Total Fire Ban: Making the 6:30 am Call
A Total Fire Ban has been declared for the second day of a three-day walk in the Flinders Ranges. The forecast is 38 °C with north winds of 20–25 km/h and a late change. Day 2 is 14 km with 400 m of ascent, no reliable water en route, and a section crossing dry grassland. The group carries 3 L per person, one gas stove, and a planned campfire for the evening. Two students have asthma and one has had heat cramps on a previous trip. The planned camp sits in a creek bed with a single narrow access track. At breakfast, two students argue the walk should proceed as planned because 'we've trained for it'. The journey plan set a go/no-go review for 6:30 am.
1. Make the call at the 6:30 am review, and justify it against the plan's own criteria rather than against the students' confidence.
Read the worked answer
The call: Day 2 as planned does not proceed. The campfire is cancelled outright, and the group either relocates to a low-exposure option or exits.
Reasoning against the plan's criteria
- Regulatory trigger. A Total Fire Ban is not a matter of judgement; it removes open flame and typically triggers park and track closures. Checking whether the route is even open is the first action, before any debate.
- Fire exposure. Dry grassland crossing, 20–25 km/h north winds, 38 °C, a single narrow access track, and a camp in a creek bed - a creek bed is a trap under fire weather, not a shelter. The group's exit options collapse at exactly the moment they are needed.
- Heat and water. 14 km, 400 m of ascent, no reliable water, and 3 L per person is not adequate for a 38 °C day with sustained effort. The plan cannot self-resupply.
- Individual risk factors. Two asthmatics (hot, dry, possibly smoky air plus exertion) and a history of heat cramps. The heat-cramp history is the most predictive single item in the scenario.
Why 'we've trained for it' does not answer the question Fitness addresses endurance, not fire behaviour, not water availability, and not the speed at which heat illness develops. It is also not one of the criteria the group set at 6:30 am on the planning day - and the value of a pre-set review is precisely that decisions get measured against criteria chosen when no one was invested in a particular outcome.
Process point: state the decision, state the criterion it was measured against, and record both, so the reasoning is assessable rather than reconstructed later.
2. The group decides to salvage some walking rather than abandon the day. Specify the modification you would make, and the trigger conditions that would end it.
Read the worked answer
Modified plan
- Route: a 6–7 km low-level option with a reliable tank at the midpoint, avoiding the dry grassland section, avoiding the creek-bed camp, and staying within reach of a formed vehicle track.
- Timing: on the track by 6:00 am, off the track by 11:00 am. The afternoon is not available.
- Water: carry 4 L per person with a planned refill at the tank, not an assumed one - verify the tank's status before departing.
- Fire: no campfire under any circumstance; stove only if the ban permits it and only in a cleared area; otherwise cold food.
- Camp: relocate to an open, accessible site with more than one exit route and mobile coverage verified.
- Load: redistribute so the heaviest packs go to the strongest walkers, and reduce the day's load.
Hard triggers that end the day immediately
- Any student showing confusion, vomiting, headache unrelieved by rest, or cramps that persist after fluid and shade.
- Smoke visible, or the smell of smoke, or a wind shift - any of these means the fire situation has changed and the group moves to the pre-identified safe area or exits.
- Water falling below 1 L per person before the midpoint.
- Ambient temperature or observed conditions exceeding the threshold set at the 6:30 review.
- Any closure or advice from park management or the CFS.
Why the triggers are written in advance: under heat and fatigue, the group's judgement degrades before its fitness does. Pre-agreed thresholds are the only reliable way to stop a bad decision being made by tired people at 1:00 pm.
3. How should the group's decision and its reasoning be recorded so it can be assessed as part of the Outdoor Journey?
Read the worked answer
Record the decision, not just the outcome. A journal entry that says 'we cancelled because it was hot' gives a marker nothing to assess. The entry should follow the structure below.
1. The information set at the time Time, date, who was present, forecast received and its source, the Total Fire Ban declaration, water carried and water available, and the location of the nearest exit. Then explicitly note what was not known at 6:30 am - this guards against hindsight creeping into the account.
2. The criterion used State the go/no-go criteria that were written into the plan before the journey. The decision then reads as 'measured against our own threshold' rather than 'we felt it was unsafe'.
3. Options considered and rejected Proceed as planned, modify, wait a day, exit. Give the specific reason each was rejected. This is the analytical core - a decision is only assessable if the alternatives are visible.
4. The decision, the decision-maker, and the review point Who made the call, when it would be revisited, and what would have changed it.
5. Post-journey reflection What the group would plan differently (for example, a second water source, an earlier start, a camp location chosen for egress rather than shelter). Identify one planning change and the evidence that justifies it.
Why this scores: it demonstrates decision-making under uncertainty rather than a good outcome achieved by luck, and it makes the group's reasoning visible to someone who was not there - which is the entire purpose of journey documentation.