Like many folks out there I subscribe to The Secret List (which of course is not so secret) to get notified about what’s going on in the Fire Service.Chief Billy Goldfeder and his team do a great job of updating us about significant events in the fire service, Line of Duty Deaths in particular.
I opened my email this morning and saw that I would have to update my count of Line of Duty count.Then I read the email and was prompted to say, “What the f^%k?”
For those who haven’t seen it, here is the email from The Secret List:
I too want to extend my sympathies to the family of Captain Hall, his wife and adult kids and the members of the Hitchins FD.It’s never easy to lose someone you care about.
Is this REALLY a Line of Duty Death though?The man was 86 years old!What in the name of all that is reasonable is an 86 year old doing functioning on an Emergency Scene?
If we are going to get serious about reducing Line of Duty Deaths we need to look at limiting the age of our members.This may come as a shock to some people, but every single one of us is going to die.Me.You.Everyone.So, given that fact is it really reasonable to make a statistic out of someone who is 86 years old that has a heart attack?
So far in 2010 we have seen 77 Firefighter Line of Duty Deaths.26 of those fatalities have happened to firefighters who are over 60 years old; of those 14 have befallen firefighters over the age of 65.65 is a mandatory retirement age in many Public Pension systems, and an age where you can collect full Social Security Benefits!Now, I understand that in many departments that make use of on-call/volunteer responders it is men and women who have a wealth of experience, like Captain Hall, who are willing to show up when the bell rings.Maybe we need to look at the studies into metabolic output, and the effects of aging on reaction times, and acknowledge that Emergency Response is really a young person’s game.Maybe we need to find roles where our older members are able to serve in support capacities so their knowledge and experience, as well as their dedication, are not lost, but they aren’t placed in a position where they are under the stress and strain of emergency response.
If we are going to be serious about reducing firefighter LODD we need to consider whether age should be a limiting factor in participation.If being over 65 placed a limit on the extent to which a member could participate (i.e. a prohibition on acting in an operational capacity) we would see an 18% reduction in Line of Duty Deaths.That is taking life safety initiatives seriously.That is making an effort to eliminate PREVENTABLE line of duty deaths.
There are articles being written everyday about the “real world” of firefighting, discussing topics like Crew Resource Management, Everyone Goes Home, and The Courage to be Safe. I’m not entirely sure that all of them really address real world operations. It seems to me in fact many of these catch phrases really are advocating a Fantasy world of firefighting.
Now, as someone who spent many years playing Dungeons and Dragons®, and has become an avid reader of Neil Gaiman I think Fantasy is cool. I can totally see the Fantasy World of Firefighting working.
Your Engine Company arrives on scene to find a two story, ordinary constructed, two-flat, with a garden apartment, with heavy fire showing from the first floor, front windows. As a level 7 Officer you have Situational Awareness of a Base 10 plus a skill bonus of 15. That allows you to know intuitively that the second floor is unoccupied. Your Wisdom score plus your EGH ability modifier give you an overall VSP Insight of 14: you know that there is no possible way that anyone could be alive in the rear of the fire apartment, so the flames are really just a foolhardy trick by Loki, Norse God of trickery and Fire, to get you to commit to the inside of a building that should probably just get bulldozed anyway.
You pulled up with that three man Engine the City Council told you would have a +8 Attack bonus because of the Stinger Monitors they added to allow you to attack without entering, so you figure, Why not use the tools I was given and make sure that no one gets hurt? You give the order, “Hit it from the street!”
The Truck has staged in front and has started to deploy. The OVM (Outside Vent Mongrel) has headed to the rear and the Truck D/O is getting ready to throw the main. The Inside crew is walking to the front door and hears your order to the Engine.
“We have to primary the floor above,” says the Level 8 Truck Officer.
You have no choice but to stop him from such a dangerous plan. “I use my Cloak of Safety to stop you from entering a possibly dangerous place until we have an IRIC team on scene!”
This Truck officer didn’t get to level 8 without some serious XP. “I have the Outside team functioning as an IRIC and I have a +4 Brunicinni modifier which allows me to act before all the Incident Management Team sections are staffed.” This guy is good.
“Hey, hey, wait a second here, that doesn’t allow you to move forward without at least a Level 9 I/C and a Level 8 Safety Elf!”
“The Safety Elf is allowed a seven minute response time, and the rules say I can move forward. The I/C already turned the corner. Get that line in and protect the stairs.”
He may have a Charisma score of 18 but there is no way you are going to risk the lives of this Truck crew on a building that really isn’t worth that much. They probably have insurance anyway, you think. “I’m casting a Call Rules of Engagement Companion. You can’t commit to the inside without the consent of the team!”
“You’re going to use that petty CRM spell? Come on!”
The Incident Commander calls over the radio, “Hey, I have this SOG of Immobility tying me to the front seat of the buggy! Are you guys getting water on the fire yet?”
The fireground is a dynamic environment that is all too filled with threats. While we must never willfully or negligently commit our people to a scene that is likely to fail catastrophically because of Flashover (or another fire event) nor because of the imminent potential for collapse because of fire growth or building construction, we cannot pretend that this environment can be made, “safe”.
We must strive to achieve Relative Safety. We do this by requiring our members to be competent in a host of skills that are interrelated and interdependent. Passing an exam that says you have learned all there is about Building Construction is of little value if you don’t have a comparable level of expertise in Fire Behavior. Knowing just enough about ventilation techniques to say, “We have to open up,” serves no good if you don’t also have the knowledge base to finish with, “...opposite the Engine Company so we don’t drag this fire over their heads.
It is only in a Fantasy World where the fireground can be made to behave to the point where risk is eliminated. The reality is that every structure fire response is an ambush. We have the strategic initiative, we have trained and equipped ourselves to deal with the likely threat, but the fire always has the tactical advantage. Assuming an operating position that defaults to not allowing offensive operations will seriously hamper our effectiveness on the fireground and may end up costing one of our neighbors their lives.
Thanks to Dave LeBlanc for encouraging this idea with a text message thread today (he gets full credit for the Brunicinni line). No actual persons, places, or buildings were harmed in the writing of this blog. I cannot speak to hurt feelings from reading it.
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.
Seriously, I'm going to post something about the fire service this week, but I thought it would be interesting to mention some statistics I was just looking at for the blog here.
This is where people have been from that are visiting the blog in the last month. Welcome to everyone from outside the US. Thanks especially to Brazil for such a strong showing! Watch out though, the French are gaining on you. Oh, and to my friends in the UK, the Chinese are looking to knock you guys and gals down. It's really nice to see that this is being viewed all over the world. I hope that the ideas and discussion are useful to you all. Please shoot me a note with how you have found the blog and what you would like to see discussed! Thank you all!!
This week I received an email regarding my %$#@ VSP posting, from Captain Stephen Masar (FDNY) the author of the VSP concept. With the Captain's permission I am sharing the post in it's entirety, unedited, below. I have been thinking about the ongoing discussion that Capt. Marsar and I are having and I will share my thoughts at some point this week. I like being able to offer a forum for conversation about things that are going on the in the Fire Service, and I appreciate the Captain wanting to open up with his thoughts and continue the discussion.
Dear Mr. Brennan,
In response to you blog “%$#@ Victim Survivability Profiling; Do Your Primary Search” dated October 28, 2010, Thanks for bringing up the topic and the opportunity to join in the discussion. I’d first like to give you a brief history on the origins of the Survivability Profiling Concept. The notion was born out of my 20+ years in the Fire Department of the City of New York (FDNY). To date, the FDNY has suffered 32 line of duty deaths in structural fires (not including the 343 members lost on September 11, 2001 or 11 other fatalities from other types of causes). The sobering fact that not one civilian was killed in any of those fires readily produces a dichotomy that deserves investigation.
Survivability Profiling became the subject of an Applied Research Project for the National Fire Academy’s Executive Fire Officer Program. The research earned a grade of 4.0 and is up for a National Outstanding Research Award for 2010. Survivability Profiling is a “concept.” And honestly, as a career interior -structural firefighter, not one that I am even 100% comfortable with. However, it was my intention to stir conversation and yes, even debate, on the subject which you so readily acknowledge. If my articles lead to a national discussion on what risks are acceptable and what are not, and helps save the life of one firefighter, than I am proud to have been part of it. You mentioned articles 1 & 2. Numbers 3 & 4 will be published in the near future and will feature practical applications.
The notion of Survivability Profiling follows in the footsteps of the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation’s/United States Fire Administration’s “16 Life Safety Initiatives" for Firefighters and the International Association of Fire Chief’s proposed “Rules of Engagement for Structural Firefighting.” It is an honor to be regarded in the same realm as such noble and recognized professionals and organizations.
You wrote that “We killed 25.4 firefighters for every civilian fire fatality during the time period examined so we aren’t necessarily doing a poor job of deciding if the occupant may or may not be alive. It doesn’t? Do you mean to say that loosing 25.4 firefighters for every one civilian fatality is acceptable? You continued “...we are doing a terrible job of making the fireground safe for our personnel.” Ah Ha! Exactly the point. We can improve fireground safety. Applying Survivability Profiling is a tool (Like any other in our firefighting arsenal) to assist in reaching that goal.
You question “If we are conducting a “proper” survivability profile then should responding crews ignore the information that they are receiving of victims trapped and the information from an occupant of the house who has exited the building saying something to the effect of, [My husband is in there!]?” Not quite. We should not ignore credible reports of trapped occupants. However, we are expected to be professional and use our education, training, and collective experiences to make sound survivability determinations that are simply unfathomable to civilians. That includes accepting our own realistic limitations.
“Would the “right” answer have been to decide from the front lawn that because there was a significant volume of fire and a building charged with smoke that there was no possible chance of.... the 84 year-old homeowner reported trapped, being alive and attacking from a defensive mode?” YES!“Significant volume of fire and a building charged with smoke” combined with the initial dispatch report to responding units—from the victim’s wife—that the paralyzed man on oxygen, was “in the chair that was on fire” in the part of the house with the largest volume of fire,suggest that Survivability Profiling would have been correct. The victim was not savable and the life of one firefighter and the severe injuries to two others may have been avoided.
You continue “...I would say no. I would say that while our objective must be to make the building behave and control the fire to create a relatively safe environment for our personnel, that in the face of a believable report of a trapped occupant that we must enter the building and search.Must enter the building and search? In all cases? Such a blanket statement has little validity. We all know from experience (in varying degrees) that fires can be uncontrollable and are, at best, unpredictable. We also know that every fire is different. Fires can change drastically in a matter of seconds. We have policies & procedures to attempt to control them but, to “make them behave” is a naive notion.
You conclude “..That is why we are firefighters...” I beg to differ; we are firefighters to save savable lives, and property that has not already been lost.
“I am afraid that if the risk adverse mentality that has slowly, and insidiously, taken hold in the fire service continues then we will be pitted against the communities we are there to serve.” Insidiously? No ambush here my brother; we are trying to save firefighter’s lives. Us against the community? Possibly, but we will save firefighter lives and their families, departments, etc. from the pain of that experience. When you state “We will find ourselves either not fulfilling the expectations of our citizens, or we will see increased litigation and disciple for Incident Commanders, Company Officers, and Firefighters who make a decision, literally in the heat of battle, that results in a line of duty death or injury.” How many civilians do you know have realistic expectations of fire behavior & fire progression; smoke travel & its debilitating effects on humans; and the limited survival times within these hostile environments? Litigation will always be a concern. Our best defense continues to be sound – documented education; following established standards, policies, guidelines and procedures; and subsequent utilization of technological advances and scientific facts.
“While egregious errors in decision making must be dealt with through discipline the fact remains that we do not have perfect knowledge on the fireground. We do not have a Google Earth.” Here’s whereI agree with you 100%. “What we are really talking about defining, nationwide, the virtues and values of the American fire service. While fires happen locally, movements, like survivability profiling, become the cause célèbre on a national level. The time has come for this debate to extend beyond the firehouse kitchen table, or the bay floor. We must decide, at a national level as well as at a local level, what level of risk we will accept.” Amen. Check out the NFFF’s/USFA’s Life Saving Initiatives and the IAFC’s Rules of Engagement. That’s exactly what these organizations are trying to accomplish.
“We must decide what value we place on protecting both the lives and the property of the communities we serve. We must train our members to be Fire Service Warriors consummate professionals, who are able to thrive on in the dynamic and high risk environment of the modern fireground.” Here, here. We must also train firefighters that “saving lives” includes there own life! "...to thrive on in the dynamic and high risk environments...” is simply not always possible for firefighters. Top “Warriors” throughout history (including Theodore Roosevelt) have learned this valuable lesson. In some cases they chose to defend in place or even advance in a different direction (i.e. retreat). We owe it to ourselves, our firefighters, their families, and the departments/communities we serve, to be able to do the same.
Just to let everyone know I launched Spartan-Concepts.com today! It is a work in progress but in the coming weeks it will offer you a location to check out upcoming courses, projects that we are developing, and contact the Spartan Team to schedule a training session.
Also, in the coming week, I will be moving the blog to a dedicated URL. You will still get the same quality content, but the domain name will get shorter.
Stand by for further information and please check out the Spartan-Concepts.com site.
First let me thank everyone who has been reading, commenting on, and emailing me about my post of Victim Survivability Profiling. It seems that the last week it has made some pretty wide rounds and I am grateful to all of you who have given it a read.
This week has been a busy one. I presented the three-hour version of Situational Awareness & Fireground Tactical Decision Making for MABAS Division 10 in western Cook and eastern DuPage Counties. With the students who came through this week I have had over 400 students through the class. It has been really rewarding. Thanks to all of the departments and divisions that have hosted the class. Be looking for information soon about open enrollment courses! I am working with a few departments to schedule host sites for classes that will be open enrollment.
This week also brought the copy edited version of my book, The Ready Position, to my door for me to do an "Author's Review". This being my first book I wasn't entirely sure what to expect. I was not surprised to see that there were some changes made, most of them fitting and appropriate, cleaning up my language without changing my meaning. I tend to write the way I talk, which works in this format, but for a formal TEXTBOOK I suppose it may not be 100% appropriate. I did have to do some tweaking of their edits (like changing their edit of journeyperson back to journeyman. A journey-person sounds like someone who should be walking around with a mullet and acid washed jeans. However after three long nights of reading I went through all 280+ pages of text and I am looking forward to seeing the galleys in six to seven weeks.
Be looking for some additional commentary on the VSP issue as well as my thoughts on progressive ways to deal with the budgetary crises that many of our departments and municipalities are facing in the coming weeks. Again, thanks to everyone out there reading and sending the links around.
First off if you aren't reading Urban Firefighter go now and start. This is the baby of Erich Roden (Milwaukee FD) and Ray McCormak (FDNY) two guys who created a magazine with amazing content to inspire, educate, and remind those of us whose vocation it is to crawl down a fire ravaged hallway to "keep fire in your life." Read it now, thank me later.
Second, my post today has generated some great conversation. I was on the phone with a friend of mine who is an aggressive Fire Officer and Career Battalion Chief who brought up some good points. It is important that we remember that each and every fire is the first time we are seeing it, sort of like each time a surgeon removes a skull based tumor its the first time he or she has done it in that persons head (even if they have removed them thousands of times before). That means we need to be vigilant in our size-up and allow good information to guide our decision making on the fireground.
Your size-up should be starting before you ever get on the rig in the morning. Who are the brothers and sisters you are riding out with that day? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the individuals and the crew? I had a Lieutenant who looked at his assembled crew one morning and said, "These guys are like dogs on a chain. If we get a fire its going to be like turning three pitbulls loose on a hunk of raw meat." Those are people you can trust to do things like Vent Enter Search, or allow an Outside Vent Member to go to the rear alone. Conversely if you have new, or less talented, folks on your crew you MUST reduce the speed of the fireground operation.
Unfortunately we do not always get to dictate that the crew for the day will have all of the abilities we would love. Not everyone willingly assumes that mantel of being a Fire Service Warrior. Or, we may not have the staffing we need to operate safely.
I've discussed the Line Of Duty Death of a 24 year-old volunteer firefighter (NIOSH F2008-34) in the past. He was one of three people operating on the scene of a house fire, where there we reports that the occupants were out, and he entered alone, became disoriented, and was caught in a Flashover. That is unacceptable. Not because he wanted to be aggressive, but because he didn't have a solid Standard Operating Guideline to follow that spelled out how many people needed to be on scene to make the building behave BEFORE we commit to interior operations. He did not belong in there, but his personal condition: his view of his Duty, compelled him to act. Rather than relying on an inexperienced member to stop we should have training or SOGs that spell out the minimum safe standards when they can go. It shouldn't be about deciding if the victim might be savable, it should be about deciding if our department can make the building behave to afford us a relatively safe battleground.
The Fire Service is constantly finding new buzzwords and phrases to describe what we do and how we should do it. One of the newest, trendiest, phrases around is “Victim Survivability Profiling” (VSP). The phrase was coined by FDNY Captain Stephen Marsar; he has presented his view of the topic in multiple articles. (1, 2) The difficulty with buzzwords and phrases is they attempt to distill complicated ideas to chicken nugget sized bites of information.
The core idea of VSP is that firefighters have to conduct a through size-up of a structure fire and conduct an analysis to determine the likelihood of a victim being rescueable. This is a perfectly reasonable idea. We should be conducting a dynamic, ongoing, size-up regardless of our position on the fireground. If we hope to maintain Situational Awareness we must constantly be observing conditions. We must use our judgment and training alongside our personal condition to decide what we are willing to risk.
I take issue with the application of Victim Survivability Profiling as a way of approaching the fireground operation. In his 2010 article the very first statistics that Captain Marsar presents are correlations of civilian fire deaths to firefighter line of duty deaths. For the three year period that he discusses (2007-2009) there were 102 firefighter line of duty deaths that occurred in structure fires while only five civilian fatalities occurred at the same fires.
The first likely place for us to jump in our conclusions is that our brothers and sisters must be acting far too risky. They are rushing head long into “lost causes” and getting killed as a result. After all if firefighters had conducted their survivability profiles they would have asked themselves, “…if people are suspected or known to be trapped—is there a reasonable assumption that they may still be alive? If not, we should slow down and attack the fire first and complete the searches when it is relatively safe for our operating forces to do so.” (3)
Here is where I find fault with the correlation of these statistics, there weren’t fatalities in these fires where our members died. IF we were seeing a ratio of one firefighter fatality to one civilian (or even ten fire fighter fatalities to one civilian because we operate as teams) I would say that we are being too aggressive in scenarios where civilian lives are beyond being saved. That isn’t that case. We killed 25.4 firefighters for every civilian fire fatality during the time period examined. So we aren’t necessarily doing a poor job of deciding if the occupant may or may not be alive we are doing a terrible job of making the fireground safe for our personnel.
Captain Marsar makes the case that once the ten minute mark has been reached from fire department notification that any victims will have been exposed to temperatures or Carbon Monoxide levels that would likely be fatal. In those circumstances were we are being told that the building is both vacant and derelict, or where a significant forcible entry problem is present because of HUD windows or Vacant Property Security systems we should take on less risk. There is nothing to save.
However our mission is to save lives and property. If you have a building that is still salvageable, or you have a stated victim in the building then we should be aggressively attack the fire to save the victim and the property. The NIOSH Fire Fighter Fatality Program report 2010-10, which examines the line of duty death of Brian Carey of the Homewood, IL, fire department, states, “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.” (4)
If we are conducting a “proper” survivability profile then should responding crews ignore the information that they are receiving of victims trapped and the information from an occupant of the house who has exited the building saying something to the effect of, “My husband is in there!”? Would the “right” answer have been to decide from the front lawn that because there was a significant volume of fire and a building charged with smoke that there was no possible chance of Mr. Wendell Elias, the 84 year-old homeowner reported trapped, being alive and attacking from a defensive mode?
I would say no. I would say that while our objective must be to make the building behave and control the fire to create a relatively safe environment for our personnel, that in the face of a believable report of a trapped occupant that we must enter the building and search. That is why we are firefighters.
If an agency is not going to conduct primary search operations of burning buildings because there is a risk of members being hurt or killed then we can cut staffing to two people per Station and run with ARFF vehicles rather than attack Engines and Trucks (has anyone thought that some politician who doesn’t actually care if citizens live or die might use this argument to “reduce risks to firefighters” while also cutting staffing?). Anything beyond an incipient fire can be fought from the outside and we can return to the day and age when the job of the Hook & Ladder Company was to hook the walls down to create a fire break.
This is not a safe job. I know that may come as a shock to people, but you can get hurt fighting fire. If your primary concern is not getting hurt you may have chosen the wrong career. I am not saying that Captain Marsar is advocating a position of “zero risk”, I have not sat down and talked with the Captain. As we can see from the Homewood LODD NIOSH report an attempt there are attempts to advocate a risk adverse agenda when dealing with a dynamic, high risk environment.
A firefighter who is unwilling to risk his or her life to save the lives and property of the community they have sworn to protect is of no more value than a police officer who will not use their weapon to stop a crime or a member of the military who refuses to go on patrol in Afghanistan.
I am afraid that if the risk adverse mentality that has slowly, and insidiously, taken hold in the fire service continues then we will be pitted against the communities we are there to serve. We will find ourselves either not fulfilling the expectations of our citizens, or we will see increased litigation and disciple for Incident Commanders, Company Officers, and Firefighters who make a decision, literally in the heat of battle, that results in a line of duty death or injury.
While egregious errors in decision making must be dealt with through discipline the fact remains that we do not have perfect knowledge on the fireground. We do not have a Google Earth™ view of the fireground with built in thermal imaging and ultrasound technology. We must make decisions rapidly, using a proven system of size-up and in accord with our department (and community’s) values. We must make sure that each and every member on the fireground is trained to operate there and make life and death decisions in a timely manner. Then when injuries and fatalities occur, and they will, we must learn from them and do what we can to reduce the avoidable errors.
We must also recognize the times we get it right, like in Oak Park, IL, where a teenage boy was rescued from a reportedly “vacant” building on October 10, 2010. Or the case of the Gilmore Street fire in Baltimore, MD, where crews rescued a homeless man who had taken shelter inside a rowhouse. He was burned, but he was rescued and transported. Would these fires have been blasted for “mistakes” had a firefighter been seriously injured or killed? Is it only a “mistake” if there is no victim saved?
What we are really talking about defining, nationwide, the virtues and values of the American fire service. While fires happen locally, movements, like survivability profiling, become the cause célèbre on a national level. The time has come for this debate to extend beyond the firehouse kitchen table, or the bay floor. We must decide, at a national level as well as at a local level, what level of risk we will accept. We must decide what value we place on protecting both the lives and the property of the communities we serve. We must train our members to be Fire Service Warriors, consummate professionals, who are able to thrive on in the dynamic and high risk environment of the modern fireground.
It may be worth remembering for a moment a passage from the speech that Teddy Roosevelt gave at the Sorbonne in 1910, “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” 5
