On Friday, July 31, incident commander Tom Clemo and his team had just arrived in Baker City, Oregon. Clemo’s group is known as California Complex Incident Management Team 7. They were getting ready to take over command of a wildfire from another team.
Then, Clemo’s phone rang. It was a coordination center in Portland. They told Team 7 to get back in their vehicles and go to Spokane, where three dangerous fires had broken out.
"So within 15 minutes, 127 of us had checked out of hotels and we were northbound," Clemo said.
Clemo spent the five-hour drive calling Spokane administrators and officials and getting up to speed.
"We actually have a guideline on how to assume command in what we call a 'hot handoff,' and this really couldn’t have been a hotter handoff," he said.
Team 7 is one of 38 incident management teams in the nation. They’re dispatched by the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center.
Areas with active wildfires are given a “preparedness level,” 1 to 5. 1 is the least dangerous, and 5 the most.
Jean Nelson-Dean is with the Northwest coordination center.
"So when we reach a preparedness level of 4 or 5 in an area, it means that you’re going to have to bring in resources from outside the area," she said.
The center works with the National Multi-Agency Coordinating Group (NMAC), which figures out how to dispatch those 38 teams across the country.
"So they are constantly looking at the data," Nelson-Dean said. "What’s available, what’s going where, what are the priorities — and priorities are often values at risk," or communities or protected areas being threatened by fires.
"And based on the complexity of an incident, based on values at risk, they make determinations about where a CIM team is going to go," Nelson-Dean said.
According to Nelson-Dean, when the Spokane fires broke out, the dispatching system worked exactly as intended. The Northwest region was at a preparedness level of 5. The wind had shifted so fires threatened Spokane’s residential communities. And so here’s where Spokane got matched with Team 7: Down in Oregon, Tom Clemo and his group were well rested and ready to go.
"That’s kind of a success story of the system, right?" Nelson-Dean said. "I mean, that’s
— that’s the goal, is that something like that happens, we had a team ready — well, they were ready to go to another fire, but could immediately be shifted and dispatched over to take on the Spokane fires."
Most of the members of California Team 7 live in California. But deputy incident commander Jon Lucas said that as fires in the Northwest have worsened, Team 7 has seen more assignments farther from home.
"It’s kinda funny — we haven’t had a fire in California in the last three years," Lucas said. "We’ve been basically up here in Washington and Oregon and Montana."
This Sunday, California Team 7 will finally return home. There, after three days of mandated rest, many team members will go back to their day jobs...as firefighters.
I’m Audrey Nelson, reporting.
