For firefighters to be effective on the fireground, we must rely on the tools of our trade. These tricks are just some of the many examples of how today’s firefighters are always pushing ahead to make things better. Before using any of these suggestions, make sure they are approved by your department’s administration. Run them by your officer; discuss them around the kitchen table. Remember that modifying tools or using them for a purpose for which they were not designed can void the warranty and may expose you to injury.
Seat belts make great carrying straps for a variety of items: step chocks, cribbing, saws, hose packs, pressurized water extinguishers, hand lights, and more. Although readily available from any junked car, if possible, get them off an old school bus. This way you’ll have a good number of belts that use the same type of connector. If you get belts from different vehicles at the local junkyard, you’ll wind up with a bunch of belts that don’t clip together.
Successfully using seat belts depends on how you tie the two cut ends together. Ideally, you could have a car seat or boat cover vendor sew them together (photo 1).
 (1) Photos by author unless otherwise noted. |
Or, using a heavy-duty needle and heavy-duty thread, you could sew them yourself. However, keep in mind the weight you intend them to carry, and make sure this attachment is up to the task. Some personnel have used rivets with washers.
Using seat belts for the above listed uses is pretty basic; the procedure for using them to carry saws varies slightly. Carrying saws using seat belts frees your hands while climbing a ladder, provides a wide strap that won’t cut into your shoulder, and enables you to easily disconnect it from the saw when you reach the roof so it doesn’t get in your way when cutting.
You can attach the strap to the saw in a variety of ways-use your imagination and creativity to see what works best for the tool and your operation. However, if you opt to attach one end of the belt to the saw using screws or rivets, make sure it doesn’t impede the operation or void the saw’s warranty. Try different ways before you start drilling holes. You can attach the belt to the saw permanently or loop the belt over each end. Just make sure the belt clips don’t end up in the middle where they would rest on your shoulder, where the weight will certainly make carrying a painful task.
Door chocks are among the items most commonly carried by firefighters. Captain Al Lawler of the Mountain Home (ID) Air Force Base Fire Department modifies his chocks so they can hold open high- and low-bottomed doors and plug fused sprinkler heads. Sometimes chocking a door at the bottom doesn’t work, is impractical, or is at risk of getting knocked out by a boot or hoseline. To modify, drill a hole, insert a nail, and bend the nail over to provide an attachment point from which the door chock can hang from a hinge; it will prevent the door from closing by sitting between the door and the door jamb.
Using a 2 × 2 piece of wood, cut a slot in it as indicated in photo 2. Using a #12 to #16 nail (a finishing nail works best for screen doors), pound the nail into the side of the chock wood as shown in photo 2. Bend the nail 90°, and pivot it so it lies flat along the side of the wedge.
 (2) Photos 2, 3, 4 by Al Lawler. |
The slot cut down the middle of the slanted edge allows the wedge to break more easily to produce two small wedges to plug an operating or fused sprinkler head. Using two wedges or one wedge and a tool, force one wedge or the tool into the long groove of the other wedge. It will break the wedge in two, and the two pieces will serve as wedges to plug fused sprinkler heads.
With low-cut doors, use the wedge to hold the door fully open, although firefighters and hoselines moving through the doorway may knock it loose.
Doors with bottoms too high for the wedge can be held about halfway open by turning the nail about 45° downward and placing the nail over the door hinge in the area in which the hinge closes. It is difficult to accidentally knock it out (photos 3, 4).
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Most locksmiths use wedges to pry auto doors open far enough to get a wire inside to pop the lock. Pivot the door on the Nader bolt; the door usually will flex enough to allow the coat hanger wire to pass through.
An alternative door chock is a homemade device to hold doors open (photo 5). Its design is pretty straightforward. Cut a short length of angle iron, drill a hole through the top, and insert an “S” hook and then bend the bottom of the “S” hook over so it can’t come out of the hole in the angle iron. Make sure to grind down all sharp edges. Its benefit over the standard door chock is that it is off the ground and can’t get kicked out by a boot or an advancing hose. Thanks to Deputy Chief Doug Kelly, New Rochelle (NY) Fire Department.
 (5) Photo 5 by Doug Kelly. |
Fire extinguisher. To make a cost-effective and easy-to-use home fire extinguisher, take an empty small metal coffee can and two plastic tops. Clean out the can and dry it. Flip the can over, and poke a series of holes around its perimeter using a can opener. Place one of the plastic tops on that end, and flip the back over. Fill it with baking soda. Place the other plastic cover on the open top. Label the can “fire extinguisher.” Store it in the kitchen away from the stove so you don’t have to go toward the burning stove to get it. More information and a printable label for your homemade fire extinguisher are available at www.armhammer.com/brochure/documents/firepail.pdf. Besides using in your own home, this is a great tip to pass along to the public. Thanks to Arm & Hammer for this tip and making the label available (photos 6, 7, 8, 9).
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Powerpoint® has firmly established itself as a powerful training tool in today’s fire service. Besides the obvious uses as a presentation tool, it can provide varying scenarios for strategy and tactics training. Insert the picture of the local structure you want to discuss and then insert fire animations in the locations on the pictures you want to simulate as having fire. Free fire animations are readily available through the Internet; just search for “free fire animations.” Change the size of the fire on each ensuing slide to show an increase or decrease in fire. Then, based on the tactics employed, you can indicate improved or worsened conditions by advancing or moving back to a previous slide.
Jeopardy!TM is another popular use for Powerpoint®. Tim Riecker, training program branch director for the New York State Emergency Management Office, created an effective “Jeopardy!”- based incident command training system. It uses the Powerpoint® feature “Action Buttons” (under “Slide Show” on the top bar of PowerPoint®). Each action button is a command that takes you to a specific slide. On that slide is a question followed by the right answer. But the answer doesn’t appear until you tell it to. So a team says, “I’ll take Hydraulics for $100.” Click on that button; the question “How much does a gallon of water weigh?” appears. Whichever team raises its hand first has five seconds to answer. After it answers, the moderator displays the right answer on the slide. A stripped-down template of this game is available at http://faculty.sunydutchess.edu/walsh/. Click on “Free Training Resources” on the left side, then “Powerpoint®,” then “Training/Safety.” This version of “Jeopardy!” is a little different from the TV version; it provides the question and participants must give you the answer, whereas the TV game gives the answer and the person must provide the question.
First, create five categories for your questions. Then just go through each slide and type in your questions where it asks for a question. Put the answer below it. Make sure you use books or other authoritative sources to create your questions and answers so you are sure your answer is correct. People enjoy competing with each other. It also serves as a great teaching/reviewing tool. Keep score. A Double Jeopardy! and Final Jeopardy! question are included. Keep the original template Jeopardy! file intact: As soon as you start entering questions, you must immediately save it under that topic name so the blank template is always unchanged.
Powerpoint® can also be used as a timer during classes. If you tell students to take a 10-minute break or that they have 15 minutes to finish a task, 10 turns into 15 and 15 into 20 minutes.
Using Powerpoint®, you keep things on schedule and easily display a timer on the screen so everybody knows exactly how much time is left. All you have to do is make up a set of slides in an order that indicates how much time is left. If you want to time 10 minutes, make a slide that says “10 minutes.” Make additional “countdown” slides indicating nine minutes and so on, down to one minute. Go to the “Slide Show” button on the top of the page. Click on that, and scroll down toward the bottom to “Slide Transition.” On the lower right side, click the button “advance automatically”; indicate “one minute” in that spot. Do this for all the remaining timer slides you have made up to that point.
Create additional slides for the last minute set at 10-second intervals-50 seconds down to 10 seconds. Do the same for the last 10 seconds, setting it at one-second intervals.
Finally, make a slide that says “Break is over; please return to your seat” or “Activity is complete.” You can insert some sound like a fog horn or a siren that will also play automatically when this slide appears, leaving no doubt in students’ minds that the break or activity is over.
When you give students a set break or a specific time limit to do a group activity during a class, you can just start this Powerpoint® “show.” If you are already using a Powerpoint® show for your drill, just insert an “Action Button” on the slide where you want to take a break. When you click it, it will start the timer. Ready-made Powerpoint® timers can be downloaded at http://faculty.sunydutchess.edu/walsh/. Click on “FREE TRAINING RESOURCES,” then “POWERPOINT,” and then “Training/Safety.”
Using the “Action Button” feature, you can also set up each slide as a test. Post a question and then offer your answer choices. Set your action buttons so that a mouse click on an answer goes to a slide that says “You’re right; congratulations” or “You’re wrong; What were you thinking?”
Back injuries are among major disabling injuries for firefighters. Just about everything done on an emergency scene involves some sort of lifting, usually alone. It often involves hurriedly lifting a heavy, bulky item; most lifts are done in full personal protective equipment with your SCBA on your back. This weight alters your center of gravity and makes bending over a much more strenuous task. Although firefighting is a team effort, often tasks are accomplished solo or at least without sufficient personnel. Lifting and carrying a fan, ladder, generator, or length of hose are just a few examples. Some lifts always are accomplished with a two-person team, such as lifting/carrying a stretcher. Stretchers are especially problematic, as it is difficult to perform a good lift with the cot often in the way of your knees. Lifting puts a strain on your body, specifically your back, especially if not performed properly. Back injuries often haunt you throughout your career; once you suffer a back injury, it often never seems to go away totally. Experts tell us that each “bad lift” does damage, often without any obvious indications of the harm (no immediate pain); we, of course, think we have dodged the bullet and no damage was caused. They also tell us that often the damage from each bad lift accumulates until one day that seemingly minor lift results in excruciating pain shooting across your back, the result of the cumulative damage from all of those “bad lifts.” The Internet has much good information on proper lifting methods.
From Day One, every firefighter is taught to lift with the legs. During drills such as ladder drills, undoubtedly proper lifting is encouraged and hopefully even mandated. How do you convince the troops that they are not lifting properly? Use the same technique as you would to show them that their search patterns are not thorough: Videotape them. Have them perform a variety of lifts, videotape them from the side, and then show them the videotape. Seeing is believing. Make sure you have them perform a number of proper different lifts consecutively so it becomes habit. Some experts say that a person must do something the same way 21 consecutive times for it to become a habit.
DAVE WALSH is a 34-year veteran of the fire service and the program chairperson for the fire science program at Dutchess Community College in Poughkeepsie, New York. He served 27 years as a career firefighter with the Arlington Fire District in Poughkeepsie, where he was the municipal training officer for 19 years. He is a nationally certified fire instructor II, a New York State fire instructor, and an adjunct instructor for the New York State Emergency Management Office. Walsh has a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Marist College and a bachelor’s degree in fire science from Empire State College.
