Episode 8 features an interview with National Forest Firefighter Mike Crook who recently battled the wild fires in Australia. He shares his perspectives on the spirit of resilience when communicating with teams, sharing data and taking action in the face of extreme conditions. Despite these complex challenges, this firefighter still believes the future is good.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPT
MINDSAILING: You're listening to Currents & Currencies. The podcast from Mindsailing that's focused on helping leaders navigate market sea change. We know how challenging and disruptive change can be for today's business leaders, and we're emphasizing the importance of maintaining resilience during those times of change.
Today's a special edition of Currents & Currencies, as we're saluting the change makers who are working hard to create resilient futures for us all . We recently reached out to firefighter Mike Crook from the US Forestry Service, and who returned a short time ago from battling large-scale wildfires in the southeastern Australian state of New South Wales.
Through our conversation, we were able to understand how his expertise and perspective helped him stay resilient while helping him meet high stakes challenges under pressure.
MIKE CROOK: My day-to-day title is just forestry technician. I've been with the United States Forest Service for 22 years. Superior National Forest has five districts, and we break that up into a west side and east side. And I do the majority of my work on the east side of the forest.
That would include the Gunflint Ranger District, which our base is in Grand Marais, kind of the North Shore of Northeastern Minnesota. I feel like at some point, you decide that you want to make a difference. You want to make a mark. You want to know that what you're doing is going to be of benefit for the long term, not just suppressing fires, putting out fires all the time.
I was lucky enough to kind of work with a lot of prescribed fire practitioners and hazardous fuels reduction practitioners, people that had been doing it for a long time before I started. I guess you could say I became passionate about it. If you implement this tool, you will very likely have success in reducing impacts of large out of control fires.
MINDSAILING: In tandem with planning and implementing prescribed burns, Mike was developing the skills of a fire behavior analyst.
MIKE CROOK: As fire behavior analyst, you're taking a lot of data and information and you're creating intelligence with it. And that intelligence is being used to make bigger decisions on where resources are going to be and how you're going to allocate all those resources.
The last few years, I've spent quite a bit of time in the Pacific Northwest. Washington and Oregon had several fires. Most of the fires I go to would be of the moderate to high complexity fires. They're large, they're in urban areas, and they have a lot of values, infrastructure, or personal property. And so that's where the teams come into focus.
They go out there. Incident management teams will be deployed on fires when the local resources in that area might need additional help. I've been pretty lucky to have gone to an assignment in Portugal. I was there to help at a national level, a prescribed fire program.
And then in 2011, I went to Ethiopia. We were trying to implement a strategy for rangeland management. We were using fire as a tool to help eradicate increased invasive species in rangeland areas of southern Ethiopia.
MINDSAILING: This past December, Mike was invited to Australia to help fight wildfires, a tough decision less than 10 days before Christmas.
MIKE CROOK: It was hard. That was a difficult thing to do, to leave this time of year for essentially a long-term fire assignment over the holidays. And I didn't have a lot of time to prepare both myself and my family. So I got notified on December 16 that they wanted me to go. And
I was in the air flying over there by December 19. My ticket was digitally set up and ready to go. All I had to do is pack the appropriate equipment and gear, and then go to the Duluth Airport, and I was on my way.
That was hard, yeah. I really enjoy Christmas. And I have two daughters, so that was really kind of an, OK, I'm making this commitment. I'm going to do it. My head's got to be fully focused on it.
MINDSAILING: Mike shared some perspectives on the massive 1.5 million acre fire he encountered in Australia, as well as how he needed to remain resilient to face that challenge.
MIKE CROOK: I showed up on a very active fire day, and it was making a big run 40 or 50 miles in one operational period, which would be like 10 AM to 8 PM, something like that. So, like, a 10-hour day. You'll have hurricane-force winds to the point where whole trees are being knocked over, and so it was kind of apocalyptic.
A big, giant mushroom cloud, and evacuation warnings going on, and just a lot of tension. There's not a lot of options for suppression. At that point, you have to fall back. So you station people at communities, and homes, and private properties, businesses, and stuff like that.
Spread your resources over those areas and protect them as best you can until the fire gets back to more manageable behavior. While the back of my mind might be going, wow, this is incredible and pretty scary, the front of my mind is engaged in, OK, what are the things that need to happen right now in this time and in this place?
Even at our level where I wouldn't say, call it common, but we've seen it enough that we know that it's there. These big catastrophic days are occurring. For me, my focus becomes, OK, what's my role? What am I going to do to help? What needs to get done? And in that process of things that needs to get done, what are those priorities inside of that?
And if I can focus in on that, then maybe I'm going to be very helpful and not just be in the way. For me, I guess, that's the role that I play, whether I'm doing fire behavior, analyzing whether I'm in operations or I'm on the ground.
MINDSAILING: Even in fire and containment, effective communication is one of the most important tools shared by Mike and teams in the field.
MIKE CROOK: Most of the teams internationally that are working on complex situations like this they would also have what I call a communications group. That's one of the key factors in success for these things is being able to talk with each other, both from a technical level and from just a human connection level.
So think about radio traffic and how to dispatch resources. And then on an interpersonal level more of like, OK, if I have intelligence and it's important, I need to be able to communicate it, and not just over an email or a text. Those things come into play as well. But I need to be able to find the right person to relay my information, that intelligence, so that they can make decisions.
Moving people out of harm's way is huge, but it is our number one objective. Knowing when to say, OK, this area is threatened, instead of waiting to evacuate when fire gets to it, let's do it now. And that played a pretty huge role in what we were doing.
And then knowing where to commit the resources that would be most effective. It does take a little bit of effort and work in the communication of the things to be able to talk to, say, operational people and say, this part of the fire is really super active, and it's going to stay super active. But that's not where the priority lies.
All that's out there are trees and brush. And what we need to concentrate in on is this area that doesn't seem as big of a deal right now, but it's close to towns or close to infrastructure. Those are what we should focus our energies and resources there when you can convince people that the bright shiny areas of the fire aren't necessarily the most important areas of the fire. That's been fairly productive.
MINDSAILING: Mike estimated between 700 and 800 personnel were actively involved in containment efforts at the Dunn Roads Fire where he spent the majority of his time on assignment.
MIKE CROOK: You know, that also includes the firefighters on the ground doing the work and stuff as well as you think about all the things that have to go to support a big operation like that. So you need a planning section that does maps, and analysis, and resource gathering.
And then you have to have a logistical team, one that supports, where are you going to sleep? Where are you going to eat? Where's the food? Where are you going to get gas for vehicles? Where's the equipment coming from that's going to do all this work?
And then you have an operations section. And their job is to, how are we going to fight this thing? What's out in front of it? Where are the resources going to be most effective, and where's our priorities? And
Then you have some other sections. You've got to have finance. And they're figuring out how to do the contracting for food, bathrooms, or places to stay. Where's the money coming from to pay for certain things, and how is that going to be allocated? And so there's other parts of the fire that are outside of just fighting it.
I fit into the team as a fire behavior analyst under the planning section. And so on a day-to-day basis, I would try to spend a couple hours in the field to get a feel for what the fire's doing, how it's moving, what it's burning through. I would try to see the fire, especially the more active fire.
And then I would talk to a lot of the fire personnel. I try not to get their way a whole lot, but talk to them about what their experiences have been in terms of fire moving through that area. And then I would come back to the incident command post and spend the rest of my time using software and modeling to see what to expect in terms of fire movement, fire growth, rates of spread, flame height, time frames for when fire was going to reach certain areas, and how it might impact the values of those areas.
MINDSAILING: Looking forward, Mike is encouraged not only by the progress made by fire teams on the ground, but also by the country's resiliency to be able to bounce back from the fires of the past few months.
MIKE CROOK: So what I would say that was happening the most was the planning level, and having ideas and processes that they wanted to do and were trying to implement some things, like practical things that they don't necessarily see until you have big catastrophic events.
Watershed management-- now, you have all this burned landscape, and you're going to have rain. Having water caches for regular day-to-day living, and having that. So how are they going to handle it, and what are the things that they're going to do right now to make that happen? Some of it was, like, aerial seeding and/or erosion control measures on a large landscape scale.
Probably I guess what encourages me the most is that Australia has a huge active volunteer kind of system. But people are very volunteer-oriented, more than any place I've been in the world. Most of the emergency personnel are voluntary. They're not being paid. They're doing this because they want to make a difference.
So the resiliency, these people are actively working towards a common goal to try to have the resiliency to bounce back from these big catastrophic events.
And that's probably, like, looking back on it, that's really impressive that they just have a really strong character and sense that they're going to come out of this on the other side being stronger and better. And I compare that to what's going on in big portions of Australia. And they're like, yeah, we're going to come back from this.
MINDSAILING: We want to thank Mike Crook and the US Forestry Service for being such amazing examples of positive change makers in the world. They look within, commit to strong communications with others, and work to connect in meaningful ways. Ultimately, they change the world for the better. And in doing so, their hard work helps create resilient futures for us all. Learn more about Currents & Currencies by visiting mindsailing.com.