Quick, Quick, Quick, and Quicker

BY ALAN BRUNACINI

Last month we discussed how critical situation awareness is to effective fireground operations. We also looked at the challenge of establishing and maintaining a mental connection and operational focus, using a tactical color chart to somehow sort out and keep track of all the involved (red), exposed (yellow), and uninvolved (green) people, places, and things that quickly become the basic ingredients that make up incident conditions. We continually and habitually include the word “quickly” when we describe almost any operational action that occurs on the fireground. Virtually all such action, particularly in the beginning of the firefight, is performed in a rapid manner within a very narrow window of opportunity for offensive attack and exposure protection. Simply, fires burn up, and burning buildings fall down quickly. Completing the primary search and achieving initial fire control (knockdown) are typically and appropriately done in an urgent manner. Mrs. Smith calls us because her kitchen is burning and at that moment she needs an attack team to arrive quickly willing, ready, and able to fight the fire, not to study it—there we go with “quick” again.

The incident commander must realize that anything we do in a compressed time frame—i.e., quickly—within the hazard zone can be very dangerous. Those rushed operations are conducted when and where there is the most excitement and confusion with the least verified and processed information. Our major operational/command objective is to bring under control as quickly as possible conditions that are out of control and generally worsening. When we have stabilized high-hazard, compressed, urgent-time conditions, we now have reached a less severe stage that allows a safer, slower, and more stable approach. This allows an operational shift to discretionary time. Gordon Graham has taught our service that being able to understand and then sort out the difference between urgent and discretionary time is a major part of effective, survivable operational engagement. Knowing when and where to quickly do what is required to stabilize out-of-control deadly, damaging (urgent) incident conditions and when to shift gears, slow down, and now use discretionary time to deal with a situation where the fire is knocked down and the fire area searched, ventilated, and lit up—with more mature, accurate 360-degree information—becomes a major part of effective and standard risk management. When we reach the discretionary point in managing operational time, we can realign our incident action plan (IAP) to include activities such as salvage, overhaul, secondary search, check for fire extension, rehab, and customer support.

As we get older and gain more experience, we figure out how to better match our active energy expenditure to current incident conditions. As young firefighters, most of us had someone who had been around awhile tell us the old-time fire service story about the patient old bull telling the passionate young bull how fast they were going to travel down the hill to the work site. The timeless tale put urgent and discretionary time into a pretty understandable perspective for a young firefighter. The storyteller was generally a coolheaded old guy who figured out when to speed up and when to slow down. This was the same grumpy senior citizen who calmly said to a very young firefighter (me) who was getting excited at what I thought was a really big fire, “Son, I’ve been to a fire, and this ain’t one.”

The story is very applicable to our fireground time management situation awareness challenge and illustrates that “urgent” to one person (or bull) can be a little to a lot different to another person. Let’s take Mrs. Smith’s kitchen fire. At the point of ignition, her very own and only kitchen is on fire and what has personally defined her life is now about to go up in a thermal column. Also, it is very probably her first kitchen fire, so she is a first-timer who has very little or no experience as a fire customer. She now has a very emotional connection to a situation that is at that very moment quickly changing (i.e., wrecking) her life. From her standpoint, when she picks up the phone and dials 911, the situation has the highest level of urgency to her. She calls us because burning kitchens are our business.

We now have a very tactical service delivery connection to her emotional problem. This creates a contrast in urgency that requires us to extend a standard response (respond quickly/solve the problem/be nice) to an event that is routine to us but is the worst day in the life of our customer. This creates the need for us to operate on the fireground at a consistent pace that is somewhere between hysterical-looking running and casual-looking strolling. Out-of-control running appears as if this is the first fire we ever attended; strolling looks as if we could care less about the incident problem. Either approach—too fast/too slow—causes Mrs. Smith to wonder if she called the right agency.

I got the punch line for all this fast/slow fireground stuff from the same old guy who told me the young/old bull story. After he explained to me that unless walls were about to fall on me I was not to run on the fireground, he then told me if he caught me going for a leisurely walk when something was burning he would give me a stiff “C” side kick. I responded: “If I can’t go too fast or too slow, how should I move?” He quickly said, “Always move on the fireground at a CONTROLLED HUSTLE—you should always look as if you came to do business, you know your business, and you mean business.” He was really a smart guy.

Retired Chief ALAN BRUNACINI is a fire service author and speaker. He and his sons own the fire service Web site bshifter.com.