Phoenix (AZ) Fire Department (PFD) Executive Assistant Chief Steve Kreis talked about the “Top 10 Hot Topics in Structural Firefighting” to attendees of his class. Following the same curriculum that the PFD uses everyday at its command training center, Kreis began his discussion by focusing on size-up and how an operation’s first five minutes sets the stage for the remainder of the incident. For the company officers and battalion chiefs present, the program aimed to improve fireground operations.
The majority of class content focused on firefighter success once he crosses the threshold of the fire building. Among the “Top 10” topics he covered in his discussion included “Instincts,” “Aggressiveness and Time,” “Hazard Zone Management,” and “Risk Assessment.” “Every year at FDIC, we all go to a bunch of training sessions. In those sessions we are provided a lot of really valuable and important information to take back to our communities for improved service delivery and firefighter safety.”
Kreis added, “The problem is that we are all human…we typically only retain a few nuggets from each class. This class captures the nuggets from the top ten training sessions in the American fire service and packed them into a fast-moving, highly interactive one hour and forty-five minutes.”
