“Bad Things Happen When You Are Not Trained for Your Work Environment”: Greenwood
Firefighters attending Thursday’s “Critical Decision Making Under Fire: 2014 Interior Benchmarking” class left with a “proven situational awareness (SA) model for operating safely inside a hostile fire environment that they can pass on to fellow firefighters,” as described by Instructor Lt. William Greenwood, Keene (NH) Fire Department. Greenwood believes that “we must train our firefighters to the environment in which they are expected to work.”
The Interior Benchmarking model, he said, can be overlaid on the highly volatile fire conditions of the firefighter work environment. The 2014 model was upgraded from the original 2008 “Interior Benchmarking” program to “Critical Decision Making Under Fire,” which includes the latest National Institute of Standards and Technology and Underwriters Laboratories fire behavior studies.
Students were made acquainted with the five-step model for increasing situational awareness and helping them to remain oriented to their locations on the fireground. The model includes the following steps:
1. What do I see? What does the firefighter see with the human eye and through a thermal imagining camera? New this year was a revised component resulting from a professional relationship with ISG Thermal Imaging Company and the viewing of numerous pieces of damaged firefighter gear made available through Globe Manufacturing that show how personal protective equipment (PPE) provides thermal insult protection.
2. What do I hear? The use of hearing was stressed to “increase” situational awareness to locate victims and the fire more quickly.
3. What do I feel? This section includes a strong component on how PPE protects firefighters from thermal insult through proper fit, design, and condition. PPE exposure times, protection factors, and maximum heat saturation and ways to gauge heat were covered.
4. Where exactly am I? Students were given ways to acknowledge construction features as a means of maintaining awareness of their location.
5. How much air did it take to get here? Air management monitoring is critical in today’s life threatening environment, Greenwood noted. “Fires today are extremely dangerous, and the class provided the student with a systematic process to take back to their fire departments to educate all of their personnel.”
The bottom line, Greenwood explains, is, “Bad things happen to good firefighters every day because they were not trained to the environment they were expected to work in.” Firefighters must always be aware, he cautions. “When you are at the point that you are uncomfortable and feel the heat, you must ask yourself, ‘If I take that window, are the conditions going to get better or worse?’”
