The Federal Emergency Management Agency has released a provisional report on the 2004 firefighter fatalities. This report categorizes firefighter deaths into areas such as type of duty, type of incident, cause of fatal injury, and type of injury, among others. Although the fire service is aware of this serious problem, firefighter fatalities continue to average 100 annually, leaving family, coworkers, and the community behind. Even with our professional training and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) Firefighter Fatality and Prevention Program’s invaluable research, from which we can learn from firefighter fatalities, these numbers, unfortunately, do not change drastically from year to year. How do we improve our chances of fireground survival? How do we avoid getting lost, running out of air, getting trapped, or having the structure collapse on us? An effective company officer, using not a nozzle or an ax but the ability to correctly perceive conditions as they unfold around his company and who takes decisive action, is crucial to reducing firefighter fatalities and injuries.
On the fireground, the company officer is responsible for maintaining team continuity, accurately assessing his company’s suppression efforts, monitoring surrounding conditions, and maintaining communication with the incident commander (IC) and other operating sectors. Moreover, the company officer is simultaneously accountable for his personnel and for keeping the IC well informed as conditions evolve. All of these functions play a role in a successful fireground operation; fail in just one, and the situation may be irretrievable. How does an individual observe, absorb, and process information to make decisions, often with little time available and under extreme conditions?
PERCEPTION
Perception is one key to a company officer’s success on the fireground. Perception can be defined as awareness of the elements of the environment through physical sensation in the light of experience. Company officers who maintain situational awareness while drawing on their past experience perceive events as they happen; these perceptions are the basis for fireground decisions. If at any point one’s perception does not reflect actual events, flawed decisions may result. It’s as if you were making decisions based on false information; the results would most certainly not meet your expectations. On the fireground, if either our awareness or our experience fails us, our perception is flawed and the resulting decisions may be costly.
Awareness. Firefighters and officers alike should make every effort to maintain fireground awareness. Sometimes, however, when operating a hoseline, searching above a fire, or doing any number of our critical functions, other essential operations may be overlooked. The company officer is responsible for maintaining this awareness while firefighters perform the tasks at hand. Awareness items include air consumption-does your company have enough air to make it back out when the time comes? Do you know you and your company’s location within the fire building? What other companies are operating around you; are they aware of you? What is the type of building construction of the structure in or on which you’re operating? Do you notice when additional units are summoned, indicating an expanding situation? Finally, is the IC aware of your company’s location, function, and progress? The company officer must be aware of all these aspects for his company.
Experience. This is a sensitive subject in the fire service since some believe that since the number of fires is down, opportunities for gaining experience are limited. Others argue that such opportunities are everywhere and the fire service does not capitalize on them. Decision-making experience accumulates as one is exposed to various situations and incidents over time. Traditionally, firefighting is a profession that requires a great deal of on-the-job training. This day-in, day-out exposure to a variety of different incidents gives us our necessary experience.
Also, since every firefighter starts out at the bottom of the ladder, we all have had the opportunity to observe and learn from more seasoned members. We have learned what works and what doesn’t, memorizing this information for later recall when faced with a similar situation in the future. Experience plays a vital role when making fireground decisions, according to cognitive psychologist Dr. Gary Klein’s book Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions. Klein examines how people who work in unpredictable situations make life-or-death decisions. Regarding the fire service, he writes, “The commanders’ secret was that their experience let them see a situation, even a non-routine one, as an example of a prototype, so they knew the typical course of action right away. Their experience let them identify a reasonable reaction as the first one they considered.”
How can we increase our awareness and obtain experience to use on the fireground? Being a student of the size-up process and applying it at every job helps develop and sharpen these essential skills. Regardless of which size-up system you use, the 13-point size-up or another variation, you as company officer must perform a complete, accurate size-up to identify the fireground factors that may affect your company’s operation. You must also be aware of your company’s location in the structure, its air consumption, fireground radio traffic, surrounding conditions, and fire behavior, and you must preserve the crew’s continuity.
Experience is stockpiled by reviewing every incident exhaustively-how it was dealt with, what could have been done better, how others handled the same situation, and what worked for them. Every experience should be explored, studied, and dissected to ensure that we walk away with all of its lessons learned.
Experience opportunities extend beyond calls; training now provides us with exposure to a wide range of situations from which we can learn. The popularity of Hands-on Training (H.O.T.) classes at the Fire Department Instructors Conferences indicates the strong desire for realistic training. This is particularly well suited for developing practical experience for a variety of fireground tactics; many firefighter associations across the nation have modeled their training on such realistic scenarios. Even at the company level, firefighters are eager to participate in hands-on evolutions or training sessions that place them in realistic situations and conditions.
Accurate awareness combined with experience will likely result in well-informed fireground decisions. But what happens to awareness and our ensuing perceptions when the company officer is required to actively participate in the suppression efforts? Staffing fire companies according to national standards is often out of reach for most jurisdictions because of financial constraints. A fire company with three or more personnel (officer included) is now a luxury for most departments. As a result, the company officer is often expected to back up the nozzleman on a hoseline and sometimes even be the nozzleman. Current staffing in many departments has operating personnel spread thin to cover all the necessary fireground functions. Unfortunately, when faced with the day-to-day realities challenging company officers, fireground awareness suffers.
The fireground is continuously changing and thus unpredictable; at times requiring using survival skills to escape when a situation goes bad. To make a positive impact on their personnel’s survival, company officers must work to maintain fireground awareness while fulfilling all their other essential duties. Quickly recognizing and reacting to situations before they worsen limit the risks we face in an already risky business. Maintaining our awareness and drawing on experience will give us a window of opportunity to manage situations before conditions deteriorate such that the situation manages us. ■
Reference
Klein, Gary A. Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998.
■ STEVEN MILLS is a career lieutenant with the Ridge Road Fire District in Rochester, New York. He has an associate’s degree in fire protection and is a nationally certified fire instructor I.
