Good Luck, Bad Luck, and SOGs

It never ceases to amaze me how many times I hear or see really bad ideas espoused as the way to do things. Examples abound;

1) Refusing to wear seat belts in the rig "So we can go right to work at the scene".

2) Putting a vent crew on the roof of a structure that is an obvious defensive fire that has already autovented.

3) Putting engine crews in the collapse zone on a defensive fire.

4) Forcing crews to wear structural firefighitng PPE for situations where it actually creates hazards from heat stress, lack of mobility, or negative buoyancy such as remote wildland fires, USAR calls, and water rescues.

5) Advocating rescue procedures based on how easy they are to perform even if they create excessive risk to the patient.

My responses to the above are;

1) If your rig only makes it halfway to the scene and you are ejected from the rig, how did the few seconds you "saved" on this call make it worth the end of your career and maybe your life?

Those few seconds pale in comparison.

2) If the fire is through the roof, the fire has already been vertically ventilated. It's the fire's way of telling you to put the truckies to work somewhere else.

3) If your hose stream can't reach the interior of a defensive fire from a safe location, either get a bigger stream in play or just protect exposures with the one you have. You don't need to see how close you can get to the fire when it can drop a wall or an overhang on your head.

4) If you fight wildland fires, do USAR work, or do water rescue, dress for the sport you're playing. Wearing structural PPE to wildland fires can kill you from heat stress and will greatly reduce your mobility. Mobility is a big deal when you're hiking 100 yards - or 5 miles - in a wildland firefight. Mobility is a big deal in confined spaces, trenches, or structural collapse. Structural PPE doesn't help you float, so don't wear it to water rescues.

5) We need to follow best practices because they're the best thing to do, not because they're the easiest thing to do. Rescue procedures need to be evaluated on what we might do TO the patient as well as what we can do FOR the patient.

The photo above shows a best practice - placing a barrier board between rescue tools and the patients. That provides fragment and impact protection for the patients just in case something goes wrong. The rescuers in the photo are demonstrating a best practice instead of just hoping that they get lucky.

If you do something dangerous or stupid and get away with it once, you're lucky.

If you get away with it twice, you're VERY lucky. If you get away with it three times, it's now your SOG.

If you count on good luck as an SOG, sooner or later you'll be attending a LODD funeral for someone that was killed by "We've always done it that way."

Be smart, and don't count on good luck as a SOG. Eventually, your good luck will run out.

I don't want "Unlucky" on my tombstone. How about you?

1st Due Arithmetic

How do you know when you have enough firefighters to complete all of the jobs required for a 1st-due assignment? It's not always easy to tell, because the equation of firefighters vs. fire is weighted differently at almost every fire. NFPA 1710 provides a baseline number, but some of us don't have even that small number of firefighters available. That number isn't sufficient to deal with a high-rise fire, a big box fire, a pier fire, or just about anything bigger than a duplex or small, single commercial occupancy if you want to accomplish all of the necessary tasks simultaneously.

With the budget crunches, brownouts, station closures, and disbanding of fire companies that we hear about every day, it makes you wonder when the "fuzzy math" is going to stop.

1st-Due Arithmetic is simply about numbers...numbers of firefighters, apparatus, and command personnel. If you don't have enough firefighters to stretch a line, then the fire is going to exceed the capability of that line by the time the water arrives at the combustion. If you don't have enough firefighters to search a building of whatever size confronts you, then the search isn't going to be completed very quickly. If you don't have enough firefighters to ventilate, then the engine crews take an unnecessary and dangerous beating. Most importantly, if you don't have enough firefighters to staff all of the 1st Due functions plus an Incident Commander, a Safety Officer, and a RIT Team...yes, a REAL RIT team, then an even fuzzier math sometimes takes place.

If we're shorthanded, Command may choose to staff a RIT team made up of firefighters that would otherwise be doing basic engine or truck work...forcing Side C, providing ladders for secondary egress, stretching a backup hoseline, or completing the primary search. That means we'll be putting off essential firefighting basics so we can staff a team that we'll hopefully never have to use.

On the other hand, we can't put everyone except Command and one pump operator inside and think that we'll always get away with it.

How do we ensure that we get enough numbers for the 1st Due Arithmetic? In theory, it's simple. We send more firefighters on the first alarm. Repeat after me..."Overkill is good, Overkill is good, Overkill is good." Use Automatic Aid/Mutual Aid if you have to, but get the additional firefighters there in numbers that shift the equation advantage from the fire to the firefighters. Send the extra engine or truck on the first alarm and cancel them if it's food on the stove. No matter what it takes, have an adequate number of firefighters respond on the first alarm!

After all, the fire doesn't understand budget cuts...it just understands 1st Due Arithmetic.

Safety Culture vs. Extinguishment Culture – Smart Fire Departments Can Have BOTH!

If you have a personal or departmental "Extinguishment Culture", would you grab a line and enter this flashed over abandoned house that is showing signs of impending collapse? If you have a personal or departmental "Safety Culture", would you wear your SCBA , a traffic safety vest, and crank a PPV fan while sitting in the rig a half-mile down the street? Chances are, if you are a U.S. firefighter, you'll choose an option somewhere in between the two extremes.

In a recent FDIC speech, Lt. Ray McCormack, made some statements that have generated a great deal of controversy in the U.S. fire service. His comments in favor of an “Extinguishment Culture” and against a “Safety Culture” in particular have stimulated a lot of thought, comment, disagreement, and counter-disagreement. Art “ChiefReason” Goodrich, in particular, blogged a sharp and well-articulated counterpoint to Lt. McCormack’s thoughts.

I watched the video of Ray's speech several times, and read some of the thoughtful, not-so-thoughtful, and some downright nasty comments that other firefighters posted in replies to Art’s counterpoint. I gave the issue a lot of consideration for several days, watched the video again to make sure that I didn’t miss something, and decided that I finally couldn’t go any longer without saying something myself.

First, for those of you who called Art a “coward”, a “yard-stander”, or who made rude, vulgar, or even threatening responses to his blog, shame on you!!! Those comments were an embarrassment to the profession and to the people that made them. Just because another firefighter has a differing opinion doesn’t make him a coward. In particular, I noticed that many of the alleged firefighters that called Art a coward and worse posted anonymously. Does anyone else see the irony in that??? In case you don’t, I’ll spell it out for you. You call someone who posts his opinion under his real name a coward, while being too chicken to post your own name??? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out who the real cowards are when that occurs.

Brotherhood includes respecting other firefighters opinions and differences, even when you disagree. Calling a brother firefighter a coward out of one side of your mouth for a simple difference of opinion while preaching the brotherhood out of the other side is practicing the former while demonstrating that you really don’t understand the latter.

On the other hand, for those of you who castigated Lt. McCormack for his fist-pumping, gum-chewing performance at FDIC, you’re focusing on style points at the expense of consideration of the substance. I don’t care about the style points – what is important is what he said. I don’t think Ray was advocating that we commit suicide for anyone or anything. It is apparent that he truly believes that extinguishing the fire before it grows larger tends to make the fireground safer, and he’s got a point. Al Brunacini’s 1985 comment that “Things on the fireground tend to get better when the fire is extinguished” tends to agree with Ray, too.

There are three important issues that neither Lt. McCormack or Chief Goodrich addressed.
1) New York firefighting rules don’t work for everyone else. Not every fire department has the building types, manpower, apparatus, or response times to which Lt. McCormack is accustomed. When you have a short response time for several companies and 35 or 40 firefighters to a multistory, ordinary construction apartment building, there is a reasonable expectation that the structure won’t collapse on the firefighters in the first 15 minutes of the firefight, and that you’ll have enough manpower to accomplish all of the necessary fireground tasks in fairly short order. On the other hand, when you get 3 or 4 firefighters, an engine and a tanker, no hydrants, and a 15-minute response time to a lightweight construction, two-story house with truss floors and roof, putting firefighters inside with a working fire is flipping a coin with their survival chances, no matter the reason for or method of entry. Years of fire fatality statistics show us that in almost every lightweight construction house fire, the occupants either self-rescue or they are dead when we get there.

2) We generally rescue civilians from smoke, not from fire. If the room – or structure – has flashed over, anyone in it is dead. If the truss void has flashed over, pretty much anyone we put in it or on it is probably going to be dead, too. On the other hand, if you have a solid apartment building with smoke-filled apartments above the fire, your team should take the can, tools, search rope, and thermal imager and go get ‘em. New York and other big cities have a lot of situations where they can rescue people from smoke. The vast majority of U.S. firefighters don’t see a lot of those situations, because they don’t fight fires in those structure types very often. The rules for non-dimensional lumber frame houses or garden apartments are simply different than a lot of the building construction seen in the big northeast and Midwestern cities.

3) We can have a culture that achieves both safety and extinguishment. That culture is one that believes strongly in fire sprinklers in EVERY occupancy, along with smoke detectors, kitchen hood systems, and monitored fire alarm systems. Fire protection systems – especially automatic sprinkler systems - make the building safer for the civilians and for the firefighters. Their response time is better than what any engine company on the planet can match. Of course, that will take away a lot of the “fun factor” in going to fires, but the public doesn’t fund the fire department based upon us having fun while they experience tragedy.

Firefighting is challenging, it’s ever-evolving, and the rules for doing it are not the same for every occupancy or for every fire department. A culture that places extinguishment over safety in all situations is a culture that will run into Born Losers and unnecessarily kill a lot of firefighters. A culture that places safety over extinguishment in all situations is going to have fewer funerals…and more parking lots. We need a culture that stresses both. Safety and extinguishment are not mutually exclusive. We need to be smart about choosing the right mix, depending upon the situation.

Putting generic Strategic Priorities to work

One of the things I do with my all-too-rare spare time is that I read. My favorite genre is science fiction and sci-fi fantasy, because it often fuels my imagination. A lot of yesterday's science fiction ends up being tomorrow's science fact, too.

I recently finished a book regarding an unusual twist on a fairly standard plot - an uneasy intergalactic peace brokered by an advanced non-human society after two different human societies attempted mutual genocide.

The author could have been writing Strategic Priorities for fire and rescue. Her take on how to keep oriented to the proper Strategic Priorities, no matter what the situation involved four simple concepts and keeping them in sequence. The priorities...Life, Mission, Security, Operations. Fire and rescue services would be well-served to remember those same four priorities during both emergency situations and during our everyday routine.

Life - If we lose our lives, we can't accomplish the mission or any of our other priorities. At the scene, we need to focus on the most important things - discovering the things that can kill us and avoiding them. Those things can be buildings, forces of nature, evil people, or or our own egos. Or...it can be more insidious...smoking, lack of fitness, heat stress, cumulative stress, or a driver that's just a little sloppy with the accelerator.

Mission - If we don't accomplish the mission, we're wasting our time being there in the first place, plus our training time, plus our pre-planning time, plus our vehicle maintainence, plus the public's trust...

Security - If we don't secure our apparatus, our stations, and the rest of the public property with which we've been entrusted, then we may not be able to take care of our first two priorities. If we're missing tools, or if our station is wide open for anyone to steal from it or trash it while we're gone, then we might be missing the one tool that will save our lives or just the public's trust that we're going to be responsible with the expensive stations and equipment with which we're entrusted.

Operations - We have to keep on operating, no matter what challenges occur. Budget cuts, brownouts, station closures...the department keeps on operating. High call volume and unusual calls, check. Major terrorist attack, check. Long, boring shifts with few or no calls, check. A firefighter-arsonist that shames us all...the rest of us still keep on pulling on the gear and rolling out the doors.

If in doubt about what the priorties are, make sure that you and your crew can stay alive...the other priorities are important, but you can live without them. After all, imaginary intergalactic heros do it all the time, and they have it made compared to us. After all, their problems are imaginary.

To evaluate progress, take a SEET

During simple call like a room and contents fire, it's usually fairly easy to evaluate progress.

The black smoke turns to white steam, the fire goes out, the building cools down, we go home, and the invetigators take over. The next morning, the local newspaper reports the wins and losses...hopefully with a box score that reads "Fire Department wins, 1 to 0". The local paper usually isn't shy about reporting the score when we're on the losing end, either.

Have you ever seen the morning paper report a tie score?

I've never seen a "Fire 1, Fire Department 1" front page box score. That means that eventually we figured out who won, but during the fight, it wasn't easy to tell. We can have a smoky fire that's difficult to find, even with thermal imagers. We can have a prolonged entrapment at a motor vehicle accident with so much wreckage that it's difficult to tell if we're making real progress or not. We can have a major incident where it takes days to find all of the problems and weeks to sort them out.

I've found a simple way to evaluate progress that works on almost any incident type...you just have a SEET. SEET is a simple set of four strategy considerations that you ask yourself Jeopardy style...in the form of a question.

Safety - Are we being safe? If we don't create additional patients, properly care for the people who were injured before we arrived, and operate using safety equipment, PPE, and while practicing safe behaviors, then we're being safe. If we're injuring responders, operating carelessly, or not wearing appropriate PPE, then we're not being safe.

Effectiveness - Are we being effective? Are we getting the job done? Can we tell? Task completion is the easiest way to measure effectiveness, but on a prolonged incident, task completion might have to be broken down into a subset of smaller tasks. "Cut through Beam A by 4 PM" or "Defensively confine the fire to the structure of origin if we can't extinguish the fire offensively in the next ten minutes" are pretty obvious measures of effectiveness.

Efficiency - Are we being efficient? Did we do an accurate size-up and take the right tools to the building or wrecked vehicle the first time, or did we have to send firefighters back to the rig for something that was forgotten or not anticipated? Did we split a four-firefighter crew so that they could accomplish two simultaneous tactical objectives? Are we operating in a manner that looks calm, smooth, and professional?

Timeliness - Are we doing things in a timely manner? Are we doing things at the right time and in the right sequence. Timeliness includes getting water on the room and contents before it extends, stabilizing the wrecked vehicle prior to applying tons of force to the it...and to the patient's cervical spine injury, and in performing tactical priorities in the correct sequence for the situation. RECEO-VS is a mneumonic invented by a Timeliness fan.

I don't know about you, but I'm having a SEET the next time I want the paper to report a win for the firefighters.

Staging Prevents DIOs

"DIO" is a "Disfunctional Incident Outcome". A DIO can be something as mundane as two engines trying to lay in from opposite directions in the same street, or it can be something as severe as a LODD at hazmats, shootings, and other violent or escalating incidents.
Staging Prevents Funerals when you're responding to incidents with an expanding Hot Zone.

Rolling the Window Down on Safety

Skip Kirkwood's Jems Connect blog had an excellent post about the recent multiple shootings at the nursing home in Carthage, NC, Binghamton, NY, and todays triple police officer murder in Pittsburgh, PA. Skip made some excellent points about how to approach dangerous scenes.

Skip's post triggered reminders of some old street safety habits that were daily occurrances in two high-volume cities where I previously worked. I have gotten a little slack on using these basic survival behaviors, due to the relatively peaceful nature of the town where I work now.
Skip's reminder that two of the three above multiple shootings occurred in similar "peaceful" towns to mine reminded me that there's no such thing as a really safe place to work fire-rescue or EMS.

My old habits - ones I dusted off today - are the following:

1) Roll the Window Down on Safety. If you roll the window down at least a block out from the scene, you can hear screams or gunfire that would otherwise not be heard over the death metal your new EMS partner or engine driver plays while responding. Rolling down the window also lets you smell the natural gas leak started by the car that creamed the meter when it hit the house or the unusual smoke smells from the landscaping company fire that was reported next door to the actual fire location. With the window up, you have disengaged four of your five senses - vision is the only one working. With the window down, you add the senses of hearing and smell, and triple the number of senses working to keep you alive and unhurt.

2) Stage on every call where a known violent event has occurred. Domestic violence, reported shootings/stabbings/assaults, robberies, hostage situations, or even unknown suspicious scenes or high-crime locations are good places to stay away from until law enforcement secures the scene. Stage a block away, out of line of sight, and it could save the lives of everyone riding your rig.

3) Don't run the lights and siren right up to the front door. Unless you work on crowded city streets where you can't get to the scene any other way, it won't make a real difference if you cut the lights and siren a block out. Being the center of attention is great...unless you're a shooter's bullseye. Reducing your "Bullseye Profile" might also save your life.

Roll the window down, stage, lower your Bullseye Profile, and remember that bad things happen in otherwise peaceful towns as well as in the big city.