Preparation Safety is the first and last consideration in preparation. It hardly makes sense to undertake a task as complicated and difficult as defending your home against a wildfire without having made detailed preparations. The thing to ask about the pictures you have seen of a lone homeowner on his roof with a garden hose is, did the house and owner survive? And, if they did, how much help, and from whom, did they have before it was all over? Before you leap onto your roof, you should, at least, consider the facts discussed below. It is one thing to say that when the day comes, here's what I'll do. . .it is quite another to look the flames in the eye. Your stress level will skyrocket and the major effects of stress will come on rapidly --narrowing your attention and deteriorating your judgment. No one is immune. The whole purpose of planning and training is to implant some routines in our mind, in the hopes that they will come to the fore when needed. Professionals acquire their presence of mind only with constant training and experience. Even so, they suffer the same effects of stress as everyone else. Their advantage is that their repertoire of responses due to training and experience is wide enough and fresh enough to kick in quickly and with good effect. An important aspect of confronting a wildfire is acknowledging that you cannot do it alone. At a minimum you need someone to watch your back--to keep an eye on the fire and where it is. Perhaps the greatest cause of firefighter deaths due to entrapment while fighting a wildfire is the victims' losing sight of where the fire was. Wind and terrain can combine to cause rapid and unpredictable changes in the fire's behavior. A case in point was the entrapment of several engines and crews during the Calabasas fire of 1996. In this case several engines had been assigned to protect homes in an enclave in the Malibu hills. In the process of repositioning one of the crews, a lookout had to take his eyes off the fire, and in that few minutes a wind gust blew the fire around a corner and up a driveway so that it caught one man in the open and three others trying to shelter in a fire engine. (See Los Angeles County Fire Department, "Calabasas Entrapment.") This only illustrates how quickly conditions can change and how important it is to maintain surveillance of a fire. A shorthand way of expressing this used by firefighters is "LCES." The initials stand for Lookouts, Communication, Escape routes and Safe areas. "LCES" functions sequentially--it's a self-triggering mechanism. Lookouts assess--and reassess--the fire environment and Communicate threats to safety; firefighters should always identify potential Escape routes and use them to reach Safety areas which are identified and/or prepared as the operation proceeds so that safe areas follow the firefighters. (See Gleason, "LCES.")