How to Fight a Wildfire -- the Inside Story [Video]

Smokejumpers. Air tankers. Ax-wielding ground crews. Those are just some common images that come to mind when you think about the men and women who fight California's wildfires. A less popular image in our collective imagination is the team of fire chiefs who oversee the firefighting operations on the state's biggest fires.

Fighting a large wildfire presents a broad set of logistical and tactical challenges. Cal Fire assigns one of six statewide incident management teams to coordinate the efforts of multiple agencies to fight the biggest and most complex fires. The fire chiefs that make up those teams are tasked with containing a fire that can change course at any moment, and they also must feed and house hundreds (and often thousands) of firefighters.

California's six incident command teams are made up of fire chiefs from all over the state who are trained in specific functions – operations, logistics, planning, finance, planning, command, and so on. The strength of a team is that the relationships between its leaders have already been formed and tested.

"When a team is called upon, we don't need to necessarily take a lot of time to get to know one another, so we can hit the ground running," explained Todd Derum, Incident Commander for Cal Fire's Team 4.

Team 4 was deployed to Mendocino County in late July to oversee operations at the Lodge Lightning Complex Fire. A series of lightning strikes on July 30 caused two or three separate fires, which later grew together into one bigger fire. Steep, remote terrain made it difficult for firefighters to access the fire, and in the weeks that followed, the fire spread to more than 12,000 acres. (It's now 95 percent contained.)

Within 12 hours of being deployed, the team transformed a cow pasture along U.S. 101 in Laytonville into a small city capable of feeding and housing about 1,000 firefighters. A command station, consisting of trailers containing weather-monitoring computers and large map printers, was set up on the north side of the base camp.

Inside those trailers, Derum and his section chiefs gathered intelligence relayed from the fire line, and they developed a plan for the following morning. Members of the incident management team began drawing up the plan around lunchtime, and by about 3 p.m. the action plan was set.

But wildfires don't conform to anyone's plans. They're complex, always moving, and each fire brings a unique set of challenges. The incident management system applies the same organizational structure and methodology to each fire, but there is room within that system to adjust to different types of fires.

The behind-the-scenes work done by the incident management team enables the ground crews working on the fire line to do their jobs without having to worry about the big picture.

"I'm supposed to have that 10,000-foot view of the priorities," said Scott Lindgren, one of Team 4's operations section chiefs. "Firefighters at the ground level are laying hose and chasing the fire up a hill. But I have to take a step back and look at where that fire is going."