Objective-Based Live Fire Training: An Alternative Model

By IAN BENNETT

The first time a new firefighter crosses the threshold into a burning building is a moment he will never forget. It is a moment filled with anticipation, excitement, and anxiety. Whether a new firefighter can succeed in that moment comes down to training, a fundamental part of which is live fire. Live fire training is an essential part of the development of every firefighter. However, despite its importance, there has been little discussion in fire service literature about what the objectives of live fire training should be and how best to achieve them.

I have spent more than a decade as a live fire instructor in both fixed facilities and acquired structures across multiple jurisdictions, with students ranging from those with decades on the job at metropolitan departments to brand-new, never-held-a-nozzle rookies. Throughout these experiences, a consistent theme has presented itself: As a fire service, a lot of the commonly pursued objectives during live fire training are not where the focus should be. Despite our best intentions, most live fire training is not as valuable as it could be for the students involved.

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This article will discuss live fire in fixed facilities or acquired structures, where firefighters make entry into the building. Although small-scale live fire props such as the dollhouse, candle flames, and others have a live fire element, they are fundamentally different in how they are used and what can be accomplished with them.

Objectives and Instructional Models

National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) 1001, Standard for Fire Fighter Professional Qualifications, addresses the basic job performance requirements a firefighter must meet, but it does not address how we should use live fire to teach or enhance these skills. NFPA 1403, Standard on Live Fire Training Evolutions, only states that training objectives must be clearly communicated and documented and does not address or suggest instructional models or methods. The few books and articles that do address these topics generally recommend a series of evolutions ranging from moderately to highly complex. The common belief appears to be that live fire training is where all the skills a firefighter has learned should be put together in a multicompany operation. By doing this, students will learn how their skills are applied on the fireground while simultaneously getting a chance to experience real fire conditions.

Although large-scale evolutions that mimic a fire response are valuable and necessary, this style of live fire training has several downsides. The first issue with evolutions is that most participants have little interaction with the fire itself; instead, they are focused on accomplishing their assigned task. This task-focused mindset distracts from their ability to pay attention to what the fire is doing, how it changes over time, and how it reacts to various outside forces including fireground actions such as water application and ventilation. This, in turn, reduces the live fire evolution to another skills drill that happens to have a fire somewhere in the general vicinity.

The second issue with large-scale live fire evolutions is that it becomes very difficult to create precise conditions that cue specific actions by the students. As the number of moving parts increases, it becomes virtually impossible to time the fire with the students’ arrival so that they are given specific visual, heat, and auditory cues. The result is a lack of consistency in fire presentation and difficulty in consistently reinforcing desired behavior and skills. Instead, instructors light the fire, and the students get what they get.

Finally, evolutions, especially complex ones, can be more dangerous. With multiple tasks happening simultaneously, the chances that something will get out of order or that there will be a failure increase. This is especially true in acquired structures, where delays in fire attack or uncoordinated ventilation can have disastrous results.

Large-scale evolutions are a critical part of any training program. Everyone responding to a fire should have a clear idea of where they fit into the overall fire response. Standard operating guidelines and tabletop training reinforced by large-scale evolutions are helpful for this. However, we should think of complex evolutions as coordination drills, where live fire is not required and may not even be desired.

Using Live Fire Training

If the performance of skills in an evolution is not the best use of live fire training, what is? For most students, the goals of live fire training should fall into three main categories, which follow:

1. Normalization of the live fire environment.
2. Establishing cues and context for existing skills.
3. Building student self-efficacy (confidence).

Normalization of the Live Fire Environment

The primary purpose of stress training is to prepare the individual to maintain effective performance in a high-stress environment, to enhance familiarity with the criterion environment, and to teach the skills necessary to maintain effective task performance under stress conditions.¹

To the uninitiated, the inside of a burning building is a foreign place that is dangerous, dark, hot, and confusing. There is truly nothing else like it in the human experience. As a result, when new and inexperienced firefighters respond to and then enter a burning building, they are flooded with stress hormones. This stress increases the heart and respiratory rate, reducing cognitive ability and not infrequently causing sensory deprivation such as auditory exclusion and narrowing the visual field. The common belief is that, as a firefighter goes to fires, he will be exposed to interior and exterior conditions and become progressively more resistant to the stress of the fire environment. Eventually, he is supposed to learn to predict how fire will behave and how fireground actions will affect the fire. However, when considering this expected learning curve, we need to acknowledge some things.

First, most firefighters don’t actually respond to a lot of fires (how many times you were first in on the nozzle or performed a vent-enter-isolate-search at an active fire; most would be humbled to realize how low the number really is). This means it can take a long time—years perhaps—to develop true comfort in live fire. Second, and more importantly, a real fire is a very difficult learning environment; this does not mean that you can’t learn at real fires—quite the opposite. There are things you can only learn by going to real fires. However, it is tough learning, especially for the inexperienced.

With staffing levels being what they are, it is rare for a new firefighter to have a senior member or officer with him who can teach him as they go. Even if he has someone in a position to instruct him at a real fire, there is much less time available to study what is happening and how what he is doing affects the environment. Also, the new firefighter is under extreme stress during these events, so he is less likely to be able to accurately perceive what is happening because of sensory overload.

All of this means we need to focus live fire training to expose our members to the fire environment so they can get used to it. We need to make the fire environment normal for them; by doing so, we take the mystery away, reduce the fear, and make the confusing predictable. This, in turn, reduces the stress of the event, meaning that the firefighters arrive at the building calmer and more able to focus on what is happening around them.

Establishing Cues and Context for Existing Skills

A Sonohomish (WA) County Academy fire student discussed his first experience on the nozzle at a house fire: “Literally, every step from rig to door and door to seat, I used exactly what was taught, and at no point was I unsure of what I needed to do with the conditions I was faced with. It was pretty much cut-and-paste from the acquired burns.”

One of many important differences between the novice and the expert is the expert’s ability to read subtle cues that the beginner does not see.² Another important difference is the expert’s ability to understand how his knowledge/skills apply in an unfamiliar situation.

It is common for new and inexperienced members to apply the physical skills they have learned incorrectly. In after-action reviews of real and training fires, we have found that, if the new firefighter has demonstrated competence with the skill, the cause of his mistake is almost always a result of one of the two issues mentioned above: He did not perceive the cues that would have told him what to do and when, or he did not know how to apply the skill to the unfamiliar environment.

During live fire training, instructors should create specific conditions (cues), then point out the cues to the students and have them perform the desired skill. The application of the skill is also discussed so that the students understand how the skill needs to be altered to fit the given context. This method allows the students to observe more fires and, with appropriate instruction, learn to pick out important cues and context and tie them to the skills they already have.

For example, in photo 2, the student is advancing upstairs to a fire on floor two. Observation groups were placed on the fire floor and the floor below. Two additional exits from floor two were available besides the stairwell, and an emergency exit plan was established. A charged hoseline staffed by an instructor with a partner was in place next to the camera taking the photo, and an exterior rapid intervention team line was staffed and in place. The firefighter shown had been trained on how to flow and move upstairs and had practiced this before at the training tower. The location of the fire was known, and the context of how the orientation of the stairs to the fire room would affect the fire attack was discussed. The fire was allowed to grow to the desired intensity, and the fire attack was made. This created a strong association for all participants between the cues created by the fire and the desired fire attack.

As mentioned above, new firefighters rarely have anyone at the training to point out cues and context for their skills. This means that, unless they have had prior training to close the gap, they are just making their best guess as to when and how to do what they have been taught. In this way, lessons learned can be very valuable, but they can also lead to normalizing bad practices. In the dynamic environment of a real fire, unless you perform a postincident review, it is impossible to know all the factors involved, so people can be successful despite poor performance while still believing that their actions were correct.

Rather than relying on time on the job and the hope that firefighters will experience specific conditions and learn the right lessons from them in the field, we can and should create the conditions and ensure that the right lessons are learned in training.

Building Student Self-Efficacy

You can train someone and teach him technique until you are blue in the face but, at some point, the athlete in question must go out there on the stage and “pull the trigger” when the time is right. What’s going to give you that ability to go from the physical skill you’ve learned to execution under pressure is confidence.³

The final goal we should strive for when conducting live fire training is the creation of student self-efficacy. Often described as confidence, self-efficacy is the belief that one can do what is necessary to achieve his goals. This belief is vital for someone to perform at a high level in any arena. When we conduct realistic live fire training that focuses on normalizing the environment and establishing cues and context for existing skills, we have engaged two of the most important methods for establishing positive self-efficacy.

First, create positive experiences that give students a chance to observe and overcome a challenge successfully; this gives students a sense of mastery over the environment. It is important that these experiences be guided by an instructor. The instructor is necessary for not just safety but to also ensure students are successful in completing their assigned tasks. (This will most often be fire attack, but it could be for any fireground task.) Failure will endanger the students and undermine their belief in their future performance. This does not mean that the students should not be allowed to make mistakes, but rather the instructor should help the students safely overcome these mistakes so they end up succeeding.

Second, we create positive, vicarious experiences that occur when students see others succeed and feel an increased sense of their own ability to succeed. Psychological studies have shown that when we see people like ourselves do something successfully, our own belief in our abilities goes up. For example, if I am in an observation group at a training fire and the nozzle firefighter makes a successful flow and move attack, my belief in my ability to make the same attack will increase; this is why the idea that every student must be on the nozzle is not accurate. Although it would be ideal for each student to be able to make an attack on a realistic fire, this is often not practical because of issues of time, budget, participants (especially instructors) taking too much heat, and the durability of the building (in the case of acquired structures). Rather than reducing the size of the fires to get everyone on the nozzle, we can focus on creating fewer but more realistic fires and use what we know about self-efficacy and psychology to maximize the experience for all students.

A New Model for Live Fire Training

So, if we are not going to perform large-scale evolutions and instead focus on the goals mentioned above, what should live fire training look like? Most scenarios should consist of simple stations: Precharge and prestage hoselines and place most students in observation groups. Design the fire and instruction at each station to make students comfortable with one or more aspects of the live fire environment, create a specific cue for a specific action, create context for a specific skill, or reinforce a desired decision. Most drills can accomplish multiple objectives at once.

A heat evaluation drill is a simple drill that can be set up in most Class A fixed facilities. It is vital to understand that heat evaluation drills are designed to increase the student’s comfort in the environment and create cues for action; it is never a toughness test. The Class A fixed facility is ideal for the heat evaluation drill since fire conditions can be tightly controlled and easily replicated. We can create high heat conditions often with less risk since the building itself cannot burn.

In one variation of this drill, students start inside the burn building close to the seat of the fire and observe ignition and fire growth. As the fire grows, the students are prompted with the various ways they are absorbing heat, how the heat and smoke begin to stratify, and other basic fire behavior lessons. As the fire progresses, the students are moved farther and farther away. Eventually, the students move several rooms away from the fire or even outside the building. The students are then moved back toward the fire. As they move closer, they are prompted to evaluate the heat and locate the fire based on this and other interior cues such as sound and air/smoke movement. Eventually, the hoseline will extinguish the fire. The students will observe the change in heat as they make a fire attack and conduct ventilation.

Another station that can be set up in a Class A fixed facility or an acquired structure is a hallway fire attack drill. If the building has a hallway with the fire room at the end, conditions in the hallway can be varied to prompt everything from a pump can that can douse the fire to a flow-and-move fire. Two student groups can be staged at the entry to the hallway: the attack and observation groups. A charged safety line staffed by an instructor with a partner should also be in position to cover the hallway. Once the desired condition is created in the hallway, the attack group extinguishes the fire while the observation group watches.

For example, in photo 3, heavy smoke and flame conditions in the hallway necessitated a flow-and-move attack. The observation group observed the hallway conditions transition from something needing a pump can to a hit, shutdown, and move attack and eventually to a flow-and-move attack. The observation group then observed the effectiveness of flowing while moving. The possible stations that we can design to create cues and context for specific actions will be limited only by the facility and the students’ and instructors’ skills.

A common tool that is excellent for this type of training is the flashover trailer. Students, with no assigned task, observe fire growth in a compartment as it approaches flashover. This process allows the students to spend time with the fire, thereby reducing their natural discomfort in the live fire environment. The fire grows until the visual indicators of flashover are seen. Once the visual cue is demonstrated, the fire is knocked back. The fire is then often allowed to regrow so that the cue can be seen several times. A visual cue is tied to a specific action. A flashover simulator does not provide much context for action since the setup does not correspond to a realistic building layout, but it does provide normalization and a cue for action.

Most live fire drills should consist of observation groups watching a fire being lit in a known location. As the fire grows, an instructor points out relevant cues and context. The attack team should prestage and charge their hoseline. When directed, they should then advance and attack the fire in a preplanned manner that corresponds with the condition created. Throughout the process, an instructor should accompany the nozzle firefighter to direct his actions. To some, this seems too simple. However, the lessons students can learn about interior fire behavior, cues and context for action, and normalization cannot be learned any other way. By using this style of drill, especially in fixed facilities, instructors can dial in an entire range of conditions for various locations to train cues and context.

It is important to remember that this is a training environment, and learning—not performance—is the goal. Putting out the fire and other fireground tasks in which we might engage are just a small part of what we are attempting to accomplish. Every part of the experience, from smoke movement, to heat buildup over time, to the sound of the hose stream against the walls, should be dissected and analyzed for lessons learned for the students.

The current state of live fire training is unstructured, with a wide variety of practices and policies, depending on your location. The general focus tends to be on large-scale evolutions that allow all portions of the firefighter skills set to be combined in a fire response. Although this has value, it skips some crucial steps in the firefighter’s development since it does not allow most participants to spend time with the fire.

To truly prepare the next generation for the challenges they will face when they cross the threshold into a burning building, we must reconsider the objectives of live fire training and adopt a new model that focuses on normalization of the live fire environment, establishes cues and context for existing skills, and creates student self-efficacy. This, in turn, will necessitate some changes in the mechanics of how we burn.

Endnotes

1. Cannon-Bowers J, E.S. (2008). Making Decisions Under Stress. American Psychological Association.

2. Bransford E, J.D. (12/5/21). National Academies Press. Retrieved from National Academies Press: https://www.nap.edu/read/9853/chapter/5.

3. Donaher J. (5/9/21). Lex Freidman Podcast. (L. Friedman, Interviewer).

References

Washington.edu. (12/5/21). Retrieved from washington.edu at https://www.washington.edu/doit/what-factors-affect-students-self-efficacy.

Casey D, S.S. (2018). Live Fire Training: Principles and Practices 2nd Edition. NFPA, ISFSI, IAFC.

Reeder F, A.J. (2012). Fire Service Instructor: Principles and Practices, 2nd edition. Jones and Bartlett Publishers.

IFSTA. (2019). Fire and Emergency Services Instructor, 9th Edition. Fire Protection Publications.

Asken M, D.G. (2010). Warrior Mindset.

NFPA. (2018). NFPA 1403. USA: National Fire Protection Association.

NFPA. (2019). NFPA 1001. USA: National Fire Protection Association.

NFPA. (2019). NFPA 1041. USA: National Fire Protection Association.

Wollert T, J.Q. (2018). A Scientific Approach to Reality Based Training. Manitoba: 3 Pistols Publishing.

Wulf G. (2007). Attention and Motor Skill Learning. Human Kinetics.

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IAN BENNETT is a captain in the Seattle (WA) Fire Department with 16 years of service. He is the president and owner of West Coast Fire Training and has a BA in chemistry.