1.3.4. Safety

If the whole organisation is aware of the Vision, Mission, Position and Capacity, this means that the different members or sections have the capacity to adapt the orders in tasks that go in the same direction as the rest of the organisation. Therefore, they work towards a common goal and at the same time they may be able to identify those orders that arrive late (due to various factors such as decision-lack) or that have a different direction to the path of resolving the situation.

1.3.4. Safety

Until a few years ago, the experience from firefighting organisations have shown that safety in the management of vegetation fires was only considered at the level of people and work teams (manoeuvre level); and was focused on describing protection equipment, protocols or procedures of work, and command procedures. Accidents and lessons learned coming from different areas of risk management have shown that in complex scenarios with rapid changes and a high degree of uncertainty, the set of measures, manoeuvres and self-protection protocols mentioned before are not sufficient to guarantee the safety of personnel.

The evolution that risk managers have made in these complex scenarios (such as forest fires) has been focused on incorporating new doctrines that assume that errors and accidents are not avoidable. Nonetheless, there are ways to reduce them through systemic changes by improving the ability to identify efforts and focus these efforts on how to deal with the unexpected and to build organisational resilience.

This step forward implies incorporating safety as part of the backbone of operational reasoning at all levels. Therefore, safety is a ‘pre-conditioning’ factor, so, it cannot be included after the fire analysis has been done. Thus, the different possible scenarios of resolution must be approached including safety from the beginning.

Therefore, it is necessary to focus on the information, understanding and processing it. And it is also required to identify the one on which it is necessary to focus attention because it is the one that will allow to detect the change that can lead to safety failure and collapse.

Safety is the responsibility of all the organisation, so, it needs co-responsibility (surpasses the individuals). Each decision has a consequence. Consequences and reasons behind each action must be considered, not only for the group of people performing it, but for the rest of the team involved in the fire. Organisations need to build tactical security in decision-making and strategic security in the planning of operational scenarios to make them safe, without sudden changes leading to collapse and lack of safety.

This objective is reached when the elements of the scenario that can change are introduced into the tactics and strategy. That is, when decision-making and security are linked in the same rationale. On the contrary, if situational awareness is some-