BY IAN W. CASSIDY
The greatest risk we face in the fire service is avoiding conversations about risk. Sure, we talk about risk in broad terms, like the risk management plan “Risk a lot to save a lot,” but when was the last time you asked your company or your company officers to define risk? Are their definitions of risk different from yours? Or, if you have had this discussion, did you talk about value—not just monetary but the value of the things that are at risk? You will be surprised by the answers you get. Having a common framework for understanding these concepts is critical to be effective risk managers.
As a firefighter, I rarely considered risk in the same way I do as a company officer. The extent to which I considered risk would probably have sounded short and sweet—something like, “It’s just a part of the job.” Now as an officer, I have a different perception of risk; and, honestly, I think about it all the time. We can do one of four things with risk: avoid it, transfer it, mitigate it, or accept and manage it. Below, I’ll expand on these four avenues and discuss the hot topic of situational awareness, which goes hand in hand with risk management, and some ways to train for greater efficiency in risk management.
Risk vs. Danger
First, let’s develop a common definition of risk. What is risky to me may not be risky to you. Our perception of risk is based on our personal and professional life experiences and level of training. As a firefighter, if I routinely engaged in risky activities but was lucky to come out unscathed every time, I most likely would have some normalization of deviance clouding my perception of risk, whereas if I experienced multiple close calls or accidents throughout my career because of the proverbial Swiss cheese holes lining up for me and leading to some bad outcomes, then I may be less cavalier in my view of risk. Furthermore, incidents deemed risky by some may be downright dangerous for others. This is how our level of training affects our perception.
I have read a few authors who give the example of a free solo climber who prepares to climb a seemingly unclimbable mountain without the aid of ropes or other safety equipment. The climber spends years preparing for the single climb, climbing sections of the mountain on rope, studying every move he will make, and then making the climb when conditions are perfect and he is prepared. This example is completely in line with our profession. The climber takes a situation that is extremely dangerous without preparation but that becomes more safe or considerably less risky with training and preparation. The same is true about a firefighter going into a house fire. If I were to enter a house fire without personal protective equipment (PPE), training, and the proper equipment, that situation would, without a doubt, be exceedingly dangerous. However, if, like the free soloist, I consider all the risks, train, prepare, and equip myself to manage those risks, the once dangerous situation becomes much less dangerous.
The following basic definitions can help us frame risk and differentiate it from danger:
- Risk involves a known problem with some degree of predictable outcomes that you are adequately trained and equipped to handle.
- Danger involves a problem with an unpredictable nature that you are not adequately trained or equipped to handle.
If one of my firefighters tells me, “That Bravo/Charlie corner looks dangerous,” I can interpret that to mean it’s unpredictable. At a hazardous materials incident, the trained hazmat team perceives it as risky but well within its scope to manage. However, to the engine company, which does not specialize in hazardous materials response, that hazmat incident may be perceived as dangerous. As a rule, we are in the business of taking dangerous situations and making them, at a minimum, risky.
Risk Avoidance
As firefighters, we don’t typically think of risk avoidance as an option, but we make choices to avoid risk every day. In certain situations, you may choose to avoid a specific risk. One choice could be backing out of an offensive fire attack to go defensive. Another may be to position crews outside the collapse zone at a well-involved multistory building. In both examples, we recognized the risk and avoided it. Did that risk go away? No. In fact, risk avoidance only applies to the one avoiding it. If the investigators need to go into the building to investigate or if the insurance company comes to appraise the damages, those same risks may still apply to them. Understand that the risk I chose to avoid persists; it becomes amoeba-like in nature; it doesn’t go away. Risk will typically morph to impact another area of the incident or another group of people involved after responders have left the scene. In some cases, risk avoidance makes the situation worse, but there are still valid reasons for avoiding risk. As the saying goes, “Everything you do can get you killed, even doing nothing.”
Risk Transference
You can transfer risk in many ways. You can avoid it, as above, or you can wait until the people who are qualified to take the situation from dangerous to risky are on the scene. For example, in a hazmat incident involving a tank leaking anhydrous ammonia, the situation is dangerous to my company; but to the hazmat team, it’s only risky. Our perceptions, mostly from training and responses, are vastly different. In this example, the risk is transferred to those who have the technical expertise to mitigate the risk.
In a switch to defensive fire operations, the risk transfers to the exposures because the main fire building has been written off. Transferring risk isn’t a bad thing; it’s either getting the right people to deal with the risk or it’s moving the risk to where we will have the best outcome. Well-managed risk transference is highly effective, and we should regularly use this tool.
Risk Mitigation
A commonly held understanding of “mitigation” is “to fix the problem,” but it means to make less severe or painful or stack the deck in our favor. Some risk-mitigation techniques we use are as follows:
- Standard operating procedures/guidelines: common actions for common outcomes.
- Residential sprinklers.
- PPE/self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA) use.
- Driver/operator response training.
- Two in/two out, and rapid intervention teams.
- National Fire Protection Association 1403, Standard on Live Fire Training Evolutions, live fire checklists.
If you apply any of the above items to a scenario, although the risk is still present, each item applied stacks the deck in our favor to keep the community and the firefighters as safe as possible.
Don’t confuse risk mitigation with risk acceptance. In my mind, they sometimes seem the same, but they are not. As risk managers, we wish we could mitigate all risk and address every issue that may arise. Unfortunately, that isn’t always the case, so we must consider risk acceptance.
Risk Acceptance
On many fire and emergency medical services (EMS) scenes, the options to mitigate, transfer, or avoid risk are absent because of a high reward scenario like a rescue. We have only one option, to accept the risk. Accepting risk is probably the most difficult route to take when we are in command of an incident. We use risk management models like “Risk a lot to save a lot” to help us drudge through the decisions and keep our people as safe as possible while meeting the needs of our customers. Accepting risk is always tied to action. We cannot say that we are accepting risk and then do nothing about it. We must act. This is the shocking, uncomfortable truth of risk acceptance, which in essence is saying, “I am okay with losing this company based on the reward I will potentially receive when they are successful (rescue).” Trust me when I say I am no more comfortable with that than any of you, but these are the decisions we make when lives are at stake.
Risk goes away only when you accept it and you’ve engaged it. Only two outcomes are possible: You succeed in making the rescue, or the worst outcome happens. In both cases, that risk is now gone because you engaged it. When you do decide to accept risk, make that decision based on the best and most current situational awareness (ground truth) because the potential consequences are so great.
Situational Awareness
I am not an expert on the subject, but I have a slightly different perspective on situational awareness than the mainstream. As a lifelong student of this craft, I regularly read line-of-duty-death reports and near misses. The common thread in many is “loss of situational awareness.” I have some reservations about tossing that phrase around so freely; it depends on how you define or understand it.
I see situational awareness as a sliding scale. You don’t have it or lose it. Your awareness on an emergency scene becomes focused, and when it’s focused in a specific area, you may miss the things that are not within that focus. But isn’t this what we want from our teams? I believe it is. Whether it’s a house fire or an EMS response, initially I want everyone on my team to be aware of the big picture; but as we zero in on our individual assignments, I need them to focus on achieving success in the area that is now their responsibility. My job as the officer is to focus on a slightly larger picture than that, and the battalion chief must focus on an even larger picture. All the team members come together to provide collective situational awareness, and the information from each focal point must be communicated throughout that team.
Look through a straw with one eye and cover the other eye with your hand. If you look through a straw, you have not lost all awareness of your surroundings, but you are focused on a specific area. The fire service deals with looking through straws in almost all aspects of the job. We put you in the front seat of an engine or a truck with a windshield, then have you put on an SCBA mask with a lens, enter a fire building hallway, and give you a thermal imaging camera with a screen—all of which restrict your awareness but none of which take it away. If each member is focused on his area and is communicating well, you have situational awareness. That is why I see it on a sliding scale. It requires communication; it’s about relationships, and no single person owns it. You lose all situational awareness only when you are asleep.
Critical Fireground Factors
It’s impossible to examine situational awareness on the fireground without looking at critical fireground factors. If that’s not a term your organization uses, I can guarantee you’re still examining them in some way. In the system in which I grew up, the critical fireground factors (CFF) we consider on all working incidents are building, fire, occupancy, life, arrangement, resources, actions, and special circumstances.
Multiple factors reside under each of these broad topics, but these factors are in general what officers consider as they approach and work at a fire. After each structure fire, our department participates in an after action review (AAR) (See “Learning the Lessons: The Staff Ride,” Fire Engineering, May 2018). AARs help us to recognize our successes and our failures and, most importantly, to learn from them. What we tend to lack in these AARs is an emphasis on the CFFs, which speak directly to the situational awareness that the company officer had as he arrived and then what that awareness was throughout the incident. Asking officers during an AAR what factors they considered as their top three can help you determine why specific decisions were made on the fireground.
In photo 1, the three critical fireground factors I would consider are building, fire, and arrangement. There may be factors outside of those three that I would also consider, but for the sake of an AAR, I would focus on these three for the reasons stated above. CFFs can be somewhat subjective based on experience and training, but they should always explain why strategic and tactical decisions were made the way they were.
Teaching the Next Generation of Risk Managers
We may run into multiple risks on the fireground, but we bring to our jobs the bulk of the risk with which we deal. It’s the firefighter sitting next to you. This is where a discussion on value comes into play in teaching risk managers. We have Mr. and Mrs. Smith at the top of our list of what is valuable, but we put equal value on the lives of the firefighters responding with us.
(1) Three critical fireground factors at this incident are the building, the fire, and the arrangement. The building is critical because of its size and construction; with light to no smoke showing, the fire is critical because of the size, the location, and the extent of the fire (which may be sprinkler controlled or deep within the structure); and the arrangement is critical because of the anticipated high storage racks and possible mezzanines. Since water from the sprinklers will weigh down the stored products on the racks, collapse is likely. Because of the first three items, I am significantly concerned with life safety (mostly of the firefighters) and about resources. Although these are not the only factors, they would be at the top of my list of considerations. (Photos by author.)
The fire service has a myriad of ways to train the officer corps in risk management, but the skill sets rarely begin before the members are three to seven years into their career. Not that it’s wrong, but the earlier we define and flesh out what risk means to us as an organization, the more effective we will be at recognizing it and dealing with it.
Many will say that during a fire academy is too early to be discussing risk management, at least to the level that we expect our officer corps to understand it; but the earlier we expose firefighters to these concepts, the more likely they are to excel at it down the road. For this reason, we should begin conversations about defining risk and value during the academy. For this to happen, organizational leadership needs to be on the same page and have those conversations at the top levels of the organization so that the leader’s intent pertaining to risk is well established. Once risk and value have been defined and we are working off the same sheet of music, we can develop the programs for delivery in our fire academies and officer training programs.
(2) Risk acceptance comes with a bias for action. No one accepts a risk to do nothing about it. Here a firefighter is performing vent-enter-isolate-search. Based on the fire location, a high potential exists for occupants with a likelihood of survival, so the reward greatly outweighs the risk.
A recruit program would start by asking recruits about their ideas or definitions of risk and value. This would then be matched with the leadership’s view of these concepts. The differences in the two would be where the conversations would focus for the rest of the program. Furthermore, recruits would be exposed to the critical fireground factors, thereby allowing them to gain a deeper understanding of all the things their officers are considering when making strategic- and tactical-level decisions. If firefighters understand why decisions are made in a specific way, they, too, in the absence of direct supervision, will begin to evaluate risk in a way similar to that of their officer. This ultimately will lead to more cohesive, successful incidents.
If not already in place, organizations should consider a tiered certification process that builds on the basic understanding of risk introduced in the academy or probationary year. In our system, we have two programs that deal with risk management—the Captain Certification Program and the Battalion Chief Certification Program. Each level addresses risk management as it pertains to the position and builds off the other. Our engineer/paramedic programs do not address risk management, but I believe there should be a stopgap in these areas as well. Essentially, each promotional level in your organization should contain a training package regarding risk management that has the ultimate goal of producing excellent risk managers.
If we fail to discuss risk in the multiple levels and time frames that exist between academy and becoming officers, we are setting ourselves up for failure. Creating teams of thinkers, not robots, takes time that cannot be made up during a singular training program or testing process, and it surely isn’t pinned on your chest with a new badge.
Reference
1. “Learning the Lessons: The Staff Ride.” Ian W. Cassidy, Fire Engineering, May 2018.
Ian W. Cassidy, a 20-year veteran of the fire service, is a training captain for the Northwest Fire District in Tucson, Arizona. He is a certified fire instructor II and fire officer III and teaches the National Fire Academy leadership series in Arizona. Cassidy has served in various leadership roles in emergency medical services, training, and special operations (hazmat and technical rescue). He has assisted in reviewing new course content for Jones & Bartlett and contributed to the ISFSI Training Officer’s Desk Reference.
