BY ALAN BRUNACINI
For about the past 25 years, our service has lived through a lively period of discussion regarding changing the safety of our members while they are traveling to and operating in and around hazard zones. The development of the then very controversial standard National Fire Protection Association 1500, Standard on Fire Department Occupational Safety and Health Program, started us down this interesting and active path. This ongoing discussion has raised our level of energy and awareness about our occupational welfare and survival. The process has caused two opposing groups to emerge: One group represents a redefined and increased level of operational safety, and the opposing group supports a more traditional aggressive attack approach. Let’s call them the “safety guys” and the “attack guys.”
The safety guys maintain that we should always operate in a manner that is based on a standard risk management plan that is based on the consistent application of a standard safety system. The application of this approach is designed to integrate safe practices into everything we do on the fireground. The attack guys say that we took a vow when we became firefighters to aggressively make physical rescues and to attack fires. They say that it is part of our job to take quick, big risks, if necessary, to save lives and that sometimes the safety stuff just slows us down.
Many current safety activists describe the disagreement as a clash between the safety culture and the attack culture. I would call it more of a family squabble. Like most families, any proposed change to a long practiced “inside” behavior produces a predictable reaction to those who grew up with a comfortable and familiar attachment to that behavior. I have been a fire service family member for more than 50 years, so I have lived through this change in how our service manages safety. Along with all my children and their mates, our little family collectively has 130 years in the service, so the “not safe enough/too safe” subject has produced many long and lively discussions around the dinner table.
I have (luckily) had the opportunity to live on both sides of the issue and have a strong attachment to both “cultures.” I worked in and directly managed street operations for the first 25 years of my career. I served in every fire company position and held for six years each the position of battalion chief and the position of operations chief. During that period we were still highly attached to delivering service in a very traditional attack-oriented way simply because everyone then was an attack guy. I was raised and operated in that system and was highly attached to that very aggressive approach. I was successful at that point in my career simply because I was part of the attack team.
INCIDENT COMMAND RAISES SAFETY QUESTIONS
I became involved in the early development of incident command, and this change in how we did incident management caused a new set of safety questions to emerge. It did not take long while assembling the pieces and parts of the incident command system (ICS) before the subject of safety emerged. That development process framed the reality that we cannot rescue Mrs. Smith if we have to rescue ourselves. The discussion caused us to begin to develop a close connection between operational effectiveness and firefighter safety. Beginning the safety development process was at that early time essentially a free-for-all. Then, there were very few safety guys and a whole lot of attack guys. Basic things like using self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA), full personal protective equipment (PPE), taking command on a strategic level, and developing and actually following safety standard operating procedures (SOPs) all created a huge yelling match between the two groups. The attack guys shouted, “The babies will die in their cribs while you (safety guys) do the ‘safety dance’ out in the street.”
What is going on today is just the natural, ongoing continuation of that 25-year-old shouting match. Just about every safety article in a fire service journal (including this one) is almost automatically followed the next month by a Letter to the Editor that passionately exclaims the responsibility we have to deliver fast, aggressive, interior firefighting because the possibility always exists that “someone could still be inside.”
My interest in this discussion is to somehow connect safety with attack, because I believe that both ends are correct in what they represent and we can do better/safer if we can connect them. If you engage the safety guys, they will tell you that making physical recues of rescuable trapped occupants is our number-one tactical priority. If you talk to the attack guys, they will support the application of standard safety practices while we do rescue operations. It seems there are a couple of basic directives that help connect the issue.
A major procedure we have developed and refined is a standard operational risk management plan. The plan outlines in really basic terms how big a risk we will take based on the life safety status of the situation:
- We will take a big risk to protect a savable life.
- We will take a little risk, in a highly calculated manner, to protect savable property.
- We will not take any risk protecting whatever is already lost.
The big risk situation involves our going into a well-evaluated hazard zone where a conscious decision has been made that there is the possibility that someone inside is still alive and that we have the resources to reach and rescue him. The decision to make such a rescue is based on incident commander (IC) #1 doing a fast, lucid size-up; assigning companies to do a primary search; providing an attack line and support to the search; and closely commanding the situation until an “all clear” is given. The IC must then reevaluate the risk level after the “all clear,” because we are no longer in the rescue mode and must go from a big to a little risk because now we are only protecting property (remember the plan).
Rescue operations under active fire conditions are the most dangerous thing we do. Fireground bosses must be certain that the initial strategic size-up is done in an effective way and that rescue is not being used as an alibi by overly aggressive firefighters to conduct interior operations for what are in fact unprotected occupants who are in non-survivable places. What taking a big risk means is that we will take the safety system we have discussed in recent columns right up to the severe edge of its effectiveness because we believe we can make a rescue. The safety system includes the roster of our firefighters on the fireground, safety SOPs, hardware, PPE, and ICS. Taking a big risk does not mean skipping those things, because we need the safety system the most during rescue operations.
We say in the plan that we will take a little risk in a highly calculated manner to protect savable property. What this means is that when we search Mrs. Smith’s house on kitchen fire day and we get an “all clear,” we will then continue to extend the attack to extinguish the fire in the kitchen. We are operating in what is a hazard zone that still has a little risk—that’s why we call it a hazard zone. We are confident that our safety system (the operational items listed in the above paragraph) will now protect us from that level of hazard. We conduct these operations routinely. In most fire situations, the occupants are out on our arrival; we still do a primary search and then we find, cut off, and put out what is generally a room-and-contents fire. Our safety system protects us from the typical incident hazards: The building does not collapse on/under us, our PPE protects us from the heat, and our SCBA provides squeaky clean air to breathe—it’s just another day at the office.
The third part of the plan directs us not to take any level of risk in nonsurvivable/nonsavable situations. This means (in plain English) that everyone who is now in the hazard zone is unrescuable and a lot of the property in the involved fire area is now really burning. These are incidents with advanced fire conditions that we define strategically as defensive. We conduct standard exterior attack operations (surround and drown) and then, after we achieve exterior fire control, we generally go inside, do a secondary search, complete interior fire control, and do property conservation on anything savable.
Defensive fires occur at the end of a regular cycle (set of stages) that uncontrolled structural fires naturally burn through. Defensive fire operations are used as a standard strategy to match advanced fire stages. They are legitimate, understandable, and explainable and are designed to be survivable. They constitute a standard logical firefighting response and are not in any way a failure of the attack guys or the safety guys.
We must effectively engage the real world with a huge dose of reality therapy that always connects standard conditions with standard action with standard outcomes—if the body politic does not want buildings to burn down, then they should simply sprinkler those places. Standard risk management-based firefighting is no substitute for such built-in automatic hydraulic protection. When we encounter well-involved situations, the loss is generally going to be the complete fire area. In these cases, every other part of the prevention/protection system has already failed, so we are at that point—the last, not the first, level of response. It is not our fault; the world is highly imperfect and basically combustible.
CREATE A “MIDDLE” GROUP
I hope that our current and more balanced level of focus on both effectiveness and firefighter welfare begins to reduce the “static” between the safety and attack guys. Creating an increased level of mutual listening might cause each side to more clearly and effectively connect to what the other side is saying (and meaning)—each side represents the outer edge of its position. It would be smart for us to develop a new group in the middle that I am going to call the “intentional guys.” This group would incorporate the best of both ends, and they would always apply that approach in a conscious, deliberate way where standard safety practices would always be in place and practiced. The level of aggression would be determined based on a clinical (not emotional) evaluation of conditions and capabilities. In well-evaluated offensive situations, fast, active interior operations would be extended to support search, rescue, and fire control. As fire conditions worsen, the standard risk a lot/a little/no risk plan would be automatically applied; all risks would be determined and managed within the framework of the plan.
Intentional operations would also be regulated within a continual comparison of the hazards and the safety system (described and discussed in recent columns). This comparison becomes a major part of the “intentional approach” simply because it eliminates the emotional response to fighting fires. Each component of the safety and hazards side has its own set of characteristics, and they are what they are. There is nothing romantic about the thermal protective performance capability of a turnout coat or the British thermal unit-absorbing capability of a gallon of water—don’t get attached to it or mushy about it; just understand it. There is also nothing romantic about being captured in a place where you really shouldn’t be by an about-to-flash over thermal condition that just exceeded the capability and time limits of your protective safety system. Now you are on the floor muttering “Mayday!” into your portable radio. Simply, when the hazard side of the teeter-totter outperforms the safety side, the only place to be is outside.
We will always be challenged to learn as much as we can from each other. Many times, those who disagree with us are our best teachers. We cannot become smarter and safer until we turn down the noise and turn up the listening. It is difficult to learn very much from someone you’re yelling at.
Retired Chief ALAN BRUNACINI is a fire service author and speaker. He and his sons own the quarterly fire service magazine BSHIFTER.com and the Blue Card hazard zone training and certification system. He can be reached at alanbrunacini@cox.net.
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