Abstract
In 2016, the USDA Forest Service, the largest wildfire management organization in the world, initiated the risk management assistance (RMA) program to improve the quality of strategic decision-making on its largest and most complex wildfire events. RMA was designed to facilitate a more formal risk management process, including the use of the best available science and emerging research tools, evaluation of alternative strategies, consideration of the likelihood of achieving objectives, and analysis of tradeoffs across a diverse range of incident objectives. RMA engaged personnel from a range of disciplines within the wildfire management system to co-produce actionable science that met the needs of the highly complex incident decision-making environment while aiming to align with best practices in risk assessment, structured decision-making, and technology transfer. Over the four years that RMA has been in practice, the content, structure, and method of information delivery have evolved. Furthermore, the RMA program’s application domain has expanded from merely large incident support to incorporate pre-event assessment and training, post-fire review, organizational change, and system improvement. In this article, we describe the history of the RMA program to date, provide some details and references to the tools delivered, and provide several illustrative examples of RMA in action. We conclude with a discussion of past and ongoing program adaptations and of how this can inform ongoing change efforts and offer thoughts on future directions.
Highlights
Extreme wildfire events are overwhelming fire management systems’ capability to control fire and limit its impacts [1,2,3]
incident management teams (IMTs) and agency administrators use these tools when considering tactical operations, and externally, maps of suppression difficulty index (SDI) and potential control locations (PCL) are used in public meetings to help explain conditions on the ground and intended fire response actions (Figure 3)
The credibility capture these observed dynamics, risk management assistance (RMA) analysts modified the SDI to account for upslope winds and increased surface fuel loading only in the snag patches identified by Ecosystem Disturbance and Recovery Tracker” (eDaRT) (Figure 5). These custom snag hazard and modified SDI products provided a more accurate portrayal of the increased hazards to fire responders from recent beetle kill and were used to communicate the need for indirect tactics to protect fire responder safety until the fire moved to more defensible roads and open country. This initial snag-mapping effort led to additional cooperation between RMA and the R5 Remote Sensing Laboratory (RSL) over the 2020 fire season, to produce an eDaRT-adjusted snag hazard map that accounts for pre-disturbance forest height and tree density
Summary
Extreme wildfire events are overwhelming fire management systems’ capability to control fire and limit its impacts [1,2,3]. The concept of safe and effective response within federal wildfire management agencies in the US has transitioned from one that is focused largely on individual responsibility (see, for example, the US Forest Service Safety Journey [17]) toward a more corporate risk management approach that incorporates strategic risk assessment, structured decision-making, and accountability [18] This transition has emerged in part through the recognition that much of the exposure of personnel to the hazards of the wildfire environment is determined at the strategic level, through choices such as which resources to mobilize, when and where to deploy them, and what tasks to accomplish.
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