N RANCHING
atural Resources
with the Forest Service and relay messages on any thoughts or suggestions you might have with regards to fi ghting this fi re.’” When that time comes, he believes the special
rangers could relay suggestions from the landowner to the Texas A&M Forest Service Incident Commander, regarding good places to set up fi re lines or perform back burns, feasible places to get water and the best ways to enter the property. TSCRA’s special rangers also have a role. Gray says
they usually team up with a Texas A&M AgriLife Ex- tension agent to contact landowners. County Extension agents or USDA Farm Service Agency personnel have aerial and topographical maps that help identify water sources. Gray says they periodically schedule training sessions where they go through how the Incident Com- mand Center works, and the role of each person when responding to a major wildfi re.
TSCRA special ranger supervisors
serve as landowner liaisons during large wildfi res.
Coordination among state agencies Texas A&M Forest Service says it places a high pri-
ority on science-based analysis, clear and transparent fl ow of information and public outreach and education. Among the ways it works with other agencies and the public is through the Texas Interagency Coordination Center (TICC) website, which provides the fi re and emergency response community with online tools like wildfi re weather forecasts, fi re risk assessments and drought indices. Since opening in 1998, TICC has mobilized more than
60,000 emergency response personnel and hundreds of aircraft and pieces of equipment from all over the U.S. to support disaster relief efforts in Texas. Texas A&M Forest Service also keeps the media,
public, other agencies and government offi cials in- formed through its Communications Offi ce. In addition to news releases, media alerts and social media com- munication regarding incidents, the offi ce disseminates information on wildfi re prevention and preparation educational campaigns. It often sends alerts to broadcast media meteorolo-
gists ahead of forecast wildfi re weather and it recently conducted an informational webinar for affected areas
48 The Cattleman June 2016
of the state forecasted to experience wildfi re weather conditions potentially conducive to increased wildfi re activity. The Emergency Operations Center (EOC) oversees
statewide incident operations. The EOC is primarily re- sponsible for tracking and allocating response resources such as ground crews, dozers and heavy fi refi ghting equipment, ordering up Regional All-Hazard Incident Management Teams, Texas Intrastate Fire Mutual Aid System task forces and aerial assets. “We’re more of an intel resource,” says EOC Coor-
dinator Don Hannemann. “We work with the Texas Interagency Coordination Center and the dispatch sys- tem to order both in-state and out-of-state resources to support the incident.” During fi re season, EOC sets up an Incident Com-
mand Post. Most recently, that has been in Merkel, but Hannemann says they will locate it depending on need. “If it’s far West Texas, we’ve done something in
Midland. We had something at Granbury for a while, back in ‘05 and ‘06,” he says. “That is where we will bring in a lot of our out-of-state resources where they can be checked in and their qualifi cations verifi ed to make sure they are educated about the many different areas of Texas, because we will shift resources around depending on the fi re danger.” The EOC’s role is to interface with the Incident
Command Post to get an overall count of resources coming in. They also deal with many of the fi refi ght- ing aircraft, most of which are on a statewide contract with the U.S. Forest Service or another federal agency. They contract with single-engine air tankers available within the state. Texas has a tiered response to fi res. The needs for
each incident, he says, “are gauged by the ground per- sonnel. We try to staff based on need and not necessar- ily on fi re occurrence, so if we see a weather pattern coming into the state, one that is going to produce el- evated fi re weather conditions, and we have dry fuels in a particular area, we will staff that area up. We will relocate resources based on that need.” They get that information through their partnership
with the Texas A&M Spacial Sciences Lab. The data, which are live and updated daily, are public for users ranging from local fi re departments to the general public, and come from a network of remote automated weather stations across the state. While it is in place, the Incident Command Post
generates a daily Incident Action Plan that outlines where the resources will be staged for that day. Al-
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