting. I don’t even know what lessons there are in the “planet of fire”, as Stephen Pyne has called our world. But the first one for me is that there is a big world out there with stories that can be uncovered and shared. No doubt if Herd Peak was staffed in May 1987, there were beautiful sunsets coloring a sky full of Siberian smoke.

The 2020 North Complex fire siege that, among other milestones, made an almost 30-mile run in less than 24 hours. Photo by Kari Greer.

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For this ten-year anniversary issue of Two More Chains, we thought it would be beneficial to get the perspective and insights from a wildland firefighter who’s been in the wildland fire service business for about the same amount of time that Two More Chains has existed.

We heard impressive accolades about Anna Graves, an Assistant Engine Module Leader for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Many folks directed us to Anna for this Spring Issue’s “One of Our Own” interview. As you’ll see in the following enlightening conversation with Anna, we’re extremely grateful for this head’s-up about her!

Chris Fry, the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center’s Assistant Director (Acting), recently got on a call to interview Anna. They explored a gamut of interesting and insightful topics: from the art of staying present, to overcoming the “Us and Them” syndrome, to great advice for new wildland firefighters, as well as some profound advice for our “salty” older firefighters.

Anna graduated from the University of Montana in December of 2008 with a BA in Forest Resource Management. During her college summers she worked on an engine crew for the Washington State Department of Natural Resources (DNR).

In June of 2009 Anna was hired by the U.S. Fish and Wildland Service to work at its Inland Northwest Refuge Complex in northeastern Washington and northern Idaho. Her duty station is the Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge in Cheney, Washington.

“I was hired at Turnbull as a permanent GS-5 on the Regional Prescribed Fire Crew,” Anna informs. “I’ve been an assistant on the heavy engine since 2012. Since working at Turnbull, I’ve become an ICT4, ENGB, FAL2, TFLD, and RXB2.

“Hopefully, soon, I'll be working on ICT3 and DIVS with hopes of doing RXB1 in the future.”

Anna continues, “I love to hunt and fish. I have a small farm in Otis Orchards, Washington where we raise goats, sheep and chickens.”

One of Our Own

Insights on Resiliency and Innovation and . . .

By Chris Fry, Assistant Director (Acting) Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center

Chris: What does the term “Two More Chains” mean to you?

Anna: That was always the joke. Out on the line someone would ask: “How much farther do we have to go?”. And somebody would always reply: “Two More Chains”.

But for me it’s that everlasting grind of fire season. You start off with spring burning and then you’re either in the Southeast or at home. Then you burn until you either get rained-out or you’re checking your burns every day until your seasonals come on.

During that time of the year, it’s a grind when it’s rainy and then it’s a grind when it’s hot and it’s dry. Then you do fire season, which is just like the permanent grind. Then you get to the end of fire season, in which most of the time now, we don’t even get a break—it’s just straight into prescribed fire season in the fall, which is another grind.

You might get a shot of weather and go straight into piles. We have hundreds and hundreds of acres of piles. Then before you know it, you’re timed-out and you have 90 hours of “Use or Lose” and your seasonal staff is timed out and going on furlough.

6 Anna on a prescribed fire in Florida’s Blackwater River State Forest during her training in 2020 with the national Prescribed Fire Training Center (PFTC).

Anna Graves

7

So, for me, “Two More Chains” is more like just the permanent grind of the job.

Chris: What about “work/life balance”? With the permanent grind and our fire seasons getting longer, and then on top of that putting in your prescribed fire season and fuels treatment season, not just burning but cutting and piling and all that. What do you do to balance your work with your actual life? What are the things that keep you grounded?

Anna: So, it’s kind of funny, because at home here, sometimes it feels like it’s just another form of work. But I find for me, it’s most important to stay in the present.

Right now, I have nine Boer goats and six babies that were born in March. Sitting outside with a bunch of crazy baby goats jumping all over you, that’s the kind of stuff that keeps me grounded.

It’s the same thing as taking a brand-new firefighter out on a rockin’ and rollin’ IA and he turns around and has this huge smile on his face and tells you how awesome that was. That’s like the same warm, fuzzy feeling that makes it all worth doing. But yeah, staying present.

Chris: Staying present—that’s really good advice. I appreciate that. Not a lot of people know how to do that. It’s an art.

So with new firefighters, have you noticed a cultural change in the fire service over the past 10 years of your career?

Anna: For me, the biggest change has been the interagency coordination. I started with DNR my first three seasons. So it was always DNR responding to our state fires.

Back then we knew that there were Feds in the area, which is the Fish and Wildlife Service’s Turnbull Wildlife Refuge, where I work now. But I never met any of the people who worked at Turnbull. I didn’t even really know that they had fire trucks at Turnbull when I worked for DNR.

It’s not so much of the “Us and Them” culture now. It’s more like we’re all one big team. We just work for different agencies.

It was always that “Us and Them” culture.

And then my first year at Turnbull, we started doing the interagency/closest resource Dispatch, which forced us to go to DNR fires—which has been really good. It’s not so much of the “Us and Them” culture now. It’s more like we’re all one big team. We just work for different agencies.

We’ve also invited our local cooperators to do prescribed fire with us. This has been really helpful for overcoming that traditional “Us and Them” syndrome. Just sharing our common knowledge. That way they know how we operate and we’re all familiar faces on IAs. I think that’s always helpful.

It did take a few years for everybody to kind of get used to the different procedures. But I think we’ve done really well at incorporating all of the agencies. We have BLM (Bureau of Land Management) here too. The closest to us is BLM, DNR and also our local fire districts.

We’ve kind of created this really cool culture just to help our neighbors—which has made us all a really good team.

Chris: Yes. That shows the importance of interagency relationships. And I think we’re getting much better at developing these relationships with our cooperators.

Anna: And for Fish and Wildlife, we’re so tiny as far as our fire staff. Most of our burn plans require a minimum of 12 people. Permanent fire staff for our complex is eight, plus three collateral-duty Red Carded Refuge staff. So even if everyone was available,

Anna attended the women’s module at the Prescribed Fire Training Center in Florida in February of 2020. After classroom training, her module went into the field and burned for 18 days.

8

we would still be short people. Without interagency cooperation, we wouldn’t be able to even meet our minimum staffing requirement for a burn. So that’s a huge factor for us, relying on our partners to show up.

Chris: What advice would you give for those new to firefighting? Those people just coming up? What advice would you give them to continue their career in wildland firefighting?

Anna: It would be to learn as much as you can and then to find people that you really admire and have conversations with them. That’s something that I’ve done in my career. It can sometimes be difficult to find those people. But for me, to do so has been huge. Finding people who I admired and trusted their opinion on a given situation or how things went in a given situation.

Those people could then tell me the hard truths about what I needed to work on, or my leadership skills, or whatever. Having that kind of mentor is really important.

My advice to new firefighters would also be to, early in your career, decide what kind of leader you want to be—and work toward that. Take it seriously, but also be sure to have tons of fun. And in the process, make lots of fire friends. Your friends will also tell you those important hard truths.

Chris: Can I dig a little deeper into your advice about finding a mentor? How did you go about finding one? Was it more of an organic process? Or did you seek somebody out that you really admired who you wanted to gain more knowledge from?

Anna: A lot of it was watching how other people did things, how other people led. And then, from that, starting a friendship or relationship. I’m normally not someone that trusts super easily. So, when I do, then I know, okay, this person can be trusted. For me, I had a few mentors at DNR that were awesome men, really good ICs, really good leaders, who cared about people. I would pick their brains, have helpful learning dialogue about what they thought about certain situations.

My advice to new firefighters would also be to, early in your career, decide what kind of leader you want to be—and work toward that.

Take it seriously, but also be sure to have tons of fun. And in the process, make lots of fire friends.

Chris: So if that young firefighter came up to you and said: “Hey, how do I find a mentor?” What specific advice would you give them?

Anna: Watch and wait to see what kind of leadership qualities you like—or that you might have gained from a person. And, after that, approach them.

Chris: That’s, good advice. I’ve had some pretty prolific mentors in my career that have focused me in the right way—and still do. I think that’s a huge part of being successful as a wildland firefighter. I don’t think everybody thinks about that. And sometimes we have mentorship programs in our agencies in which you can formally say: “I’m looking for a mentor.”

I think the process that you use is pretty organic in nature. And I think that’s the best way to find a mentor. So, thank you for that.

Anna: I still call these people sometimes. Like when I need a sounding board. Or when something’s weird or off. There’s a few women from PFTC (the National Interagency Prescribed Fire Training Center) that I am still in contact with. I’ll ask them certain questions when I need a good sounding board.

Chris: For our readers who might not know about PFTC, could you tell us more about this program?

Anna on another burning assignment with the Prescribed Fire Training Center in Florida. “The Southeast is awesome,” she says. “It burns like crazy. Even after it rains. It’s nuts. Different fuel

types. Tons of learning experiences.”

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Anna: It’s basically a school that’s headquartered in Tallahasse, Florida that holds prescribed fire training involving a variety of agencies throughout the Southeast. I attended the women’s module in February of 2020, pre-pandemic.

The first portion of this training is classroom to ensure that everyone has all the basics and knows what to expect. We covered fuels, burn plans and terminology. Then your module goes into the field and burns for about 18 days. It’s all formulated in a training environment from FFT1 to RXB2. It sets the tone for a true peer group. It’s pretty cool. When I went, we burned in various environments, including: private land, U.S. Department of Defense land, and state forest land.

Chris: What initially motivated you to apply to PFTC?

Anna: I had burned in the Southeast three years before I went to PFTC. It’s a kick in the pants. It’s always super fun to go to a new place and burn—I don’t care wherever it is. But the Southeast is awesome. It burns like crazy. Even after it rains. It’s nuts. Different fuel types. Tons of learning experiences. I especially wanted to go to PFTC because of the women’s module. I’d heard lots of good things from other women who went and how it was a really good experience.

Chris: Awesome!

What advice would you give to those senior firefighters that you work with? Those who have been doing it for 20 years—those folks sometimes referred to as “salty firefighters”.

Anna: This is going to sound super callous. But, for me, I hope that if I ever get to the point where it’s not fun anymore—somebody will tell me to go do something different. I’ve seen a lot of people in their careers get to a point where their job is a grind. And when they get there—to where it’s not fun anymore—they’re just miserable.

And we all know how misery just spreads.

So, for me, if I ever get to that point, I hope somebody will be honest and tell me: “Hey, this isn’t fun for you anymore. Figure out something else to go do.”

I hope that if I ever get to the point where it’s not fun anymore—somebody will tell me to go do something different. I’ve seen a lot of people in their careers get to a point

where their job is a grind. And when they get there—to where it’s not fun anymore—they’re just miserable.

Chris: What’s your favorite place that you’ve seen that you wouldn’t necessarily have ever had the opportunity to experience if you hadn’t gone there on a fire assignment?

Anna: There’s Refuges all over the place, like eastern Oregon’s Sheldon-Hart Antelope Refuge and Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. I would have never gone there on my own because they’re out there in the middle of nowhere. But they’re awesome. There’s also several Refuges in the Southeast that are really cool.

The coolest place that I’ve ever gone to on a detail was definitely the Gulf for the oil spill in 2010. I would’ve never gone there, like on a vacation. But one year after the oil spill, I actually went back down there just to see it again, on vacation on my own time.

Chris: What did you do on the oil spill?

Anna: We had several taskforces that were running around catching oiled birds and then taking them to rehab facilities. They just issued us a bunch of net guns and all this equipment that we had to learn how to use. They were basically like: “Here you go”. It was pretty awesome.

Photo by Anna Graves.

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It was super fun and super out of the ordinary.

A pretty laughable learning experience, for sure.

We learned that you can really use just about anything

to carry and spread fire.

Chris: Could you please share a funny or memorable fire story?

Anna: It would be the Miller Complex near Medford, Oregon in 2016. We were on Division Q Night. It was the wind down of fire season. We were the only agency engine on this entire fire. We kind of got picked out of the herd, like: “Oh, you guys actually do prescribed fire, you come with us.”

One night we were burning-out a whole Division and we ran out of all ignition devices. Anything that could light fire, we ran out of. A coworker and I looked at each other and we got that same look in our eyes—you know, like we knew what the other one was thinking. Next, we started lighting pinecones on fire and hucking them down the hill, and then logs, and then anything we could think of to light on fire, to create our backing fire a little better.

It was super fun and super out of the ordinary. A pretty laughable learning experience, for sure. We learned that you can really use just about anything to carry and spread fire.

Chris: That’s the definition of resiliency right there, right? You’ve exhausted everything that you can do and someone comes up with an innovative way of continuing your mission to achieve that goal—not being like, “Oh, we can’t do anything else, we’re done.” That’s a cool story.

I really appreciate you taking the time to tell us your story and to share your various perspectives on both new firefighters and the salty ones, as well as your insights on resiliency and innovation.

Anna: Thank you.

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