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Command Considerations for Carbon Monoxide and Natural Gas Incidents · B Shifter

• 0:50
  Speaker 2: Welcome to the B Shifter podcast.
• 0:52
  Speaker 2: You've got John Vance here, along with Josh Bloom and Chris Stewart today, and our topic when we get into it will be on carbon monoxide and natural gas incidents, which we'll also talk about propane.
• 1:07
  Speaker 2: But first let's check in with the guys.
• 1:09
  Speaker 2: How are you doing, josh and Chris?
• 1:12
  Speaker 3: I'm doing great.
• 1:12
  Speaker 3: The wintertime is upon us now here in Cincinnati, so it's probably gotten cold and we had a little snow this morning.
• 1:20
  Speaker 3: So you know, by you you wouldn't call this snow.
• 1:22
  Speaker 3: I mean there was some white stuff coming out of the air, but we have a nice little dusting.
• 1:27
  Speaker 2: I got in a hot tub last night.
• 1:28
  Speaker 2: It was 28 degrees and snowing, and my hot tub is outside, so it's the best time of year to use the hot tub.
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: We love that here in Minnesota.
• 1:38
  Speaker 2: How about you, chris?
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: What's your weather like?
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: We've had a pretty rough cold snap.
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: Uh, it got down to 50.
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: Um, I put a jacket on the other morning walking the dog.
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: Um, yeah, so it's.
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: Uh, it's turned bitterly cold here in phoenix bitterly cold.
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I love going to phoenix seeing people bundled up and scars and stocking hats and it's 50 degrees.
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: If I was home and it was april, I'd be in shorts and a t-shirt it's like this is gray weather.
• 2:09
  Speaker 2: But yeah, they, uh, they.
• 2:11
  Speaker 3: They tend to adapt differently in the desert southwest yeah, you go around those stores, jv, and it's like, oh they, they got all this wintertime stuff because of like flagstaff and the ski places and all that, and it's like, no, that that's for the lady who's walking down the street right now, that's for walking your dog in 60 degree weather.
• 2:28
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's it.
• 2:29
  Speaker 2: That's it, hey.
• 2:31
  Speaker 2: So this is the week of December 2nd.
• 2:33
  Speaker 2: We just celebrated Thanksgiving.
• 2:35
  Speaker 2: We have a few things coming up here for the rest of the year.
• 2:39
  Speaker 2: The grants close soon for AFG and we wanted to give a little bit of a reminder on that because we do have resources for you with Blue Card to get those grants.
• 2:52
  Speaker 2: Jeffrey King, who specializes in writing grants.
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: He's been very successful in not only assisting other agencies but with his agencies attaining those grants.
• 3:02
  Speaker 2: So in the show notes today I will include a link to a webinar that can help you out, as well as some contact information for Jeffrey.
• 3:12
  Speaker 2: But over the years here we've had a lot of very successful grants that have been awarded through AFG for folks to not only get into Blue Card but also sustain their Blue Card programs.
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm a recipient of one of those Like it's legit, the tools and the resources that Jeffrey and Eric and other folks who have actually, you know, had experience doing.
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: That was a fantastic help for us getting rolling and not only introducing Blue Card but then training, train, sending folks to train the trainer, getting trainers into our organization and starting to build a, you know, a sustainable system.
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: So I I have personal experience.
• 3:53
  Speaker 3: I love it and there's been quite a bit of progress, uh, and success with, with regionalization grants.
• 4:01
  Speaker 3: So organizations that work together, train together, run together, go to alarms together, you know, doing a regional grant to get all of their people on the same page Because, as we talk about so often, there's very few fire departments in this country that respond to incidents by themselves and don't get mutual aid from somebody else.
• 4:22
  Speaker 3: So, um, maine, new Hampshire, massachusetts, uh, north and South Carolina, florida, now, um, and then some Midwest Kansas area agencies that have gotten been successful with some regional grants as far as getting getting initial certification for all of their people who may be in the front seat of the apparatus, or strategic ICs.
• 4:50
  Speaker 3: So, yeah, reach out if you guys need help or support on writing your grant.
• 4:58
  Speaker 2: We've got that support for you.
• 4:59
  Speaker 2: Also, I'd be remiss not to mention that, if you're putting together your 2025 training plan, look at our events page and get your people signed up.
• 5:12
  Speaker 2: We have several events posted already for the first half of 2025 and some beyond, excuse me, including our workshops.
• 5:21
  Speaker 2: Do we still have one workshop available for big box, or are those all spoken for already, josh?
• 5:28
  Speaker 3: So if somebody's wanting the big box workshop, you know you go ahead and send it to me.
• 5:32
  Speaker 3: We're, we have we have one agency that is that is trying to figure out if they can make it work or not.
• 5:38
  Speaker 3: But if you send me that you're interested, then we can get you kind of on a list to see when we could deliver that and if, if Shane ends up having some additional time available somewhere that we could squeeze him into a place for a day to do the day, one part of the big box we could potentially end up doing.
• 5:56
  Speaker 3: You know one or two more this year.
• 5:58
  Speaker 3: So if somebody is interested in that, and then you know the same thing with the May Day workshops and critical thinking and all that.
• 6:05
  Speaker 3: So we're, there's quite a bit of stuff already posted.
• 6:11
  Speaker 3: The first half of the year is definitely filling up and then that second half of the year it's interesting people forecasting, you know that far out to make sure that they get the dates that they want, to make sure that they get the dates that they want.
• 6:22
  Speaker 3: And we're also going to be posting we'll probably get it up today or tomorrow all of the Canadian, all the train-and-trainers that are going to take place in Canada in 2025.
• 6:31
  Speaker 3: I think there's five or six classes there.
• 6:34
  Speaker 3: I know we've got a lot of viewers from Canada that get on and listen to this.
• 6:37
  Speaker 3: So it's on AO on their website up there, but it'll be on our website as well just when those classes are, so you could reach out to Todd and get registered for that if you wanted to get into one of those classes.
• 6:54
  Speaker 3: Excellent, Bshiftercom.
• 6:56
  Speaker 2: Click on events.
• 6:57
  Speaker 2: You can see all the dates there and get your folks signed up, because we don't want you to go without.
• 7:03
  Speaker 2: And get your folks signed up because we don't want you to go without, and the earlier you can sign up, the better to secure your spots.
• 7:07
  Speaker 2: That would be advantageous for you.
• 7:11
  Speaker 2: Any other announcements that you want to add before we dive into our topic today?
• 7:17
  Speaker 3: We're going to be pushing out the conference, some conference information and registration here relatively soon.
• 7:23
  Speaker 3: So it'll be it's September 29th through October 3rd, 2nd or 3rd, I believe it's that Monday through Friday.
• 7:31
  Speaker 3: We've moved around a little bit.
• 7:37
  Speaker 3: We got some other general session people.
• 7:38
  Speaker 3: John Cirillo from FDNY is going to be presenting this year, talking about what we know now about wind-driven fires and then a lot of the stuff that he's done and worked on over the years when it comes to this rapid fire growth.
• 7:47
  Speaker 3: And we know it's science, but he connects it to the boots on the ground and I think he can make it make sense.
• 7:53
  Speaker 3: He's got a lot of incidents that he can talk about and review when it comes to that.
• 7:58
  Speaker 3: And then we have several other instructors that sent us information from the conference this year that we're going to bring on to present.
• 8:08
  Speaker 3: So we are going to do the pre-conference workshops.
• 8:11
  Speaker 3: We're going to offer a Mayday workshop, critical thinking workshop.
• 8:14
  Speaker 3: We're going to offer a workshop that's, you know, from engine one and escalating an incident all the way through, really connecting to the EOC and to the state.
• 8:25
  Speaker 3: So those large scale incidents maybe it's a hazmat incident or some kind of a release like that, so you only get to the.
• 8:34
  Speaker 3: You're only successful getting to the end of that as if it starts off well and you build a good foundation really with engine one.
• 8:39
  Speaker 3: So that's going to be an excellent workshop.
• 8:42
  Speaker 3: Tim Schaubel and Kevin Alexander from Houston are going to, you know, have put that together and are going to be, you know, presenting that over the two days, and then we've got many other things.
• 8:54
  Speaker 3: I mean it's pretty far away still, so I mean we'll be.
• 8:56
  Speaker 3: We'll be pushing out the dates and opening up registration here, probably in the next close to the first of the year.
• 9:04
  Speaker 2: All right, looking forward to that.
• 9:05
  Speaker 2: And, again, great crowd.
• 9:07
  Speaker 2: This year we had about 600 in Sharonville slash, cincinnati, and that will be the venue that we're going back to again this year.
• 9:16
  Speaker 2: It's a great venue, it's low cost and it enables agencies to be able to send multiple people to this conference because we keep the costs very reasonable.
• 9:28
  Speaker 2: So looking forward to getting that announced.
• 9:31
  Speaker 2: Look for it, all right.
• 9:34
  Speaker 2: Today's topic carbon monoxide and natural gas incidents.
• 9:38
  Speaker 2: Let's start on carbon monoxide, because really this time of year is when we see the majority of those incidents that turn very serious.
• 9:48
  Speaker 2: What, what are some of the stats that we have on that and when does a carbon monoxide incident turn serious?
• 9:57
  Speaker 3: well, you know the when they started pushing out and putting co alarms and everything, um, it kind of caused the fire service, I think, a little bit to take a drawback.
• 10:06
  Speaker 3: I mean, I remember agencies that if you got a carbon monoxide alarm we'd send an engine and a truck and a battalion chief to the alarm.
• 10:13
  Speaker 3: And then some departments went all the way back to hey, kid, go get in the car, take this meter over there, and that battery's probably gonna be out, gotta be replaced.
• 10:23
  Speaker 3: And really we didn't, didn't and many still don't provide adequate training for gas monitoring and what that really looks like and what it should be.
• 10:31
  Speaker 3: So, um, we're gonna, we're gonna continue to see, I think, an uptick, uh, in some of these incidents based off of, you know that there's more, more and more monitoring and more and more fixed monitoring.
• 10:43
  Speaker 3: So you know new residentials oftentimes got hardwired to the alarm.
• 10:47
  Speaker 3: You know CO alarms connected to it.
• 10:50
  Speaker 3: And then the same thing in so many of these commercial buildings.
• 10:53
  Speaker 3: It's part of the building code that there's CO, you know, wired into the system.
• 10:58
  Speaker 3: So what we really want to talk about is we should treat all of them as an event and it's real until we prove otherwise, no different than going to the fire alarm.
• 11:09
  Speaker 3: I mean, we still go there and we're just going to verify that, hopefully that there's nothing there.
• 11:17
  Speaker 3: But you know, the alarm went off for some reason or another and it's our job to really serve the customer of.
• 11:22
  Speaker 3: If it's a battery, we'll fix your battery and if it's something else, then we'll get the appropriate resources there to solve and reduce the risk until that particular component or appliance can be corrected or fixed.
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: So there's some interesting kind of parallels here to the fire ground, I think, and for initial arriving company officers, who likely are not technicians right and don't have the same equipment and the capability and capacity that technicians have is when they're showing up.
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: Is that initiating that size up process in a standard manner that we do at every other incident?
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: And in these you don't have smoke pouring from the building, you don't have fire rolling out of windows and all those other stuff You're dealing with, likely an invisible hazard, and you're starting to gain information from what either people tell you, information you may have gotten from the 911 caller or things that you can learn in response there.
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: And a lot of the same questions and concerns on the front end for the fire ground are the same.
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: Here is one of the early things we've got to figure out is do we have a life safety component here?
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: Is life safety a critical factor to us?
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: Do we have an occupied structure that has an alarm activating and are we going to have to engage and act so that we can remove those people, evacuate them, isolate the area, establish a hazard zone and deny entry to it?
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: And so the early on thought process matches what we do.
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: On the fire ground, however, we have a very different problem with being invisible and we have to have some background knowledge and understanding of what it is, where it could likely be.
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: And then how do we actually protect ourselves if we figure out early on that we need to engage, we need to evacuate, we need to do certain things so that we can be more successful, things so that we can be more successful.
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: We can set it up appropriately, like we talked about, for the technician level folks to show up, the hazmat guys, the 100-pound brains, to come in and figure this out, meter and do a much more thorough job of establishing this and then maybe even start working on all right, how do we mitigate this problem?
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: So I think for those initial arriving folks, whether it is a chief officer or a company officer, a lot of the same thing's going to play, but we have to recognize the difference in this hazard and what carbon monoxide is actually doing to those victims and how we can isolate it and or improve it before the technician type folks get there, how we can isolate it and or improve it before the technician type folks get there.
• 14:11
  Speaker 2: And to throw some context behind this, guys is unintentional, non-related CO poisoning is responsible for approximately 15,000 visits to the emergency department annually and 500 deaths in the United States, and I think it's the largest group that is receiving.
• 14:26
  Speaker 2: Unintentional poisoning, too is carbon monoxide.
• 14:30
  Speaker 2: So to blow it off and just say one person in a pickup truck, which I know, that is still going on, it goes on around me, where they'll just send a duty officer and that's it to a CO alarm.
• 14:43
  Speaker 2: But before we look at mitigation, let's talk about deployment.
• 14:47
  Speaker 2: What is a suggested deployment?
• 14:50
  Speaker 2: Not only on an alarm, but then once we find a credible threat of carbon monoxide inside a structure?
• 14:57
  Speaker 3: So, john, I think one thing with the deployment is that, just like every bit of deployment that we do, so what is it?
• 15:05
  Speaker 3: And then what are the factors that we got from dispatch?
• 15:08
  Speaker 3: And then where is it right?
• 15:09
  Speaker 3: So we're going to a single-family residential home for a carbon monoxide alarm.
• 15:15
  Speaker 3: You know it's going to start out and they say there's no symptoms.
• 15:19
  Speaker 3: Because 911 dispatchers ask that question.
• 15:21
  Speaker 3: You know it starts out as an investigation, but we're still going to do the exact same thing.
• 15:25
  Speaker 3: Like Chris said, we're going to have a little bit of a standoff, we're going to monitor the situation and if we don't have the monitor, then we need to wait until we get somebody to monitor it.
• 15:33
  Speaker 3: But with that said, organizations all across this country, some big cities, especially Midwest to the East Coast, for as long as I can remember in my career, have been carrying single gas CO and maybe some single gas other types of meters.
• 15:47
  Speaker 3: The officer or somebody else carries that.
• 15:49
  Speaker 3: And then EMS units have been have recently, you know, in the last 10 years, started putting single gas CO like they're on their clipboard or on their airway bag.
• 15:58
  Speaker 3: And I can tell you, you know, just in the last 10 years I can think of 50 incidents where we identified the problem from, we were dispatched to.
• 16:10
  Speaker 3: You know, grandma was sick.
• 16:11
  Speaker 3: And they get there and it's like, what's that noise?
• 16:13
  Speaker 3: And it's like, well, the single gas CO meter is going off.
• 16:16
  Speaker 3: That's not what we got called here for, but that's what the problem is.
• 16:18
  Speaker 3: So we've seen some instances and some write-ups in some of the fire department journals of those kinds of incidents in the buildings and buildings that don't have updated you know furnaces and so on.
• 16:34
  Speaker 3: Then you know we're going to continue to have you know carbon monoxide incidents as well as you know the malfunctioning piece.
• 16:52
  Speaker 3: So there's clearly a range of of deployment to these types of incidents.
• 16:59
  Speaker 3: If I'm going to a single family building, I'm probably not going to need as many resources, but I still need to set it up and take all the appropriate steps.
• 17:04
  Speaker 3: But you know, one of our blue card simulations is I'm you're going to a multifamily complex for carbon monoxide and, uh, you know the call is grandma is sick.
• 17:15
  Speaker 3: And you get there and then you identify that all there's carbon monoxide here.
• 17:18
  Speaker 3: Well, it's not just that unit that you're in, that units connected to many other units and, um, you know it comes out that there's a car running in the garage.
• 17:27
  Speaker 3: Well, you know, multiple spaces now need to be checked and cleared from carbon monoxide.
• 17:34
  Speaker 3: So this isn't necessarily a technician response level incident but depending on your organization's deployment model and how you carry your meters and who carries the meters and who runs the meters, that kind of lines back up to deployment.
• 17:50
  Speaker 3: But we shouldn't be sending one person for a known CO problem.
• 17:55
  Speaker 3: There should be a standardized deployment for that.
• 18:00
  Speaker 3: Chris.
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I take it back to the bosses.
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: You better be doing everything right when something goes wrong.
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: So, if you're thinking about this from a policy standpoint for an organization and you're trying to determine your deployment thresholds and the volume of resources, you're trying to determine your deployment thresholds and the volume of resources you're going to send on certain type of emergencies, well, you better set yourself up, depending on the occupancy type and the initial information, that, when you've got the appropriate amount of folks going to not only initially size this up and work on figuring out what's going on dealing with any victims that you may have, and then if and when you need that technician level to deal with the source and or how we're going to control this, because it's one thing to get there, have the alarm go off, remove people from that place, start taking care of them and start to ventilate the space.
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: Well, that you're still not fixing the the source of that.
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: So the appropriate uh resources need to come and help determine what.
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: What do we need to actually solve this or fix this uh source problem?
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: Is it something we can do as a fire service or is it secondary partners that need to come in and and manage us from building to vendors to whoever contractors that that come in and manage this, from building to vendors to whoever contractors that come in and manage these things.
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: So it's a trick here is you don't want to over-send and you don't want to under-send, right, and so you've got to find a balance point in that and it's going to be critical factors driven is planning for what is the legitimate potential of this incident when we go there, so evaluating residential versus commercial, the volume of people in and around there, and then what is actually going to be appropriate and available inside your organization.
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: You can't send everybody every time, so it is a balance point.
• 19:50
  Speaker 2: This is the time of year that we see most of the CO poisonings happening because of different things.
• 19:57
  Speaker 2: A lot of you know heating equipment that's improperly vented.
• 20:01
  Speaker 2: We see vents that are actually blocked.
• 20:04
  Speaker 2: I know here in the upper Midwest and the Northeast our vents actually get frozen over either with snow or ice, so the venting from the building is impeded by that.
• 20:15
  Speaker 2: So so really being a little bit of a sleuth when you get there and looking at things pessimistically from the outside instead of just just the complacency part because we do see a lot of complacency on these types of alarms, correct?
• 20:31
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I think.
• 20:32
  Speaker 3: I mean we see complacency all the time, right.
• 20:33
  Speaker 3: So I mean, if we should go there and act like you know professionals and you know, like I think Chris said, be prepared, be prepared for the worst and you know, hope for the best kind of thing, right, and you know, hopefully it's absolutely nothing, hopefully it was, you know, false alarm for whatever reason hairspray or somebody was spraying something, or dust, or you know a battery or whatever.
• 21:01
  Speaker 3: But we talk so much and everybody talks about rescue.
• 21:05
  Speaker 3: Well, here's just another instance.
• 21:07
  Speaker 3: Right, you get there and there's carbon monoxide in a multifamily apartment building and you're getting, you know, a reading of anything anywhere.
• 21:16
  Speaker 3: Then you need to check that entire place because any reading anywhere that could be the lowest reading that there is there could be a much higher reading somewhere else.
• 21:25
  Speaker 3: So you know, carbon monoxide, it really will mix with air more than it will, you know, rise or fall.
• 21:33
  Speaker 3: I mean it has a better instance of it being lighter and it'll it'll rise a little bit, but it actually mixes more than I think, than probably anything.
• 21:39
  Speaker 3: But you know, we need to be cognizant and aware of that that any reading means that there is likely a reading higher somewhere else.
• 21:48
  Speaker 3: So I mean, if I'm at the front door of a house or an apartment building and I got a reading of 50, well then somewhere else in there there's probably a higher reading than that, because the front door is not the source.
• 21:58
  Speaker 3: So you know, just sitting down and having training and having that discussion of what that really means, and you know, circling back to deployment, with that, I send one person or two people in a vehicle, and they don't even take their gear with them, and they go and have a meter and it starts going off and now the building does need to be evacuated.
• 22:18
  Speaker 3: Well, now they're exposing themselves to something that they don't need to be exposed to and that comes back to, you know, really a failure in the deployment system.
• 22:26
  Speaker 3: So your organization needs to figure out what that best practice really looks like.
• 22:32
  Speaker 3: Your organization needs to figure out what that best practice really looks like.
• 22:34
  Speaker 3: And you know, john, you sent it out on the buck slip the carbon monoxide and natural gas.
• 22:39
  Speaker 3: You know, kind of SOG, that's for organizations to take.
• 22:42
  Speaker 3: That it's a word document.
• 22:43
  Speaker 3: They can take it and tweak it and modify it and make it what fits them.
• 22:46
  Speaker 3: But you know that that's the start of it.
• 22:49
  Speaker 3: But again, you just can't sit there and talk about it.
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: You have to actually exercise it to get everybody on the same page, and I think it's more likely that folks in the Southwest, kind of in my area these calls are actually more of a surprise to us than I think they are to you guys in the norm the vast majority that I've been on, because it does get cold here for three days and people decide they don't have great heat so they run their stove.
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: Or I've actually been on them where they brought in a charcoal grill into the house and burned it.
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: So those tend to be a surprise to us and because it's an invisible hazard, it's all of those things that we do get complacent in those evaluations and so slowing down, utilizing a standardized process of sizing up especially when we don't have smoke and you do have folks with, sometimes some type of symptoms you've got a life safety issue, sometimes some type of symptoms, you've got a life safety issue need to start dealing with it.
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: We need to be a little bit more cautious, mindful, prepared and have the ability to smartly figure this out, because we can't walk away without solving the issue.
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: We can't just fix it or remove somebody from one apartment and have an issue that's pervasive in the building that nobody else has called about.
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: Yet We've got to find the source and we've got to do our due diligence.
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: It's that whole prevent harm thing that I think is our responsibility in fixing it and coming to a solution of it.
• 24:24
  Speaker 2: I think working with your dispatch center too, and making sure dispatch is asking the right questions and giving the right pre-arrival instructions is very important in these cases, and I've been on incidents where they have miscoded it as a carbon dioxide alarm.
• 24:43
  Speaker 2: But let's talk about the differences between those two and how we can help educate dispatch.
• 24:50
  Speaker 3: Well, so one thing with that, john, is, you know, if we get into the mindset that we're going to a carbon monoxide incident and an agency is using a single gas, co, for whatever reason, and that's all they're using and it's actually CO2, they are going to have no idea and it's a CO2 alarm.
• 25:10
  Speaker 3: But there's actually CO2 in, you know, in the quickie mark that's got a problem with their CO2 tank.
• 25:16
  Speaker 3: That's in the manager's office, which we have that as a simulation as well, that an inert gas thing that displaces oxygen.
• 25:23
  Speaker 3: But it'll be the you know it'll be the McDonald's incident.
• 25:28
  Speaker 3: Right, they had no idea what was going on.
• 25:36
  Speaker 3: And the next thing, you know, you're blacking out.
• 25:37
  Speaker 3: Or one of our close colleagues and friends and instructors, grant Light, at a fire incident with CO2, where CO2 had gone off, the system had gone off and they weren't really recognizing that and the CO2 had sunk into a stairwell and they were in there later into the event and didn't have SCBA on.
• 25:57
  Speaker 3: Fire was out and guys were like I'm going out because, you know, lack of oxygen in that space.
• 26:04
  Speaker 3: So you know, if your dispatch center is dispatching CO and CO2 together, there's a problem with that.
• 26:10
  Speaker 3: So you know, connect with your dispatch center to get that fixed.
• 26:13
  Speaker 3: But then also you need to spend a lot more time with your companies talking about, uh, they're sending us to two different things.
• 26:21
  Speaker 3: That are two drastically different things.
• 26:22
  Speaker 3: Um, both of them are going to be, uh, an issue for us when it comes to cognitive response.
• 26:28
  Speaker 3: But, uh, if you've got a CO2 alarm, there's actually CO2 present.
• 26:32
  Speaker 3: You have a, you have, you have quite an issue and you know, the only way you're going to monitor for that is if you have a really a four gas meter and it's going to start to show, you know, a lower O2 percentage and you're going to get zero on the CO.
• 26:46
  Speaker 3: So, um, that's something definitely definitely to think about, and that that kind of comes back to the deployment thing.
• 26:52
  Speaker 3: I, that's something definitely to think about and that kind of comes back to the deployment thing.
• 26:55
  Speaker 3: I don't want one or two people out there going into a potential hazard zone.
• 26:58
  Speaker 3: It's actually, you know, a CO incident is a hazmat incident.
• 27:00
  Speaker 3: I mean, no matter how you look at it, it is.
• 27:05
  Speaker 3: So you know we should be treating that appropriately and monitoring in accordance with best practice, and you know not to get into a ton of stuff on that.
• 27:12
  Speaker 3: But that just goes back to circling around that, besides what we're talking about, organizations need to spend a little time with everybody and make sure they understand fully.
• 27:19
  Speaker 3: You know, on my, you know radio or whatever, or on my gear, you know it takes longer for that to capture and pick up a reading than it does assist something that has a pump on it that's actually pumping air into the system.
• 27:46
  Speaker 3: But you know, I see people go to incidents and they just, you know, they're walking, as you know, about as fast as you can walk.
• 27:53
  Speaker 3: Well, we ain't got nothing.
• 27:54
  Speaker 3: And it's like, well, that thing's not automatic, it's not like it hits you in the face, it it takes some time for it to respond.
• 28:01
  Speaker 3: Right, it's got a, there's a.
• 28:04
  Speaker 3: There's some little Keebler elves in there that are doing some math trying to figure out exactly what am I reading and then what is the reading going to be coming out the other end of it.
• 28:12
  Speaker 3: It's not automatic.
• 28:13
  Speaker 3: So I think we downplay these incidents so much and then, you know, I think, as Chris said, sometimes we get surprised or get caught and we're not prepared for what we're really dealing with.
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think on the CO2 side, at least in my experience, that displacement of oxygen and that asphyxiant situation that it provides is those incidents have seemed to be pretty significant in that we show up and you actually have unconscious people.
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: It seems to have happened much more quickly.
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: They're in confined or compartmentalized spaces and again it's an invisible hazard to us and we show up and we may or may not be prepared.
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: That McDonald's incident down in a basement that happened locally for us is somebody's down there.
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: We started to move down there and instantly we start getting the oh, I'm going to lose consciousness thing.
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: Well, it seems to be, at least in the incidents I've gone on.
• 29:19
  Speaker 1: It's a much slower buildup in the carbon monoxide.
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: There's symptoms, there's, you know, some progressive things with, and then the CO2 it hasn't, and then the presence of alarms.
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: Now, so, like the CO2 alarms in my area may actually be replacing the natural gas calls for what we've always referred to as the hazmat man down call.
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: We're just going on them constantly and it's lulling us to sleep because we're going on a lot of alarms and bad alarms and not having any outcomes and then when we have something serious there that we again we get surprised because we're not prepared for it or we've been lulled to sleep because of everything else.
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: So there definitely is a difference between the two.
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: One seems to be, at least in my experience, a lot more serious in the immediacy and the other is a slower build.
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: But you got to pay attention to what it is and it's not the same measurement and tools to utilize and verify what exactly that problem is.
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: And, again, being smart and setting things up correctly for the hazmat guys to come in and do their thing to better identify it and maybe control the problem has always got to be in the forefront of our mind.
• 30:32
  Speaker 2: Always got to be in the forefront of our mind.
• 30:33
  Speaker 2: Well, let's switch gears and start talking about our natural gas emergencies, because we do see a lot of very destructive incidents.
• 30:45
  Speaker 2: I mean, when things get to the right mixture, we're going to have an explosion and or fire with natural gas gas, and there's a big difference between the outside leak that typically caused by construction, pipelines or other service markings were not done correctly or not done at all, versus appliances leaking or other reasons why we have leaks inside of structures.
• 31:18
  Speaker 2: So, first of all, let's talk about the physical properties of natural gas and why it is a threat to us and why now, although you know by far there are more people killed annually by carbon monoxide versus natural gas, but it seems like when natural gas gets to that right mixture, it's catastrophic.
• 31:38
  Speaker 3: Yes, I mean, we don't have to look far to see this time of year.
• 31:43
  Speaker 3: You know, just a few weeks ago, right here in the Cincinnati area, likely a propane incident that you know that caused an explosion.
• 31:55
  Speaker 3: And then, I think, just a couple of days after that, in the Detroit area, a condo complex, I believe it ended up coming out that was natural gas.
• 32:05
  Speaker 3: And then I think everybody sitting here has been on one of these incidents either, I think all of us after um, after the event had happened, after an explosion had happened.
• 32:18
  Speaker 3: So when we think about that that way, we need to understand the risk that we're responding to that.
• 32:24
  Speaker 3: There is a potential that when we get called for natural gas leak, that there could or we should plan for there potentially being an explosion, right.
• 32:35
  Speaker 3: So we have several line of duty death events that we can kind of tie back to some propane and natural gas incidents.
• 32:47
  Speaker 3: Propane specifically.
• 32:49
  Speaker 3: So in understanding the difference between propane and natural gas, I mean very similar except for natural gas is going to rise and propane is going to sink.
• 33:01
  Speaker 3: And then you know, in your organization you should probably have a pretty good idea whether there's natural gas to an area or whether it's supplied, you know, by propane.
• 33:11
  Speaker 3: You know just some of those, some of those stats, john, I don't know if you were going to put them up, but every year, the average over a 10-year period, 300 incidents a year with natural gas explosions where firemen were hurt or killed and the average of $475 million in property damage.
• 33:31
  Speaker 3: So, um, uh, you know the one I shared with you all from here, locally, it, uh, there was a debris field for quite a ways, you know from that event, and there's no, there's no alarm or warning to that.
• 33:45
  Speaker 3: So you know, as we talk about, you know, blue cards, best practice for response to these types of incidents, and why we deploy and stage the way we do and monitor the way that we do and set the incident up the way that we do.
• 33:57
  Speaker 3: You know that's why we do it, because it is a ticking time bomb if there is gas there, uh, for a potential event and and, um, we can, we'll walk through and talk about.
• 34:10
  Speaker 3: You know all of those parts and pieces and what, what, all that really looks like.
• 34:15
  Speaker 3: So the flammable limits, you know, from five to 15 percent in air with, with natural gas, it's, that's, that's a pretty decent, you know pretty decent size range.
• 34:27
  Speaker 3: And you know, without jumping into making it, you know tech level stuff.
• 34:32
  Speaker 3: You know that doesn't mean that if I have 5% LEL on my meter that it's 5% natural gas.
• 34:38
  Speaker 3: But you, you need to figure that out depending on what your, what your gas meter is, you know calibrated with and and what all that really, what all that really means.
• 34:49
  Speaker 3: But you know our magic number and you know what you know NIOSH puts out uh, we get to 10 of the lel, your meter's probably set to go off.
• 34:56
  Speaker 3: Well, it's like that for a reason because we need to, you need to get out of there, because if you have 10 in one place and you're not at the source, it's higher somewhere else.
• 35:03
  Speaker 3: So anytime that we have gas present, natural gas or propane present, in a space somewhere there, it would be in the flammable range somewhere.
• 35:17
  Speaker 3: I mean, even if it's all the way back at the.
• 35:20
  Speaker 3: You know initial source.
• 35:21
  Speaker 3: So you know, we just need to keep that in our mind.
• 35:24
  Speaker 3: But I still see the same thing.
• 35:25
  Speaker 3: Not that long ago I seen an engine company pull up, pull up right in front of the building.
• 35:29
  Speaker 3: They sent one company non-emergency, no natural, called in, reported that it was natural gas and they go in and monitor and they got a reading and not dressed in anything, everybody's inside the building and it's like what in the world are you doing?
• 35:45
  Speaker 3: I mean, you're literally standing inside of a bomb and it could potentially go off.
• 35:50
  Speaker 3: So I didn't pull it up really for sake of time.
• 35:55
  Speaker 3: But you can look at, uh, a lot of the project mayday stuff, the, the, the maydays that are happening due to gas leaks.
• 36:02
  Speaker 3: Um, during the time that that that Don Abbott was doing all the work he was doing on project mayday, it was on a rise, uh, a big uptick of how many maydays were happening due to natural gas leaks.
• 36:18
  Speaker 3: So, or due to natural gas in some form or fashion.
• 36:21
  Speaker 3: So it's another real thing, right, and we manage this the same way.
• 36:26
  Speaker 3: We do everything else.
• 36:27
  Speaker 3: We evaluate the critical fire ground factors and we deploy based off of what do we have and what do we need to do to really fix the problem.
• 36:35
  Speaker 3: And in our case, we're not really there to.
• 36:38
  Speaker 3: We're not there to fix the problem.
• 36:40
  Speaker 3: As we were building this hazmat module out many years ago, we worked with multiple energy companies and they said we want you to get there and, as Chris said earlier, we want you to kind of evaluate, isolate and evacuate and call the professionals, and the professionals are us.
• 36:55
  Speaker 3: But if you do something that causes a problem, it is on you, it is not on us, you're not there to fix it.
• 37:01
  Speaker 3: That's what we do and that's why our things are outlined.
• 37:05
  Speaker 3: You know the way that they're outlined because we're not going to put it on the fire department to take liability of doing something.
• 37:12
  Speaker 3: Now, I mean, if you can shut the meter off because you just walked past it, you know that's one thing, but we shouldn't be in there inside of a building.
• 37:18
  Speaker 3: You know, uh, with, with no victims, uh, trying to hunt down a natural gas leak.
• 37:24
  Speaker 3: And then you know the same thing outside, we, if we have natural gas outside, uh, you know, gas through, you know fissuring through walls, through, you know all of those different things gets into a space.
• 37:35
  Speaker 3: There was an event with propane that we can all you know recall and talk about what the propane leak was outside the building and it, you know, fissured through the ground, got through the wall and it was in that basement space, found an ignition source and, you know, end up having an explosion, and that that resulted in a line of duty death Right and, and that that resulted in a line of duty death right and and that fire department was called for a known odor, like they knew that there was a problem.
• 37:56
  Speaker 3: So, um, we can, we can kind of get into the nuts and bolts, but we just all need to realize this is a real, it's a real thing and, uh, I think we've made so many of them and we're successful oftentimes with it and nothing happens that we downplay the response.
• 38:16
  Speaker 2: Well, and 75% of the time in that Mayday study, we were told by dispatch that there was a leak.
• 38:23
  Speaker 2: They've let the companies know and we're still walking into it.
• 38:27
  Speaker 2: So, to back up, let's talk about deployment, because we see a huge disparity depending on jurisdiction, and there's a difference between an outside leak and an inside leak, what you should be deploying.
• 38:41
  Speaker 2: So outside leak is a lot easier to deal with.
• 38:46
  Speaker 2: However, I still see in fire apparatus vice grips, duct tape.
• 38:54
  Speaker 2: They're jumping into trenches and crimping off lines.
• 38:57
  Speaker 2: What do the experts tell us about those outside leaks to start off with?
• 39:02
  Speaker 2: Then we'll work our way inside about mitigating that.
• 39:05
  Speaker 2: Is that at all acceptable?
• 39:08
  Speaker 3: So I think so there's organizations all across the country that do you know, really, the plastic line, yeah, mitigation, and the people who are doing that are are are technician, specialist level people who have trained with, most times, their utility company.
• 39:29
  Speaker 3: So their utility company has trained them, showed them, and they have all the appropriate tools to do what they're supposed to do, and that there's a process that they go through of what do we do and what are we, you know, not going to do?
• 39:40
  Speaker 3: Um, and I think the local jurisdiction sometimes gets tied into.
• 39:45
  Speaker 3: Well, we don't have the training, but I got a, I got a towel and I can get it wet and I got a pair of vice grips and I can fix it, because the last gas leak I was on I saw the energy company don't jump in the hole and that's all they did.
• 39:56
  Speaker 3: Well, because they're doing it and that's what they do, doesn't mean that we should do it.
• 40:02
  Speaker 3: It's interesting to me over my career, when the safety bosses show up to a significant outside league, how the task level people perform, compared to when the task level people go to their everyday routine incident and they don't do all of the things that they would do if their safety boss or their operations field manager was there.
• 40:27
  Speaker 3: So it's not our job and we shouldn't do it, just like we don't want people doing.
• 40:34
  Speaker 3: We don't want people doing our job, we shouldn't do their job.
• 40:37
  Speaker 3: And you know, the energy company told us you're not trained to do that and if you touch it and it causes an issue, you're taking responsibility for it.
• 40:43
  Speaker 3: And if you touch it and it causes a bigger problem inside the building, you're taking responsibility for it.
• 40:48
  Speaker 3: So you know you shut off gas to a 300 unit apartment building.
• 40:52
  Speaker 3: You potentially just created a bigger problem, depending on what exactly was going on inside the building.
• 41:00
  Speaker 3: So you know, when it comes to, you know boiler shutting off and and you know a list of other things.
• 41:06
  Speaker 3: So, uh, our stance on it is you, we don't do anything besides turn a valve on like a gas meter to turn it off.
• 41:17
  Speaker 3: Or you know there was a a slight odor from a stove and we got inside.
• 41:21
  Speaker 3: We got basically no reading, but we've seen it was coming from a line on the stove.
• 41:25
  Speaker 3: We turn that valve off inside the building.
• 41:27
  Speaker 3: But as far as like trying to fix delivery lines and so on that are outside the building, our stance is we don't do it.
• 41:36
  Speaker 3: And if your organization is trained, like so many that we I do see you know that have that expertise because they have a designated hazmat response every day, like the system that Chris grew up in you know, the Phoenix fire department with a designated hazmat response, or Winston-Salem, north Carolina, with a designated hazmat response, where they have trained on and they do train on you know some of that stuff and they're trained by the utility company then yeah, you can do it.
• 42:01
  Speaker 3: But if you're not, then we shouldn't.
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and there's a lot of measurement of critical factors, even when they're deciding to do it.
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: Are we talking about a leak that a piece of digging equipment just created when it fractured the line?
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: Is it between houses or is it out in the middle of nowhere, where it doesn't, where we don't have any occupied structures as exposures, right?
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: And so they're evaluating when and how they're going to do these things and to figure that out.
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: But for a non technician to consider that it's not, there's no, there's nothing reasonable about it, we, we, we should not be doing that.
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: It's no different than jumping in a trench when you're trying to dig somebody out.
• 42:45
  Speaker 1: We need to stay out of it and allow either the professionals, both from inside our organizations or outside our organizations, to actually deal with that and measure that.
• 43:00
  Speaker 2: So how about the inside gas leaks?
• 43:01
  Speaker 2: Because I've also witnessed and heard crews that are searching for the source of the leak once they get their LEL alarm.
• 43:08
  Speaker 2: If we enter a structure and our LEL goes off, should we turn around and leave?
• 43:13
  Speaker 2: Or, you know, is there any circumstance that we should continue on in the building?
• 43:20
  Speaker 2: If, if everyone's evacuated, let's say that the building's evacuated is there any instance that we should be searching for the source of?
• 43:31
  Speaker 3: that leak.
• 43:31
  Speaker 3: I'm just going to read a line from RSOG's and then you know that we basically took it from the pipeline industry's.
• 43:40
  Speaker 3: You know best practice stuff Whenever there's a gas leak somewhere, there's the right mixture to support an explosion and or fire.
• 43:48
  Speaker 3: So it goes back to what I said earlier If there's no life safety hazard in there and that we're to that 10% LEL or even close to it, there is really no reason for us to stay inside that building.
• 44:01
  Speaker 3: Now, if I can shut that gas meter off to the building or I can go outside and shut that gas meter off, you know, then fine, so be it, but I'm not going to, I'm not the repair company, right?
• 44:11
  Speaker 3: Our, our job is really life safety and then, uh, call the appropriate people to fix the problem and people to fix the problem, and if we can isolate it through, you know, like I said, a meter valve on the outside or somewhere like that, then that's fine.
• 44:30
  Speaker 3: But we're not going to keep, and should not keep just searching around inside the building if there is indeed no life safety hazard inside the building, because we are the life safety hazard, we're literally standing inside of a potential bomb.
• 44:45
  Speaker 1: So let's take a step back, go back to the fundamentals, like we should right.
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: So this is a risk management question.
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: This is why we have a risk management plan as a part of the functions of command.
• 44:59
  Speaker 1: This is why we have the risk management plan as part of strategic decision-making.
• 45:03
  Speaker 1: We're going to evaluate on the front end, size up and determine critical fire ground factors or critical factors for this given incident.
• 45:11
  Speaker 1: In the case where we're showing up and we've got a supposed leak or we've got an odor or we have some information that we likely have a problem on the inside of that building, the first thing we're doing is is do we have life safety as a critical factor?
• 45:25
  Speaker 1: Do I have a hazard zone and I have people inside that hazard zone?
• 45:30
  Speaker 1: Do I need to remove those people from that hazard zone?
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: And then there should be some thought as okay, how big is the hazard zone?
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: How many people or how many components of a structure or an occupancy do I need to actually evacuate in that?
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: And then that's where we plug in the risk management when we're doing the evacuation, when we're removing those people.
• 45:57
  Speaker 1: We are in the green of our risk management plan.
• 45:59
  Speaker 1: We're willing to risk a lot because we are in this instance to save savable lives.
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: Once we've evacuated that area, we've removed that life safety, there needs to be a complete and total reevaluation.
• 46:10
  Speaker 1: That's no longer a critical factor.
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: I've established a hazard zone, however big it actually is, and now am I willing to engage in a little bit of risk to save the property, meaning manage the leak, or aren't I?
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: Well, we likely need to be in that position because we're not.
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: We don't have the knowledge, skills, abilities, tools and and and and responsibility to actually go in there and fully investigate and figure out where that leak is.
• 46:44
  Speaker 1: So our job was to protect the people.
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: Our job is to protect the property the best we can, evacuate it, get everybody out, try and minimize that to the best of our ability and then connect with the professionals, whether it's inside our department with hazmat guys, or outside, with the contractors and or vendors or the utility partners, and say, okay, what is it that is appropriate for us to be doing here?
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: And there is a time and a place where we're going to have to support the professionals with their ability to mitigate the leak.
• 47:19
  Speaker 1: So sometimes we're going to man hose lines where, then, when they're in the hole, getting ready to crimp that off.
• 47:23
  Speaker 1: Or sometimes we've got to support them with opening the structure up so they can go in the building and fix it.
• 47:29
  Speaker 1: So we got to use our fundamentals of the functions of command and our fundamentals of strategic decision making to help us make good decision on the action.
• 47:39
  Speaker 1: Does our action match the conditions?
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: Are we operating in offensive positions during defensive incident conditions?
• 47:49
  Speaker 1: So it's all the same as a fire ground, if you ask me.
• 47:52
  Speaker 1: That's the beauty of this system and how we do it.
• 47:55
  Speaker 1: And yeah, I'm not trying to beat a dead horse, but it does matter.
• 48:00
  Speaker 3: And yeah, I'm not trying to beat a dead horse, but it does matter.
• 48:03
  Speaker 3: We offer in our SOG, you know, kind of best practice response to multiple different types of gas emergencies.
• 48:12
  Speaker 3: So reported gas leak, no visible ignition.
• 48:14
  Speaker 3: So like what should we really do?
• 48:16
  Speaker 3: What does that really look like?
• 48:17
  Speaker 3: Every single one of these starts out with right from the North American Emergency Response Guidebook and from the people who we worked with on this, from the energy companies, that no apparatus should be within 333 feet, 100 meters or roughly 100 yards of any of these buildings.
• 48:37
  Speaker 3: And basically that's based on if a house lets go, you're going to have a debris field that far away, so everybody else is outside of that.
• 48:48
  Speaker 3: And then you know from that point we start monitoring from there all the way to the building and in the American fire service we see people pull right in front of the building.
• 49:00
  Speaker 3: We see all kinds of different levels of response and we've talked about a little bit in the past when we look at some of the larger municipalities, metro cities, when they respond to natural gas.
• 49:10
  Speaker 3: I'll just put Washington DC out there Last year from that incident that they were responding to.
• 49:15
  Speaker 3: I think most people probably saw it their company was clearly parked like a block away going to a known gas leak.
• 49:21
  Speaker 3: They're walking up the street and the building lets go, and it's like that's all I need to see right there.
• 49:25
  Speaker 3: And if you can't buy into, you know, park away from the building, start monitoring from a distance and then, you know, continue to evaluate the critical factors to figure out exactly what we're going to do with the incident.
• 49:41
  Speaker 3: Then then you're just I don't know, you're just totally missing it, right, but it just fits right into everything.
• 49:44
  Speaker 3: Chris just said, the system.
• 49:46
  Speaker 3: We evaluate critical fire ground factors and figure out what can we do to solve those critical fire ground factors, all based on the risk management plan and model of life safety.
• 49:59
  Speaker 3: So there's a simulation that kind of goes along with that as well in the blue card system.
• 50:06
  Speaker 3: We have an interior gas problem, we have a commercial gas problem and then we have a fire gas problem that's on the exterior and then we have an explosion.
• 50:17
  Speaker 3: So the companies pulled up, got called for an actual building that exploded, and you know.
• 50:22
  Speaker 3: So what does that look like?
• 50:23
  Speaker 3: And that's another instance where we shouldn't just run right up on top of it because we don't necessarily know that every bit of gas has been, has lit off right, there could be gas in void spaces and then understanding what damage was done from that explosion.
• 50:44
  Speaker 3: So again we have the SOGs that are kind of like the playbook of what are we going to do.
• 50:50
  Speaker 3: And then we offer the simulation part and the tactical instructor guides to get organizations to go through and talk about.
• 50:57
  Speaker 3: What does this deployment really look like?
• 50:59
  Speaker 3: So you can exercise it, so you're actually doing it, before you actually get called to one of these incidents.
• 51:07
  Speaker 2: You and I have talked about that anecdotally a lot because here in the Midwest, especially suburban departments that are stretched or they don't have appropriate staffing, on a normal day they tend to be the ones that are sending either a duty officer or one person by themselves or a single company response to a known gas leak inside a structure.
• 51:27
  Speaker 2: And we'll include these SOGs that we're talking about in the show notes so you can get a link to those if you didn't get them in the B-Shifter buck slip last week.
• 51:36
  Speaker 2: We are saying best practice is natural gas inside of any building or structure or space, even if it's a sewer or some other kind of enclosed area with no explosion or gas fire that is not exposing.
• 51:50
  Speaker 2: A structure should have a minimum of two engines.
• 51:57
  Speaker 2: A ladder, pointed out, is to not only cordon off the area but establish an evacuation zone and deny entry to other people that are trying to go in there until the situation gets mitigated.
• 52:12
  Speaker 2: And again, we see a lot of instances where it's either a single company or a single person trying to track down where the leak is coming from inside the structure prior to the gas company arrival on the scene.
• 52:25
  Speaker 2: And they're inside, but the gas company at the end of the day, is going to tell us to do exactly what Josh was just talking about Be a meter, you know, 100 meters or 330 feet away, and to park in an area that we're not going to become part of the problem or part of the debris field.
• 52:45
  Speaker 2: You know, post-explosion, what are some of the issues that we deal with, and you know we've always been told not to fully extinguish a gas fire, especially if it could get back into an enclosed space.
• 53:01
  Speaker 2: So what?
• 53:02
  Speaker 2: What are we talking about?
• 53:03
  Speaker 2: Best practices after the explosion or if a fire does occur?
• 53:09
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so the, the building there, the space where that explosion occurred is, you know, when we look, most oftentimes everything there is is gone, right.
• 53:19
  Speaker 3: I mean the if we're talking residential lightweight wood frame it, it doesn't look like anything.
• 53:24
  Speaker 3: I think, john, last year you made one there in your area and it's like it was literally a vacant lot, basically with a debris pile, right.
• 53:32
  Speaker 3: So, yeah, we don't want to extinguish the fire if there's a fire from the leak.
• 53:37
  Speaker 3: Really that's the best case scenario, because then we don't have to worry so much about a pocket of gas, though when there's an explosion we could have a gas leak somewhere else from damaged infrastructure, you know underground, or another pipe piece somewhere.
• 53:49
  Speaker 3: But the big deal becomes, you know, getting into those other spaces, right?
• 53:53
  Speaker 3: So you know, typical setback 15, 20 feet in a space and a house blows up.
• 53:59
  Speaker 3: Well, there's going to be significant damage, you know, to a few of those houses on either side, and I mean we've seen some instances where you know people were hurt pretty significantly in the exposures on either side.
• 54:14
  Speaker 3: So you know, still metering right and getting into those spaces.
• 54:18
  Speaker 3: And then there's another level added as far as a critical factor of what damage has been done to this building.
• 54:23
  Speaker 3: So, again, that size up of I can't, I shouldn't just run inside there, right, but we should look at, like, what kind of damage was done to this exposure space that we're about to go into.
• 54:34
  Speaker 3: But we should have lines in place.
• 54:36
  Speaker 3: We have to have plenty of resources to protect ourselves and protect those other buildings, because we protect life and property.
• 54:43
  Speaker 3: So the one building is gone.
• 54:45
  Speaker 3: It's defensive for the most part, right, we're not going to do anything there and the exposures is what we're going to protect and we're going to get the people out of there.
• 54:52
  Speaker 3: So, as Chris says so often, the system can be applied to anything and everything we do.
• 54:59
  Speaker 3: It's all hazards, right?
• 55:01
  Speaker 3: What the difference is is understanding the critical factors Critical factors at a fire versus critical factors at a gas leak, versus critical factors at a lithium ion battery fire versus critical factors at a high-rise fire right, it's understanding those critical factor pieces that change, but the system still applies, whether we're talking about the strategic decision model or applying the eight functions of command.
• 55:23
  Speaker 3: It's an all-hazards system.
• 55:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 55:26
  Speaker 1: So those considerations for likely, on the front end, your critical factors, your risk management, is going to lead you to a defensive strategy on the front end when you're initially evaluating this incident, right.
• 55:39
  Speaker 1: And so when we start thinking about a defensive incident action plan, in the simplest form is identify what's lost, write it off and protect exposures, right.
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: So if we have a home or an apartment building or whatever that's exploded, identify it, figure it out.
• 55:55
  Speaker 1: Where is it, do you have active fire or don't you?
• 55:59
  Speaker 1: But we're not going typically through and digging through that.
• 56:02
  Speaker 1: We really need to expend those initial resources on the exposures and the critical factors in those exposures, which primarily is life safety is getting in there, getting searches done, evacuating and taking care of that and then evaluating.
• 56:19
  Speaker 1: Are there other things that need to be done in these exposures, like fire protection?
• 56:24
  Speaker 1: You know, protecting uh, uh, they're an exposure because you've got an active fire and what just blew up and and really treat it that way.
• 56:33
  Speaker 1: This is a defensive incident, right, and we are in the defensive strategy.
• 56:37
  Speaker 1: We are working now to protect, we're putting water on and trying to trying to uh, control the fire from what just blew up, and now we're trying to protect.
• 56:42
  Speaker 1: We're putting water on and trying to control the fire from what just blew up, and now we're trying to protect the exposures, first and foremost with the life safety, and then trying to protect that property and using our risk management and our strategy to manage where and what we should be doing on the fire ground.
• 56:58
  Speaker 3: I think we could just circle around real quick just with the.
• 57:01
  Speaker 3: So we're really going to treat propane for the most part the same, except for the factors that propane um, the molecular makeup of propane is just different, right, that propane is going to sink and that, uh uh, flammability range is a bit different, but we're going to treat it the same.
• 57:20
  Speaker 3: But with that said you, range is a bit different, but we're going to treat it the same.
• 57:29
  Speaker 3: But with that said, you know, oftentimes with propane there's going to be a little bit of a challenge as far as sometimes getting a company there to help you mitigate what's going on with a propane tank.
• 57:35
  Speaker 3: The nice thing with a propane 500 pound tank or whatever that's outside, depending on if it's a, you know, a vertical tank that you have at like a trailer park, like type place or modular home place, or if you have an underground, you know larger, you know propane like type tank.
• 57:49
  Speaker 3: Oftentimes we can control that from the outside because there's a valve on it, right.
• 57:54
  Speaker 3: So it's it's, we could, we can cut, we could cut that gas off.
• 57:58
  Speaker 3: But again, it goes back to your knowledge and your organization should.
• 58:02
  Speaker 3: If you have that, then you should get the propane company to come in there and do some training with you.
• 58:09
  Speaker 3: As far as, if it's an underground tank, like, how would you shut that off?
• 58:10
  Speaker 3: How do you get to it?
• 58:10
  Speaker 3: What would the access look like?
• 58:11
  Speaker 3: How far away is it from the building, you know?
• 58:14
  Speaker 3: And if it's a vertical tank, it's really a giant tank like you put on your grill, right, I mean, we see those.
• 58:21
  Speaker 3: Next, you know modular homes or in, you know oftentimes, the rural environment or places that don't have natural gas supply.
• 58:27
  Speaker 3: But it's not super difficult.
• 58:31
  Speaker 3: It's like I can turn that valve, but it still comes back to the risk management.
• 58:34
  Speaker 3: Am I willing to even go into that area?
• 58:36
  Speaker 3: And if it's outside, potentially I'm willing to go into that area because outside monitoring is going to outside.
• 58:41
  Speaker 3: Uh, potentially I'm willing to go into that area because outside monitoring is going to be one thing, but I have to still be cognizant of what is the reading inside the space, cause if I'm standing next to that building when it lets loose, it is not going to be good either.
• 58:51
  Speaker 3: So, uh, there's there's a lot more goes into it than um, than the typical mindset that firemen have.
• 59:00
  Speaker 3: We were fixers, right.
• 59:04
  Speaker 1: We're just going to fix the problem, and a lot of times the critical factors here for the propane can be different.
• 59:08
  Speaker 1: Right, because most of the time the delivery mechanism is different.
• 59:11
  Speaker 1: With natural gas it's typically piped into the homes and there's not With a propane at least in my experience, a vast majority of the incidents we've had involves the delivery mechanism, like so I have multiple delivery trucks in my community every single day delivering propane to the underground or above ground tanks, and we've had issues with valves not being closed appropriately afterwards and then leaking fast enough that they ice over, and then we actually can't control it until they come out and do those types of things.
• 59:47
  Speaker 1: So assessing that and then connecting the location and type of leak that you think you may have with, all right, what type of building is it associated with?
• 59:57
  Speaker 1: In my community it's homes, and in a good portion of my homes have basements, right.
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 1: So a propane leak at a home with a basement scares the shit out of me, right and so, and because we've seen them just recently blow up and that propane settles in that basement and we're investigating after we've evacuated everybody and something bad happens.
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 1: So we need to recognize the combination of not only the flammable hazard itself, the building type, the potential for it to pool, where is it going to be, and then being smart about risk management.
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 1: Once we've removed the people then decide whether we should or shouldn't be inside there.
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 1: Likely oftentimes we shouldn't be inside and we shouldn't be anywhere near it, and establishing that hazard zone very clearly on the front end puts us in the best possible position and we may not stop it from blowing up, but at least if it blows up, I don't want to be in and around it when it occurs, or I don't want my firefighters in and around it when it occurs, or I don't want my firefighters in and around it when it occurs.
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 1: So there's some interesting differences, I think, with natural gas and propane.
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 1: Some of it's based on the specific gravity and whether it rises or it doesn't, but then what is it associated with and what are the other complicating factors surround propane that may be a little bit different than the natural gas.
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 2: Why don't you say we do a timeless tactical truth?
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 2: Timeless tactical truth from Alan Brunicini.
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 2: I would rather be on the ground, wishing I was in the sky than being in the sky, and wishing I was on the ground than being in the sky and wishing I was on the ground.
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 2: This is a fantastic tactical truth for this.
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah, the boss often talked about gravity and the effects that it has on us, but also the effects that going the other way may have on us is not advantageous as well, especially if we're in a situation where we've got an explosive atmosphere and we get launched out of it.
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 3: Yeah, shit doesn't fall up.
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 3: That was one of his things, right?
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 3: Shit doesn't fall up.
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 1: Yeah, neither do we.
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and I guess I'll be the you know.
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 1: Go right to the obvious is when we show up.
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 1: If we're doing a good job of evaluating critical factors, if we're doing a good job of applying risk management and strategy, then we're way less likely to be in a position where we are actually leaving the earth headed towards the sky when something bad happens.
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 1: We may or may not be able to control that bad event from actually happening, but we can control our position and, a lot of times, whether there's members of the community in that hazard zone to experience the consequences of this going boom.
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 1: So this makes me laugh, but I don't think it's like we're not splitting atoms here and figuring it out.
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 1: We got to, we got to evacuate and clear out and identify that hazard zone as quickly as we can and not be in it if something stupid happens.
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 3: And so I think my piece on this would just be you know, we have to keep ourself grounded, and the way that we stay grounded is that we are comfortable with what we're responding to, and the way we do that is through education, repetition and experience, right?
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 3: So just to circle back around, you know we have an SOG, we have simulations.
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 3: You can do it in your firehouse, you can talk about, you know these types of events.
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 3: There's thousands of case studies out there that you could review, look at, talk about.
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 3: So if we keep ourselves grounded and stay in control and we use the strategic decision-making model and follow best practice and learn from other people's experiences, I think that that's how we keep ourself.
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 3: You know, on the ground, you know, and not not the in a different position.
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 2: So All right, josh and Chris, thanks so much for sharing today and being on the B Shifter podcast Again.
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 2: The SOGs that we spoke of will be in the show notes.
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 2: Also, our emails are available.
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 2: If you're watching on YouTube, make sure to subscribe and get that notification when we put a new episode out, so that you never miss an episode of the B Shifter podcast.
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 2: Thanks a lot, guys, and we'll talk to you again next week.
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 2: Thanks, John.
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 2: See ya.