Chief Kanterman’s Journal Entry 66
Nothing in this business beats experience. If you’re not a busy fire department, you’re training has to happen often and mut be top shelf, safe, meaningful, and realistic, since it’s the next best thing to the real thing. That’s why over the years we’ve told new folks to hang out with the old folks at the firehouse and at a job. The older members have experience and will hopefully teach, share, and pass on good habits. Passing down bad habits to the next generation is poor, but some have been doing it for a long time. Sometimes you have to step back and a take a good look at what we’re doing and make some fundamental adjustments. Making these adjustments may be hard to do by the veteran members in the firehouse however if we don’t start somewhere, we’ll never make the changes we need to in order to create a smarter and safer fire service. We need to strike a balance between what we learned, what we know, and what we want the next group of folks to know. (Sounds like a Billy G. book title.) Relying on the experience of others is paramount to this process.
There is a memory recall theory known as recognition primed decision making (RPDM). It’s taught in various curricula at the National Fire Academy—and worldwide as well. It’s a model of how people make quick, effective decisions based on past experiences when faced with complex situations through deciding what makes sense and evaluating a course of action. It’s the “slideshow of experience” going off within our cranial hard drives. Your brain is saying: “We’ve been here before. What did we do last time, and how did we do it? Were we successful or not based on the decisions we made?” This happens within seconds, and a decision is made. Only experienced people can use RPDM effectively. It’s been known that inexperienced people tend to use the first course of action they believe will work and have the tendencies to use “trial and error” through their own imagination and thought processes. Success is rare with the inexperienced person including military, police, fire, and incident commanders at large.
Situational awareness is something that we’ve been discussing and trying to hone with our personnel for quite a while. “What’s going on now and can happen next?” The experienced firefighter should have a more heightened situational awareness based on the aforementioned RPDM. However, new personnel can start to think the same way. During an interior attack, even the newest person on the team should know the signs of a flashover through rollover, smoke and heat changes, and so on.
I once heard a fellow chief take the concept of situational awareness and reword it to “situational curiosity” and it took a very different track. We know our people are curious and have forced or simply opened doors “just to take a look.” A chief from England once said to me at a national conference: “You Yanks are a curious lot, aren’t you?” We are and at times, it has gotten us in trouble. Although curiosity has killed the cat, it can be something that may lend itself to safer and more effective operations, where looking around for a second time or a bit deeper may pay off. We know that getting too deep may get us in trouble as well. Controlled curiosity of firefighters can work to our advantage e.g., opening another wall or prying baseboard molding looking for hidden pockets of fire. It’s about balance, experience, and supervision.
At the end of the day, experience rules, so let’s be cautious about passing along bad habits to the next generation.
We well, stay well be safe.
Ronnie K
RON KANTERMAN is the executive inspector of the Bureau of Fire Prevention for the Fire Department of New York. He is a more than four-decade veteran of the fire service and recently retired as chief of the Wilton (CT) Fire Department. He has a B.A. degree in fire administration and two master’s degrees. He’s a contributing author for Fire Engineering, the Fire Engineering Handbook for Firefighter I and II, and the 7th edition of the Fire Chief’s Handbook.
MORE
Making Firefighter Safety at Training a Priority
