Abstract
Wildland firefighting is inherently dangerous, fraught with simple mishaps to inevitable fatal outcomes for the unwary. Established, sound rules and guidelines will continue to work to keep Wildland Firefighters and Firefighters safe. Human factors, consistent across all work groups, are variously broken down into human errors, human failures, error chain(s), etc. making fatalities unavoidable. All we can do is reduce them. Nineteen Prescott FD Granite Mountain Hot Shot wildland firefighters and supervisors perished on the June 2013 Yarnell Hill Fire in Arizona. Inexplicably, they left their Safety Zone during explosive fire behavior. A Serious Accident Investigation Team found, “… no indication of negligence, reckless actions, or violations of policy or protocol.” The authors and others infer: the final, fatal link, in a long chain of bad decisions with good outcomes. Among other things, tunnel vision, auditory exclusion, goal fixation, non-critical thinking, destructive goal pursuit, Groupthink, and “Friendly Fire” are discussed.
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Acknowledgements
The authors wish to express their gratitude to: Dr. Ted Putnam for his Human Factors insight; InvestigativeMEDIA; the two Yarnell Hill Fire Eyewitness Hikers; those mandated to silence due to Agency ‘direction’ and ‘guidance;’ those troubled by the event; and WFs, FFs, and others that encourage us. To those who lost family, friends, and loved ones, the authors and most WFs and FFs think about those young men every day. They inspire us to research and write toward reducing fatalities.
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Schoeffler, F.J., Honda, L., Collura, J.A. (2021). How Many Human Factors Influenced the June 30, 2013, Yarnell Hill Fire 19 Fatalities and Yet Were Never Investigated Nor Documented?. In: Arezes, P.M., Boring, R.L. (eds) Advances in Safety Management and Human Performance. AHFE 2021. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 262. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80288-2_14
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