The most important job on the fireline.

On the fireline, the Lookout hikes to a good vantage point and watches the fire, keeping an eye out for things a crew ‘down in the hole’ can’t see: weather changes, an unexpected increase in the fire’s behavior, or a spot fire that compromises the escape route. It’s often boring, lonely, and tedious, but when things start to fall apart, the Lookout has the most important job on the crew.

Today, whole counties are chopped up with dozer line, and your normally-quiet neighborhood may be “Division Papa” on today’s Operations Map. The Lookout fills its role for the general public; keeping an eye on what’s happening, and communicating to the crew (that’s you) what’s coming next. Why aren’t there more tankers flying? Why didn’t the lines hold up to the winds? How did we end up in such a bad relationship with fire? Why do we keep going back to our broken ways of managing it?

There is plenty to dig into and while the official government information officers work really hard to get info out, they are bound up trying to deliver a sanitized, hopeful version of an incredibly messy, political, and complicated topic.

My name is Zeke Lunder. I’ve been working in wildfire for almost 30 years, and I started The Lookout during the Dixie Fire when I realized Twitter, Facebook, and other fire information pages weren’t really working to tell the kinds of stories I want to tell. We are drowning in misinformation, and even the good information which gets out often lacks any historical context or geographic specificity. It often seems that the public information officers on major wildfires don’t give the public enough credit for being able to understand nuanced messages or the operational details of how the fire is being fought (really the most interesting thing to a lot of us).

Our mission is to help people get a better grip on how fires work, how they move across the landscape, how we fight them, and when they are going good work for us.

The Lookout

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The Lookout

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