The Devil is in the Details

            I don’t know who first said, “The Devil is in the details,” but it’s true that plenty of great sounding ideas can begin to fall apart on deeper examination.  I’ve written before about the how the mission statement, “Everyone Goes Home” is doomed to fail; it’s that kind of well-intentioned statement I think of when I think about the devilish details that we have to deal with in the Fire Service.  I’ll be honest; as the concept stands today, I feel that Victim Survivability Profiling is in the same place.

            Captain Marsar, the author of the concept, took the time to reply to my previous post, “%$#@ Victim Survivability Profiling, Do Your Primary Search.”  I posted his reply here, with his permission, so it could be read in its entirety.  I appreciate that Captain Marsar has continued the discussion, and I am happy to have the chance to do the same.

            The problem in trying to discuss the applicability of ANY tactic, technique, or guideline to the American fire service is that there is no single American fire service to speak about.  (Now that I know I have so many international readers I am going to specify American fire service.  I haven’t fought fire in the Brazil, the UK, France, or Germany so I have really no idea how you folks apply specific tactics, but I would love to come visit and see.)  There may not be as many different fire services as there are fire departments in the US, but it’s probably close.

            The capabilities of the FDNY are different than a suburban department like mine, which in turn are different than a rural all-volunteer department.  The Engine I’m assigned to rolls out with two of us; our first due manpower for the whole town is ten members on four Engines and one Truck.  We have no automatic-aid responding, and mutual-aid companies generally will not respond until requested by an on-scene Company.  We are capable of operating in a particular way, and we manage to do a lot with fewer resources than some of our neighbors because of the frequency our members find themselves on the fire ground. 

I say this as a reminder that any discussion has to be measured and evaluated within the capabilities of your department. When I start talking about what we (the fire department) will or won’t do on the fire scene you must always base it on what YOUR department can do. 

I read the articles on Victim Survivability Profiling when they were published.  My first reaction was, “Don’t we do this already?”  I’ve always learned that you need to conduct a thorough size-up and make a decision about the tenability of the building.  The articles seemed to be a reminder of this, but with a bit more of the risk adverse “Everyone Goes Home” philosophy behind it.  I didn’t comment on them.  I figured anyone who read them would need to do their own assessment and see if there was any practical knowledge to be gained.

Then NIOSH released the report into the Homewood Fire Department Line of Duty Death of FF Brian Carey (FF2010-10).  The first of the Key Recommendations identified was, “Ensure that a complete 360 degree situational size-up is conducted on dwelling fires and others where it is physically possible and ensure that a risk-versus-gain analysis and a survivability profile for trapped occupants is conducted prior to committing to interior fire fighting operations.” (1)  The report references Captain Marsar’s articles as a factor in this recommendation.  It was the publication of this LODD report that brought about my desire to talk about this idea head on.

Captain Marsar said in his reply to my previous posting that to date two articles exploring his concept have been published, with two to follow.  To date there has not been a clear cut explanation in his work about correlating clues for size-up that would indicate definitive go/no-go scenarios.  I get the impression from our email exchanges that he offers some of these in his forthcoming articles; I look forward to reading them.

The dilemma that I am speaking to, rather than being about Captain Marsar’s work in particular, is about mixed of messages from various national recognized sources being at odds with the expectations of the public we serve.  I have said before that the public expects us to go into burning building.  If we are not going to meet that expectation we owe it to the public to explain what we will and won’t do, and how we will make these decisions.

The Homewood incident is one example, but is one that is at the core of the issue.  I think that Captain Marsar is right about us not over committing if to a structure that is beyond being saved if we are certain that no life hazard exists.  Since I’m all about clues, if we pull up and see a building that his sealed with a Vacant Property System or HUD windows we can reasonably assume the building is vacant. 

My biggest concern, and the point I was raising in the earlier post is that we need to define explicitly for our Neighbors (our customers if you prefer) what we will and will not do.  Bill Carey of http://backstepfirefighter.com/ pointed out in a discussion I was privy to that we must consider that at some point in time a family is going to sue the fire department, or the incident commander, because the choice was made to assume (with an educated assessment) that there was no savable life in a structure where one of their family members dies.  We must minimize the chance of this by both training our personnel AND educating the public.  That is a job for the Chiefs and Political leaders out there.

One of the concerns that I have, and why I referred to the insidious growth of risk adverse attitudes in the fire service, is concepts like Victim Survivability Profiling being employed by those Chiefs/Company Officers/Firefighters out there who are completely terrified of actually fighting fire and joined the fire department because it was a chance to be part of the “boy’s club” or carry a badge and a pager.  It is a hop-skip-and-jump from “This scene is likely beyond having savable life,” to, “What with the products in smoke there is no way anyone is ever going to be alive in there,” and now we are making every excuse in the world to NOT go in.   Check out Dave LeBlanc’s post “When did it become okay to say no?”  Dave raises some great points that should be part of the conversation.

As soon as you start to question if someone is operating too safely you become labeled a Cowboy, or too stupid to understand the intentions of the well-meaning folks who believe that we can serve the public without ever getting anyone hurt.   The fact is that we exist to save lives and property and we will risk our lives to do it.  We have to do that with a deep understanding of everything that occurs on the fireground, and our personal reasons for being there.  If you are unwilling to accept an added risk to yourself in order to search and rescue a KNOWN or suspected victim then in my opinion you need to look yourself in the mirror and ask what are you doing here.

(1)  http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/fire/reports/face201010.html