Latest / B Shifter / Tickets & Strategy

Transcript

Tickets & Strategy · B Shifter

• 0:49
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the B Shifter podcast.
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: John Vance, your host here, along with Nick Brunicini and Chris Stewart.
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: Good day, gentlemen.
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: How are you all doing?
• 1:06
  Speaker 2: Est-à-moui bien, yeah, are we allowed to say what date it is on this episode?
• 1:10
  Speaker 3: Yeah, we can, okay, we're in 2025.
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: This is 2025.
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: It's not an evergreen episode.
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: We're not stocking up today, because you usually blow it anyway, chris.
• 1:20
  Speaker 2: It was in the first 30 seconds.
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, I tell you no secrets, so you don't blurt out the secrets.
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: So even if this ends up airing at some other time, we're just not.
• 1:30
  Speaker 2: I can keep secrets.
• 1:31
  Speaker 2: It's just the people I tell yeah.
• 1:33
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: I do want to mention that we have our Blue Card Hazard Zone Conference coming to Cincinnati.
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: October 3rd and 4th is the general session.
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: The week prior to that we have a number of workshops which include a Blue Card Certification Lab, which really, when you look at this whole thing packaged together, you don't get a better deal than that anywhere.
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: We have a Safety Train the Trainer.
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: We also have a Strategic Decision-Mmaking workshop that you were teaching, and then Nick will be there with the Silverbacks to roll out the latest on Silverback during the general session.
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: That sounds like a gang.
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: I know the Silverbacks.
• 2:13
  Speaker 3: Yeah, at Roller Derby Club.
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: Get signed up.
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: The hotels are going fast.
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: We only have about 140 rooms left and it's a really good deal for the hotel room.
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: So all the information is at bshiftercom.
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: Today we want to talk about some mail that we've gotten.
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: Anytime you want to send us anything, our emails are in the show notes plus on our platform for the podcast on Buzzsprout, you can just click fan mail and that sends us a direct text message.
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: So if you ever have a question, you just want to get into us that way you can.
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: Today's first question is about the strategy and Blue Card.
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: During Blue Card, the size up, the follow-up report and then on the command transfer, we state the strategy those three times, and the person who wrote in to us is asking why is it important that we are stating the strategy three times and reaffirming the strategy three times?
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: So I thought I'd ask the experts on this today.
• 3:23
  Speaker 3: The strategy three times.
• 3:26
  Speaker 3: So I thought I'd ask the experts on this today.
• 3:29
  Speaker 3: The strategy drives the incident action plan and really kind of defines the safety requirements that you're going to be implementing to do whatever you're doing at the hazard zone.
• 3:43
  Speaker 3: Be implementing to do whatever you're doing at the hazard zone.
• 3:47
  Speaker 3: And so when you look at the effect of the strategy that has, the strategic decision has the greatest effect on everybody working at the incident scene.
• 3:57
  Speaker 3: And so the example earlier we were talking about bow-strung roofs.
• 4:02
  Speaker 3: Example earlier we were talking about bow strung roofs.
• 4:09
  Speaker 3: Well, in in phoenix arizona, if you had a working fire in a bow strung attic, we would say those are defensive fire conditions, because those roofs in phoenix arizona and much of the rest of the country, uh do not hold up very long when they're exposed to uh out of-control fires.
• 4:24
  Speaker 3: In fact they fail within less than 20 minutes in most cases.
• 4:28
  Speaker 3: So there would be an example of clearly indicating the strategy with your initial radio report, something to the effect I'm on the scene, I have heavy fire conditions and a bow-strung roof.
• 4:42
  Speaker 3: This is going to be a defensive fire, yada, yada, yada.
• 4:45
  Speaker 3: So then all of your tactics are going to be defensive around that.
• 4:49
  Speaker 3: Now, if you have exposures, you may do offensive operations in those exposures, but the strategy identifies it applies to the main fire area.
• 5:02
  Speaker 3: So in that example it would be the bow strung structure and then you would deal with the exposures around that as separate things, almost, depending on the critical factors.
• 5:13
  Speaker 3: So that way we started under control.
• 5:17
  Speaker 3: There's no uh, guessing about, okay, this is what we're going to be doing in here.
• 5:22
  Speaker 3: So in fact, fact Vance, the other day you shared a deal.
• 5:24
  Speaker 3: There's a department coming on doing blue card here in the next little while, and one of the things that gets people to that is they operate without that strategic separation.
• 5:37
  Speaker 3: So I think the example you had is they had an old, old house that was multiple stories and they were putting master streams in it.
• 5:43
  Speaker 3: And at some point they said, well, old house that was multiple stories and they were putting master streams in it.
• 5:45
  Speaker 3: And at some point they said, well, we need to go in and search something in it.
• 5:49
  Speaker 3: Well, that's no, you're in the defensive strategy.
• 5:51
  Speaker 3: You don't do search and rescue during the defensive strategy.
• 5:54
  Speaker 3: It's, you've said, the fire area, I'm writing it off here.
• 5:57
  Speaker 3: So, and if you're going to like in the very front end of that, you say, okay, we're going to do search and rescue here, we do it immediately if the conditions allow for it.
• 6:13
  Speaker 3: So anyway, that keeps keeping the strategy straight.
• 6:15
  Speaker 3: If you get that screwed up and you put a bunch of firefighters under a bow-strung roof, this is kind of the Southwest supermarkets.
• 6:18
  Speaker 3: Takeaway for me is that was a it wasn't a bow-strung roof, but it was a trust roof.
• 6:24
  Speaker 3: But and that thing burnt for an hour before it collapsed because it was made out of steel like I-beam steel.
• 6:32
  Speaker 3: It was a huge, heavyweight roof which represented less than 1% of the roof structures in Phoenix, arizona at the time.
• 6:38
  Speaker 3: So what I took away is that thing should have collapsed between the 20 and 30-minute mark they always do and it didn't.
• 6:46
  Speaker 3: Well, if it would have, it would have killed all 16 firefighters underneath it and that would have been a different thing altogether.
• 6:53
  Speaker 3: So that is the importance of the strategy.
• 6:55
  Speaker 3: And then, because everything pours out of that, tactically you keep reaffirming your strategy as you go along.
• 7:03
  Speaker 3: Out of that, tactically, you keep reaffirming your strategy as you go along.
• 7:10
  Speaker 3: So in most cases during my career, the strategy, 95 plus percent of the time, was offensive Big city, lots of deployment capability.
• 7:19
  Speaker 3: You get there within the first few minutes of the call you show up and it's okay, got offensive fire conditions.
• 7:24
  Speaker 3: This is what we're going to do.
• 7:25
  Speaker 3: Well, offensive fire conditions that looks like one thing.
• 7:34
  Speaker 3: So an offensive fire attack is over quickly.
• 7:35
  Speaker 3: They don't last 10, 15 minutes, they're done.
• 7:36
  Speaker 3: You put the fire out.
• 7:37
  Speaker 3: That's why we do what we do.
• 7:39
  Speaker 3: Well, during that, you want to make sure that people aren't putting defensive water in on top of people in offensive positions, because now you're going to hurt them with master streams.
• 7:49
  Speaker 3: That's not going to be good either.
• 7:50
  Speaker 3: So you're really managing where people are and what they're doing based on the overall incident strategy.
• 7:58
  Speaker 3: And so it becomes very important that we're doing offensive or defensive.
• 8:02
  Speaker 3: You never combine the two in the same fire area, because when you put firefighters in offensive positions under defensive fire conditions, you are going to injure or kill them.
• 8:15
  Speaker 3: That's what defensive fire conditions do.
• 8:17
  Speaker 3: Fully protected firefighters cannot survive 1,000, 1, 1500 degree excursion into the hot zone.
• 8:28
  Speaker 3: It's just it's going to kill you through your turnout.
• 8:30
  Speaker 3: So burn it all up Structural collapse, all the other stuff that you associate with defensive fire conditions.
• 8:37
  Speaker 3: So the IC manages the strategy, so the firefighters can go in and kill the fire and it prevents the fire from killing the firefighters.
• 8:47
  Speaker 3: Chris Stewart's turn.
• 8:51
  Speaker 2: So the system is designed right to, in the initial radio report based on that initial evaluation of the incident, is you have to define your strategy, right, right, and that strategy's got to match the critical factors.
• 9:04
  Speaker 2: That strategy's got to match the initial incident action plan.
• 9:10
  Speaker 2: You can't describe defensive fire conditions and say you're in the offensive strategy, or say you're in the offensive strategy and describe defensive incident action plan.
• 9:20
  Speaker 2: None of that makes sense.
• 9:22
  Speaker 2: So it all has to connect.
• 9:23
  Speaker 2: So you're going to establish it in your initial radio report.
• 9:26
  Speaker 2: Then, when we start to do a 360, we start to do that follow-up evaluation, then we are truly challenging or validating our initial decisions, right, our initial critical factors, and our initial strategy and action, and our initial strategy and action.
• 9:41
  Speaker 2: And so utilizing the system gives us that ability to then measure that up front.
• 9:49
  Speaker 2: And so IC number one is validating their original decision or going, oh man, this looks way worse from the back, or hey, it looks way better.
• 10:02
  Speaker 2: So we're either going to stick with what we started with or we're going to make a change.
• 10:06
  Speaker 2: And then, when IC number two arrives, they're going through the same process of evaluating not only the conditions that they're finding, but then they're connecting it to the action that's already taken place prior to them arriving, and putting the two together and saying, okay, are we going in the right direction?
• 10:22
  Speaker 2: Are we working in the right position?
• 10:23
  Speaker 2: Are things happening the way it should be?
• 10:26
  Speaker 2: Is this thing de-escalating rather than escalating?
• 10:28
  Speaker 2: And if that's the case, then they're going to confirm that incident strategy.
• 10:33
  Speaker 2: No, we're doing the right thing.
• 10:34
  Speaker 2: If things are different or they're not lining up or maybe some unforeseen issues are occurring, then they need to then at that point say, no, we're going to, we are going to do something different.
• 10:46
  Speaker 2: And they have the opportunity then to change that incident action plan and the strategy that goes along with that.
• 10:51
  Speaker 2: So, or I should say, the strategy and then the incident action plan that goes along with it.
• 10:54
  Speaker 2: So the reason we have it three times is that initial blush of no, this is what strategy?
• 11:02
  Speaker 2: Or when based on the critical factors, based on the risk management.
• 11:05
  Speaker 2: And then now it's giving ic number one the ability challenge to validate their own decision with some more information and, excuse me, ic number two's ability challenge or validate that, that initial strategy choice and moving forward.
• 11:19
  Speaker 2: And then there's that continual evaluation by ic number two saying, okay, are we going in the right direction and is the strategy or is our actions managing the conditions and should we continue with what we're going on?
• 11:34
  Speaker 2: It makes me think back to like it was like 1991 or 1992.
• 11:39
  Speaker 2: I was brand spanking new in the Phoenix Fire Department and I was taking tactics and strategy and uh, it was the uh, you know, uh, I think Dennis Compton and Doug Tucker, I think, for teaching the class, like right before you and Terry started doing it and and it was when the fire chief had come out and said no, you're going to start announcing strategy in your on-scene report, your initial radio report.
• 12:07
  Speaker 2: And so this is a group of young firefighters who want to be company officers, and I'm just brand spanking new.
• 12:13
  Speaker 2: I'm in the class because I think I'm supposed to be, so I'm not saying anything, but I'm listening, and they're freaking pissed about having to say strategy on the radio.
• 12:24
  Speaker 3: They were.
• 12:26
  Speaker 2: If you hear me saying I'm stretching a hand line to the interior, why can't you assume I'm in the offensive strategy?
• 12:32
  Speaker 2: And the explanation was no, you have to consciously make a decision about your strategy.
• 12:39
  Speaker 2: So in order to do that effectively and process it, you have to say it out loud.
• 12:43
  Speaker 2: We want to hear it out loud for you, number one, and then number two, everybody else responding in, so that it has to make sense to them too.
• 12:55
  Speaker 2: So if you're communicating it out loud, it's creating that.
• 12:58
  Speaker 2: So for me it's always been a part of it.
• 13:03
  Speaker 2: But actually hearing that and watching the consternation that it created, now knowing what I know right, it completely and totally validated the importance of strategy and it was making us have to say it out loud, making a conscious decision.
• 13:19
  Speaker 2: You know that this is the strategy we're going to be in, based on these conditions.
• 13:24
  Speaker 3: Well, chris, you said something earlier that it's all got to line up and make sense.
• 13:27
  Speaker 3: So I'll give you an example.
• 13:29
  Speaker 3: Where this is really good, it makes us more effective, is what it does to.
• 13:36
  Speaker 3: So they're like, oh, this is a safety thing.
• 13:38
  Speaker 3: You're like, yeah, it's a safety thing, but it's an effective thing.
• 13:42
  Speaker 3: So what it means is I'm going to take an extra 10 or 15 seconds in the beginning to make sure I'm right, and then I'm going to go down and I'm going to kill whatever the problem is.
• 13:54
  Speaker 3: So I'm not going to just go off willy nilly and do this because if I'm not correct, the problem's going to bite me in the ass.
• 14:03
  Speaker 3: This because if I'm not correct, the problem's going to bite me in the ass.
• 14:08
  Speaker 3: I'm the battalion chief.
• 14:08
  Speaker 3: Two in the morning, they dispatch a structure fire call to a place north of me Universal Propulsions.
• 14:16
  Speaker 3: And what Universal Propulsions did is they had a bunch of underground concrete bunkers and they tested propellants for airbags and other explosives.
• 14:25
  Speaker 3: Engine 36 gets there first and so we're all responding and you see a little smoke on the horizon.
• 14:33
  Speaker 3: Engine 36 on the scene.
• 14:37
  Speaker 3: I got smoke showing from a concrete building establishing a water supply, and we'll be advancing an inch and a half attack line for fire attacks, search and rescue, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 14:47
  Speaker 3: So they get done and the alarm room repeats it back and I'm halfway there, so I'm four miles away, and I'm like no, it's a bomb testing factory you responded to, so I get on the radio.
• 15:06
  Speaker 2: They're not having church services in there at night.
• 15:08
  Speaker 3: No, but in this case I got on the radio and called the alarm room and said battalion or north deputy to blah, blah, blah, have engine 36 reevaluate and-transmit their initial radio report.
• 15:24
  Speaker 3: And you could hear them gathering themselves in the cab of the truck going oh my God, what have we done?
• 15:31
  Speaker 3: And it was like they woke up and it's like no, we're going to establish a water supply and we're staying out.
• 15:38
  Speaker 3: It's defensive right now.
• 15:39
  Speaker 3: Thank you, that took how long?
• 15:43
  Speaker 3: It didn't take 30 seconds total.
• 15:45
  Speaker 3: Put the radio down.
• 15:47
  Speaker 3: If that wouldn't have happened, they may have drug an attack line into a bunker with explosives and killed themselves.
• 15:53
  Speaker 3: Okay, another example.
• 15:58
  Speaker 3: In fact, I got a PowerPoint.
• 15:59
  Speaker 3: We can show this.
• 16:00
  Speaker 3: We're going to do some B-roll kids there.
• 16:04
  Speaker 3: You go, strip mall fire, engine sevens at john c lincoln hospital.
• 16:08
  Speaker 3: Right, it's three in the morning.
• 16:10
  Speaker 3: L-shaped strip mall, you'd call it medium size.
• 16:14
  Speaker 3: There's a laundromat.
• 16:16
  Speaker 3: There's a pizza parlor I was at this far there's a grocery store and that's that's in one end of the mall.
• 16:23
  Speaker 3: So now the big N's doing its thing, engine 7's at the hospital.
• 16:28
  Speaker 3: They tone this thing out, they haul ass, they get on the truck, them and the rescue are, they get in the catapult, they launch themselves there.
• 16:37
  Speaker 3: They're there ahead of everybody else by a good distance.
• 16:41
  Speaker 3: So because they got the AMBO behind them, they drop.
• 16:44
  Speaker 3: They stop at the plug, ambo's hooking up the hydrant.
• 16:47
  Speaker 3: They lay a line to the front, they pull an attack line off and there's three occupancies affected right now.
• 16:58
  Speaker 3: They go in the middle one for whatever reason.
• 16:59
  Speaker 3: Wrong selection.
• 16:59
  Speaker 3: They should have gone to not the three but the fourth that bordered the three.
• 17:05
  Speaker 3: That's where they needed to be and put the deck gun where the fire's burning.
• 17:12
  Speaker 3: They get their attack line inside the grocery store.
• 17:16
  Speaker 3: I believe is what it was.
• 17:17
  Speaker 3: The pizza parlor is on the, that would be on the Bravo side, and then the laundromats on the Delta side.
• 17:29
  Speaker 3: The battalion chief is the next one there.
• 17:31
  Speaker 3: Well, it's the deputy.
• 17:32
  Speaker 3: It's Aikens has moved up.
• 17:34
  Speaker 3: I'm his driver.
• 17:38
  Speaker 2: Take over.
• 17:38
  Speaker 2: No, we're sitting there watching them inside this deal and we see some ceiling fall and then we see it flash over and we're like, no, you guys need to get out right, they're not very far in.
• 17:56
  Speaker 3: Exactly so what happens is, as soon as Akins gets there, you're back and in and Aikens just gets on the radio and says North Deputy, on the scene, give me emergency traffic Now.
• 18:07
  Speaker 3: Engine 7's on their bellies inside the grocery store and command to Engine 7, north Deputy, engine 7, get out now, abandon the attack and get outside and give me a part Now you're going to see the video that was shot because Hamilton Keddie was working for whoever right across the street and they were getting coffee and they're videotaping this whole thing.
• 18:30
  Speaker 3: You're seeing the five silhouettes against this wall of fire.
• 18:34
  Speaker 3: That's Engine and Rescue 7.
• 18:36
  Speaker 3: They have just pulled their line out, given a par within the last 30 seconds to a minute, and the entire end of that strip mall collapses and just is engulfed in fire.
• 18:50
  Speaker 3: If Jeff Akins and Chris Stewart were a minute later, engine 7 would be dead.
• 18:55
  Speaker 3: Well, the building would have landed on them and they would have been consumed in the fire.
• 19:00
  Speaker 3: I assume they would have probably died from that.
• 19:02
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that's normally what happens.
• 19:04
  Speaker 3: That's the strategy.
• 19:06
  Speaker 3: It's no more complicated than that.
• 19:08
  Speaker 3: The strategy Jeff Akins and Chris Stewart used this strategy that night to save Engine and Rescue 7's life.
• 19:16
  Speaker 3: And I'm going to just go on a limb and say it was not worth the risk, what they were doing.
• 19:21
  Speaker 3: It was inappropriate.
• 19:22
  Speaker 3: They should have moved their attack, because this is what they did afterwards.
• 19:26
  Speaker 3: They saved the big end.
• 19:28
  Speaker 2: It actually did not go past in any other occupancies.
• 19:32
  Speaker 3: No, and what happened is and you'll see here is they had fire in the attic, huff and whoever else was the BC on the alpha side of that thing got lines in and they got fire control.
• 19:42
  Speaker 3: That was worth the risk, it was well managed, it was intentional, it was deliberate, they made the decision no, we're going to stop it here.
• 19:49
  Speaker 3: And that's what they did.
• 19:50
  Speaker 3: It was a professional fire attack.
• 19:53
  Speaker 3: They kept Engine 7 from getting caught up in defensive fire conditions and then they readjusted the incident action plan around the defensive strategy and took the action they needed to.
• 20:05
  Speaker 3: There were other issues at the fire and those got handled later on, but it was uh.
• 20:09
  Speaker 3: There was two or three different uh plays in there that could have turned into a shit show, and it was the command system that and and like the adults that came in and corrected incorrect situations.
• 20:24
  Speaker 3: Basically, is what?
• 20:26
  Speaker 2: it was.
• 20:26
  Speaker 2: It was a first-in-company officer who's not showing up intended to make a bad decision.
• 20:32
  Speaker 2: No, but he's on autopilot, because 80, 90 percent of what we go on are single or family residents, especially in that neighborhood.
• 20:39
  Speaker 2: Fires, right yeah, and so not actually measuring truly.
• 20:44
  Speaker 2: All right, this is much bigger.
• 20:46
  Speaker 2: This is multiple occupancies.
• 20:47
  Speaker 2: That fire's been booming.
• 20:49
  Speaker 2: In fact it was an arson fire.
• 20:51
  Speaker 2: So it was intentionally set and it was going for a reason and just didn't recognize what are my true critical factors here.
• 20:59
  Speaker 2: Where should I actually be doing this?
• 21:02
  Speaker 2: And so the verbalization of what was going on and then saying they were in the offensive strategy when, when I see, number two showed up and we looked at it and said, uh, we're going to do something different.
• 21:15
  Speaker 2: That that drove the change.
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: Some of the pre blue card command classes that were done by Bruno and and everyone else.
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: I think Nick, I've heard him, I think I've heard Nick or Terry say this when you're IC number two, you're either accepting the incident action plan and strategy that IC1 set up for you, you challenge it or you change it.
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: So this is a good example of changing it.
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: So restating it on the command transfer isn't just a pre-functory function.
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: It really has meaning because you're making that big safety decision that impacts everyone.
• 21:54
  Speaker 3: See, and I think it's I don't think challenging is the right word, and we use that a lot it's really what it is is see, when you look at the process, it's like size up is its own thing, and so I'm going to size up this incident.
• 22:11
  Speaker 3: So what I'm doing is I'm going to take an inventory of the critical factors that are here now.
• 22:16
  Speaker 3: So the structure, what's the general footprint, the shape, the number of levels, the occupancy type, what's the fire doing those kind of things.
• 22:26
  Speaker 3: So you're identifying that.
• 22:30
  Speaker 3: Well, you turn that into actual situation evaluation by confirming a certain set of things and then putting that plan in motion under that strategy.
• 22:42
  Speaker 3: So really, you're vetting it and then confirming.
• 22:46
  Speaker 3: Really, you're vetting it and then confirming.
• 22:48
  Speaker 3: So what I'm doing is like when I get there in the beginning and I look at the front of that, the alpha side, and I say, okay, this is what I got.
• 22:54
  Speaker 3: Well, the way I vet and confirm that is I get a 360 on the back.
• 22:59
  Speaker 3: Well, that wasn't a big deal for me during my career, because the back of the building meant shit to us.
• 23:03
  Speaker 3: It was the back of the building.
• 23:05
  Speaker 3: We didn't have multiple levels.
• 23:07
  Speaker 3: We didn't have everything else that the rest of the country has.
• 23:10
  Speaker 3: So when we first started doing Blue Card, we go to Indiana, to South Bend, indiana, and we're like, hey, where's the basement stuff, guys?
• 23:16
  Speaker 3: And we're like, show me a basement.
• 23:18
  Speaker 3: And they took us outside and they said all those houses have basements and we were going to go to work on the basement stuff then.
• 23:25
  Speaker 3: So, go to work on the basement stuff.
• 23:30
  Speaker 3: Then so, but in that, see, that changes it drastically of where the fire could be and what you're doing.
• 23:33
  Speaker 3: So you got to go back and vet and say this is exactly what I have here.
• 23:35
  Speaker 3: So that becomes the deal.
• 23:39
  Speaker 3: So what you're doing is you're really just kind of confirming.
• 23:41
  Speaker 3: Ic2 gets there and they confirm with IC1, this is what you had.
• 23:46
  Speaker 3: Well, with the example we just used, they didn't need to do that.
• 23:49
  Speaker 3: They could see the visual factors all their own and they know I could write a 200-page book on just looking at that for five seconds and understanding.
• 24:00
  Speaker 3: This is what happened.
• 24:00
  Speaker 3: Here's the psychology of why he did what he did and all the things that led up to us being in the wrong strategy here.
• 24:07
  Speaker 3: And you said it.
• 24:08
  Speaker 3: He was a great human being.
• 24:10
  Speaker 3: He was a tremendous captain If you had a problem and you needed to call 911, you would want that crew to show up.
• 24:17
  Speaker 3: I mean, they were legitimately very capable, nice, smart people.
• 24:23
  Speaker 3: They just weren't experienced in strip mall fires as well as they should have been.
• 24:28
  Speaker 3: I guess, see, that's the reason you train for the thing.
• 24:35
  Speaker 3: When I first went in from like company officer to working in the battalion chief's rig, the guy I worked for said I'm driving and you're going to be the mouth.
• 24:47
  Speaker 3: I'm getting ready to be a deputy chief.
• 24:49
  Speaker 3: I've done this enough, so you get to be the.
• 24:51
  Speaker 3: Well, it happened to be like the support officer.
• 24:57
  Speaker 3: It was Battalion 1.
• 24:58
  Speaker 3: So we're going, so we're responding, south to a fire, and it's a structure fire and it's another strip mall, and we're responding and my boss is telling me okay, you're going to do this and you're going to learn what it's going to be like to unwrap a sandwich, because this is what we're going to.
• 25:15
  Speaker 3: And he knows, because he knows who's there running it.
• 25:18
  Speaker 3: I've just started.
• 25:19
  Speaker 3: I thought, okay, but I don't get down south much.
• 25:22
  Speaker 3: This is no, you'll see, you'll see.
• 25:24
  Speaker 3: So we get there.
• 25:26
  Speaker 3: Same thing, man.
• 25:27
  Speaker 3: It is rocking and rolling.
• 25:29
  Speaker 3: There's a ladder on the roof and they've cut a couple holes in this thing.
• 25:32
  Speaker 3: It just there couldn't be more pressure.
• 25:36
  Speaker 3: It would just explode if there was.
• 25:37
  Speaker 3: And you're like we get there, we set up the command van, we bring the IC in.
• 25:45
  Speaker 3: So now I'm a captain and there's a BC sitting there.
• 25:48
  Speaker 3: I'm like I cannot start yelling at this guy.
• 25:50
  Speaker 3: He outranks me.
• 25:52
  Speaker 3: And I'm looking over at my boss and I'm like, and he's like, and he's pointing, like he wants me to attack him, and I'm like hey, man, you need to go defensive right now.
• 26:01
  Speaker 3: Nick, I have asked for a par three times now and engine 22 will not give it to me and I mean he stopped and I'm thinking, hey man, let's call that a clue?
• 26:16
  Speaker 3: It's starting to delaminate the paint on the rig right now.
• 26:20
  Speaker 3: You need to go defensive, please go defensive.
• 26:25
  Speaker 3: Ladder 22 gave me a par and I mean he is stuck in par land right now.
• 26:30
  Speaker 3: And so my boss comes over and grabs him by the ear and said go defensive now.
• 26:39
  Speaker 3: And I mean it was like violent and I'm like oh wow.
• 26:44
  Speaker 3: And he went defensive and got mad and like well, I'm like jesus christ, this is what am I doing.
• 26:52
  Speaker 3: It was easier working on a ladder truck, for the love of god.
• 26:54
  Speaker 3: This is so.
• 26:56
  Speaker 3: But I learned the value of the strategy and again, it was the same deal that went defensive.
• 27:01
  Speaker 3: And the five minutes later, that end of the strip mall they had master streams on it's continued to burn.
• 27:09
  Speaker 3: It's maybe burning today, vance, I don't know if it stopped, but it was one of those things that it burned for hours and hours and, yeah, nobody got hurt.
• 27:19
  Speaker 3: It was, and you could tell when you pulled up this this whole end of this thing's going to the dump.
• 27:24
  Speaker 3: There's nothing here salvageable.
• 27:26
  Speaker 3: I can see fire down 75 feet of the front of this thing, popping out through the front, the walls.
• 27:35
  Speaker 3: It was purely defensive and, in fact, what I would suggest, if you're responding on a lot of things, where you're having to get people out of those situations is you're cruising for a bruising because at some point you're not going to get there in time.
• 27:51
  Speaker 3: And when the fire does what it does, it don't give a shit, there's no timeouts or breaks.
• 27:56
  Speaker 3: And then that's why we manage the strategy so vigorously and see, that's where the real value in it is.
• 28:04
  Speaker 3: And see, we think, okay, we're going to get the safety officers there and more chiefs and they're going to be over here and do this and that.
• 28:09
  Speaker 3: And the other thing, you think, no, this needs to be like right away, bright and tight with the few of us here.
• 28:16
  Speaker 3: And there's fewer strategic people than there are task level people, for a reason.
• 28:22
  Speaker 3: So we need enough to make sure that the task level people are going to be okay operating where they're operating in the hazard zone, and then enough tactical people between to kind of keep that span of control nice and tight.
• 28:36
  Speaker 3: And then that's kind of it.
• 28:39
  Speaker 3: In fact, the reason we organize is so the IC can more efficiently manage the strategy, which is what happened at the strip mall fire, as they put a battalion chief in the front of that thing, see, and a lot of people oh, blue car, you just burn it down.
• 28:52
  Speaker 3: A safety thing?
• 28:53
  Speaker 3: No, no, no, no, no.
• 28:54
  Speaker 3: What we did is we saved our people that were going to be killed.
• 28:57
  Speaker 3: So all of you who think that this is a safety system, you need to go with Engine 7.
• 29:03
  Speaker 3: Their gear's like scorched, so they're out, they're okay, and now we can take effective action that actually protects the rest of this.
• 29:15
  Speaker 3: Now, when you go back by that strip mall today, it's still there.
• 29:18
  Speaker 3: They rebuilt that end of it but, and you will see from the pictures, it was destroyed, I mean to the ground.
• 29:25
  Speaker 3: That whole end is on the ground.
• 29:28
  Speaker 3: There's no rubble, there's nothing in between, it's just.
• 29:32
  Speaker 3: It was very definitive Defensive conditions did that?
• 29:37
  Speaker 1: Sometimes on the command transfer, you know we get there and we might restate the strategy as being offensive, then the incident continues and then you get a change in conditions on the outside but they're not seeing it on the inside.
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: And I can think of two instances where we were there.
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: We called and said we're going to go defensive on this and we got the old give me two more minutes, chief.
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: I think we got one was a McDonald's fire and immediately after pulling them out we get a collapse.
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: So I was like, chief, I think we got one was a McDonald's fire and immediately after pulling them out we get a collapse.
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: So I was like whoa.
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: Well, you know, the one guy had tears in his eyes because he had no idea what we were seeing from the outside.
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: They thought they had it under control when indeed they didn't.
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: So let's talk about those two things matching up.
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: Are I see, number two, what they're seeing?
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: I see, number one, what they saw and how we reconcile those two things matching up.
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: Are I see, number two, what they're seeing?
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: I see, number one, what they saw and how we reconcile those two things.
• 30:34
  Speaker 2: Well, first and foremost, at any given point, we're talking about the transfer of command.
• 30:41
  Speaker 2: At that point, the conditions are, the conditions are and we're still in the offensive strategy.
• 30:47
  Speaker 2: That's okay.
• 30:48
  Speaker 2: And 30 seconds later, can they change and us have to make a decision?
• 30:56
  Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely it can.
• 30:56
  Speaker 2: And let's see.
• 30:57
  Speaker 2: I see his responsible responsibility to recognize the change in those conditions and then say, yeah, no, this ain't working.
• 31:02
  Speaker 2: We, we have to make a change now and call it.
• 31:04
  Speaker 2: I don't, I don't care if 30 seconds ago you said we're still offensive, no, this is what's going on right now.
• 31:09
  Speaker 2: So make the change.
• 31:09
  Speaker 2: And then, uh, I can speak to both sides of that conversation, of being a company officer on the inside and thinking, you know, we've, we've pulled ceiling position, we're working from man, it looks like we've got this thing licked, and uh, and we go, yeah, we've, we've got no fire where we're at.
• 31:29
  Speaker 2: And they're like, hey, man, it is rocking and rolling out here and I'm like you've got to be kidding me.
• 31:34
  Speaker 2: And so I walk back out the front door and look up like, oh, yeah, we are not in the right place to be able to see that.
• 31:43
  Speaker 2: So then we actually made a change and we put it out that one didn't drive a change in the strategy, but it re-centered the company, those of us working on the inside and then being the same thing on the outside is like getting that report of, no, it's all good in here, no, it is not.
• 31:59
  Speaker 2: Here's what we have going on out here.
• 32:02
  Speaker 2: And that one definitely drove a change in strategy.
• 32:05
  Speaker 2: So it's in the moment the IC's got to be paying attention.
• 32:10
  Speaker 2: The IC has to be communicating with the companies on the inside, recognizing when they're saying something different than what they're actually seeing on the outside, or if something drastic changes.
• 32:24
  Speaker 2: There's no time to ask, hey, how do you feel about going defensive now?
• 32:28
  Speaker 2: No, no, we don't know.
• 32:29
  Speaker 2: We're going defensive right now.
• 32:31
  Speaker 2: This is what just occurred.
• 32:32
  Speaker 2: I want everybody out of the building and then we start that process of changing strategies.
• 32:36
  Speaker 2: So I think, uh, it's, it's not uncommon, but the ic has that responsibility to pay attention to it.
• 32:42
  Speaker 2: And and, uh, don't, don't, don't, don't, ride a sinking ship, you're going nowhere.
• 32:55
  Speaker 3: When going from IC1 to IC2, whenever, when I was IC2, it was my fire.
• 33:02
  Speaker 3: So you know, you all work for me and this is what you're going to do now.
• 33:06
  Speaker 3: That's really the way I felt when I got there.
• 33:08
  Speaker 3: There was no.
• 33:09
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it wasn't well.
• 33:11
  Speaker 3: I think, hey, we're going to go defensive.
• 33:14
  Speaker 3: Well, I don't know if we should.
• 33:15
  Speaker 3: Let's take a vote.
• 33:16
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and in fact, my experience has been, when I have switched the strategy from offensive to defensive is, people have come out and thanked me for it.
• 33:26
  Speaker 3: There was no.
• 33:28
  Speaker 3: They didn't come out and say how dare you?
• 33:29
  Speaker 3: Or the rest of it.
• 33:30
  Speaker 3: In fact, I've had the opposite.
• 33:31
  Speaker 3: I've had people they were in as this hot in here.
• 33:36
  Speaker 3: It's just I say, yeah, you need to put the fire out and it's going to be okay.
• 33:39
  Speaker 3: Then Put the fire out.
• 33:41
  Speaker 3: Well, it's, we need ventilation.
• 33:43
  Speaker 3: We didn't.
• 33:43
  Speaker 3: No, you need to put the fire out.
• 33:44
  Speaker 3: Right now.
• 33:45
  Speaker 3: I'm sitting out in front and you got offensive conditions.
• 33:47
  Speaker 3: Command to 725, help them on the inside, take another attack line.
• 33:52
  Speaker 3: Well, that pissed them off.
• 33:53
  Speaker 3: Well, we were.
• 33:54
  Speaker 3: No, you guys were willy nilly in it and, like you said, it's like you hadn't found the seat of the fire.
• 33:59
  Speaker 3: You're in a place.
• 34:01
  Speaker 3: You're not going to find it and it's starting to adversely affect you.
• 34:04
  Speaker 3: I'm going to put another.
• 34:05
  Speaker 3: It's, the best reason to put a second crew in there is to help you get fire control in the thing.
• 34:11
  Speaker 3: And they came out and they were all like sunburned.
• 34:13
  Speaker 3: They weren't burned but they were flushed.
• 34:17
  Speaker 3: Let's say, well, we got flushed.
• 34:19
  Speaker 3: Well, you know, that's glorious, isn't it?
• 34:25
  Speaker 3: So anyway, to answer your question, that's the reason you could continue in the offensive strategy is because you're on an exterior position IC.
• 34:33
  Speaker 3: That's where the IC should always be.
• 34:35
  Speaker 3: We don't arrive in an order to do that.
• 34:39
  Speaker 3: So the first NIC is mobile and will go inside at some point.
• 34:43
  Speaker 3: Well, that's predicated.
• 34:45
  Speaker 3: See, we've been doing this initial reinforced Well, that initial operation is 15 minutes long, so that's how long a bottle of air lasts.
• 34:53
  Speaker 3: So if you're IC1 and you're a mobile IC the company officer, the first arriving unit you should not be commanding that thing for more than 15 minutes.
• 35:01
  Speaker 3: You shouldn't go through your whole air bottle.
• 35:03
  Speaker 3: If it's offensive and you put it out in the front end, you have more than enough air in your bottle to do that.
• 35:11
  Speaker 3: That's going to be a five to seven minute operation in most house structure fires that we roll to and then if it doesn't do it, it's predicated on IC number two getting there, because you have to have that exterior presence managing that.
• 35:27
  Speaker 3: If you don't, that's where you get Engine 7 in the wrong place and now the fire can kill them and there's no mechanism to keep that from happening.
• 35:37
  Speaker 3: The only person that does that and they validated this over the course of my career a bazillion times is FDNY would do after-action things with Maydays and they would ask the Mayday firefighters what is it?
• 35:52
  Speaker 3: What gave you confidence and hope and calmed you down that it was going to be okay?
• 35:58
  Speaker 3: And they said to a person they all said the first thing that popped in my mind is who was running the fire?
• 36:07
  Speaker 3: And then the number two is who are the other crews that are coming to get me?
• 36:11
  Speaker 3: In that order, who's running it and who's coming to get me?
• 36:15
  Speaker 3: So those who think that you can just do this willy nilly and you know I don't have a hard and fast system because it's got to be flexible those are not professional people in this.
• 36:28
  Speaker 3: They're not part of the solution.
• 36:33
  Speaker 3: It's a lot easier to have accidental success in the offensive strategy because we're very good at putting water on the fire.
• 36:42
  Speaker 3: If you will do that in the front end, that's going to deliver the mail 90% of the time.
• 36:46
  Speaker 3: 10% of the time that may not get it done, but when that happens, you've got an outside presence to say hey, uh-uh, you guys are not in the same situation.
• 36:57
  Speaker 3: You thought you were, you thought you were fighting Shirley Temple and you're fighting Mike Tyson.
• 37:02
  Speaker 3: So you need to reevaluate.
• 37:06
  Speaker 2: So Nick's point earlier about 80 to 90 percent of our fires are more starting and ending in the offensive strategy.
• 37:16
  Speaker 2: Uh, it's important to recognize that when we get dispatched and we leave the barn, we're going with the mindset, with the intention of we're going to be in the offensive strategy.
• 37:25
  Speaker 2: We change that when we get there and we have legitimately evaluate the conditions or if we need to change it, it's because we're measuring and assessing the conditions and determining whether we can or we can't.
• 37:41
  Speaker 2: We're going with, we're starting with that intent and we're starting with the intent of we're going to save people and we're going to save stuff.
• 37:47
  Speaker 2: And when we get there, we're actually going to take a second to legitimately measure this and say, okay, this is what's going on, this is the strategy we should or shouldn't be in from the very get-go.
• 37:58
  Speaker 2: So that mentality of where we're starting yeah, it's in spite of any criticism that Blue Card may get, you know, we're not hiding under the bed, right, we're here to manage actual, real work and we start with that intent.
• 38:12
  Speaker 2: We just have to be smart enough when we get there to actually measure if that's real or not, or that's right or not Well.
• 38:18
  Speaker 3: And the other piece of this of situation evaluation and formulate an incident action plans and identifying what's lost and what's savable is understanding the effect that the products of combustion have on life forms.
• 38:33
  Speaker 3: So if you're looking at a structure fire and you have advanced fire conditions, then, like if you're considering flashed over fire areas, those are not survivable.
• 38:47
  Speaker 3: So when we go in into the offensive strategy, we're going to put the fire out and control it.
• 38:53
  Speaker 3: Well, we're also searching.
• 38:54
  Speaker 3: We're searching from the moment we make entry into that building, the attack corridor, to put that fire out.
• 39:00
  Speaker 3: And we worked in a big deployment system where we could start our initial action that way and then bring in companies behind that to assist with whatever needed to be assisted with, whether it was fire control, extended the search in other places, whatever it happened to be.
• 39:17
  Speaker 3: But what you're doing is, when Chris talks about those critical factors, that is what you use to do incident action planning and that's what makes one fire different from the other.
• 39:26
  Speaker 3: So a fire in a strip mall versus a fire in a small house versus a fire on the fifth floor of a seven-story building, all of those have different tactical requirements based on what's going on at any given time in the thing.
• 39:40
  Speaker 3: So we use the strategy to identify where the position and function of firefighters are going to be.
• 39:48
  Speaker 3: If it's offensive, it's inside the hazard zone.
• 39:50
  Speaker 2: If it's defensive, it's outside the hazard zone inside the hazard zone, If it's defensive, it's outside the hazard zone and if the last thing I think it's important to say is if we have changed to a defensive strategy, what we have essentially said is we are writing off what's in that space and we are writing off what's been consumed.
• 40:09
  Speaker 2: We have multiple examples now of firefighters after the incident's under control it had been in a defensive strategy the entire time After it's under control, firefighters going then into that space to overhaul or do whatever it is that they do, and there be some type of structural collapse and kill firefighters.
• 40:32
  Speaker 2: Right, Kansas City, Missouri and Pittsburgh are the two that come to mind.
• 40:37
  Speaker 2: One of those is in that 30 Fires book we've talked about previously.
• 40:41
  Speaker 2: So if you've written it off, you're going into overhaul it afterwards, Like that's just.
• 40:49
  Speaker 2: That makes no sense.
• 40:50
  Speaker 2: You are saving nothing, and so we need to.
• 40:55
  Speaker 2: The defensive strategy needs to continue all the way until the time we go home.
• 40:59
  Speaker 2: It's not now that the fire is out.
• 41:01
  Speaker 2: It's okay to be in here, because a lot of times it's not.
• 41:04
  Speaker 3: Well, if you want to do that, you have to reevaluate it.
• 41:06
  Speaker 3: That's what we would say is you have to come back and reevaluate it, that it's safe to do that.
• 41:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah, fred the structural engineer, come look at it.
• 41:13
  Speaker 2: We were talking about it.
• 41:15
  Speaker 3: What we used to do is and we would have command meetings, chief meetings, to talk about it and say there's on duty staff, fire protection engineers that will respond to our fires, that work for the city of Phoenix Joel McElvaney was one of them, roach was another and so what you could do as the IC is you could say, okay, we're going to evaluate this for structural stability, and these were typically bigger, more complicated buildings where an area of it had a fire that you had controlled and you were like you said I don't know if I should overall in here or not.
• 41:45
  Speaker 3: Well, once you said structural engineer.
• 41:49
  Speaker 3: That was simple Because okay, I'm getting a structural engineer.
• 41:52
  Speaker 3: Here's what this routine looks like.
• 41:54
  Speaker 3: I'm getting everybody out of what I say is a hazard zone in here, this area that's suspect, and we're going to deny entry.
• 42:01
  Speaker 3: And then this guy's going to show up within the next 30 minutes or show, and he's going to put on his goofy boots and his hard hat.
• 42:08
  Speaker 3: He's like a nerd guy.
• 42:09
  Speaker 3: Oh yeah, get to be with the guys and he's going to go in and do his fire protection engineer thing.
• 42:15
  Speaker 3: Well, I'm already decommissioning stuff, we're winding down, busting down hose lines and figuring, okay, I can get rid of these six.
• 42:22
  Speaker 3: Keep these two he's going to figure out this that the fire's over.
• 42:26
  Speaker 3: All I've done is just kept them out of the area for the time being.
• 42:29
  Speaker 3: It's controlled, so that became part of the routine.
• 42:31
  Speaker 3: It's controlled, so that became part of the routine.
• 42:33
  Speaker 3: The other, like Chris was talking about overhaul, is we had contracts with demolition companies so we would just call for heavy equipment If it's a big-ass defensive fire.
• 42:45
  Speaker 3: I've been to these things where, like 20-foot-high tilt walls, I said I got 20-foot-high tilt walls, call Hydra, I'm going to need the big back hose and they would come in with these Volvo front end loaders that were as tall as the building and they would just push the walls back in on top and just go down and they would eliminate all those hazardous areas.
• 43:05
  Speaker 3: And that was just part of the deal.
• 43:08
  Speaker 3: And you think, okay, that's what this looks like.
• 43:11
  Speaker 1: Talking to Overhaul from smaller department points of view.
• 43:15
  Speaker 1: The reason they usually go in is just the haste to clear the scene yeah they just want to go back and get home, yeah yeah and um.
• 43:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah, my son had a fire and he's not in the fire service, but across from him was a four alarm fire.
• 43:33
  Speaker 1: They ended up going defensive.
• 43:34
  Speaker 1: In San Francisco they kept an engine there well into the next day.
• 43:38
  Speaker 1: They weren't going back into the building, but they had an engine there babysitting it.
• 43:44
  Speaker 2: And it's connected to other buildings in San Francisco.
• 43:46
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's very dense.
• 43:48
  Speaker 1: And we started doing the same thing.
• 43:49
  Speaker 1: We started saying I'll bring a couple people in on overtime, or whatever Firewatch, I'll bring a couple people in on overtime, or whatever Firewatch.
• 43:56
  Speaker 2: I'll buy you food.
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I'll go to McDonald's and we'll stock up.
• 44:00
  Speaker 1: That is so much cheaper than having to deal with the heartache of the worst that can happen.
• 44:08
  Speaker 3: At one point we had some issues with fires and attic fires in old big houses that had cellulose insulation and, like you would get a small fire in a corner like the laundry room and if you didn't dump that whole attic you were rolling the dice for a rekindle.
• 44:27
  Speaker 3: And at one point the tech people where Rell may have have been involved built a smoke detector that was hooked up to a portable radio, so when the smoke detector went off it would tell the alarm room smoke detector sounding at this, and so so we, they put this in.
• 44:48
  Speaker 3: Oh it was.
• 44:48
  Speaker 3: We thought it was genius, so we put this in.
• 44:50
  Speaker 3: And then you know, we had a fire and they did the thing, and they did the deal and put it in.
• 44:54
  Speaker 3: And, like I don't know, it was six, seven hours later, the first it pulls up after the radio called itself in.
• 45:02
  Speaker 3: So yeah, we're on scene, we have a full involved act.
• 45:07
  Speaker 3: It was too little, too late, yeah, and you know it was a good idea but it just wasn't refined to give you pre-alerting.
• 45:17
  Speaker 1: There's a reason that's not a standard thing that we do.
• 45:20
  Speaker 1: We gave it a shot man.
• 45:22
  Speaker 3: And then we went to the deal where you just babysat it, you just left somebody there.
• 45:25
  Speaker 3: It was easier, cheaper.
• 45:28
  Speaker 1: Well, we want to thank Ron from South Florida for that question.
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: He was the one who wrote in.
• 45:34
  Speaker 3: Ron Swanson.
• 45:34
  Speaker 3: Sorry, ron, we beat that one to death.
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: It was good he appreciated it, I'm sure, god bless.
• 45:39
  Speaker 1: Someone else wrote in.
• 45:40
  Speaker 1: This is Andy from Michigan and he is asking about tickets.
• 45:44
  Speaker 1: He said for his department the tickets that we use before our radio transmissions now on BlueCard is new to them.
• 45:53
  Speaker 1: They've been doing blue card for a while and he wants to know why we are doing that now.
• 45:58
  Speaker 1: What?
• 45:58
  Speaker 1: Why use tickets to get on the air?
• 46:01
  Speaker 2: the.
• 46:01
  Speaker 2: The modern term in blue card, that is, tickets is is having a reason to call, and having and and communicating specifically and and, uh, and then based on those tickets, because there's only a short few that then it also gives the IC the ability to start triaging radio communication.
• 46:22
  Speaker 2: Because if engine, if engine five comes at me with a status change because they're low on air and they need to, they need to recycle, and then immediately and before I can answer them immediately, you know ladder four comes in with priority traffic, then all right, then I need to know I need to get that priority traffic and process that first before I deal with engine five.
• 46:45
  Speaker 2: And engine five can do what they need to.
• 46:46
  Speaker 2: We'll, we'll tie, we'll finish that up when it's most appropriate.
• 46:51
  Speaker 2: So that triage becomes pretty important and I think the the at least what I'm seeing now is having those reasons or those tickets to actually communicate causes folks working in the hazard zone to think about what they're communicating before they communicate is number one do I actually need to communicate what I'm what I feel like I need to right now?
• 47:13
  Speaker 2: Actually need to communicate what I'm what I feel like I need to right now?
• 47:18
  Speaker 2: And um, uh, and if I do great, have a good reason and likely that should be tied to priority traffic or something serious.
• 47:22
  Speaker 2: And if it's not, then hold onto it and and then communicate it when it's appropriate.
• 47:28
  Speaker 2: And we we described that in a lot of instances.
• 47:31
  Speaker 2: We don't want new good news reporting and we want you to communicate with us when you've completed the objectives that you were assigned.
• 47:40
  Speaker 2: It's the objectives that you were assigned and so I don't need you to narrate what's going on in there.
• 47:49
  Speaker 2: Me feel better by telling you every step of the way what you're actually doing inside, because I'm insecure out here in the chief's rig and I need to know everything that's happening is.
• 48:04
  Speaker 2: No, it's meant to prioritize, organize and make communication more efficient and really the goal is to decrease the overall communication because we know because of Don Abbott's stuff that 37% in his study, 37% of all the Mayday calls were missed on the initial communication.
• 48:27
  Speaker 2: So if we improve and make our communication more efficient, we have less likely chance of missing Mayday or priority traffic or something other serious going on there so you keep you operate at top efficiency with this by training with it routinely.
• 48:53
  Speaker 3: It's not a one and done deal.
• 48:54
  Speaker 3: So you have just like being a paramedic or an EMT or a hazmat tech or technical rescue is.
• 49:04
  Speaker 3: You have ongoing training where you discuss this in a setting where you have the strategic, tactical and task level all present at the same time.
• 49:15
  Speaker 3: We did this once every four months and it was a four-hour session.
• 49:22
  Speaker 3: So you taught one four-hour session to every officer in the operations division every four months to maintain the system the way it was.
• 49:36
  Speaker 3: And so you would have discussions about okay, you're doing a simulation, you're doing the after-action review of the thing.
• 49:44
  Speaker 3: You say, okay, you got an assignment with task location objective, and they talk okay, I went and did this and blah, blah, blah, and so everybody kind of talks and works around this where they all are on the same page and they're like, yeah, this is just the best way to do this.
• 50:03
  Speaker 3: So, and it's a deal, like, ok, we all understand this.
• 50:07
  Speaker 3: Then moving forward out of the room and so that keeps everybody hooked up is, if you stop the training, it falls apart within about I don't know three to six months.
• 50:21
  Speaker 3: You start reverting back to your old bad habits and then shit starts getting bad.
• 50:25
  Speaker 3: And why are you telling me to do this and that and you're like, no, if we'll just do three training sessions a year for four hours with everybody, we'll fix all this.
• 50:36
  Speaker 3: And that's what happened.
• 50:37
  Speaker 3: We fixed it all.
• 50:38
  Speaker 3: In fact, the challenge came is it became the most popular training within the Phoenix Fire Department for a five-year period.
• 50:48
  Speaker 3: I mean, it was people were.
• 50:51
  Speaker 3: They were breaking into the building to train when we weren't there to prepare for promotional exams.
• 50:58
  Speaker 2: So there's a.
• 50:59
  Speaker 2: There's something Eric and I tend to do in, at least in the workshops, and we'll do it in the trainers when we have the chances, we like to find the senior, most person in the room and say, ok, you know, and usually it's 20, 30, 40 years sometimes of folks.
• 51:13
  Speaker 2: And so, ok, all right, you're the senior guy.
• 51:17
  Speaker 2: How long in your career has communications been a problem on the fire ground?
• 51:23
  Speaker 2: And we have yet to have a student go?
• 51:26
  Speaker 2: Oh, the whole time.
• 51:27
  Speaker 2: Okay, well then, when are we going to do something different about it?
• 51:31
  Speaker 2: Like, when are we going to quit fooling ourselves, accepting this stupidity, and actually use and manage a communication system?
• 51:45
  Speaker 2: And that's what we're talking about here, and many people will say that's the problem.
• 51:51
  Speaker 2: All right, well, what are you doing to fix it?
• 51:54
  Speaker 2: What we're doing to fix it is defining purposes for when you communicate and that goes for the IC and that goes for the company officers and measure that and do it consistently so you don't lose the perishable parts of it.
• 52:18
  Speaker 2: Then you tend to get better, much better at it and you actually start to build a little bit of a trust that, yeah, I'm sending that crew in there to do what it is and I'm actually going to be OK with them doing all the work.
• 52:31
  Speaker 2: They don't have to narrate back to me everything that they're doing and that they're going to tell me when something's bad or they're done with what they were able to complete what they wanted.
• 52:42
  Speaker 2: So there's a whole litany of things here, but as the fire service, we're great at identifying problems and we are great at doing abso-fucking-lutely nothing about it.
• 52:54
  Speaker 2: So what we're talking about is having a system where we're actually going to take control of it and do a much better job and if you're doing it effectively, you're going to have half to a third of the normal communication that you've grown up in your organization.
• 53:11
  Speaker 2: However long that is in radio traffic, and nobody's going to be yelling.
• 53:16
  Speaker 2: There's going to be silence, radio silence, and we can embrace it.
• 53:21
  Speaker 2: And if the IC gets really scared, they can have their support officer, hold them and do whatever it takes, but let it happen and allow the work.
• 53:30
  Speaker 2: Give the workers the respect you can to give them to do the work.
• 53:35
  Speaker 2: You always have the ability to make changes and the responsibility to make changes and then, uh, I don't feel like, just because I'm doing uh, uh, I want them to.
• 53:46
  Speaker 2: Let me be in an offensive position.
• 53:47
  Speaker 2: I'm going to talk to them every 10 seconds on the outside.
• 53:50
  Speaker 2: So that's I.
• 53:52
  Speaker 2: I there's.
• 53:52
  Speaker 2: I think there's something to that.
• 53:54
  Speaker 2: Well, one of the things that spread blue card.
• 53:57
  Speaker 3: The first deals were a number of fire chiefs went through it and so and then they would they implemented it back home.
• 54:08
  Speaker 3: You talk to them and they said oh no, no, no, no.
• 54:10
  Speaker 3: What this is for my own sanity is because I'm at home after five o'clock and if there's a fire I just have to go, because all that's on the radio is screaming and shrieking and you just don't know what's happening.
• 54:24
  Speaker 3: And you show up, and half the time I show up and there's no fire there anymore.
• 54:29
  Speaker 3: And so he says now I like actually know what's going on at the incident scene.
• 54:35
  Speaker 3: They're describing what's actually going on.
• 54:38
  Speaker 3: Well, the fire chief, once we started training, three times a year, four hours a time, the fire chief said first time in my career that the people on the Alpha side and the Charlie side were at the same fire.
• 54:55
  Speaker 3: He says that this never happened before.
• 54:58
  Speaker 3: He says I've been here 40 years.
• 55:00
  Speaker 3: This is it.
• 55:01
  Speaker 3: This is the first time.
• 55:02
  Speaker 3: Well, that's a good thing.
• 55:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 55:06
  Speaker 3: And he's like, wow, this is so, that became the thing.
• 55:09
  Speaker 3: Oh, we can fix everything with command training, and we would you know if it was an operational issue Including the tattoo policies.
• 55:18
  Speaker 3: We could have.
• 55:19
  Speaker 3: Well, we would have got to there, we would have taken that over.
• 55:20
  Speaker 3: See, and what happened is we absorbed.
• 55:22
  Speaker 3: We absorbed safety and training, so it aligned with operations because operations managed it all.
• 55:28
  Speaker 3: And I think that's a major problem in the fire service today is when you get to that level where you got the ops chief and the training chief is they're all competing and 80% of the fire departments to be the next fire chief or the fire chief next door, and it's like no, if you, you can't get points, I got to get points, so they're at odds, and it's it's.
• 55:49
  Speaker 3: They're separate teams.
• 55:51
  Speaker 3: And you're like no, we all work for the same fire department.
• 55:54
  Speaker 3: You guys can do this outside of that.
• 55:55
  Speaker 3: We don't need to screw the fire department up because you guys are having ego problems with one another, and that's what's happening across the thing.
• 56:04
  Speaker 3: And then you put in all the other lunacy that we look at and you think you need a strong system where you can process all of this.
• 56:11
  Speaker 3: Systems that do blue card.
• 56:17
  Speaker 3: In fact, one of the things we talked about.
• 56:19
  Speaker 3: You talked about strategy and how that improves the safety of the workforce and sizing up and knowing what you're going to do.
• 56:28
  Speaker 3: Well then you have a group of people say, no, you can't do that because you have to search everything and you can't be putting the fire out and this, that and the other thing.
• 56:34
  Speaker 3: Well, when you really examine what's going on, you talked about a fire that happened in Minnesota a few months ago.
• 56:40
  Speaker 3: Where they were, it was more defensive in nature, they did a full size up.
• 56:46
  Speaker 3: They had somebody report there's victims in there and they were able to redirect the attack to support a rescue.
• 56:55
  Speaker 3: Well, you couldn't do that without a command system.
• 56:59
  Speaker 3: If it was just, hey, man, I'm going to go over here and do VES, well, they're not taking an attack line.
• 57:05
  Speaker 3: Well, when you go in to rescue those people, as soon as you create any ventilation at all, you're going to cook them.
• 57:11
  Speaker 3: So unless you're putting water in first, you're not saving anybody at that point, in those conditions at least.
• 57:19
  Speaker 3: So that's the importance of managing the incident from the beginning to the end.
• 57:26
  Speaker 3: A lot of people thought well, it's just a communications program, you know.
• 57:29
  Speaker 3: So the fire chief will know what they're doing.
• 57:30
  Speaker 3: Well, that's yeah, there's one.
• 57:33
  Speaker 3: That's one eighth of it, that's one function is communication that hooks up to organization, hooks up to incident action planning and strategy.
• 57:40
  Speaker 3: It hooks up to review and revision, all these different things, but that's only the part you see in here.
• 57:47
  Speaker 3: So there's there's a lot of blue card experts out there that don't have never been through the program.
• 57:53
  Speaker 1: They've never, never been through the program.
• 57:56
  Speaker 3: Well, they're not going to go through it because you know.
• 58:00
  Speaker 1: I want to thank Andy from Michigan for that question.
• 58:02
  Speaker 1: If anyone out there has a question for us, feel free to send it in the emails that we have are in the show notes or send it in on fan mail.
• 58:11
  Speaker 1: Timeless tactical truth.
• 58:14
  Speaker 1: Let's do this now.
• 58:15
  Speaker 1: Sorry, vance.
• 58:15
  Speaker 1: From Alan Bernasini.
• 58:17
  Speaker 1: We have the set of cards now in stock at bshiftercom, and today's is the five of clubs.
• 58:25
  Speaker 1: How bosses behave at showtime when a lower ranking responder is in command sends the most powerful and authentic message about their actual commitment to the system.
• 58:37
  Speaker 1: I'm reading a report this week about other chief officers not taking their role that was assigned by the IC because they just didn't want to do it, and for the system to work, we all have to understand where we are.
• 58:55
  Speaker 1: Do you guys have any examples of that, or maybe some reinforcing statements on how you fit into the chain of command, regardless of rank?
• 59:04
  Speaker 3: The IAC outranks everybody.
• 59:06
  Speaker 3: If you don't want to be outranked, you got to go.
• 59:09
  Speaker 3: Transfer command.
• 59:11
  Speaker 2: And in fact, if you have a system where you work in a command van, if, unless you're in the command team, uh, minus the fire chief in our day that you ain't getting in no, you can't get past the rope velvet uh, barrier out out front of the club, so uh well you didn't have.
• 59:30
  Speaker 3: If the ic told chief shows up, company officers the ic if you don't like, what?
• 59:34
  Speaker 3: If the IC told chief shows up, company officers the IC If you don't like what they're telling you, you're going to transfer command.
• 59:38
  Speaker 3: In fact, that's kind of the way the system's set up is like.
• 59:41
  Speaker 3: The outside IC is typically a chief running outside the response vehicle or inside of it rather.
• 59:47
  Speaker 3: Now, if I'm giving orders to other chiefs and they're like I'm not going to do that, then I'd have them arrested or I would assign somebody to remove them from the scene.
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 3: That's disruptive.
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 3: You can't, you don't get to pick what you do.
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 3: When you show up, you're giving an assignment Go run level two stage.
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 3: I don't want to do that, I want to go do something else.
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 3: Well, all right, then go find another job.
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 3: That's in fact in our system.
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 3: If that happened, you would not be, yeah, during the day.
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 3: You would be dealt with in a way that you wouldn't be seen in the field much, ever again.
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 3: Unprofessional organizations where the chiefs show up and I don't feel like doing that, that's an ego right.
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 3: Well, what happens if somebody gets hurt because you just decided I'm not going to play today because I don't get to be the big toe or whatever it is you want to be.
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 3: That's your borderline on criminal activity now mean you're not part of the solution, you're.
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 3: And in fact, what would the authority have in jurisdiction say?
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 3: I mean, I've heard deals where, like, the city came out and they told the fire department don't do this anymore, stop doing this ever again.
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 3: This is against the rules.
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 3: And the fire department came back and said, no, well, we're the fire department, you're like you.
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 3: If the mayor tells you to stop doing something, they can take action, like they could fire the fire chief.
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 3: In fact, they could probably clean out the whole top if they wanted to.
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 3: I mean, if you had the right mayor, they would say okay, you don't work here anymore, chief, but thanks for your service.
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 1: Meet Leo the security guard.
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 3: He's going to make sure you don't take anything of ours and you can have the picture on your desk and that's it.
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 2: Bye.
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 2: So I think, of some negative examples we had.
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 2: We had a shift commander on B-shift when I was working at Battalion 3 who was an exceptionally trained micromanager.
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 2: An exceptionally trained micromanager.
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 2: He'd gone to years of college to learn how to be a highly effective micromanager.
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 2: That we absolutely did not want in and around us.
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 2: And so we had a couple of experiences where we're at a fire, had stuff rocking and rolling, but it's going in the right direction, and he would always show up and get in the back seat and just always had really stupid things to say, or stating the obvious, or starting to focus on shit that didn't even matter, right?
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 2: So so we it.
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 2: We.
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 2: We built a strategy to combat that by uh, when we got to work, there were always stuff that ended up in our back seat because we were having to go deliver or we were going to go drop some you know, a motor off, to go get the cylinders honed or something.
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 2: So there'd be a welder in the backseat or something that we just needed to keep people out, right?
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 2: Because so the how they are behaving while we're running the incident is they're making it about them.
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 2: They're not making it about the work incident is they're making it about them, they're not making it about the work, they're not making it about the people doing the work.
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 2: They're not hell, they're not even supporting us in trying to keep that organized.
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 2: So there's, I've had that experience.
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 2: And then I've had other experiences where they show up, it is they are very, very quiet in their presence.
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 2: They sit in the back seat.
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 2: They may say nothing at all and go.
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 2: At the end, go.
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 2: Hey, thanks, good job, see you later.
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 2: We're out and or, or if things are going during the incident, just make a small suggestion.
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 2: Hey, you may need to think about this.
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 2: Oh cool, thanks.
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I wasn't thinking about that.
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 2: And then it wasn't disruptive at all.
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 2: So there's the highly disruptive ones, and then there's ones that have figured it out and how they're going to support the IC without making it about themselves.
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 2: So, yeah, there's Well being a shift commander.
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 3: That was really a good position to do that from.
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 3: Because if you were going to help the IC, the best way you could do that was to set up the command van and then call them over the command van and so they got their support officer and them, and then you build this command team around them and they're focused on the incident operation and we're doing all the support work behind them.
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 3: And if they really didn't need that level of help, I would just get there.
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 3: You figure out, okay, this is what's going on.
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 3: And I'd go stand by the driver's door and like knock on the window and they'd roll it down about that much.
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 3: And hey, how you guys doing if you smelled the dormant station, and so we would, we would.
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 3: We would have a clubhouse conversation right now if, if something needed to be done, we'd set the command van up.
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 3: But if it's a deal like it's just I'm just going to hang out here for 10 minutes and and that's what we're going to do, that's what we would do, and then you wouldn't bother the IC.
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 3: I mean it was pretty easy.
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 3: And you thought, okay, there's levels of command, there's the mobile IC.
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 3: They solve it 50% of the time.
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 3: If it's a work and fire 50% of the time.
• 1:05:05
  Speaker 3: Command never leaves them.
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 3: They kept it, they put it out.
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 3: They did great.
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 3: You only needed three or four units to be assigned, needed 15 minutes, you were done.
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 3: If it goes past that, it's going to be a reinforced operation where you got the IC and the buggy with their partner.
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 3: Well, we came from a big system and we had partners.
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 3: So we had 10 battalions.
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 3: Each one was paired.
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 3: So then that evolved into a system where the safety officer became the chief's partner.
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 3: So that was the best of both worlds and in fact the chief kind of became like a trainer where the safety officer became the chief's partner.
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 3: So that was the best of both worlds and in fact the chief kind of became like a trainer in the thing.
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 3: So that was very good.
• 1:05:41
  Speaker 3: And then the top was you set up a command van and it was normally a five person operation IC support officer.
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 3: You had logistics.
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 3: Who was the person who drove the command van would take care of staging and that second channel for rehab and staging.
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 3: And then we would put a safety section in occasionally, especially if it was a bigger offensive, a bigger fire that had an offensive component.
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 3: It was going to be an hour or more.
• 1:06:12
  Speaker 3: Then we could do two channels in the same hazard zone, and we had worked on that and practiced that multiple times before we actually did it.
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 2: And it wasn't about managing the work, it was about.
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 2: The second channel was accountability, 100% it was accountability.
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 3: That's what it was, and so, anyway, that just completed the loop for the support officer to be able to okay, this is who's in and out, and the divisions being run by sector bosses.
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 3: So those three levels.
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 3: I was there damn near 30 years and we never I mean, I worked on things that were probably type three in nature, where the state was there doing wildland shit, north, something like that, and that was a little bit longer.
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 3: And then you had the senior advisor, which was filled by the shift commander.
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 3: So the shift commander was in charge of the command post and you would keep all the distractions out of it, which is anybody that didn't fit into that five-person command team.
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 3: So, like the micromanager Chris is talking about, they try to come in and say, nah, you guys go out there and do whatever.
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 3: So you're just keeping the strategic level clean where they can focus, and what it is is.
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 3: You've got somebody listening to the radio, the tactical channel, 100% of the time, and they're direct in the operation essentially.
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 3: So it was the best way to run an airline, truly.
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 2: The people that can't manage themselves and be supportive and do the things when somebody else is in command.
• 1:07:43
  Speaker 2: They're the same ones that screw up personnel issues.
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 2: They're the same ones that screw up relationships with partners, our agency partners, that cause problems with shifts.
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 2: It shows up a lot of times, the most in the operations, but then there's pretty much a trail of dead bodies around those people.
• 1:08:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah, their management style is chaos and they leave a wake behind them.
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I've seen that we haven't made this about me yet, so let's make this about me, yeah.
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 3: Yeah, they're tough to be around sometimes.
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 2: So you know I only want to be around if we're putting a pillow over their head.
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 3: Well, you know, sometimes the dorm would smell funny because they'd set their shit on fire.
• 1:08:38
  Speaker 3: I mean, it's just, we have a unique way of disapproving, yeah, of sharing our deepest opinions of one another.
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 3: I suppose yeah, so that's yeah exactly.
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 1: Fellas, thank you very much.
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 1: Appreciate the, the, the sage advice, as always, and if folks have any questions, again send them in, and we want to thank everyone for joining us on this B shifter podcast.
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 1: Talk to you again soon, thanks you.