Basic Skills Mark the Pro
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The Editor’s Opinion Page
Last year, as we have in other years, we carried a number of articles on the subject of management. Not as many as other fire service magazines, perhaps, but enough since management plays an important part in the workings of an organization. But management—good management—is just one of the tools that an organization uses to achieve its goals. It is actually an exercise in common sense and an exercise that great leaders have used going back to the dawn of history.
But management, or rather the study of management techniques, came relatively late to the fire service. It came on with a bang, however, and was embraced by some fire service educators and instructors as the be-all and end-all of training. They became enamored of the impressive sounding words and phrases that the management gurus used-words and phrases that are difficult to translate into the understandable, everyday English that the great writers of English like Shakespeare used. Somewhere along the line, we think, “fireground management and control” became a sexy subject for the trainers, to the diminishment of the basics of fire suppression.
As one chief (who is loaded with common sense) put it to us: “We’ll eventually have a bunch of educated idiots on the fireground who won’t know how to stretch a line!”
We got on to this subject because of some fire pictures that have recently come across our desk. One showed four 1 1/2-inch lines being thrown (from the outside) on a raging, large-area warehouse fire. In effect, it was a water pistol attack when a water cannon was called for. Fire fighters in the picture had apparently forgotten the relationship between the amount of fuel burning and the amount of water required to extinguish it—or perhaps they had never been told of this relationship by their instructors.
Another picture showed water from a ladder pipe being directed into a hole in the roof of a building that had heavy flame and smoke pushing out through the windows below. The ladder pipe, of course, successfully inhibited any good that the hole in the roof might have accomplished and only added to an already severe problem.
The hallmark of a professional in any profession lies in his mastery of the basics. And without this mastery, there can be no professionalism, since everything else stems from the basics—a foundation actually. The fire fighters, including two officers, who appeared in the photos we discussed above were surely not professionals. But the blame for this lack of professionalism must fall on whoever instructs them. Perhaps their instructors are among those who are so deep into management that they have lost sight of the need for the simple skills.
In any event, we hope that the new staff of the National Fire Academy which is charged with instructing the instructors will not forget to include the basics.
