Habituation to Risk, by Bobbie Scopa

[Editor's Note: This piece was recently featured in wildlandfirefighter.com and is a guest post from Bobbie Scopa.]

Here we are during the time of year where we remember our lost friends and coworkers. Those we know or knew and those we’ve just read about. We’ve all learned of their tragic tale in a training session or maybe you’ve read about it in a book or online. Many of you are probably driving from one incident to another. Or maybe you’re hanging out on standby and reading this on your phone. But wherever you are while you’re reading this and whatever you’re doing, you know what I mean. During the summer we start talking about South Canyon and Dude and Yarnell Hill…. again, and again. And all the thousands of other fatality incidents that have occurred over the last 100 years. It’s really staggering if you think about it. And we should all be thinking about it. But to what end? Do we just mull it over in our minds hoping for some wisdom to strike us like Saul on the road to Damascus?

Last week I was listening to an NPR program called “Hidden Brain”. It’s all about brain science and what drives us to behave the way we do. If you’ve listened to many of my podcasts (BobbieOnFire.com) or read many of my stories here at The Wildland Firefighter magazine, you know how important I believe self-awareness is to our career and our relationships. And since we all have a brain, it’s probably not a bad idea to learn what we can about ourselves.

When we talk about risk management we often talk about the normalization of deviance. It just means getting used to not following the rules or standards. Have you ever been assigned to an incident with unclear directions or possibly without talking to someone that’s familiar with the fire area in order to get good solid intel? We all have. Just hiking into a fire you haven’t seen from where you’ve parked the crew buggies or engines is enough to break a few of the Fire Orders. We get used to the reality of having to hike through unburned fuel on the way into a fire without having a look out. We’ve just deviated a bit from the rules. We get used to it and it becomes normal.

When we were just starting out in our careers, we might have been bothered by this seemingly breaking of the strict adherence to the Standard Orders and Situations. As time goes on, we realize this is more often than not, the norm during the initial attack phase of fire suppression.

Is anyone dumb enough anymore to say, “We don’t bend them, we don’t break them?” The reality is we’ve always bent them, and we’ve always broken them. It just depends on how close you want to look.

Now I’m not suggesting we throw out the 10 Standards and 18 Situations and LCES, etc etc. But I am suggesting we recognize our actual fireground behavior and be honest about how and why we perform our jobs the way we do.

Have you ever been in a basecamp with generators running all night while you’re trying to sleep? It’s a bother and an annoyance. But for most of us, after a while, the drone of the generators seems to blend into the background. Our brains can’t use up all their bandwidth on the generator noise. If it concentrates on that background noise, it might miss something more important like an evacuation order for the camp. Your brain is prioritizing the inputs it is receiving. After awhile the generator noise is just in the background while your brain scans for something new. In my career, I went from hating the generator noise to finding it a soothing white noise in the background.

The more we do something, the more we get used to it. Imagine being a smokejumper on your first jump. You might be terrified. But after every jump you get more and more used to the idea of jumping out of an airplane. The risk of jumping out of an airplane hasn’t been reduced. But your brain is becoming habituated to the act of jumping out of a perfectly fine plane.

The same can be said for any number of activities we engage in. Imagine you get assigned to building a fire line in an ugly snag patch. You’re not crazy about it. You’ve done it before without problem but you’re getting pressure from the overhead to take the assignment. Every time you successfully complete a high-risk assignment without an accident, it seems less risky to your brain. It becomes background noise like the generators in camp.

When I was Chief 1 on a large western Forest, I had to tell a District Ranger that we wouldn’t be rappelling into a fire on his district. The area was too high risk. Huge boulders surrounded by cliffs with an iffy means to hike out and no landing zone. If anyone were hurt on the fire, we’d have little chance to extract them for medical treatment let alone packing out after the fire was contained. We got into a heated argument about my decision to not engage the fire in its location. He was concerned about the political ramifications if the fire grew, and its smoke impacted upon an already smoke weary community. My bottom line was the safety of the firefighters. If the community had to breathe smoke for one more summer so be it. But as I told him, “I’m not risking the lives of our firefighters by putting them out on the skids of that helicopter to save a rock pile.” His response was, “since when did rappelling become dangerous?”

What? When did rappelling onto a rock pile become dangerous? His perception of the task had become blind to the inherent risks of a 212 in a hover at high elevations on a hot day, with firefighters rappelling down the lines into an uncertain environment. When did it become dangerous? The better question is when did you begin thinking it wasn’t dangerous?

Every successful rappel and jump and arduous hike into dangerous locations had become routine. His brain (and many of our brains) become habituated to routine tasks. Just because they’re routine doesn’t mean they’re not dangerous.

Our jobs are dangerous. There are risks that need to be identified. We need to mitigate the risks we can. Those risks that can’t be mitigated should also be identified to determine whether the juice is worth the squeeze for the particular mission/task you’re given.

As an old, retired knuckle dragging firefighter, I had plenty of opportunities to display my lack of awareness when someone asked a question or voiced concern about a particular burnout I was preparing to lead. It was so clear to me why we were going to do the burnout, where our lines and safety zones were and how we could do it safely. I’m thinking that I had done similar burnouts a hundred times. I had no time to explain something that was should have been obvious to this inexperienced engine captain. I had become habituated to the dangers in my planned burn out. It wasn’t that I was ignoring the risk, unlike the district ranger with the rappelers up in the rocks. I knew the risks of my burn out. The difference was I wasn’t allowing my engine captains to question and discuss and learn how I was mitigating the risks. If they didn’t know and understand, I was failing them as the leader. Oh, we got the burnout done and the OSC thought I was great. But I had failed as a leader that day. My habituation to risk taking had superseded my explaining and teaching so that everyone would have had the same comfort level I did. At least the risks would have been discussed.

The fireground can’t be a classroom all the time. But more often than not we should make time to discuss our plans, the risks of those plans and the contingencies for when things go wrong. That slowing down a bit is how we bring everyone along with us.

Self-awareness. Do you recognize yourself in these stories? Have you done something so many times that you just don’t even consider it dangerous anymore? Maybe you ride a motorcycle without a helmet. I would never ride mine without one even though it’s legal where I live. I know if I rode a few times without my helmet, I might like it and my brain would turn off its warning siren when I rode off without my helmet on.

Why do we ignore what we’ve called normalization of deviance or as the neuroscientists refer to the similar behavior, habituation of risk? I think we are so used to responding and acting and directing and cutting and working that it’s easy to forget about that generator noise in the background. Let’s think about it, talk about it and help each other when we’re running full bore and need to slow down to think about why we’re doing something. It’s called… self-awareness.