Kim Ernstrom

Kim has been involved with wildland firefighting for 16 years. She spent four years working as a wildland fire helicopter rappeller and 2 years as a Hotshot Crew Foreman. The remainder of her time has been in a variety of management and leadership positions with the National Park Service, the US Forest Service and the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Kim has a strong interest in leadership training and teaching the elements of high-reliability organizations. Wildland fire can be a dangerous profession if leaders are not skilled in crew management and have a high sense of situational awareness.

Kim started working as a wildland firefighter on the Bridger-Teton National Forest in Wyoming as a seasonal employee in 1993 and moved around the west for the next several years on different wildland fire crews with detours to North Carolina and the Florida Keys. She moved to Bozeman, Montana and attended Montana State University in 1999 where I received my Masters degree in Earth Sciences completing a thesis on the fire effects of the 1988 wildfires on headwater stream systems in Yellowstone National Park. During her summers in graduate school she worked on different heli-rappell fire crews on the Salmon-Challis National Forest in Idaho, the Wallowa-Whiman National Forest in Oregon and in Yosemite National Park.

Kim moved to Richfield, Utah in 2001 and spent some time on the Fishlake National Forest working on an initial attack helicopter. As her interest in training and leadership development increased she moved to Asheville, NC as the Foreman on the Asheville Interagency Hotshot Crew, which focuses on developing fire leaders for the future. Finally in 2005 she made her way to Big Cypress National Preserve as the Prescribed Fire Specialist and then to her current job as Fire Management Officer at the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge as of December 2007. She continues to participate in many aspects of fire management with emphasis on fire behavior, training and leadership development. Kim is currently assigned to the Southern Area Incident Management Team which responds to a variety of large wildland fires throughout the west as well as natural disasters such as hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2006 and hurricane Ike in 2008. Her team is comprised of people throughout the southeast US federal land management agencies and is trained and prepared to mobilize to any natural or man made disaster with 24 hours notice. After bringing her team through an Adventure Training Concepts program, she felt so strongly about the concept and the results produced that she wanted to be a part of helping other teams achieve the same. She applied and became part of our team.

Kim's leadership and team training experience makes her an instrumental part of the ATC facilitation team.

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