The Leading in a Crisis Podcast
Interviews, stories and lessons learned from experienced crisis leaders. Email the show at Tom@leadinginacrisis.com.
Being an effective leader in a corporate or public crisis situation requires knowledge, tenacity, and influencing skills. Unfortunately, most of us don't get much training or real experience dealing with crisis situations. On this podcast, we will talk with people who have lived through major crisis events and we will tap their experience and stories from the front lines of crisis management.
Your host, Tom Mueller, is a veteran crisis manager and trainer with more than 30 years in the corporate communications and crisis fields. Tom currently works as an executive coach and crisis trainer with WPNT Communications, and as a contract public information officer and trainer through his personal company, Tom Mueller Communications LLC.
Your co-host, Marc Mullen, has over 20 years of experience as a communication strategist. He provides subject matter expertise in a number of communication specializations, including crisis communication plan development, response and recovery communications, emergency notifications and communications, organizational reviews, and after-action reports. He blogs at Blog | Marc Mullen
Our goal is to help you grow your knowledge and awareness so you can be better prepared to lead should a major crisis threaten your organization.
Music credit: Special thanks to Nick Longoria from Austin, Texas for creating the theme music for the podcast.
The Leading in a Crisis Podcast
EP 55 Frontline Decisions: How Wildfire Leaders Navigate Life and Death
Leadership under pressure doesn't get much more intense than directing wildland firefighting operations when lives hang in the balance. Kelly Martin, former Chief of Fire and Aviation for Yosemite National Park, brings us into the heart-stopping moments where leadership decisions mean the difference between safety and catastrophe.
Drawing from decades on fire lines, Martin recounts responding to devastating aircraft accidents that forced her to question whether she was cut out for crisis leadership. "You have to take a deep introspection and ask yourself if you're ready to step up when people are at their worst moments and they're looking for leadership," she shares, revealing how these experiences shaped her approach to crisis preparation and management.
Whether you lead teams in high-risk environments or simply want to develop your crisis management skills, this episode delivers powerful, sometimes harrowing lessons from someone who has literally walked through fire to protect others. Subscribe now to hear more stories from exceptional crisis leaders who've faced the ultimate test of leadership.
You can reach Kelly Martin via LinkedIn.
We'd love to hear from you. Email the show at Tom@leadinginacrisis.com.
Hi everyone and welcome back to the Leading in a Crisis podcast. On this podcast we talk all things crisis management, with a focus on storytelling and lessons learned and shared from experienced crisis leaders. We're very glad to have you back with us today. I'm Tom Mueller. My co-host, mark Mullen, is on assignment today and won't be with us, but will be back with us for an upcoming episode On our podcast.
Tom Mueller:Today we are talking firefighting again. I kind of like this subject because at one point early in my career I actually put on bunker gear and participated in fire training when I worked at one of the country's largest oil refineries. So I've got some experience being on a hose, working with a team to kill a fire that would like nothing better than to just burn you alive. So it's a scary proposition and from that experience I've just developed the deepest respect for the firefighters who do this day in and day out, especially for those brave men and women who fight wildland fires, as our guest today has done and our guest is Kelly. Martin Kelly's the owner of Lassere Fire Consulting, and Kelly has a long resume of firefighting and we'll talk about that just a little bit, but today she spends her time lobbying on behalf of firefighters and firefighter issues Kelly, welcome to the show.
Kelly Martin:Tom, it's great to be with you. I really really sincerely appreciate the invitation.
Tom Mueller:Kelly, I know from your background and resume that you've spent a lot of time sort of as an aviation specialist. You worked as chief of fire and aviation for Yosemite National Park for several years, in addition to working for the US Forest Service. Hollywood has made some dramatic movies about firefighters and pilots and all that, and maybe at the end here I'll get your top firefighter movie recommendations. But it's a dangerous business and I'm wondering have you had to deal with any aircraft mishaps or crashes in your experience over the years?
Kelly Martin:I have. And it started in the 80s when I worked at Grand Canyon National Park, when I was working as a newly minted EMT and I was responding on our structure engine to a twin otter accident at the airport and I was fully expecting to just be, you know, protection in as a structural firefighter. But the incident commander knew that I had just finished my EMT training and he said didn't you just finish your EMT training? He says, why don't you come with me? So we still had people inside the, the twin otter that were still alive, that needed help. And so I think, as a new person in their 20s and you for me, I was taken EMT because I knew that the job that I was getting into was very, very dangerous and I wanted to be able to help. You know my fellow firefighters, you know if anything happened on the fire line. So I really was not expecting you know what I witnessed. You know, inside that aircraft I had two more aircraft responses and at that point I kind of knew that I didn't really want to be, you know, working as a paramedic or an EMT. So I really did switch then and during those years to wildland fire and I really did want to do more work in the outdoors and so that really suited me well.
Kelly Martin:And then in about I think it was 2002, there was an air tanker crash in Walker Canyon, on the Sierra front, during an aviation or a retardant drop, and that was really horrifying. A couple of reasons One is I was in the position at dispatch to inform the regional office of the manifest of the people that were on board that air tanker and I didn't get good information from the air tanker base and it was the wrong manifest. And so in the middle of all this, you know, I had to quote, unquote, stop the presses because the manifest was wrong. So really a horrifying experience, if you can imagine. You know, had that, you know, gone on through the up through the system with the wrong, wrong names of the people that were on the aircraft, and then there, through the up through the system with the wrong, wrong names of the people that were on the aircraft, and then there was a one of the pilots' wife was there at the air tanker base, and so having to console, you know, someone that knew that the aircraft was not coming back was extremely hard, and it was very hard for our dispatchers because they knew they had a Mayday and a major you know accident and fatality.
Kelly Martin:So these happen and those are just the few things that happened on the early part of my career and so I really began to. You have to really take a deep introspection and ask yourself is this, am I cut out for this, you know? Am I ready to step up and lead? You know, when people are at their worst moments and it's not just one person or a couple of people, but it's the whole organization that's truly suffering and they're looking for leadership, but it's the whole organization that's truly suffering and they're looking for leadership and sometimes you just don't know what to do, but you're the one everybody's looking to, and being able to have communications with people that are also, you know, part of your team is extremely important.
Tom Mueller:So, Kelly, those are clearly some difficult situations that you had to deal with. What sort of leadership lessons did you take away from having to deal with fatalities and the complicating factors in those situations?
Kelly Martin:first I felt like I could handle those kinds of situations as extremely painful and traumatic as they've been. I felt like this is something I think I can help people with and in so doing, it really forced me into thinking about how can I better be prepared or anticipate like the worst possible day, and that really kind of set me on a journey of tabletop exercises, pre-season event planning, exercises, pre-season event planning. You know anything that I could do to work with my team and work with our cooperators to say I hope this never happens, but if it does, we are here in a safe environment, in a learning environment. We know we're learning from each other about what could possibly go wrong and how we will handle that as a team. I think that was that's been so valuable for me over the years.
Tom Mueller:Clearly those are some key takeaways, I think, for any potential crisis leader is being prepared for the unexpected and of course, in the firefighting realm it can be life and death on every given day. Every given fire. Right, you know, a sudden change in the wind can put firefighters on the ground at risk quickly. Or, you know, a bad incident action plan, can, you know, result in people being in the wrong place when something happens or something changes. So there's a lot of variables that come into play here. And how do you and how do you deal with the uncertainty that comes with that? Are there processes in place to give you that confidence and comfort?
Kelly Martin:that you can lead and keep people safe every day. The anticipation of an event keeps me very humble, and I'll be the first to admit that I don't know everything, and neither do any of us in emergency management, and so, through the years, the best advice that I've been given is truly to find, you know, good mentors, you know people that are my scene in. You know both rank and experience, and knowing that those individuals have also been through some, you know pretty, pretty crappy days and and knowing that there's people there, that you're not alone, I think is probably one of the big, biggest takeaways for me. But sometimes you do find yourself alone and you're going to have to. You can't just freeze. You know there's.
Kelly Martin:There's so many people that are listening to you on the radio. They're looking for advice, they're looking for direction. The worst thing you can do is just not make a decision or just, you know, freeze in the in the middle of a, of a crisis. You know you've got to be able to say, yeah, there's going to be some, some horrible days potentially ahead in my career. Am I ready for that? And and what am I doing to prepare and train for that? That's probably the biggest thing that I have taken away in my career. You just can't again. Humbleness versus hubris is is the way to really think about how you prepare yourself, you know, mentally, physically, emotionally for crisis management.
Tom Mueller:I want to take you back in time a little bit because you've mentioned to me before your experience dealing with a fire situation and sort of the hubris versus humility issue comes to mind from that, and that was the Sadler fire back in early 2000s. I think you know. I know you have a story or two around that. What was your experience there and kind of lessons taken away from that?
Kelly Martin:Yeah, during that incident I think there was four fires that eventually transitioned into a type one incident called the Sadler incident, but I was on one of the smaller fires that we were trying to contain. I had quite a bit of resources assigned to me and one of my objectives for the day was to cut dozer line, flank it around the active fire edge and continue to flank it to the north and then to use hand crews or people on the ground and engines to actually burn out the unburned fuel between the dozer line and the main fire front that was going to threaten the dozer line.
Tom Mueller:And for people not familiar with some of the terminology here is you're basically just trying to light a backfire, basically to burn out some underbrush so that the big fire stops in its tracks.
Kelly Martin:Yeah, so when you're working in especially a large, you know, grass or brush um fire and we were in Nevada, uh, at the, that's where the Sadler fire um took place the idea being is that you know a dozer is only eight foot wide and if the, if the main fire you know hits that dozer line and you have all this unburned fuel between the main fire and the dozer line, there's a good chance that that fire is going to slap over and burn across the dozer line. So the the idea is is that you starve the main fire. Your control line is the dozer line, and so hand crews and engines can support that burnout operation to reduce the density and consistency of fuel. Now that it's black between the dozer line and the main fire, you don't have to go all the way to the main fire edge, you just need to get it deep enough so when the main fire does hit your burnout operation, that it's not going to threaten your containment lines.
Tom Mueller:Okay, go ahead and continue with the story now. So you're out there working it. And things got complicated here, didn't they?
Kelly Martin:Whenever you're working a wildland fire and we affectionately call it the witching hour by about 1231 o'clock the winds start picking up very dangerous time, you know. If you're not in a safe place and if there's lack of communication, it can be very, it can be a very, very dangerous situation. Unbeknownst to me, the one of the resources that were to report to me in the morning got delayed and I'm out on the fire line, you know, working with other resources and the dozer, and all of a sudden I get a call from the crew boss trainee for this hand crew that was assigned to my division that morning and they said you know, we're stuck on this road and we can't stuck on this road and we can't communicate with our crew boss and we have fire coming towards us. And when you hear that, your heart just skips lots of beats because now all of a sudden it's like something terrible is about to happen and you're in this middle of somebody's looking for direction and instruction to basically save them and and their crew and the only thing I could think of is like, if you can't get a hold, let's hope your crew boss is okay, but you need to get the bus and the people out of there. You cannot withstand a flaming front hitting that bus. And so the crew boss did say that there was an escape route and a road that went off to the east, I believe, and I said, please just move, get everybody on the bus and get out of there and let the fire pass, and we'll deal with that'll. We'll, we'll deal with that later on in the day.
Kelly Martin:I was so thankful that they did successfully make it out of there, but there was a lot of anxiety. I mean I think there was. There was also an engine that was behind the, this particular crew as well, and they followed them out the road as well. I had no visual of what if that road was going to hold a fire front, but they got up and over and on the back side of a ridge and and were protected.
Kelly Martin:At that point everybody knew that there was a missing person and and the air attack and the helicopter and everybody was trying to call the, the crew boss, you know, on command on air to ground, on tactical frequencies, with with no, with no contact at all. So again, you know, the whole fire just goes quiet when, when a person goes missing or they're out of communication, because people really do think you know the worst, especially when there's no contact on any. You know frequency, as it happened, I think there was one of the helicopters actually spotted this person in the black, which is the burned out area, and I believe that they didn't land, that. The person actually got in the bucket in the helicopter, actually flew this person to safety. So after all that, knowing that the crew boss was accounted for, he was flown to safety, the bus and the engine people were in a safe spot.
Kelly Martin:It's very, very, very difficult to re-engage in operations when this just happened to you and you've had to make split second decisions to save people's lives. So there wasn't a whole lot more that we could do that afternoon and I told the crew that I'd meet him in a camp. You know, that night we had pretty much, you know, finished our dozer operation or our line construction operation. So it really at that point there was not the sense of urgency that we had like two or three hours earlier, as the winds and the fire behavior was starting to pick up.
Tom Mueller:Yeah, so what are the key sort of takeaways from that then? I mean, was there decision making on the ground that you know that could have been different to prevent that? Or how do you assess you know that could have been different to prevent that, or how do you assess you know the key lessons from that?
Kelly Martin:No, I always look at myself first and when I have a new crew or a crew, you know we call them regulars or you know type two crews they're not hotshot crews that are assigned to us and you're unfamiliar with their. You know type two crews. They're not hotshot crews that are assigned to us and you're unfamiliar with their experience, qualifications and expertise. The thing that I took away on that particular incident was trust but verify, and I got sucked up into believing the crew boss that the crew was very experienced, you know burning, and that they should be given this opportunity to work with me to do this burnout operation, operation. And um, I'm like, yeah, let's that, that's what we will do. Um, tomorrow morning is we'll have you work, you know, behind the dozer to to do that burnout. So that was the the piece for me. Was you really in in this fast-moving fire world? You just sometimes you just never know what you're going to get and it's really important that you judge yourself how those resources, how qualified are those resources to do the assignment that you want them to do? That's where we can get ourselves in a lot of trouble. Number one is that maybe a crew is over inflating their, their qualifications and experience and you wouldn't know that until they came to work with you and you could hear them on the radio and you could watch their production and you could watch their inner crew dynamics. And then you go okay, yeah, I have a high degree of confidence in these crews to assign them to more hotline, if you will. So I think that was the one of the the biggest takeaways. But I also wanted to kind of resolve what I thought was a near miss.
Kelly Martin:The next morning, that evening, when the crew came in, there was there was quite a bit of verbal exchange between myself and the crew boss, in that he felt like I didn't trust him and he knew where he was and I directed the crew boss trainee to do something that he didn't want to do. Anyway, it was just a very tense situation. I said all right, let's start again in the morning, get your crew some rest. All right, let's start again in the morning, get your crew some rest. Unbeknownst to me, that particular crew took off and I never saw them, you know, the next morning, and I really wanted the incoming team to kind of know you know what happened, cause this isn't, this wasn't.
Kelly Martin:This didn't shut down our operation, but it was a, it was a close call and I needed to make sure that people knew about this. So I feel like I didn't make that very clear to the incoming team. But I also felt like the incoming team, you know, wasn't receptive to my providing them with that information. As it was, the crew went to another part of the fire and they narrowly escaped another burn over and and, um, you know where people actually did deploy shelters um this time. So it was like how could this happen again? You know it, it was a close call on my part of the fire and now they had a shelter deployment on another part of the fire.
Tom Mueller:So I just when we talk about a shelter deployment now, we're talking about worst case scenario here, right?
Kelly Martin:Oh, absolutely, yeah, yep.
Tom Mueller:Give us, paint us a quick picture of what would that look like if you're on a fire team on the ground and the boss says you know what's the command there.
Kelly Martin:It may not necessarily even come from the crew boss, which is like the first line supervisor of 20 people. It could come from the squad boss and people are feeling like they have no escape route, which is either run down the road, you know one way or the other, or they see this big flaming front coming towards them and they have. They can't run through the fire, and so they pick a spot that is hopefully a void of fuel, of vegetation, and then they pull out. Everybody is required to carry a fire shelter, so they pull out their fire shelter and get into this fire shelter and let the fire, you know, run through them not through them, but you know, around and that fire shelter is supposed to deflect the heat.
Kelly Martin:It's the worst case scenario. You never. I mean we, we encourage people to use fire shelters if they, if they have no other choice. But you know, more and more people are really recognizing that they they have to be aware that they could potentially get into a burn over situation at the worst possible time during the day and they may have to make different decisions. And so when that happened the very next day, I knew something was terribly wrong, you know, with the communication and the ability of this crew to take this kind of or challenges or too much risk-taking.
Tom Mueller:I want to share a story with you of just from my time working in the energy industry. I worked for a big refinery petroleum refinery that I mentioned at the top and of course we have trained firefighters inside those facilities who are trained to respond to hydrocarbon fires, because you've got lots of flammable materials going through pipes and heat exchangers and pumps and valves at high temperatures, and so the potential for fire is ever present.
Tom Mueller:And there was a couple of incidents that I recall where one of the firefighting supervisors got his crew of folks in too close to harm's way and took you know what was later determined to be inappropriate levels of risk with those people to try, and you know, get a fire extinguished to try, and you know get a fire extinguished and the I remember you know the fire crews themselves kind of losing confidence in that particular leader and that led to, you know, some reorganizations and some personnel changes and job reassignments because of that lack of trust and just you know the sort of behaviors that he showed that put people at risk. So is that maybe what we were seeing on the site there?
Kelly Martin:I do believe that there's a difference again between the humble and hubris, decision-making and, you know, an attempt at ego, not being able to make good decisions because no one wants to feel like they're a failure. So I do think that sometimes people enter into, you know, a situation where all the signs are there for a potential catastrophe and they still go in anyways and you're working with young people that you're supposed to be training and helping them understand, and if they don't feel confident in asking questions about what they're doing, it can be very catastrophic. This particular person I saw on another fire assignment three weeks later and I honestly my jaw dropped and he had a different group of people. They weren't the same people but it was a different group of people and I, number one, I couldn't believe he was back on the fire line and leading people again. And number two, he was pretty determined to take the crew into a canyon bottom downhill line construction, which we know is a watch out situation. What we consider it's not that you can't do it, but you have to be very prepared that the fire could race up out of the canyon bottom and trap the crew.
Kelly Martin:There was really no reason for the crew to go and I didn't even direct them to do that. But the crew boss, the guy that I had the issue with three weeks earlier, felt that he could get his crew in there. And again, it's not a hotshot crew, it's a, you know, a type two crew that some of those people are meeting for the first time, you know, on this assignment. And I said I had to give a direct order that that he would not be going down, you know, into that Canyon and assign him to another. You know another part of the incident.
Kelly Martin:Well, when I got back into camp that night I was making phone calls to the operations section chief, to the incident commanders from the Sadler fire, to say this person is still out on the fire line and he is still directing and leading firefighters and not making good decisions yet again.
Kelly Martin:So it was an unfortunate situation that you know that I had to be the one to step in and be the bad guy, if you will. And you know I suffered some blowback for that because the whole crew was demobbed or demobilized from the incident. So when there's a safety issue and collectively, the team not me, but the team agrees that yeah, this person needs to be demobilized and the whole crew, because the crew doesn't have leadership, and so that's what happens. So when something like that happens and it's not clearly understood as to why both the leader and the crew were being sent home, it can really cause hard feelings. But you know you got to think about the bigger picture and what your objective is. It's not to smooth over egos, it's to ensure that there's you know, every day, every fire throughout the day, that everyone is safe and that good decisions are the best decisions are being made possible.
Tom Mueller:I it's just very, very hard because every day changes but it's so challenging because it seems sometimes we go through incidents like that and the issues aren't they aren't resolved for us, right. We're still wrestling those and trying to figure out you know, what could I have done better, how should I have handled that differently? And of course all that leads to stress and you know the post-traumatic stress injury that can happen to us when we deal with traumatic incidents like that. You know how much do you see that. You know post-traumatic stress issues in crews that you work with. And then what's your advice and approach for dealing with that in the firefighting realm?
Kelly Martin:It's real, ptsd is real and I think we are finally beginning to appreciate and accept that mental health challenges for first responders and wildland firefighters that may have witnessed the is the death of a coworker or an aircraft accident those never go away and people process those things that they can never unsee differently and it does become a remnant in your body and in your soul. I'm so glad that our culture and our workplace environment is really recognizing that mental health is just as important, if not more important, than, you know, the physical health and wellbeing of firefighters. It's one that it's an area that we don't really like talking about suicide. We don't like talking about mental health and needing help. It's in this type of, you know, hyper-masculine type of environment, I think years past used to be seen as a sign of weakness and we can't keep continuing to do that to our employees.
Kelly Martin:And so, you know, having a, you know, robust mental health support system, you know, for PTSD and and actually getting claims approved for mental health issues is is super important. I mean, if we're going to, if we're going to have a strong and robust workforce, you know, going forth in the future, we have to think about this holistically. We have to think about the mental health, the physical health, the financial health, the relationships this comes into play in developing and maintaining and recruiting a workforce that can do this work for 20 or 25 years. And it's very, very difficult if we can't, you know, recognize all those different, you know, spokes that come together in ourselves as the hub of these. You know situations that all of these have to be, you know, taken care of, and I'll be the first to admit that I didn't, you know, recognize a lot of this in my own career, but I'm now in a position where I can support the next generation, or this generation and the next generation for, you know, this kind of, you know health and wellness reforms that is so desperately needed.
Tom Mueller:All right, kelly, thanks so much for joining us today on the podcast. We appreciate you kind of sharing your lessons learned and some of those leadership challenges that you know that any leader in a crisis situation is going to face. So thank you again for being with us.
Kelly Martin:It was my pleasure and I sincerely appreciate your outreach to the individuals that will hopefully be able to take something away from this, so thanks again, tom.
Tom Mueller:And that's going to do it for this episode of the Leading in a Crisis podcast. If you like what you're hearing, then please like and subscribe to the podcast and tell your friends about us as well, and we'll see you again soon for another episode of the Leading in a Crisis podcast.
