This past week I worked for three and half days on Type 3 Incident Management Team (IMT) as a liaison trainee on a wildfire here in Yavapai County. This is an opportunity I have been cultivating as a Plan B or Plan C for many years and this week it all came into place and the scenario couldn't have been better for getting started on something new or maybe learning it wasn't for me.
I got called onto the fire by someone connected with our department. The fire community being very small sometimes I knew a lot of people working on the incident and my functioning as a liaison, I ended up helping people I've known for many years. One part of being a liaison is relaying information to officials from, in this case, the State of Arizona, the Forest Service and County Sheriff. I know two of those three very well and had met the third several times. While I knew many in the group, I was a little more local than others on the team which helped.
Being close to home meant I could sleep at home. Usually these assignments involve getting a hotel room when you're away from home but in a remote enough area, you could be sleeping in a tent. Getting a normal night of sleep made tackling something new a little easier.
I spent most of my time in an office like setting doing work on my computer which of course meant I was not disconnected from my day job which is my priority. I was able to put a trade together for clients and handle an unexpected withdrawal need that a client had. There was one morning where we went out to make contact with a ranch owner and get some site information for law enforcement. We drove to one of the many areas nearby where you'd say to yourself I had no idea this place existed. It was about a three hour round trip drive because of how rough the road was but even here signal was coming and going enough that I wasn't really disconnected from anything.
The learning curve in some aspects of the job was pretty steep while other parts were either just like the training class or inline with the impression created of what liaisons do in the times I have been a customer of the liaison shop (when Walker has been threatened). I was challenged with some things, had to do a little detective work to track things down, talk to people outside of the emergency services realm and did a lot of documentation.
From the viewpoint of just getting started but having observed IMTs for many years, I know there is way to fit in better and ways to make fitting in harder to do. One observation is that it can be difficult for people who have been successful in other walks of life to come into an IMT or other structure that has a chain of command where they are not the top dog. Our department has had people do this sort of work and really struggle to fit in. Fitting in is important if you want to succeed. Being able to make relationships is important if you want to succeed. The State of Arizona official I mentioned above, was one of my instructors when I took my first firefighting class back in 2003, I worked with him one way or another more times than I can remember. The law enforcement official I dealt with, I've known for 10 years, he was on the call the one time I used Narcan on a patient. When I talk about taking a long lead time to a Plan B or post retirement gig, I am not kidding.
For my first incident I was hoping to start my position task book (qualification process that documents training progress for evaluation) and hope my work would leave the door open to do more with the team on future assignments. The first one, yes, I got a lot of "ink in my task book." On the second, it appears that was a success. I got to know the people who would make the decision and I feel like they went out of their way to encourage me versus "yeah, put in for it and we'll see what happens." From this standpoint, this went better than I could have hoped for.
A secondary element to my interest here is being able to reciprocate the times that Walker Fire and I have been helped by a liaison. Some people will be out 100 days doing IMT work, that's potentially 100 days away from home. That not something I want to do with respect to my home life, my day job or what I perceive as my obligations to Walker Fire related to being available to respond to calls for service here at home.
In the system where you indicate your availability to go out, there are different statuses as I am learning including "available local." If something happens in Yavapai County, I very much want to be part of the solution. I can see taking one national assignment if I get the chance which could be a two week gig out of state which I equate to taking a vacation to go build houses somewhere. I'd still spend much of my time connected to the internet but that would be more of a grind especially if we were out in the middle of nowhere and it was two weeks in a tent.
Looking forward, this turned out to be something I enjoy doing and I want to keep the door open to the sort of engagement I described above. If I understand correctly about being available for local incident, it is a good bet I would get called every so often for incidents that weren't local. Helping out on one of those occasionally if they are having trouble finding people feels like the right thing to do but I have no intention of being out for months on assignments, a lot would have to go wrong for me to end up doing that but cultivating the opportunity in case I ever need it is exactly the type of retirement-aged risk management I write about all the time.
To be crystal clear on one point, this was my first assignment and I only worked three and half days, three and a quarter really. I have a ton to learn about every facet of this. I have a first impression and I hope I made a good impression but that's it so far. Using the baseball inning analogy, I just took batting practice.
I did get some cool pictures though.
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