BY ALAN BRUNACINI
In our last monthly adventure, we began a discussion about how our fitness for duty is a critical influence in how we deliver service, which is basically the reason we are in business. We have recently gone through an interesting period where the full range of our fit-for-duty resources has been reduced based on the recession shrinking our local budgets.
Fire chiefs on one end of the system are struggling to manage the strategic level of the reductions, and fire companies on the other end are also attempting to somehow protect Mrs. Smith with less overall task level harm prevention (i.e., fit for duty) resources. The most critical and expensive part of all those resources is the firefighters who respond to and show up at Mrs. Smith’s.
In spite of all the current recession-driven resource “adjustments,” it continues to be our job to manage our own end of the service delivery fit-for-duty process. The end we “own” is (literally) where the rubber meets the road, because we are the agents of safety within the community who ride on the “rubber” and actually walk in the door at the Smith residence when she calls for help.
The combination of facilities, hardware, and systems creates the resource foundation of how we support the capability of our humans to show up to deliver service. The human component of our response system is absolutely critical to delivering service, the most expensive to support, and the most challenging and rewarding to manage. The other parts of the service delivery system are necessary because they directly and indirectly provide the resources required to deliver service, but they are fairly transparent to those who call us for help.
As an example of the perspective of the customer, during the fairly long period of being a fire chief, I received very little feedback from Mrs. Smith about the details of how she felt about her neighborhood fire station. Based on its presence and permanence, it quietly made her feel secure when she drove past. I also have the same set of secure feelings when I drive by my own neighborhood fire station Number 30. I always feel better when I see that the lights are on and someone is home (at my age, I sincerely hope that at least one of the Jack and Jill firefighters in attendance is a paramedic).
Another critical part of our service delivery system is our inventory of response hardware. Among the ton of thank-you letters we received from Mrs. Smith, she very seldom made a comment about a fire truck as an example of her awareness of mechanical stuff. I think she had an overall very positive impression of modern, well-maintained apparatus, but she never seemed to get into any detail about that impression. I don’t ever remember her asking if the rig we dispatched to her kitchen fire was a 1,000- or a 1,500-gallon-per-minute pumper or what setting we had on the constant flow nozzles we hauled into her burning kitchen.
The consistent and very frequent response we did receive from her (over and over) involved how she felt about the way the firefighters treated her and her family. She was very skillful and articulate in recalling and describing the time the responders spent with her as they solved her problem. Her description was typically written in emotional, not technical, language. When we listen to what she is expressing about her experience with us, it provides a smart beginning for bosses to understand, create, and then maintain a standard level of fitness for duty in the human service deliverers (Firefighter Smith) who effectively meet the needs of the human service recipient (Mrs. Smith). It is smart for an organization to have an abundance of what is the most important thing to the customer.
When we examine what is involved in motivating, managing, and maintaining Firefighter Smith, we see four basic areas of development that make up that person. Those standard pieces and parts are biological, cognitive, emotional, and social. Although these basic areas relate to every human, when we look at what we expect Firefighter Smith to do occupationally, we see that he must possess an exceptional capability to intensely perform in all four areas-many times, all at the same time. We will discuss the biological component in this month’s column and will cover the other three in future columns.
The biological (physical) capability to engage in rescue and combat firefighting necessitates an exceptional level of physical ability, and this part of a firefighter is what most people would naturally identify as the appearance-based characteristic that embodies a firefighter. When a group of our troops show up to go to work, they resemble an athletic team that would arrive on the playing field.
Based on that example, the entrance requirements to become a firefighter are basically equal to the physical performance level of a well-trained athlete. We are effective to the extent that we can physically manipulate and manage the fire building-forcible entry; ventilation; movement of contents; opening up concealed spaces; and to extend, move, and manage fire streams, which an Old Salt described as “the smartest form of manual labor.” That same high level of biologic capability also is necessary when we must do physical rescues to take a threatened customer out of the hazard zone (that is why we call it a “physical rescue”).
The basic and very timeless tool we use to hydraulically extinguish fire is water. For the purpose of firefighting, water is our basic weapon, the bullet we shoot at the fire. We achieve fire control effectiveness when we can deliver an adequate amount of well-timed and well-placed water on the fire. Based on that timeless reality, we have a long-standing, traditional, and very intimate relationship with water.
The operational rules of that “wet” relationship are pretty simple: Water is heavy-8.3 pounds per gallon. We move water in attack lines; you must be strong, agile, and tough to extend, move, and manage attack lines. A humanoid is effective as a water-manipulating firefighter based on biological capability-simply, for firefighters to win, they must extend at least 8.4 pounds of effort to overcome the 8.3 pounds for each gallon of water.
We can reduce the physical standards to be a firefighter when some mad scientist invents a new and improved lighter version of old-fashioned water. So far in spite of all the well-tested and advertised technical inventions of all the stuff that through the years was supposed to improve the effectiveness of water (light, wet, slippery, rapid, and so on), we are still hooking pumpers up to 100-year-old fire plugs that are connected to and use water mains that are so old that we forgot when they were installed, and pumping and applying plain, unadulterated, traditional, boring (but effective), old-fashioned water onto modern fires just as caveman firefighters did a gazillion years ago. Although a lot of stuff has changed, getting us to the current level of modern firefighting technology and techniques, 8.3 pounds per one gallon of water has stayed exactly the same.
For us, the most positive part of the job is the physical part. The best day we have is when they call us to solve a situation that requires immediate, well-performed physical labor under challenging (dangerous) conditions. Having the opportunity to be in a job where you can occupationally face and conquer this high-performance operational/tactical challenge is generally why an action-oriented person joins the fire department.
Our service must develop and manage a robust system to support the biological capability of the workforce. We extend considerable program support to select entering candidates who have the basic physical ability to perform as an effective and safe player within a firefighting team. A regular part of the entrance testing process is a physical capability exam where the candidate must perform a series of replicated firefighting activities within a prescribed time frame. The separate events involve the physical requirements of performing actual firefighting tasks. A major objective of this phase of the entrance test is to select a person who has the strength, coordination, and stamina to be a task level member of a fire company.
Another part of the entrance biological testing process is the medical exam. Our service has developed a medical exam standard designed and used to specifically evaluate if the candidate can meet the requirements of being a firefighter. When we employ young persons as entering firefighters, there is a great chance that they will spend their working life being employed by their department. The medical exam is designed to identify anyone who has any physical defects simply because they would be with us for so long!
Based on the typical (very) long-term employment within our service, we have learned a lot and have (hopefully) done a lot about worker wellness. Starting several decades ago, we began to understand and provide medical, rehab, physical fitness, and employee assistance program support to our members. Our workforce is our most important and permanent asset, and how we maintain the biological part of that resource directly influences workers’ personal well-being and professional effectiveness.
A great deal of folklore, tradition, and romance is now in place that describes the very appropriate image of a firefighter doing the most physical part of what we do, which is active firefighting. That image is accurate, dramatic, and critical because it depicts what actually occurs at “showtime,” which is when we cause the water to meet the fire. The most timeless, critical, and challenging biological act we engage in is still doing our part in that fire/water meeting.
Across from my desk, I have a set of four very early Currier and Ives lithograph prints showing firemen (traditional descriptive term used in that period) engaging in the various stages of a very active rescue and firefight. The title of the set is “Facing the Enemy.” I look at those pictures every time I look up from my desk, and it reminds me that we are effective fire control agents if we are biologically capable to lift, move, and manage an adequate amount of water to drown the fire-everything that occurs up to that point is just a warm-up.
● Retired Chief ALAN BRUNACINI is a fire service author and speaker. He and his sons own the fire service Web site bshifter.com.
Fire Engineering Archives
