Training via Cable Television
TRAINING
An innovative and relatively inexpensive training method instituted by the San Jose Fire Department is proving quite successful.
Photos by Mark Mooney
With video technology, we can bring training information to our people in three days that would otherwise take three months. And we can do it better as well as quicker.” That’s how Captain Bill Mayes, senior training officer, describes the San Jose, CA, Fire Department’s new cable television broadcasting capability. Owned and operated by the department, using the local cable television firm’s public access channel, the video training system now links the department’s training center directly to 24 of the city’s 28 fire stations.
Aided by Fire Engineer Don Lee, an experienced photographer, Mayes has created 24 one-hour training programs, broadcast to the stations each weekday. Subjects include medical evaluation, job safety, use of emergency rescue devices and wildland firefighting equipment, arson, physical fitness, and hazardous chemical spill cleanup. Other videotapes include footage on drill evolutions filmed during the 11-week training cycle, and on-location fire operations in the city.
Says Mayes, “We get a lot of input from the line on subjects needing coverage. We write the scripts and create all the material. These are all videotapes now, but microwave link equipment has been budgeted to allow us to televise live incident coverage just like the television newspeople do.”
The training center assigns each of the city’s 28 fire companies a schedule of four one-hour drills each month for each of the three shifts. Two of the drills are the television broadcasts. One is repeated daily from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. during the first half of the month, the other for the second half. That way, each shift can schedule the best viewing period and be able to make up anything missed because of an alarm response during broadcast time.
Lee is assigned to the training center full time as video engineer. He has overall control of taping, editing, adding captions and subtitles, and handling the technical details of getting the show on the air each weekday afternoon.
“Keeping the training level current for a 700-man force is a tremendous burden,” says Mayes. “We are using the television system to present what we feel is needed for skills maintenance.” What’s presented goes beyond usual company operations. If it were not for the telecasts, each company would have to report to the training center for direct instruction by the staff there.
How do firefighters react to department-wide broadcasts of their unrehearsed, on-camera behavior during either training or fireground evolutions? “This was a concern of ours,” replies Mayes. “If anyone was shown in a bad light, others might be reluctant to cooperate. But the department has a good philosophy on critiques, and that is to look at the situation and the issue, not at personalities. If an error in judgment was made, we don’t chastise the individual. Rather than pointing fingers, we want to investigate, find out why the error was made, and adapt our training to aim at preventing a recurrence.
“We are taping the action at major incidents. We photographed a second alarm and will be broadcasting some footage from that incident soon. The men are very enthusiastic about it. They like to see themselves on tape. It enhances the quality of the critique.”
The training center also has a satellite receiving dish to pick up fire service television transmissions from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the National Fire Protection Association. By mid-1984 the center had added over 50 programs to its tape library.
“We weren’t the first fire department in the country to use television as a training tool,” Mayes adds. But as far as I know, we’re the only one originating our own programs and transmitting them via community cable.”
The training center’s television equipment (its total cost is less than half the price of a new pumper) includes a tape editing system, special effects and character generators, background music systems, movie/slide multiplexer, remote control units, several color cameras, and a considerable number of accessories.
Film production itself is not difficult. If all background tapes or slides are on hand, and only scripting, story boarding, taping, and editing are needed, a half-hour show can be prepared for broadcast in about two hours. Starting from scratch, a one-hour program takes about 10 hours to produce. After studio-quality introductions, credits, background music, cuts, edits, and dissolves, the end result is a professionallooking color program.
What’s the justification for this investment in a $25-million annual budget? “The main saving,” Mayes points out, “is eliminating the need for each company to respond to the training center twice a month. For some of them, it’s a round trip of 20 miles or more. Besides that, the company is out of service and away from its response district for as long as three or more hours. Other units must back them up.
“Another benefit, although intangible, is a rise in the quality of training. We can polish up the tape to exactly what we want, and everybody sees exactly the same thing. It takes subjective variation out of each training session.”
Feedback by the viewers helps do the polishing. Just before the first of the month, each company receives a drill schedule describing what’s to be broadcast. A quiz, usually 10 questions, is given to company members after viewing the broadcast. The exams are run through a computerized Scantron scoring system. “This isn’t to grade the viewers, but to evaluate our presentation,” explains Mayes. “We study how many responses there are to each question and what pattern they take. If a particular question is missed 95% of the time, it tells us we’re not getting something across; we need to change the way we present the material.”
Also, should any training deficiency or misunderstanding emerge from the quiz results, the following month’s programming can quickly bring a clarification or correction to everyone. Another benefit is that the training officers are freed from the time-consuming repetition of the same information to successive companies day after day for three months. The staff can channel that time into developing new or improved programs.
Finally, periodic refresher courses are easier to administer. Each year, every San Jose fire company is put through a company performance evaluation. The videotape library on specific fire-related skills provides a convenient, uniform way of reviewing those skills prior to evaluation.
What lies ahead? An immediate departmental goal is a dedicated television channel for exclusive use by the fire service. This would allow broadcasting at any hour of the day. It offers the potential for two-way video communication between the stations and the training center.
Today, any area subscriber to Gill Cable’s (the cable franchise serving the area) service has a de-scrambler and can receive the fire department training broadcasts. The department wants to retain that capability for possible public education programming, or to transmit emergency information. But additional encoder-decoder devices on the training center and the stations are being considered so that “classified information” could be broadcast without public reception.
Supplementing the present training material could be such features as officers’ or staff meetings; the “incident simulator” program for fireground tactics and strategy; and a “chief’s corner,” possibly including questionand-answer periods.
A second future goal is live broadcasting of major incidents, using the microwave link already budgeted. Explains Mayes, “Lee and I both carry pagers. When notified, we would go to the training center, load the camera equipment in our van, and go to the scene.”
Live programming would serve two purposes. First, the broadcast could be beamed to the training center for retransmittal over either the dedicated or public service channels. The former would allow firefighters still in quarters to learn from watching actual operations. The latter would reach large numbers of citizens in a time of disaster.
Secondly, a live broadcast to a television monitor would give the incident commander a clearer picture of the overall operations. The monitor could be either at the local command post or in the emergency services “war room” for command operations at major disasters. This could help “clear the air” by decreasing radio traffic at the scene.
According to the fire department administration, “Management of emergency operations will be improved with the most modern communications technology.”
