A group of firefighters have traveled from the concrete canyons of New York City to the canyons of central Idaho to learn about fighting wildfires.
There are 30 firefighters from New York City working on the East Zone Complex Fire, which includes fires burning around Warren and Secesh Meadows north of McCall.
The crew arrived on Aug. 20 and returned to New York this week to apply what they have
learned here to fires large and small there.
The New York firefighters first became interested in the incident command management style used on forest fires soon after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.
The 9-11 Commission also recommended the department learn and use the incident command system on future terrorist attacks and disasters. They have been training ever since.
In 2005, the department sent one of its two incident command teams to assist the New Orleans Fire Department for six weeks after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Louisiana Gulf Coast area.
"This is their first wildfire; it's historic," said Bill Waterbury of the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise "To think they are this dedicated to have come this far in that short amount of time, they are pretty impressive people."
Taking skills back to the city "We've learned to manage incidents, which is going to be to our benefit," New York firefighter Sean Johnson said. "9-11 changed our department, a lot for the worse in the sense that we lost a lot of good firefighters, good chiefs and a lot of experience, and a lot for the better in the sense that we got involved in the incident management system."
Johnson, who works for Ladder 126 in South Jamaica Queens, is working in the communications office for the East Zone Complex Fire at the incident command camp located in Lake Fork. In New York City, his job is search and rescue.
"Coming to the wild land fires has brought us a whole new level of experience," Johnson said. "By learning it and taking it back, it just filters through the department."
Because of the FDNY's willingness to learn the system that has been in use to manage wildland fires in the west for years, they can now be deployed at wildland fires, hurricanes, disasters and terrorist attacks that may occur throughout the nation.
The department has two teams so that if something happens in New York City while one team is at another incident, it has a team in place at home to manage the crisis.
Bob Maynes, a deputy chief of the 13th division of the FDNY on the south end of Queens, is the deputy incident commander for the East Zone Complex Fire. Maynes has the ability to make decisions when Joe Ferguson, who is the complex's incident commander, is not available.
"Our main objective is to apply what happens here in a multi-operational and multi-agency response to a disaster to a terrorist attack back home," Maynes said.
Maynes is also the training officer for the department. "No one really wanted to take this on because structural guys have always had a problem with wildland fires, it's brush, it's trees,"
Johnson said. "But it's the system and the way the system runs. It doesn't matter what it is, you are able to use the system to manage hundreds of men, thousands of men because now it is done with organization and anyone who's organized is always better."
