BY TOM SITZ
The ability to rapidly locate an activated PASS alarm is an individual skill that all of your firefighters can acquire through realistic scenario-based drills completed in the station. The need to acquire and develop this skill is self-explanatory. Hopefully, you will never have to use this skill in an actual emergency, but if you do, you don’t want it to be the first time you are using it. Using your fire station’s living quarters and the bay area, you can simulate private dwelling and small commercial occupancy scenarios.
We have developed several drills using private dwelling and commercial occupancy scenarios that become progressively more difficult. Each time you master a skill, you can change it so that this new skill now becomes the basic building block required to master the next scenario. The nice thing about these drills is the setup time-the time it takes your victim to don his gear and lie down and however long it takes you to pull a couple of trucks out of the bay.
Remember, these are not rapid intervention team (RIT) drills; they are individual skill-building drills. All are based on a team of two firefighters because that is the number of firefighters needed to accomplish all of the tasks set up in these drills. I fully agree that two firefighters do not constitute a RIT, but two firefighters may be enough to locate the downed firefighter and direct additional resources to their position. Whether it is a four- or an eight-member RIT, someone has to be in charge and determine the direction of travel based on from where they believe the sound is coming.
DRILL GOALS
1. To give all members experience searching for an activated PASS alarm based on sound alone in various simulated occupancies and in zero-visibility conditions. All searching firefighters should have their face pieces completely blacked out. We like to use painter’s tape-it leaves no residue on the face piece; with careful taping, you can tape the face piece so the firefighters can still see their heads-up air status display but nothing else.
2. To reinforce good search and air monitoring techniques. The lead firefighter or orientated firefighter is not allowed to leave the wall; both firefighters will have enough information available to them so that they can abort the search if they believe they will run out of air before they can complete the task.
3. To practice the assessment of an unresponsive firefighter and the deployment of your breathing apparatus Emergency Buddy Breathing System (EBBS) or RIT pack, if applicable.
4. To practice the removal of a downed firefighter.
5. To reinforce techniques used to search a large open space.
6. To home in on the sound of the PASS as quickly as possible. So if your firefighters are searching every room they encounter, you need to redirect their efforts. If you do not believe the sound is coming from that room, move on, maintain contact with the wall for orientation, and aggressively move toward the sound.
PRIVATE DWELLING
DRILL 1. This is the most basic of all the drills in which the members get their first experience in homing in on the sound alone. The living quarters for our station are 30 x 55 feet, totaling 1,650 square feet. The square footage is divided among nine rooms with 10 interior doors we can open or close to help change the pitch of the PASS. This would be considered a very average private dwelling in several of our residential neighborhoods. One of these rooms (our day room) is 30 x 20 feet, totaling 600 square feet. This is the room where we started the initial skill-building drills.
Setup. Close all the doors in the station, and have the victim lie down along the wall either to the left or the right of the entry door. Laying the firefighter along the wall to the right or left of the doorway compels the lead firefighter to determine his direction of travel (right or left) depending on from where be believes the sound is originating as he enters the room (Figure 1; figures by Pat Tosti).
 Figure 1. Private Dwelling Drill 1 |
Execution. The search team should enter the living quarters from the bay when members hear the PASS alarm activate. Once they enter the station, the lead firefighter, and only the lead firefighter, determines the direction of travel. The lead firefighter is the one we want to develop the skill of homing in on the sound of the PASS.
If mistakes are made, let them happen and see if the lead firefighter can make the needed corrections. If you or the other searching firefighter immediately tells the lead firefighter he is going the wrong way, that firefighter will never develop the skill of distinguishing the difference in the PASS alarm’s sound as he moves away from it vs. crawling past it.
Direction of travel. Two techniques will assist the lead in determining the direction of travel. Review these techniques with the searching firefighters when you are going over the goals of the drill.
Open and close doors. When you come to a room and are not sure whether the PASS is in that room or in a room off that room, open the door and listen; then close the door and listen. If the PASS is in that room or a room connected to that room, you should be able to pick up a change in the sound. The change in the volume of the PASS sound is quite pronounced when you open and close the door to the room containing the PASS.
Plug one ear or change the orientation of your body. When you enter the room in which you believe the PASS is, you have to determine a direction of travel. If it is not readily apparent whether to go left or right, hold your hand over one ear at a time; you should be able to pick up a fluctuation in the sound that tells you which way to go. Also, change the orientation of your body-left, right, or straight ahead-trying to pick up a change in the sound (louder or softer) that will tell you which way to go (photo 1).
 Photos by author. |
Your search team leader should radio situation reports to command in a timely fashion. If this is not being done, command should initiate the traffic just as it would in a real emergency. Once the team locates the downed firefighter and the second firefighter shuts off the PASS, the lead firefighter is expected to notify command by radio while the second firefighter finishes his assessment.
Assessing the downed firefighter. Immediately shut off the PASS so the firefighters can communicate with each other and command and can assess the downed firefighter’s air status by cracking the seal on his face piece and listening for the positive pressure to kick in (photo 2).
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If applicable (depending on how you set up the drill), the second firefighter would now tie the firefighter into the RIT pack (photo 3).
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Prepare the firefighter for removal. This may be as simple as tightening down the firefighter SCBA chest straps and using them as a handhold. Or, if you have to move the firefighter a considerable distance, you may want to use a rescue strap or convert his SCBA into a harness by flexing the downed firefighter’s leg and buckling his waist belt around it to keep it in a flexed position (photo 4).
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Remove the firefighter using the same route the team used to enter, to reinforce the importance of maintaining orientation.
DRILL 2. Same setup as Drill 1, except this time place the victim in the middle of the large room, in a position where the search team will not be able to make physical contact with him unless they stretch off the wall. With the victim in this position, the search team members will have to pick up on the change in the PASS alarm sound should they crawl past the victim while working their way around the room working off the wall.
 Figure 2. Private Dwelling Drill 2 |
In this setup, when search team members believe they are in the area of the downed firefighter, they will need to stretch off the wall. The lead firefighter can maintain contact with the wall and stretch out; the second firefighter can then stretch out from the outstretched arms of the lead firefighter. The lead firefighter can increase the distance he can stretch out by placing his hand tool perpendicular to the wall and bracing his foot against the hand tool. There are very few rooms in a private dwelling that two outstretched firefighters, using their hand tools as extensions, cannot effectively cover (Figure 2, photo 5).
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DRILL 3. Same setup, except now change the victim’s location to a smaller room, preferably a room within a room, such as a shower room.
 Figure 3. Private Dwelling Drill 3 |
This, again, will change the PASS sound presentation to the searching firefighters. It will be considerably softer, since it will be behind two closed doors. Search team members may have a harder time determining their initial direction of travel depending on the distance between the entrance point and the location of the victim (Figure 3).
SIMULATED COMMERCIAL
DRILL 4. In this scenario, you are trying to recreate a small commercial occupancy. The only setup needed is to pull all the trucks out of the bay. Our main bay is 30 x 70 feet, so when we pull all our trucks out of the bay, we have opened up a 2,100-square-foot area, identical to many of our smaller commercial occupancies. This, again, changes how the sound is presented to the search team; they are used to hearing the sound in a relatively confined area up to this point. Since the sound presentation has changed again, place the initial victim within 10 feet from a wall so the firefighter team members can make physical contact with the victim if they stretch out. Execution for the drill is the same setup as before: Locate, assess, air, and removal, except now the search team enters from the fire station’s living quarters (Figure 4).
 Figure 4. Commercial Occupance Drill 4 |
DRILL 5. Same setup as Drill 4 (an empty bay), except this time, the victim needs to be in the middle of the bay floor, a location in which the searching firefighters will not be able to make physical contact with the victim, even when they stretch out. With this setup, the firefighters are more likely to initially pass the victim’s location and will have to work their way back to the area where they believe the victim is located.
After they have outlined the victim’s location area and determined that they cannot reach the victim, even when stretched out, they will need to find a way for the second firefighter to extend farther from the lead firefighter while still maintaining physical contact.
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This is where your personal rope is worth its weight in gold. At this point, both firefighters clip each end of the rope to each other. The lead firefighter then acts as the anchor and does not leave the wall so that he maintains his orientation. The second firefighter tethers out toward the sound. Once the second firefighter locates the downed firefighter and prepares him for removal, the lead firefighter can take up slack on the rope, guiding the second firefighter back into his position (photos 6, 7).
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DRILL 6. The setup changes this time in that you leave one or two trucks in the bays and pull everything else out. This is a very realistic simulation of some of our smaller auto repair shops. This time, have the victim lie next to a truck on the side opposite from where the entry team is approaching. This, again, changes how the sound is presented to the search team. The PASS sound bounces off the trucks. Some of the sound will travel underneath the trucks, making it tougher to determine the sound’s origin. The trucks also make nice obstacles for the entry team to work around when locating and extricating the victim (Figure 5).
 Figure 5. Commercial Occupancy Drill 6 |
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AIR MANAGEMENT
As with any drill involving firefighters on air, you must stress air management. The rule of engagement for this drill is that if you run out of air, you have just become a victim, making the situation incredibly more stressful for the incident commander and the other members operating on the fireground.
The other thing you need to stress to drill participants is that if they run out of air and have to declare a Mayday, they have greatly decreased the original downed firefighter’s chances of survival! Resources now have to be spent coming for the search team. If your SCBA has a heads-up display for air status and you tape off the mask so the display can still be read, the search team has two tools available to assist in air monitoring.
1. They should keep track of how deep they have penetrated into the building. Although this is certainly not an exact science when you cannot see, experienced members do this at every fire.
2. They know how much air they expended to get to the their current location. They can see it in the heads-up display.
Based on this information, how far have they traveled into the interior, and how much air did they use to get to that point? They should be able to make a fairly educated guess on when they need to start their return trip. The mindset here is that the search team members should know they cannot keep pushing forward until their low-air alarms go off if operating in a structure bigger than a small private dwelling.
Training in the station is an excellent way to develop these skills. Of course, the true test of the search team’s skill is when you go out and run these scenarios in a vacant or acquired structure where the participants have not been briefed on the interior layout.
Unfortunately for most of us, the opportunities to train in an acquired structure do not come along as often as we would like. But by running these drills in the station, we now have hands-on experience in locating an activated PASS alarm in large and small private dwelling rooms and full or empty smaller commercial occupancies.
TOM SITZ is a lieutenant and 21-year veteran of the Painesville Township (OH) Fire Department. He is an instructor in the Lakeland Community College fire science program and lead instructor for the Auburn Career Center basic firefighting program. He has been published in fire service magazines and has been a presenter at the FDIC.
