Ramp Strikes, Mom's Name, and Survival

Although I love to read, I haven't had much reading time lately. Work and completing the edits of my chapter in Jones & Bartlett's new Fundamentals of Technical Rescue has taken up most of my spare time. I have been able to complete a book I have wanted to read for a long time recently, Deep Survival by Laurance Gonzales.

Gonzales' work is an excellent study in what it takes to survive extreme situations. He discusses several high-profile and not-so-high-profile incidents in which some people lived, some died, and the reasons for each. His research also includes an astonishing view into brain chemistry, how our brains are wired, and why people make some of the decisions we do under stress.

Some of his research led him to the pilot's ready room on a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier where pilots were preparing for night landings. In case you're not familiar, night carrier landings are so dangerous and stressful that physiological studies show that the pilots are actually more stressed during the carrier landings than in combat. In the pre-flight briefing, the squadron commander tells the pilots "If you're a quarter of a mile out and I ask you your mother's name, YOU DON'T KNOW!" He went on to say that the pilots are so focused that they effectively lose 1/2 of their IQ...the half that's not necessary to land the plane.

The commander later told Gonazlez that one of the primary loss-of-focus accidents in carrier landings is the "Ramp Strike". These are devastating accidents where the pilot focuses so strongly on getting to a safe place - the flight deck - that he loses focus on the steps it takes to get to safety - actually flying the plane in the correct pattern. Ramp strikes generally kill the pilot and other carrier crew members, destroy planes worth several million dollars per copy, and cause major damage to one of our most expensive strategic weapons systems. That's a bad outcome from an event that - although dangerous - our Navy pilots perform safely dozens of times per day.

Gonzales also relates the Mt. Hood climbing accident where one team fell into another and both teams ended up with dead team members and others seriously injured. The second team was involved because they looked up at the team climbing a ridge above them and didn't realize that they were directly in that team's fall line. Gonzales illustrated this by making the same climb himself. When the guide asked him "Which way is down", Gonzales pointed down the ridge to the starting point at the lodge, even though a dropped ice axe - or falling climber - would fall off the side of the ridge, not down the edge of the ridge toward the lodge. He then realized that he'd made a basic orientation mistake - pointing toward percieved safety instead of really assessing his surroundings.

The message - staying oriented is important. When starting search rope training, I've had firefighters tell me "That's so old school. Groping around in smoke is silly - just use a Thermal Imager."

My response is that "The Thermal Imager gets you in to the seat of the fire or to the victim, but it doesn't get you out." The search rope system helps prevent disorientation and it helps you re-orient if you become disoriented. If you don't have a hoseline, anchor a search rope and stay hooked up to it. If you get disoriented, you have two choices - either spend air, effort, and time in a self-rescue or staying put, calling a Mayday, and hoping that RIT gets you before the fire and smoke do. Staying oriented and maintaining a positive connection to the exterior gives you a much better chance of self-rescuing.

A large component of personal survival is mental - both pre-event and during it. The pre-event decision is about doing a thorough, focused size-up and risk-benefit analysis, and taking only calculated risks. The during-event mental focus is to trust the survival system you put in place during the event. Being able to synthesize survival techniques from other professions can help us analyze our mistakes and avoid making them again. As my friend Mick Mayers says, "There are a lot of lessons we can learn from the military". I'd add that there are also lessons to be learned from mountain and river guides, airline pilots, wilderness survival experts, and others who are in the daily business -as we are - of surviving in dangerous places.

The lesson here is to assess your surroundings, have pre-event survival systems in place, control your emotions, and avoid erroneous perceptions of exactly how to get to a safe place.

And...if you call a Mayday, and I ask you your mother's name, YOU DON'T KNOW!

Getting Familiar with Unfamiliar Dirt

I recently spent a week on vacation that included a lot of reading on the beach. I was able to complete a six-book series, the Corean Chronicles by L.E. Modsitt, Jr... an excellent read if you're into the genre. In one of the books, a group of soldiers is deployed to an area with which none of them are familiar. They're tired from traveling and just want to set up camp and relax, but their officer immediately sends out patrols. They complain, but the officer tells the soldiers that they need to "Get familiar with the unfamiliar dirt" where they're operating in order to prevent any nasty surprises from the enemy. Frank Brannigan always told firefighters that buildings were our enemy, and "Know Your Enemy". Driving around a beachfront town that I hadn't visited in several years reminded me that there was a lot of unfamiliar dirt there, and that the unfamiliar dirt had a lot of unfamiliar buildings on it.

How will getting familiar with unfamiliar dirt help firefighters? It helps us learn how to gain access to places we may never have been, it helps us learn occupancy-specific hazards, and it helps us plan firefights in places that aren't directly conntected to the dirt.

Some firefighters don't like to spend time on the dirt at the Training Center.
The places you train are built on some very important dirt.
I spent four hours on this dirt yesterday (Sunday) with several companies of very dedicated firefighters. So did two other chief officers, one of whom was off duty at the time.



Some of your dirt has structures containing bad things like hazardous materials containers...



...or hazardous materials processing.




The dirt may be open and inviting on Side A.
No matter how familiar you are with Side A, if you have to bail out the Side C door of this occupancy, you're in trouble.





How about this dirt? Which Side C door connects to which strip mall occupancy?
How well will the cantilivered awning hold up if fire attacks the interior anchors?
If you need to force entry on Side C, will basic engine tools get you through the fortified doors, or will you need the additional power carried by a ladder or rescue company?





Is some of the structure built a long way above the dirt?
How will you access the upper floors of this structure...especially if the 1st due is a single-station volunteer fire department? Are there fire protection systems to help you keep this building from becoming part of the dirt?






Does the structure extend horizontally away from the dirt?
Do you have a way to handle emergencies in places that are not readily accessible from the dirt?







Are some of the structures on the dirt crammed tightly together?
Can you safely walk between the fire building and an adjacent exposure, or is there a chance that you'll be trapped or burned if part of the fire structure collapses or autovents while you're walking the 4-foot wide dirt between the buildings?





Does the dirt include an antique building modified into apartments over an industrial occupancy with no fire protection systems?

The officer in the Corean Chronicles had an important teaching point for the fire service...learn the unfamiliar dirt to which you're first due...

..so that you don't get familiar with this kind of unfamiliar dirt.

Mutual Dependence on Independence Day

Independence Day - July 4 - is a uniquely American holiday. Many of us treat it like just another summer holiday - a barbecue, swimming or boating, relaxing with friends, and concluding with an evening of fireworks. This year, I ask you to take a few minutes to do something a little different. The American Revolution was the brain child of a few people who resolved to risk their businesses, their fortunes, and their very lives to gain independence from Great Britain. After a war that destroyed lives and property, they achieved their aim. How did they achieve independence? They achieved it by working and fighting - together - to overcome a common enemy. They were not willing to give up, to back down, or to compromise on the essentials of what they believed to be right. When he said "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately", Benjamin Franklin understood the dichotomy that in order for America to become independent, the people fighting for that independence had to be mutually dependent by "hanging together". Benjamin Franklin was a firefighter, and he understood the community's mutual dependence upon the fire department as the protector of lives, property, and commerce, too.

Patrick Henry, another early American patriot, advised constant vigilance when being faced with the loss of freedom and mutual happiness and prosperity. He also understood the value of being able to jointly determine our common fate. His comment..."The battle, Sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave. Besides, Sir, we have no election."

In 2009, the American Fire-Rescue and EMS services are under attack, in a different way from how our country was in 1776, but under attack no less. We are under attack from the global economy that steals revenue from our cities and counties. We are under attack from increasing call volumes while under pressure to reduce staffinug and to make that old apparatus last "just one more year". We are under attack from citizens that want us to be there in their hour of need, but who don't understand the realities of making the services available in a rapid and safe manner. Our funding is under attack from politicians and administrators that see the economic meltdown as a way to permenently reduce the costs of providing fire, rescue, and EMS services.

So, how do we "hang together" to overcome these problems?

An example is the Boston firefighters who - on their own time - staffed firehouses that would have otherwise been browned out. Columbia and Irmo, SC firefighters recently worked together to fight a house fire near both city's boundaries. Sylvania Township, OH firefighters set up a live burn for some of their elected officials - officials that had previously opposed a 1.5 mil fire tax increase. My department jointly operates three special teams (Hazmat, COBRA/WMD, and USAR) with our good friends from Bluffton Township Fire & Rescue. These are just a few examples of creative ways to work together to maintain and improve Fire/Rescue and EMS services when we can no longer just throw money at every problem.

Like it or not, we're mutually dependent on our neighboring Fire/Rescue and EMS departments, our elected officials, and our public administrators. We need to foster creative ways to use that mutual dependence to our mutual benefit. If you don't like running mutual aid or automatic aid with a neighboring department, get together, work out the problems, and start helping each other. If your services are being cut due to the economy, do your homework, get the facts, and enlist community support to help minimize the cuts. If you are at odds with your public administrators and/or elected officials, invite them to participate in a live burn, extrication demonstration, or a CPR class to find out just how physically demanding our jobs really are...and why it takes that expensive manpower to do the job safely.

Once you determine the best way to foster the mutual dependence with the other stakeholders, follow Benjamin Franklin's advice and "Resolve to perform what you ought. Perform without fail what you resolve."

Tomorrow is Independence Day in the United States. Remember the people who fought to make it so, and in the words of our most famous early firefighter "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." Let's foster our mutual dependence to provide the people whom we serve Liberty - Liberty from fire, entrapment, and the loss of loved ones and livelihood. Pointing out our mutual dependence can go a long way toward improving bad relationships. Remember Great Britain, our enemy in 1776 and again in 1812? They're now our closest ally, sharing mutual dependence.

Don't save Safety for the Critique

At the end of the 2009 Safety, Health, and Survival week, I'm sitting here sadly shaking my head. June has been a bad month for the U.S. Fire and EMS services. This month there have already been 10 reported LODDs involving 9 firefighters and a rescue squad member. One of the LODDs was from my state, South Carolina. Since Safety Week started, a random sampling of fire and EMS news includes an Ohio firefighter that was originally reported as a LODD that is on life support following a line-of-duty event, three San Antonio firefighters burned when a fire unexpectedly breached a wall during an interior attack, and four Baltimore firefighter injured in an engine vs. structure crash. This morning, I woke up to see this bad news about a St. Paul FD ambulance being involved in an accident that resulted in a civilian fatality. I've had a very busy week, with focusing on the punch list for our nearly-completed training center, but I've still tried to find time to promote Safety Week and to ensure that our firefighters had easy access to Safety Week activities and information.

A couple of evenings ago, I had the chance to stop by one of our busier stations. The crew was taking advantage of a little lull in the action to engage in a little team-building discussion. The discussion was pretty interesting. It centered on chief officers - one of the four areas of concentration for this year's Safety Week. The comments were, in typical firehouse fashion, blunt and to the point. One of the firefighters commented that chief officers need to understand the difference between thinking tactically and thinking like a safety officer when they act as the Incident Safety Officer. I asked what he meant. He went on to say that some chiefs focus on how to extinguish the fire regardless of what vest they're wearing, while others understand the Safety Officer's role and how to carry it out without interfering with a properly-run operation. The other firefighters commented on the other extreme, when the Safety Officer attempts to start the post-incident critique while the battle against the fire is still being waged.

So where does the Safety Officer draw the line?

The Safety Officer is charged with recognizing unsafe acts and conditions, informing Command, and can take direct action to stop unsafe acts or remediate unsafe conditions. How do you do that without inappropriate interference with the tactical situation? My rule is that if the issue is minor, if I'm the Safety Officer, I correct it and move on. For example, if the pump operator forgot to don his safety vest, I tell him to don it and keep moving. If a firefighter wants to start a mid-fire conversation about the unsafe acts of a different company, I tell him "Save the critique for the critique." On the other hand, if I see a company starting to make entry into a building with collapse potential, not only do I stop the entry, I immediately notify Command that we need to evacuate the building and I start establishing and marking a collapse zone. The trick is to know when to make a big deal out of the problem, when to simply communicate conditions to Command, and when to directly correct a minor problem.

As my good friend and colleague Mick Mayers says..."Don’t try to take shortcuts because you think it is easier. Shortcuts are cheating and cheating ultimately results in a catastrophic failure when someone gets caught." If you're in the Safety Officer role and you see someone taking a dangerous shortcut, stop it!

There are some common sense things that we can all do to make life safer and easier for all of us. If the drivers don't routinely don full gear, then they should have their traffic vest on their seat and don it prior to responding. It won't delay the comany's turnout time, trust me. If you use the Passport accountability system or a similar system that uses helmet identifiers, then the officer should ensure that every company member has their name tags in the system and has helmet identifiers properly attached as soon as they enter quarters to start the shift. In other words, Don't let the little things become big things.

When you get to the critique, if some of us are a little peeved because the Safety Officer made us wear eye protection to operate extrication tools, made us stop to put on a traffic vest, or stopped us from entering that marginal structure fire that we just "knew" we could hit offensively and "get away with it", then remember that you're alive and well to be peeved. After all, we can work out critique points at the critique. We can't, however, go back and unbury a LODD brother or sister at the critique.

In closing, even though this year's Safety Week is over, don't act as if it is. Drive safely, condition, wear incident-appropriate PPE, stay hydrated, get help when you need it, and look out for each other. Rehab as if your life depends on it, especially in the tropical heat wave we're having in the south right now. Make every week Safety Week.

The Monkey Parable, Safety, and Resistance to Change

The 2009 Fire and EMS Safety, Health, and Survival Week begins tomorrow. My department is using these resources to help our firefighters develop healthy lifestyles, and maintain a safer work environment. In honor of Safety Week, I offer the following - The Monkey Parable.

Once upon a time, some researchers conducted an experiment. They obtained five monkeys and placed them into a single cage. In the center of the cage was a stairway that terminated in thin air. After a hungry night in the cage, the monkeys saw a researcher lowering a bunch of bananas through the bars above the stairs. The monkeys immediately charged up the stairs toward the food. Other researchers immediately blasted the monkeys with ice cold water from fire hoses, played tapes of loud, discordant music, and turned on strobe lights. They repeated these actions every time they lowered the bananas into the cage. It didn't take the monkeys long to refuse to set foot on the stairs, no matter how hungry they were.

Once this conditioning had taken effect, the researchers removed one of the monkeys from the cage and replaced him with a 2nd-generation monkey. Down came the bananas. The new monkey raced for the stairs. Before he could set foot on the bottom step, the other four monkeys grabbed him and beat him down, not wanting to experience a repeat of the previous few days' unpleasantness. No icy bath, strobe lights, or discordant music resulted. This was repeated until all of the 1st generation monkeys had been replaced by 2nd generation monkeys, none of which had experied the unpleasantness through which the 1st generation had lived.

Once the 2nd generation monkeys were completely conditioned, one of them was removed from the cage and replaced with a 3rd generation monkey. Down came the bananas. The newest monkey dashed for the food, was caught at the bottom of the stairs, and beaten down, just as the 2nd generation monkeys were beaten down by the 1st generation monkeys. During the beat-down, the new monkey cried out"Why are you guys beating me?" The beat down stopped and the four 2nd-generation monkeys looked around at each other. Finally, one of them replied..."I don't know, it's just that we've always done it that way." Hopefully, fire-rescue and EMS personnel aren't so conditioned to "We've always done it that way" that we act like the monkeys in the story. We're supposed to be smarter than monkeys.

Chief Officers share in the responsibility to help keep our firefighters safe. Safety Week activities include resources to help the chiefs take care of the firefighters and paramedics for whom they are responsible.

How many firefighters will continue to die unnecessarily because we run into Born Losers...because we've always done it that way? How many of us will refuse to use new tactics and tools because we like the old ones...because we've always done it that way? How many fire and EMS personnel will die because we are too busy donning SCBA or performing patient care to ensure our own safety...because we've always done it that way?

Let's commit to safer, healthier firefighters and emergency operations. If we don't, then we're really not any smarter than the monkeys.

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.