BY BILL MANNING
For firefighter line-of-duty deaths or injuries (LODDI) to occur, one or a combination of the following three elements must be present: (1) dangerous response environment, (2) insufficient preparation or resources, and (3) uninhibited human stupidity. We will call this the “Law of LODDI.”
The fire department’s mission-its reason for existence, in fact-assures us that firefighters will be exposed to very dangerous environments. For that reason alone, the first element of the Law of LODDI sometimes prevails all by itself. Items (2) and (3) don’t necessarily need to be in place for a line-of-duty death or injury. But that’s only true for a small minority of LODDI incidents. Most of the time, insufficient preparation and resources and stupidity are easily identified as causal factors in LODDIs.
Uninhibited human stupidity, of course, comes in endless varieties before, during, and after the tragic event. Unsprinklered public facilities, child fireplay, oily rags left exposed to heat, too few fireground radios and undisciplined radio traffic, fireground freelancing, poor physical fitness, station closures, political inertia, not reading the building, inability to market tactics during budget negotiations-these are just a few of the endless examples of stupidity that can and do kill firefighters, in one way or another.
Perhaps the most distressing example of stupidity is the negligence and cowardice of those in the fire service with the responsibility and political influence to make a difference in preventing LODDIs, but whose stupidity rarely bears public scrutiny because fire officials operate in an accountability vacuum created by public acceptance of firefighter LODDIs (“heroes sometimes die”).
Obfuscation abounds. It’s always “the firefighter was too fat” or “the firefighters should not have been in the building” (easy to say after the tragic fact) or “sprinklers are too expensive” or “the road was wet” or “increased company staffing will put us out of business.” And so we keep spinning the LODDI Wheel of Misfortune, and at the end of each year we tally up the bodies and sadly shake our heads, wondering why.
Usually, the social engineers follow this up with prescriptive policies that look good on paper but skirt our real needs, hoping their fruits somehow will get us over this terrible hump. But they never do. Meanwhile, where the rubber meets the road, firefighters are given too little by way of preparation, too little by way of support, too little by way of fireground and emergency scene infrastructure, too little by way of lessons learned, too little by way of standing up to the money interests opposed to fixed fire protection and firesafe building construction, and so on. Firefighters are almost never given what they most sorely need in equal measure to what they are themselves ready to give-their lives.
What the Law of LODDI does not explicitly say, but what every member of this business must understand, is that as much as insufficient preparation and resources can kill firefighters (intensifying inherent response dangers and magnifying stupidity), conversely, preparation-that is, physical and mental readiness (training and education)-supported by resources (staffing and equipment) is the only thing outside of serendipity that can correct the chaos that’s ready to strike at a second’s notice. We will never completely eliminate folly and human error, and we will never be able to guarantee the firefighter a nonthreatening work environment, but we can control and minimize them by emphasis on training, education, and resource support.
Our neglect of this simple truth is truly appalling.
Most training budgets are woeful. In general, we do not develop or practice a culture of ongoing training within our departments. We don’t critique incidents as companies before we take up. We whitewash fireground mistakes because we’re afraid of hurting someone’s feelings or of losing our jobs. We fail to employ the philosophy that safety is a behavior, requiring actions by thinking firefighters who know fire, live fire, think fire, breathe fire.
We punish the stupidity of the few with measures that make the many suffer, feeding into the vicious LODDI cycle, such as what occurred in Delaware, where the fire patriarchs’ response to the tragic but horrifically stupid, senseless, and self-created death of an assistant fire chief in a live training burn fell nothing short of condemning and eliminating all live training burns in the state.
For too long, the fire service has been an army that trains without real bullets. Too often, we train by anecdotes and simulations. Too often, we’re like Air Force pilots who get into their planes only when they’re dispatched to a real war.
When it comes to firefighting, we’re afraid of real training, we’re afraid of the EPA, we’re afraid of OSHA, we’re afraid of our bosses, we’re afraid of ourselves.
It is time to get a grip on the vast implications of the Law of LODDI. It is only by training for physical fitness, training for emergency driving, and putting the teeth back into training in the art and science of firefighting (and resources to support it) that we will break the LODDI cycle, overcoming the dangers and stupidity that daily threaten the demise of American firefighters.
It gives me great pleasure to welcome our new Fire Engineering Group Publisher Scott Schwadron, whose extensive publishing knowledge and experience will help bring Fire Engineering and the fire service to the next level in leadership.
