WHOSE CRISIS?
BY CARL F. WELSER
“Every dispatch is a crisis.” Such broad statements are risky. Perhaps the sentence should read, “Every dispatch implies a crisis” or–better yet–“Every legitimate dispatch implies a crisis.” Play with the sentence as long as you wish. The complex link between dispatch and crisis will not come unhooked without some form of mitigation. It takes a competent person to recognize the nature of any crisis and to resolve it.
Every dispatch/crisis provides an opportunity for action or education or both–action as deemed appropriate, remedial education when the proposed crisis proves less than a major meltdown.
The firefighter who plunges into action with both arms waving, voice rising an octave and a half, needs to go back to fire school. The fire chief who conducts an on-scene educational session with both arms waving, voice rising an octave and a half, needs to review Educational Methods 101 for the Adult Learner. As Arizona Al, the firefighter`s friend, might say, “Don`t bring your own crisis to someone else`s crisis.”
DEFINING THE CRISIS
The success of every mission depends on how the crisis is defined. Resolution also hinges on who gets to define the crisis. The citizen who reports the crisis defines it one way. The experienced fire officer arriving to deal with the crisis will judge by another standard. A veteran firefighter and the average person on the street will likely grade a crisis differently. The temptation to toy with another person`s sense of what is critical will lead a mission astray.
Scorn and belittlement do not play well among distressed people, especially among a few people most prone to snarling themselves and others repeatedly in a noncrisis. Barging into someone else`s sense of a crisis with a scornful attitude is like picking up a vital communication wire in the jaws of a pair of cutting pliers. In the end, the cutters may prove to be the tool of choice. But you`d best have a good estimate of the outcome before putting the squeeze on.
TREAT THE CRISIS WITH RESPECT
The safest ground is found by assuming at the outset that any prudent citizen claiming a crisis is indeed suffering a crisis. As the scene develops, you may also note that accepting every crisis at face value requires an active imagination on the part of both parties. That`s when things get ticklish.
The best advice is to treat every dispatch, every report of a crisis, with respect. After all, that other person`s sense of crisis gives you the opportunity to be who you are and to do what you do. Don`t fritter opportunity away.
To review the obvious, a veteran firefighter, having accumulated hundreds of hours of training, years of experience, and stacks of recertification credits, will prove equal to most any challenge presenting itself out there on the street. He also finds it difficult to deal with fools. But better to deal credibly with a fool than to become one. Ancient wisdom reminds us that cruel action only hurts the actor.
An understandable hardship develops when a broadly trained, skilled responder confronts the contrived crisis of a slightly loony customer. Experience alone prepares the responder to discern the imagination of a fool. He may approach the point of burnout when the majority of street activity seems played by a whole cage of fools and falls completely beneath his dignity.
Surviving a less than legitimate dispatch requires a keen sense of humor, a firm grip on reality, and an unfailing talent for turning rhubarb into pie. In the final analysis, burnout is better than rust-out anyway.
Fortunately, most of us are gifted with relatively few authentic crises in an entire lifetime–perhaps a personal accident, the loss of a loved one, a terrible storm or fire. The experience of dealing with a few crises of your own, plus witnessing the elegant resolution of crises in the lives of other people–and engineering a few elegant resolutions of your own for other people–weigh heavily in the experienced fire officer`s toolbox.
The chief differences between an experienced fire officer and a citizen reporting a crisis out in the neighborhood are revealed in their opposing perceptions of time and proportions. Until you have lived through a genuine crisis of your own, you cannot really appreciate how an unfolding crisis distorts the flow of time or how deceptively it magnifies what eventually turns out to be no crisis at all.
TIME WARP
Time is of the essence. Time becomes very elastic in moments of crisis. There isn`t an emergency responder anywhere in the world who hasn`t personally witnessed the tricks a feeling of crisis will play on the flow of time. Nor are responders immune to time warps of their own.
In the early part of this century, Albert Einstein suggested that time flows at slower rates for objects traveling near the speed of light. Is there a chief officer anywhere in the world who is not tempted to nickname a novice firefighter “Einstein,” or perhaps “C,” from the mathematical symbol for the speed of light, because of an evident determination to test Einstein`s theory by challenging the speed of light whenever the pager calls to duty?
Rumors persist of ribbons of red light swirling through highway intersections, hunting desperately for the strobe light that gave them birth, while the novice driver streaks away, flashing his strobe in new directions, searching for a valid reason to continue the experiment. It takes more than a few scene calls for a beginning emergency responder to get a grip on the value of time. No less is true for an ordinary citizen facing a crisis out in the neighborhood.
PERCEPTION GAP
There is a natural inclination to judge a customer`s feelings of crisis by our own experience. The service organization is not privileged to deny the crisis proclaimed by a prudent citizen just because “we know better.” The fire department–or any other emergency response unit–is not allowed to tote its own personal crisis along to someone else`s crisis.
A runaway trash fire burns fiercely across a field of tall, dead weeds. An April breeze directs the fire toward a lady`s doghouse. Whether or not the dog is occupying the doghouse is not at issue. At her level of experience, the lady is permitted to consider this a genuine crisis. She shouts to you in vivid detail what she has already screamed at your dispatcher. The runaway fire will first destroy the dog house. Having roasted the dog, the raging fire will rear its ugly head and turn on her own house. And why in heaven`s name did it take you so long to get here anyway?
We see it otherwise. We arrived within six minutes of dispatch, not 16 minutes. We observe that the back lawn is mowed down to a level of one inch. The runaway fire will stop dead when it reaches the lawn margin, no matter how hard the wind is blowing. We are confident that that`s true because we`ve seen it happen so often before. And the dog, running at the length of his chain for several years, has plowed a broad dirt track entirely around the perimeter of his doghouse. He has unwittingly created a canine firebreak against just such an occasion.
From the lofty vantage point of our training and experience, we take the measure of her crisis and simply do not see a crisis–at least not on her terms. But our failure to appreciate her crisis does not mean there is none. The lady is permitted her crisis until she sees it resolved. And that is our job.
MUTUAL SATISFACTION IS PART OF MITIGATION
Mitigation is a basic function of incident command. Mitigation sometimes means duck-walking through a smoky strip mall fire while applying 200 gallons of water per minute. But not very often. That`s good, although a bit of real action would more nearly satisfy our cravings than ensuring the survival of a doghouse on the edge of a weed patch.
We do not dismiss anyone`s crisis until we have resolved the crisis on mutually satisfying terms. Mutual satisfaction is an integral part of mitigation.
A legitimate dispatch to the scene of any crisis proclaimed by a prudent citizen is your open-ended invitation to enter directly into the lives of some of the people you are beholden to serve. Your mutual interest in their crisis will occupy only a small slice of time. Much will happen in that narrow slice of time–all to the good if you`re careful and not so good if you`re careless. In other words, it`s public relations time.
Before you start barking and biting, establish incident command. Review the entire menu of all your powers. You will do well to treat this crisis as both opportunity and privilege. If it feels more like aggravation than privilege, then something is clearly wrong either with the opportunity or with your understanding of your duty to serve. An attitude adjustment may be in order. Check the menu again. If there was the lightest odor of smoke, then a brief inspection of the premises is entirely appropriate, even if the smoke drifted in through a window from the neighbor`s barbecue. Be polite; be helpful. Inspections are not nosiness. Inspecting benefits everyone.
Inquire about the smoke alarms in the building. Offer to test them. Unwind a gentle lecture on the dreadful importance of mounting and maintaining smoke detectors. Also, develop a source of free smoke alarms donated by generous benefactors to be given away to folks who need them. If something about the occupant hints at advanced age, marginal economic conditions, or infirmity, offer to install a fresh battery or a whole new smoke alarm.
In many locales, an assertive public relations program means all the difference between funding and no funding. Anyone who`s been there will tell you: No funding is no fun.
There are times, of course, when the sanest person must blow off some steam. Consider the bogus call on a cold midnight to an empty lot in the middle of nowhere. That`s a good time and place to ventilate all the toxic stuff that`s been pushing at the roof lately. At all other times, be ye kind. Whoever first said “A soft answer turneth away wrath” must have been an enlightened fire officer.
If the crisis conditions at a scene prove phony enough to make you want to kill `em, then kill` em with kindness. You can`t go wrong by going there.
CARL F. WELSER is a 30-plus year veteran of the Hamburg (MI) Fire Department, Inc., where he serves as training officer. He is a certified Firefighter I and II instructor, Fire Officer-1, and EMT-S. He has an MDiv and an M.S. in biology and is a member of the Fire Engineering editorial advisory board.
