Anyone serious about this job recognizes the need for serious training. Training reinforces past lessons, teaches new ones, and is critical to building and maintaining teamwork. In addition, most departments and “governing bodies” require a certain number of educational hours to be documented each year. Good training officers work hard to make those required hours as fruitful as possible, minimizing the time spent trying to determine if that’s a flyspeck or a manufacturing defect on the ceiling tiles. Only the most arrogant rookies and the “4 2 5s” (four years of experience five times is not 20 years of experience!) dismiss the value of training, but, hey, they already possess all of the knowledge in the universe anyway.
If you care about being the best, you train. You sacrifice the nights and weekends to make sure that when the bell rings or the pagers go off you provide a timely, professional, and appropriate response. The rest of the time you run calls. But if you just go back home or to the station when you’re done with the latest incident, you’ve missed one of the best chances you will have to learn and to improve: Call it “OJT” or whatever. It’s a valuable educational opportunity without having to sit through a one-hour lecture first.
Example: Vehicle accident, victim pinned, serious injury. You and your team arrive, and everything goes like clockwork. Five minutes later, the car roof is on the ground, and the victim is on the stretcher and turned over to EMS. As your team loads equipment, you’re surveying your handiwork and trying to think if it possibly could have been done any better. However, before you order that “Rescue God” T-shirt, you need to recognize the invaluable potential you have here for teaching, team building, and learning. Call your team over and say: “OK, boys and girls, take a good look. What could we have done better? Differently? More quickly? More safely? What if the vehicle had been against a tree? What about this? What about that?”
Then listen. If everybody says, “Nothing, Boss—nobody could do it any better than you,” then you’ve got a major problem. You’re either a narrow-minded dictatorial egotist who spends too much time seeking revenge against anyone who voices an opinion other than yours, or you have a crew so stupid that they can’t pour water out of a boot with the instructions written on the bottom of the heel. There is little hope for this situation. Just spend a lot of time praying that you never get sick.
An honest and intelligent crew will give you honest and intelligent responses. After all, if they didn’t think they could do this job they would have been up near the truck “assisting” the pump operator. So, pay attention. Someone might have completely removed the roof instead of flapping it. Would that have made victim removal easier, or would the additional time have been wasted? Explain your decisions, and probe for constructive criticism. You might think that would show weakness, but you’d be wrong. If you honestly review the feedback you get, you’ll learn something, and you’ll also reinforce to all team members that their contribution is not only appreciated but also required.
Example: Middle of the night, theoretically unoccupied structure, room-and-contents fire on arrival. We won’t argue about whether or not you can ever really be sure that any structure is unoccupied, but there is evidence here that no one is home. Should you attack or go into defensive mode? That’s not a stupid question; some departments, looking at past incidents where firefighter losses have occurred for nothing but property, don’t enter abandoned structures and modify their attack plans if no immediately dangerous to life and health (IDLH) condition exists. Now, I’m as big a proponent of “risk little to save little” as anyone, but I want to learn something new or at least reinforce my beliefs on every call I run. Besides, it’s a structure fire, and you can never be 100 percent positive that the structure is unoccupied. Treat it the same way as you would with Junior screaming in the back bedroom: Team, plan, then attack if possible. This is a real fire, not a diesel-fueled surface burn that can be put out with spit after spending 10 minutes choreographing your grand entrance. Knock it down. Put it out. Then analyze the effort! Time? Teamwork? How was your water pressure? Your layouts? Your support from Command? Your backup team(s)?
Don’t misinterpret this to indicate that you should make entry into a rotten two-story house that’s already leaning—it’s never okay to risk team members’ lives over a piece of property. Slow down or stop in this kind of situation, and give Command time to determine whether or not an attack can be safely made. In the meantime, get lines and people in place: The faster you can do it here, the faster you’ll do it when it’s for real.
This is not a criticism of training burns, which are the single most important tool in teaching structural firefighting. You can make training burns intensely realistic, especially now with the shift to Class A materials. However, it’s still difficult to recreate the mindset of a working fire: Everything from the adrenaline to deploying lines that are not lying on the pavement in front of you conspires to make it different. Sometimes, even a small fire in an outbuilding can highlight shortcomings in your operational procedures or reveal that a member of your team who was supremely confident at the last training burn can’t turn the corner when it’s for real. It’s much better to find this out when there is no known life safety issue because it’s easier to retreat.
The key part to learning from the calls you run is the post-action analysis. It can be formal or informal, a few people or the whole department. Walk through that structure in which you just extinguished the fire or around that car you just disassembled, and take an unhurried look. Odds are that you’ll find something you could have done differently—maybe not better, but differently. Conduct a risk/benefit analysis for the options you had; figure in time, fatigue, and staffing. If you had mutual aid on the call, how long before they were on-scene? What caliber of people did they provide? You may have people in your department who aren’t interested in “wasting time” talking about it. That’s a warning sign: You’ve either got a budding 4 2 5 on your hands or someone whose duty should be restricted to getting cold water for the real firefighters.
Keep in mind that if you turn the review into a “This is what you should have done” or, worse, “This is where you screwed up” session, then you’ve wasted the most important benefit of the post-action analysis, which is team building. There is a vast gulf between “This is what you should have done” and “What if we had done this?” Ignore it at your own peril. At the very least, you’ll ensure that those firefighters will clam up anytime they think their actions are less than perfect. At worst, you will have people willfully concealing information that could be critical to finding out what happened.
Too many departments try to forget a call as soon as the master switches are flipped, especially if everything didn’t go exactly as someone thought it should. But the reality is that you learn from your life experiences, both good and bad, and those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. The most courageous chiefs are not those who stonewall the investigation; they’re the ones who logically analyze the mistakes made, put plans in place to prevent them from happening again, and then get the word out in the hope of preventing another apparatus somewhere else from being driven way too slowly with black covers on the lights.
Every call you run is a training opportunity. It offers a chance for you to pass on what you know or to learn something new. It is an opportunity to build the team confidence so crucial to a successful and consistent outcome. It is not difficult, but it does require mutual trust and respect among professionals, whether career or volunteer. Insight is not limited to those with the most time on the job; many times a fresh face can have some ideas that will improve the team. Also, keep in mind that the purpose is to build, not destroy. If criticism is warranted and you’re the one responsible for passing it out, this is not the time. Finally, recognize that every member of your team has strengths and weaknesses and that they will color the members’ opinions. Weight lifters always grab the 50-pound hydraulic cutters; those with more finesse grab the reciprocating saw. Some officers sweat only around the mouth. Some firefighters will take extraordinary steps to avoid sweating at all.
Above all, use post-action analysis to mold your people into a team of confident professionals that hits a scene with a purpose, a plan, and a solid commitment to nothing less than the best possible outcome. If you succeed, you’ll find out just how much fun and satisfying this job can really be.
LUKE STEELE, a volunteer firefighter since 1983, is a certified firefighter II, an EMT, a rescue technician (RT), and a North Carolina-certified instructor for firefighter I/II and RT.
