2002. Crew Cohesion, Wildland Fire Transition, and Fatalities.
0251 2809. Missoula, MT: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest
Service, Missoula Technology and Development Center. Describes
the role played by crew cohesion in the deaths of firefighters
in three firefighting tragedies: the Mann Gulch Fire, the South
Canyon Fire, and the Thirtymile Fire. Two types of cohesion are
involved, the cohesion within a crew (intracrew cohesion) and
the cohesion among crews (intercrew cohesion). Cohesion is a way
of describing how closely people feel they are tied to a group.
Studies of field crews in the Forest Service have shown that the
less cohesion crews had, the more likely they were to be
involved in accidents. Meanwhile, studies of wildland
firefighter fatalities during the 1990s have shown that nearly
threefourths of the fatalities occurred when fires were making
the transition from relatively small to relatively large fires,
or shortly after they had become relatively large fires. The
transition is often sudde