BY ALAN BRUNACINI
Our last “Unplugged” started a discussion about the early stages of the ongoing fire service adventure into developing and using an incident command system (ICS) to manage hometown hazard-zone operations. I was an early recruit and have been playing (fourth fiddle) in the local-level ICS band since the beginning almost 40 years ago.
I spent my entire career assigned as a local yokel to a remote desert outpost where the weather is always routine and dull—it looks summertime bright and sunny pretty much 365 days a year. It doesn’t snow, and we have fifth graders who have never seen rain. We do not have natural disasters (no large wildland fires, mudslides, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados, civil disorders, etc.).
All of our incidents are currently underway right down the street, pretty much contained to the involved address and their immediate exposed neighbors. During my time on the job, we were able to handle whatever happened right down the street with only right-down-the-street local resources managed by our own right-down-the-street type 5 and type 4 command teams. I guess you could call us the “Right Down the Street” Fire Department.
I have forever watched our California pals skillfully battle their routine humongous disaster land incidents. As I watch and admire these expert large-scale fire managers manage, I have fantasized about being a surfer dude IC who bravely grabs the radio mic, adjusts the eagle on his helmet, and majestically says, “Send me 500 engines.” So far, I have had to just live in dreamland and settle for about a fifth alarm as the biggest response our pipsqueak place could ever or would ever need to produce.
Other than for my 500-engine fantasy, living in “local land” required me to concentrate on the application of applying ICS to hometown incidents managed and controlled with only local resources. These are fire/EMS events that Mrs. Smith sees out her living room window (right down the street), picks up the phone, and calls us on the local 911 line. They are active, currently underway, and generally pretty close to whoever calls us. They require that we quickly respond and immediately go to work with just the people and stuff we show up with to make the problem go away.
A major challenge of the local response system is that we arrive at the scene before anyone has taken any action to solve the incident problem. That’s why we are called “first” responders. Many times, there is not much accurate information available regarding the current status of the situation (except that someone called and yelled “fire”). Everyone on the scene is confused and frightened, particularly if they need to be physically rescued from what is at that moment threatening their safety/survival.
If there is a fire present, it is generally growing (exponentially), and many times smoke, darkness, building obstructions, and a sneaky fire hanging out in a hidey-hole make it very difficult/impossible to quickly determine the fire’s exact size, location, and complexity. Anyone who is still in the hazard zone and has not self-rescued (key behavior: “get out!”) is in or beyond the shadow of death. In spite of all the difficulties, it becomes critical that we quickly find and operate on the fire instead of having the fire find and operate on us.
The IC must also estimate how long the fire has been burning before our arrival—that IC is in for a big (and painful) surprise if he thinks it is now the middle of the beginning. It is, in fact, close to the end of the end. The IC and the fire are basically playing a game to see which one can produce the bigger surprise package for the other. The IC surprises the fire with water; the fire surprises the IC with the products of combustion.
Based on all these typical up-front challenges, our fireground management system must react and operate effectively starting at the very beginning of our arrival on the scene. Our strong and historic obligation to act along with (at an active incident) the current need to act can create a natural initial conflict between action and command. Without an agreed-on game plan [i.e., standard operating procedure (SOP)], this action/command conflict can create a huge initial arrival challenge.
We know that if rescue and firefighting operations get out of balance, the initial imbalance can cause us to get behind in safely performing the standard tactical priorities, and many times we will never catch up. Getting and staying behind is painfully frustrating for us and can be fatal for the endangered customers. Conversely, getting behind and not being able to catch up makes the fire very happy.
We are in business so a customer can quickly call us when he has a problem that exceeds his ability to resolve it. When we arrive at the scene, the problem is indeed “right in front of us.” Now the relationship is perfect: The customer has an urgent condition he wants to go away, and the firefighters are very anxious to use their personal and organizational resources to physically and aggressively make the customer happy. The incident has brought together a problem and a problem solver.
The problem solvers who show up in the very beginning generally arrive on an engine company. Their apparatus is basically a water-pumping vehicle that is a taxi for water appliers (firefighters). It is the perfect unit because the solution at that moment involves the rapid application of an adequate amount of water applied directly on the fire. “Smart water” is positioned to protect the means of entry/escape and the unburned property.
This beginning creates a critical need for us to start our rescue and firefighting operation out under the direction of IC #1, who begins to perform the basic functions of command from the very start of the initial action we take to attack the fire. When we let the urgency of the event cause us to completely skip command and instantly attack the fire, we are engaging in what is commonly called “freelancing.” The freelancing causes the troops to then endure the old fuddy-duddy fire chief‘s standard “start under control/stay under control/never lose control” safety lecture.
All this “take command first” talk comes with its own built-in dilemma. As we said earlier, the incident requires fast, effective action, and we responded to do exactly that. The dilemma is that the initial officer who skips command and goes directly for the actions is buying a ticket in the “freelancing lottery.”
The lottery works opposite from most other lotteries, where you pretty much always lose. In the freelancing lottery, you generally win. Simply, most of the time freelancing puts the fire out, everything gets better, no serious safety problems occur, we high-five each other in the front yard (“good stop”), and we keep wearing off-duty T-shirts emblazoned with suicide slogans. Winning just naturally makes you want to play more.
Freelancing generally works: It takes advantage of the skill and spirit of our firefighters, it is very (!) fast, it puts (“candle moth”) water directly on the fire, it runs past/over anything or anybody who tries to slow it down, and it has no time or patience for anything bureaucratic (like command). It is the fastest, shortest, and most energetic response we can extend to an urgent problem.
Firefighters are smart. They do what worked last time. That is the reason we keep freelancing incident front ends. The problem happens when, after getting 152 winning (or close-call) freelancing tickets, we come up with freelancing ticket number 153, and it is a loser. What a losing freelancing ticket means is that the past 152 wins seduced you into a fatal situation and that now your buddies are going to get to wear their dress uniforms and will hear some really sad bagpipe music in three days. At that awful moment, freelancing is no longer free.
Retired Chief ALAN BRUNACINI is a fire service author and speaker. He and his sons own the fire service Web site bshifter.com.
