LIARS FIGURE, FIGURES LIE
EDITOR’S OPINION
This perhaps oversimplified and abused statement should be kept in mind anytime statistics are presented to shape an opinion, support an argument, or influence a decision. It’s especially true when studying annual injury reports from our national fire service. A little interpolation will give a more significant impact.
For years, records of injuries sustained by our firefighters have capped at slightly over 100, 000 each year. We have become “comfortable” and have accepted those numbers as “costs of the job.” If anything, the totals are remaining constant over time. It’s “routine.”
But what is not staying the same?
Safety awareness on the part of our nation’s firefighters is heightened because of national courses of study. Laws, legislation, and standards of OSHA, the Department of Labor, and the NFFA force firefighters to be better protected than ever before.
What else is “not the same?”
Are any of you responding to more fires than ten years ago? No! In fact, some statistics report that the incidence of structural fires is down as much as 40 percent.
If you put these three pieces of data together and combine it with our annual injury statistics you arrive at a startling truth. We are injuring more firefighters at less fires who are better protected than anytime since Nero burned Rome.
Photos that accompany many of the articles that you read here and in other fire service journals almost always depict flaws in basics: improperly placed or secured ladders, ineffective hose stretches, obvious collapse indicators, dangerous forcible entry techniques, improperly protected firefighters, and tactics that do not support the strategy in place.
Perhaps we are relying too heavily on compliance to avoid litigation, and finding the finances to purchase things that will bring our levels of protection to standard. True, these must be addressed—and rapidly. But at what additional cost?
Our firefighters are being overwhelmed by the red devil because they fail to detect the rapid heat buildup that accompanies the combustion of today’s space-age fire load, and because they fail to size up the probable heat flow and choose the hose size necessary for effective combat. They are also becoming lost within the fire structure—not knowing exactly where they are, not knowing their alternate means of egress. We are also not “reading” today’s fire building construction that can cause entrapment as it fails—all too rapidly.
What we are saying is that finances must be found to better protect the firefighter as mandated, but not at the cost of training and certainly not by abandoning basics.
