By Vincent Dunn
There once was a question on the Fire Department of New York’s lieutenant examination that asked: Which action does a fire officer do first–rescue people, extinguish the fire, vent the fire, or locate the fire? The answer was the fire officer must first locate the fire. That’s right–we must find it first, before we start other actions. For example, the fire must be located before you can determine which victims are in greatest danger and need rescue, where the hoseline must be positioned to extinguish the fire, where to vent, or how many fire companies will be needed at the scene to control the fire. Locating a fire is critical.
When you study fires in which firefighters have been caught or trapped, generally one of the contributing causes to the situation was that the fire’s origin was incorrectly determined. Locating a fire is the most important part of a size-up. You might say, “Hey! I never have problems locating a fire on arrival. The people are yelling, ‘Over here firefighters! The fire is in here!'” That’s true at most fires. At residential buildings, where most fires occur and where people are usually present, people usually show us where the fire is quickly. But when you respond at night to an unoccupied building or where there is only one night watchman present, you may not get help locating the fire. When responding to a warehouse, church, or strip mall store, searching for the location of the fire can be a major operation.
I remember one fire as a lieutenant, where we were searching a smoky factory building at night, the deputy chief in the street yelling, “Will sombody please tell me where the fire is?” Needless to say we quickly found it for him. At another incident, while investigating a smoke condition at a large, 20,000-square-foot distribution warehouse, the chief kept sending every arriving fire company into the large area storage building to look for the fire. After some time, when a radio report announced the fire was found, there was no one around the chief to fight it. By the time everyone regrouped at the command post, the fire had spread.
Seaching for a fire is complex. There are different search strategies and it may take hours. Do you really know the strategies for searching for a fire?
For more information on this subject, go to vincentdunn.com.
Deputy Chief Dunn (Ret., Fire Department of New York) is the author of a number of textbooks, including the new Strategy of Firefighting (Fire Engineering, 2007), Collapse of Burning Buildings (Fire Engineering, 1988), Safety and Survival on the Fireground (Fire Engineering, 1992), and Command and Control of Fires and Emergencies (Fire Engineering, 1999).
