By Dane Carley and Craig Nelson
Although the fire alarm example is the easiest, the culture shift is evident in many areas of fire service response. Those working on the street, the line personnel, know that a medical call takes at least 4-6 people; especially a full cardiac arrest. Yet, the fire service often sends a two-person quick response vehicle to work with another two-person ambulance crew, which barely meets minimum staffing needs at a routine medical call. This is also understaffed for the worst-case scenario, since a full arrest often takes more people. The fire service often sends a single engine to accidents that do not involve injuries even though it often takes more apparatus than that to create a safe workspace on roads; particularly intersections with traffic approaching from multiple directions.
Cultures do not shift quickly, and a focus on business may not be the only factor contributing to a materializing belief that we do not need to treat all calls as a worst-case scenario until we know differently. What people, including firefighters, learn in one aspect of their life often affects other aspects. A positive example of this was how our response to hazardous materials calls combined with the adoption of the incident command system (ICS) changed our fireground behaviors. Instead of having a free-for-all at a working fire, hazardous materials training taught us to slow down and build an effective strategy prior to engaging. ICS taught us to communicate effectively, coordinate our actions, and know where everyone was on the scene.
Was that the beginning of the change in our culture? Did the slow approach to a hazardous materials call affect our culture so significantly by itself? First, probably not, because culture is too big for that. Second, this was a positive change in the context of fireground operations because taking time to develop a strategy makes us more effective by improving the outcome. However, the fire service was then introduced to emergency medical priority dispatching. This ranked calls based on their importance. Now crews work in a system that places a level of importance on every call to which they respond. In this system, some calls receive a rating making it less important than others do; it is weighted. Have these factors, and others, come together to change the fire service culture in a way that causes it to be less reliable? The answer to that seems to be yes. The question that matters is, does that match the community’s expectations? The community is our shareholders. The answer to that question is that it depends on your community and the expectations they have for your fire department.
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Part of the reason we opened with the story we did is that it holds some very similar parallels to a story that is still emerging from this last year. We are hesitant to use the more recent story because an investigation is not completed and there were extenuating circumstances beyond the department’s control the day this story started. Because of its parallels, however, the basic comparison illustrates the changes in fire service behavior–our assumptions–over the last two or three decades. To ensure the comparison is as accurate as possible, we only used information that came directly from Orange County Fire Authority (OCFA) Chief McIntosh during a news conference on the incident . This information was found during a preliminary investigation conducted by the OCFA.
On October 9, 2017, the OCFA started receiving unconfirmed reports of a brush fire very near an area between the 91 Freeway and the Santa Ana River in the very southeast corner of Yorba Linda, California; this was less than two miles from the fire to which crews responded in 1990. Since decades had passed, another station, Fire Station #53, had been built near this location, so Fire Station #32 was no longer the first-due apparatus under normal circumstances. Because of a multitude of large, destructive fires across the state, the OCFA had sent strike teams out of the county to help those who had helped them in the past with mutual aid through California’s robust statewide mutual aid system.
The preliminary investigation indicates that dispatchers may have attributed the reports to smoke from an earlier fire in the same vicinity, so units were not immediately dispatched. However, the dispatch center did ask firefighters beginning to backfill Fire Station #53 to walk out front and see if they could see any new smoke. The crew at #53’s was unable to respond otherwise because of staffing issues associated with a very recent mutual aid request. After approximately one hour, Engine #32, a battalion chief, and a helicopter responded to investigate the ongoing smoke reports. The engine responded without lights and sirens until personnel at Fire Station #53 reported a spot with open flames inside of the black of the earlier Canyon Fire upon a second check. After extensive investigating, crews found what turned into the Canyon 2 Fire, which destroyed 25 structures, damaged another 55, and burned approximately 9,217 acres.
This example is not used to fault the response, because the extenuating circumstances make this a less-than-perfect comparison and we do not have all of the details because a complete investigation has not been completed. We chose to use this example because the human behavior portion so clearly illustrates the difference in the mindset between the fire service in 1990 and 2017. The dispatchers taking the 911 calls and the firefighters responded in exactly the way they have been conditioned to respond. Much like an athlete who runs plays hundreds of times or a gymnast who practices the same routine hundreds of times, the dispatchers and firefighters reacted as they had practiced hundreds, or even thousands, of times responding to calls during their career. Their mental muscle memory was to evaluate the call and rank it based on a priority instead of treating it as an emergency until other information caused them to think otherwise.
This example, based on the publicly available information, provides a window into the behaviors being taught in the fire service today. A root cause analysis, one that truly works to the human behaviors in the root cause , will likely reveal that not a single person in this chain of events acted outside of what has become expected of them based on the group’s (fire department) expectations –the same expectations of dispatchers and firefighters across the country. In an effort to become more efficient, departments have expected dispatchers to become risk analyzers based on the information gathered from a 911 caller and send the appropriate resources based on a risk model that ranks the severity of a call. The firefighters receive the filtered information, filter it further, and respond accordingly. This happens multiple times a day to these people for their entire career. Everyone from the dispatchers receiving the 911 calls of smoke to the firefighters responding behaved exactly as they had been conditioned by the fire service’s expectations over the time they had likely served in their career. This is akin to how an athlete runs a play or gymnast performs their routine from muscle memory based on hundreds of practices.
Given that, this outcome is not the fault of the dispatchers, firefighters, or fire department administration, because there has been a subtle but important shift in how the fire service responds to emergencies. In the past, we decided upon receipt of an alarm that it was an emergency based on assumptions until we were told differently; this is what made us effective. Today, we do not decide that it is an emergency until we have confirmed it with additional information in the name of efficiency; until a caller reports smoke showing or the call handler finishes an extensive interview and labels the medical a delta or echo call.
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Craig Nelson works for the Fargo (ND) Fire Department and works part-time at Minnesota State Community and Technical College – Moorhead as a fire instructor. He also works seasonally for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources as a wildland firefighter in Northwest Minnesota. Previously, he was an airline pilot. He has a bachelor’s degree in business administration and a master’s degree in executive fire service leadership.
Dane Carley entered the fire service in 1989 in southern California and is currently a captain for the Fargo (ND) Fire Department. Since then, he has worked in structural, wildland-urban interface, and wildland firefighting in capacities ranging from fire explorer to career captain. He has both a bachelor’s degree in fire and safety engineering technology, and a master’s degree in public safety executive leadership. Dane also serves as both an operations section chief and a planning section chief for North Dakota’s Type III Incident Management Assistance Team, which provides support to local jurisdictions overwhelmed by the magnitude of an incident.
