Why does this belong on Feral Jundi? These orders and watch out situations, and LCES, were all developed out of some hard learned lessons in the forest fire fighting industry. Which usually means that a fire fighter died or a really bad accident happened, and these were the patterns of mistakes or indicators prior to the incident that were ignored. If you are going to be patrolling in a high fire danger area, or protecting an estate or FOB up in the mountains, then these lessons dealing with fire will be helpful. Summer is here, and fire is a disaster in every sense of the word.
What led to the development of LCES was that it was an easy to remember, catch all acronym used to simplify the safety of fire fighting. As a smokejumper, LCES was first on my priorities and planning for the fight, and then during the operations phase, I would constantly be evaluating the situation and referring to these orders and watch out situations to help me see the potential problems. We were constantly seeking intelligence and observing fire behavior, while at the same time using strategy and hard work to extinguish it. Often times on fires, guys got killed when they got tired and did not heed these rules of forest fire fighting. Those lessons were pounded into our brains every year during fire refresher training, and for those that lost friends or survived a burn over, those lessons are seared onto the brain. Most have a fireline handbook on their person, just so they don’t forget anything out there.
I also posted this as a supplement to the building snowmobiles article I wrote that deals with the attack by fire. There is even some carry over with some of these rules of firefighting, to the war fighting or security industry, and I think it is interesting to see some of the similarities. –Matt
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LCES
Lookouts, Communication, Escape Routes, Safety Zone
10 STANDARD FIRE ORDERS
The arrangement of the Orders are logically organized to be implemented systematically and applied to all fire situations.