How to Use Fire as Distress Signal

Video Transcript

"Hi this is Eric Sterns with Expert Village and I'm going to be talking today about signaling specifically visual signaling and the use of fire in that process. Fire is a very useful tool for all sorts of things. When discussing it for signaling you want to eliminate the standard things that you would use with respect to a shelter fire. You don't want to use a fire reflector because that blocks the light from being seen from a few directions so you want to have a fire that is open. As a matter of fact you are going to want to build three fires in fairly close proximity to one another. Preferably in some kind of a triangular formation. What we are doing here is combining efforts to increase your chances of being seen from the road and also to serve as a ground air signal. There is some danger here in this process. The fires must be well tended. They need to be fairly close to one another so you can keep them well tended. You also need to put them out quickly. This is something that you need to consider when building them, the dryness of the area, whether or not it is a safe thing to do. You want to have as much water and sand on hand as you possibly can so that if you need to extinguish the fires quickly you can do so. Once again this is not something that you should do recreationally. This is something that you are doing in the event that you are stranded and you are concerned that you may not survive. You do this to stay alive. That way it is plausible to be done, otherwise, it may create too much danger, too much difficulty in the area. "