Wildland Fire Workshops

(Wednesday, April 23)

Morning session (two parts):
A "How-To" Workshop for Creating a Fire Service Mentoring Program
The Fish & Wildlife Service's Fire Management Mentoring Program was created almost four years ago. Its purpose is to develop employees and future fire management leaders by tapping knowledge and experience within the agency in an interactive, personal manner. The FWS uses this program to mitigate the loss of organizational knowledge and institutional memory, and to help employees achieve their fullest potential in wildland fire management. The instructors of this workshop will discuss how the program was created, and present its successes and challenges.

Faculty: Joette Borzik, National Fire Training Specialist, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, National Interagency Training Center, Boise, Idaho; and Terri Jenkins, Fire Management Officer, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Savannah Coastal Refuges, Savannah, Georgia.

Employee Development and Recruitment
The Idaho State Office of Fire and Aviation is engineering a program that will develop managers for our future by analyzing the position needs, competencies, and pool of employees currently available. The foundation is workforce analysis and planning. We will present basic information about this program and discuss its successes.

Faculty: Karin Frost, Human Resources Specialist, Fire Program, Idaho State Office, Bureau of Land Management, Boise, Idaho

Afternoon session (two parts):
The National Wildland Fire Plan and its Application to a Field Organization
After the unprecedented 2000 fire season, Congress authorized funding of a five-part plan to attempt to turn the tide on an escalating trend in wildfire loss and cost. The plan called for increasing the fire suppression capabilities of federal fire agencies, rehabilitating burned lands, performing extensive reduction of hazardous fuels near communities in the wildland urban interface, improving the response capabilities of local fire departments, and restoring ecosystems to healthy functioning conditions less vulnerable to catastrophic wildfire. We will discuss the challenges our local fire organization faced in the National Fire Plan, and how we met and overcame them.

Faculty: Rosey Thomas, Fire Management Officer, Lower Snake River District, Bureau of Land Management, Boise, Idaho. Ms. Thomas has served on the faculty of several previous WFS conferences. Her organization has strong cooperative relationshiops with more than 40 fire departments and agencies in southwestern Idaho. She is a qualified Type II Operations Section Chief and Type II Logistics Section Chief.

Interagency Wildland Fire in the Last Frontier: Fire Management Issues Unique to the Alaskan Bush
This lecture-based session with a progression into practical wildland fire management applications will address experiences, trials and tribulations, challenges and accomplishments of women involved with fire management in Alaska. A group of wildland firefighting women will present issues from a personal level, a management level, and an on-the-ground level, as well as from the woman's perspective on wildland fire in Alaska.

Lead faculty: Tami DeFries, Fire Management Officer, Alaska Fire Service, Fort Wainwright, Alaska