Good stuff as usual from the folks over at Vententersearch.com; a truckie tip on carrying your hooks while carrying your ladders. Go check it out!
Archives for firefighting
Pulled from Firegeezer.com
I normally don’t like to double-post, but I was checking out Firegeezer.com and found this great (okay, so if it was your truck it wasn’t so great) story about a little exposure issue.
THAT’S gotta suck, but I felt that I had to share. Good night.
There have been a few reports of firefighters injured from structural collapses in single-family dwellings recently; two which come to mind are the one in Illinois and one in Charlotte, NC which I read about courtesy of firefighterclosecalls.com
Situational awareness is the key in many of these types of incidents. What is the rate of fire progression? How long has it been burning? What are the structural conditions? Knowing the answers to these questions, even at the tactical level, is an important element in staying safe. Crews should keep a close eye on the progress of the attack and advise the IC if there is not a marked improvement in conditions after lines are placed in service.
One of my biggest concerns in 2008 has been the dwindling funds available for urban search and rescue programs around the nation. When things cut loose out there, these are the resources that everyone wants, but given the state of funding for these programs and the state of the economy, they may also be the first programs to see the axe.
When a few of us got together and developed the State Urban Search and Rescue Alliance in the middle of 2005, we had no idea that there was as much interest in putting together regional and state assets as there was. We found that virtually every state (and even some of our Caribbean neighbors and compatriots) were in the process of developing these programs, but people weren’t talking the same language (NIMS typing and credentialing was in its infancy), were “reinventing the wheel” in so many facets of their work, and most of all, weren’t communicating that they had things to share or that they had needs that could be filled by others.
The nation’s emergency service providers should learn a lesson from all of this: we can work together by reaching out to others, and find commonalities that can bring us together rather than to continue to stay in our “silos” and perpetuate the turf-guarding that keps us from solving our serious issues. In this day and age of stripped budgets, if we can show that we are willing to lay down our egos for the common good, we might have a bigger stick to wield when it comes to chasing the vultures away from our already scarce funding allocations.
Only 24 days of shopping left until Christmas. However, for something a little deeper, how about a discussion on keeping your head in the game. For my battalion’s quick training training today, I sent them a discussion on “sudden event” situations. Case in point: On Firefighterclosecalls.com, there was an article on a PA propane explosion that gave some interesting observations about the situation that unfolded after this sudden event. My question to my team was, “Are you prepared for a sudden ‘game-changing’ event during your operations?”
As responders, we go into so many calls with our own expectations as to how things are going to work. I am just as guilty of it as anyone else- it is human nature. We have to, however, shake loose some of our preconceived beliefs as to what we think is occurring vs. what is actually occurring. How do we do this? By getting facts through a proper size-up and maintaining good situational awareness. But even then, in the real world, the facts as we understand them may not be what is actually occurring.
Using a very real case in point from the other morning: While overhauling a fire the other shift, a number of us saw what looked to be an increasing smoke condition after we thought the fire was extinguished. Now there’s nothing wrong with that- the point in doing a complete overhaul is to uncover stuff like that (so we don’t have to come back later). If we had ignored the condition, or lied to ourselves about the situation and convinced ourselves that it was nothing, those decisions would have been wrong. But everything about the evidence led us to believe we had hidden fire someplace. We developed a plan to root it out, we had lines in place, but no matter what area we pulled, we found that the smoke continued.
Finally, we decided to increase the amount of ventilation in order to find out if we were dealing with pockets of smoke instead of a fire. This proved to be the case and the smoke ended. But it is a good example of seeing something you think is one thing and finding it to be something completely different.
It is almost contrary to human nature to see events unfold in a certain way 99 times, and not expect it to occur the same way for the next time. As a veteran firefighter, however, I know it will be on the 100th time that things go differently and Murphy will pay us a litle visit.
Like every other aspect of our job, we need to prepare ourselves mentally for how to overcome that complacency and act appropriately on the new evidence. This is appropriate not only for emergency response, but in our daily operations. Don’t assume for a minute that because you have seen something progress a certain way virtually every time that you have all of the facts.
Whenver you are working on solving a problem, use a good basic plan of action, know the strengths of the people who are working with you and challenge them to use those strengths, and most of all, don’t be afraid to roll with a revised plan. After all, situations change and if you fail to adjust, you are likely going to end up as part of the problem.
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