On April 5, at the Great Plains Coliseum, Comanche County Emergency Management officials met with representatives from fire departments throughout the county for an after-action review. The subject of the review was the outbreak of fires on March 20 that resulted in the death of volunteer firefighter April Partridge.
At the meeting, officials agreed on two major points to improve the county’s response to large grass and wildfires: more incident command training for select firefighters, and new protocols for radio communication during large fires that require inter-agency responses.
Clint Langford, the director of emergency management for Comanche County, said that recent fires have presented entirely new challenges to the various fire departments responding to them.
“We’re running into a situation where we have a lot more people living in the country than we did,” Langford said. “So that means that there are more houses and structures threatened. We’re not just dealing with grass fires now.”
Langford said that, in recent years, the population in rural Oklahoma has grown dramatically, leading to an increased area of what is known as wildland-urban interface, or places where human development such as houses and other buildings, are built near wilderness. Such areas are in increased danger of catastrophic wildfires.
Firefighters selected for advance incident command training will be volunteers who opt to take on the several specialized classes required. Langford said that the training would help the county coordinate a response more effectively.
“The vision behind this is to have a group of trained and qualified personnel who can better respond to situations,” Langford said. “We’re looking at building a team to help coordinate the work.”
Due to the massive number of agencies needed to respond to recent fires, another key area that requires improvement, according to emergency management officials, is radio communication.
Specifically, this involves coordinating with different fire departments and agencies to determine which radio frequencies will be used at different times and for different situations.
“We’re mostly trying to figure out how to utilize the radio equipment we have,” Langford said. “When you have 15 people responding, you can use one frequency, but when you have 100 people on scene, you need to use multiple frequencies.”
Langford also said that emergency management is looking into new radio equipment that might ease some of the communication problems experienced in recent fire responses, though he reiterated that the most important goal is solidifying and improving existing communication systems.
“We’re looking at creating a pre-planned radio communication system for large responses,” Langford said.
