Abstract
Previous attempts to identify the environmental factors associated with firefighter entrapments in the United States have suggested that there are several common denominators. Despite the widespread acceptance of the assumed commonalities, few studies have quantified how often entrapments actually meet these criteria. An analysis of the environmental conditions at the times and locations of 166 firefighter entrapments involving 1202 people and 117 fatalities that occurred between 1981 and 2017 in the conterminous United States revealed some surprising results. Contrary to general assumptions, we found that at broad spatial scales firefighter entrapments happen under a wide range of environmental conditions, including during low fire danger and on flat terrain. A cluster-based analysis of the data suggested that entrapments group into four unique archetypes that typify the common environmental conditions: (1) low fire danger, (2) high fire danger and steep slopes, (3) high fire danger and low canopy cover, and (4) high fire danger and high canopy cover. There are at least three important implications from the results of this study; one, fire environment conditions do not need to be extreme or unusual for an entrapment to occur, two, the region and site specific context is important, and, three, non-environmental factors such as human behavior remain a critical but difficult to assess factor in wildland firefighter entrapment potential.
Highlights
Wildland firefighters in the United States (US) are trained to identify and monitor particular elements of the fire environment in order to assess possible dangers or potential suppression opportunities
We propose that the current suite of firefighter safety guidelines related to entrapment potential are still largely valid, we caution against an over-emphasis on those guidelines that focus only on the potential for extreme fire behavior and argue for increased recognition that the environmental conditions capable of resulting in an entrapment are much broader than previously acknowledged
Current firefighter safety guidelines seem to emphasize only a subset of the possible conditions due to a focus on the factors that maximize the potential for extreme fire behavior
Summary
Wildland firefighters in the United States (US) are trained to identify and monitor particular elements of the fire environment in order to assess possible dangers or potential suppression opportunities. Much of the training curriculum that describes what specific aspects of the fire environment to monitor was developed based on the findings from investigations conducted after fatal firefighter entrapment incidents (e.g., [1,2,3]). An understanding of the shared factors associated with firefighter entrapments has been an important aspect of firefighter training at least since Wilson [5] presented a set of common denominators based on an analysis of 67 fatal and 31 near-fatal fires that occurred in the US between. More recent analyses have acknowledged additional common denominators related to US firefighter entrapments and wildland firefighter fatalities in general, which include high fire danger, communication issues, and a failure to identify adequate escape routes and safety zones [8,9].
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