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The Imbedded Safety Officer · B Shifter

• 0:49
  Speaker 2: And this is the B shifter podcast.
• 0:51
  Speaker 2: Today we have Josh Bloom with Bruno C in the studio, and Josh is remote.
• 0:57
  Speaker 2: He should have been here today, but unfortunately the American Airlines folks had a different idea for him, so he's stuck in some weather.
• 1:07
  Speaker 2: How are you doing today, josh?
• 1:08
  Speaker 3: I'm good, all good, wish I was there.
• 1:10
  Speaker 3: So Midwest we've got some nasty weather.
• 1:13
  Speaker 3: It's going to get nastier, though.
• 1:15
  Speaker 3: It's about to be 12 degrees, I think, in a couple of days, so that doesn't sound good how are you, Nick?
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: I'm good.
• 1:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah, are you OK?
• 1:28
  Speaker 2: Anything new in the world.
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: Now we're doing a trainer this week, so we opened.
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: It's the first one of the new year, yee-haw.
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: We're still alive and here the website keeps gaining momentum with all the new things going on, so it's a fabulous time to be alive.
• 1:49
  Speaker 2: Well, today we have a question that we were going to address.
• 1:53
  Speaker 2: So when we welcome your questions, if you have questions for us, please send them in to myself, john Vance at BShiftercom, and we'll bring them to the guys.
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: So today the question is why does Blue Card embed the safety officer into the division rather than having them keep an eye on the entire scene?
• 2:13
  Speaker 2: We have a safety officer on each shift and they're pushing back on the concept of pairing the safety officer with the division officer.
• 2:20
  Speaker 2: We have not committed to doing Blue Card yet.
• 2:23
  Speaker 2: As this is an obstacle for us, can you please explain how the embedded safety officer really works?
• 2:29
  Speaker 2: And that's from Steve D.
• 2:33
  Speaker 3: So just one thing before.
• 2:34
  Speaker 3: This is a perfect thing for Nectarco in the detail on but one thing we've been talking a bit about task saturation, right, what can you really do?
• 2:42
  Speaker 3: So we talked about it from the strategic IC standpoint.
• 2:45
  Speaker 3: What can they do in task saturation?
• 2:47
  Speaker 3: And when we start talking about a division boss, it's really the same thing plus.
• 2:52
  Speaker 3: So putting the second person there helps them to be able to manage that work.
• 2:57
  Speaker 3: So that's a piece of it.
• 2:59
  Speaker 3: You know, a safety officer can only be in one place at one time and see one thing.
• 3:03
  Speaker 3: So we put people in divisions to manage the division, because that's where work is happening and we don't need somebody out just wandering around.
• 3:14
  Speaker 3: So just like my little two cents, because I know Nectarco's got a whole chapter on this.
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: Be embedded safety officers?
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: I don't know.
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: It was one of the first things we did when we opened the command training center way back in the day, and we did that and that's a model you use for a large metro fire department and at the time we did it is the safety division was not in operations, it was in the special ops division.
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: So there was no, there was no unity between the safety division and operations period, and so when the safety officers got to the scene, they pretty much showed up and they were like auditors really, as they got there and they were going to make sure that people were following procedures more than anything else.
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: And you couldn't, is it?
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: When I worked on the task level, I didn't notice it because we didn't worry about it.
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: You were going there to put the fire out.
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: When I promoted to chief, that's where you really started to see it more and more, and then you could see it was counterproductive the way that we organized the fire department, because we were always at odds with the safety division, and so they would get to the incident scene and they would do their own thing, they would run around in circles and they'd say stuff in the radio, but you could never get them implemented and integrated into a regular incident operation.
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: And the thing that broke it is we were starting like senior people in the fire department were starting to make the comment that you don't, it doesn't get any safe, safer when the safety division shows up.
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: So when the safety officer gets on the scene it does nothing to improve safety at the incident scene.
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: We had an incident in fact it's a critique we used to show in Blue Card where we had a defensive fire and a set of buildings and we almost killed two firefighters at the scene because they were operating in the wrong position.
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: At the time of both of those events that occurred at that incident there were probably four to six safety officers on the scene.
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: So that incident really kind of triggered our fire department's commitment to somehow integrate and safety into the incident operation.
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: Right, we had promoted to the point that we could help chaperone, that is, chiefs, because we had just opened the CTC.
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: The Phoenix fire department had basically at that point 10 battalions and two shift commanders, so we had 12 response chiefs.
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: All the time Each of those response chiefs had a driver.
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: So we did two-person battalions, if you will.
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: I was a shift commander and my aide or partner was a battalion chief.
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: So I mean we kind of matched it that way.
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: When we took the safety division over, all the safety officers were company officers, so they were all captains, they would respond to the scene.
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: We integrated them into the operations division by making the safety officer the BC's partner.
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: So organizationally it had a huge effect as the safety officer then worked for the battalion chief.
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: They didn't work for an assistant chief in another division.
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: So that made them report to us.
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: So they had to do what we said the whole time.
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: We wanted help in the divisions with accountability, managing on-deck crews and then kind of keeping like a safety size up, going all the time about the conditions in the division.
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: And they were doing that with the division boss, which was the BC.
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: So they would truly.
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: They became kind of the support officer for the division boss and the safety officer.
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: So they did both.
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: And then more importantly is they were there immediately so they would drive.
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: So when the first BC got to the incident scene they transfer command On the transfer.
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: You got an IC and a support officer in place.
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: Prior to that, when it was just company officers, the group before us that ran operation would not let him in the command van.
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: So if you showed up with your partner, your aide, as a BC, he didn't go in the command van because he wasn't a chief or she, whoever it was, they wouldn't let him in because of their rank.
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: So that was counterproductive and you thought so.
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: You had a bunch of older people from like the last group that ran operations who, when we took over the group of us as shift commanders, when we went from district commanders to shift commanders as we started fixing all the operational stuff, as we said, no, this don't work anymore.
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: We're not staff chiefs, we're here 24 hours and this is what this is going to look like.
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: The safety officers were terrified because they thought, okay, they're feeding us to the lions.
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: Now Is there given, and now these guys are shift commanders who we have been fighting with for the last four or five years about what's going to happen at the incident scene.
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: Complete opposite took place.
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: Now, with blue card back in those days and I'm going to go off the reservation a little because it's just fun to do and I'm old but our CTC, we use the first version of Fire Studio and that meant that it wasn't automated, so you had to have personnel to be the simulator operators.
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: Well, we got into a routine where we would hire back the safety officers who are our partners, those the BCs, and they would come to the CTC as facilitators.
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: So within a very short period of time and we started doing command training is, the people that were there the most were the north shift commanders, because we were the ones responsible for it, but then the chiefs, aides or safety officers were there all the time at all the training sessions.
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: They quickly became, as a group, probably the best ICs on the fire department, maybe the best ICs in the country, because they did it all day, every day, and they knew what was good performance and what was poor performance.
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: And then, because they had been safety officers their whole career, they could see the mistake of their ways and how screwed up the safety division was, up to the point that operations took it over again and they actually had a role in it.
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: So, coming from a big, fully staffed Metro fire department, we have this very robust.
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: We call it robust.
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: You got like almost 600 people on duty and you have 12 response chiefs to manage it all.
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: So it's a very lean organization to keep all that horsepower at bay.
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: The other thing is you had a more management capability for the safety officer when they came in and were embedded with a battalion chief.
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: So if they found an unsafe let me give you the example.
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: I'll go back to the fire where everything went to shit, where the safety officer stood around with their thumb up their ass with all the division bosses.
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: Nobody said anything on the radio, it was all people out of the command post and the rest.
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: So we get done with this.
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: And then you say, no, this is what a safe structure fire looks like.
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: Is these things?
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: Well, these new safety officers are in charge of the training and facilitate the simulator.
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: So they see all this.
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: So they start to put these things together and think, no, this is what a safety officer is supposed to do.
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: We're supposed to keep accounting for all the resources we have and yada, yada, yada and all this.
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: And I kind of become like the aid for the division boss, as I'm their partner and I help do X, y and Z, and that's what the safety officer piece of it looks like.
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: You can open up a second channel using that approach, because everybody in the hazard zone now is all connected communication-wise, so like if you open a safety channel up, you have somebody in the command post, the safety section, who can now manage all of those safety officers in a more robust way to keep accountability more up to date and fluid throughout the incident operation.
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: So if you got a big deal where you have two or three divisions working and you got a fully staffed five-person command van, so now you've got the max of people you're going to have at an incident hazard zone thing, now we can do accountability and roll calls and things in real time because you have a second channel to perform them on and the person running that channel is directly connected to the guy on the main tactical channel.
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: So there's no gaps in communications there and, as I said, that's a big metro model for that.
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: And then the other part of it is if you want to become a battalion chief, as we put in there is you have to be a safety officer first.
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: So you got to drive a BC for a year while you're getting ready for that test.
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: So we took more control of the front end of it as coming into that position.
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: So it's almost like blue card is you got to go through and do sets and wraps and all the rest of it, and so you kind of get up to speed as a group where you can go out and communicate and operate in a hazard zone and do all that together.
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: So we embedded it and that's what we kind of did.
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: That with command safety.
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: I came after fire command and all the rest of it and that's how embedded worked.
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: Now the problem and I think the disconnect for people who asked this question is we got one safety officer.
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: I got one battalion on duty all day.
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: It's got one officer in it and then I got a safety officer.
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: So I got two strategic tactical level officers showing up to the scene.
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: Well, the challenge then becomes what's the best use for those people?
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: Well, I will.
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: That depends on a lot of different critical factors.
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: If IC number two gets there and let's say it's a 10 year BC they've been a bit BC 10 years, they're a blue card instructor and they're very comfortable taking command Well it may be that the second position I staff isn't a support officer for that IC is.
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: I'm going to take that safety officer, maybe make them the division boss where, like Josh said earlier, I got all my crews working and so that's where my safety thing goes.
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: Now the one piece of this where they want the rotate and safety officer is you always have updates about parts of the fire You're not seeing is what they think is going to happen.
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: But that's not the routine most of the time is the safety officer shows up and they do what they feel like doing.
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: There's no set routine for them.
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: Nobody's telling them do x, y and z if they train together maybe.
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: But I've been some places and done Blue card throughout the years.
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: Were that the standard deal in those smaller departments, as the IC is in a fixed command post on the Alpha side and let's say they got especially in Situations where they got some activity going on on Charlie.
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: So they said I'm gonna put an attack position in Charlie.
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: So they say I can see 50% of the incident from the front.
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: I need somebody in the back so we have better coverage of this whole thing.
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: Well, that's a whole different deal is I don't need a safety officer for that.
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: I can put a company back there and they can be a reporting agent.
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: Give me that same information.
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: So it becomes more of a challenge to figure out what positions do I actually need to staff at this fire now and what priority do I need to do it in?
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: Do I need a division boss right now?
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: Do I need generally that's going to be your biggest need is once you get command remote in a fixed stationary command post.
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: Your.
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: Your second biggest priority then is probably a division boss in your active attack position.
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: Once those two are set and this is just as a general role Then you'd probably pick up a support officer for the IC and then the, the, so now we're three into it.
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: So a lot of times at that point the fires out.
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: Well, that's gonna change what you need to do staffing wise next, so that becomes part of it.
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: Use the critical factors to figure out how I'm gonna expand the organization at this point, based on Completing the priorities and managing firefighter safety and survival.
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: So that was kind of the From a big fire department point of view.
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: That's why we embedded safety.
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: The way we did is to make a part of operations so you could use it more efficiently and effectively.
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: At the incident, say, you were not odds with the safety division anymore.
• 16:26
  Speaker 2: Roll them back to the incident safety officer that is in the command van.
• 16:30
  Speaker 2: Who ideally is that?
• 16:33
  Speaker 2: How does that person routinely work with, with the other safety officers?
• 16:38
  Speaker 2: And you know the confusion that I've had before, because We've only done that on very large incidents around me, and when we split them off to another channel, everybody's like whoa, whoa, time out.
• 16:50
  Speaker 2: You know we're one channel in the hazard zone and it's like no, they're not in the hazard zone, they're outside the hazard zone, they're there in the warm zone.
• 16:58
  Speaker 2: That's where those safety officers are supposed to be.
• 17:01
  Speaker 2: This isn't company activity going on in the inside.
• 17:03
  Speaker 2: So let's talk about the communication process, just just a little bit more.
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: When you have multiple safety officers and an incident safety officer in the command van, Well, the way the system was originally set up was to do one channel, right, so everything's going over the tactical channel.
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: It's not until you get it into a command post that you can do two channels.
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: So, and then you've got to have the personnel in the command post to manage those channels.
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: See, I, if I'm the IC, and I'm the only one in the command post, I don't want the second channel, as you can take that channel and you can stick it three feet up your ass.
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: It does nothing but distract me and it covers the tactical channel.
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: It is unsafe to put one IC on two channels with people in an offensive situation with it out of control fire it's, it's.
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: It's Most the time when you're trying to get fire control.
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: You don't have more than two, three, four companies inside the structure.
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: Period, yeah.
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: Now, if it's a bigger commercial fire, that you may, but but that is a whole.
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: You're gonna have more Officers there to fill strategic and tactical roles.
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: Then the key is figuring out what they're gonna do before they get to the scene.
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: Because if they don't, is now you got freelance and chiefs in the thing, which is worse than freelance and ladder companies.
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: They will disrupt the strategic part of a plan quicker than anybody a freelance in chief.
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: So to get back to your communication piece, if I'm in the command van, and you got the IC sitting there doing the tack channel, and there's we got divisions up and working and I've got paired officers running those divisions.
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: So I got a BC and their safety officer partner in one division and the same thing in another division I can have.
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: The way it was set up in my department is the shift commander's partner became the safety section boss, or what.
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: The safety section.
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: Let's just leave it at that.
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: They would, I, they would open another channel Once they were ready to go up the senior advisor go to the IC and say we're open in safety.
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: So have alpha division and Charlie division acknowledge and have their partners go to the safety channel.
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: I See, gets on the radio, be advised, blah, blah, blah, blah blah.
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: My partner now is sitting at the safety section seat, command, because he's in the command.
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: It was a he and he was in the command man he uses.
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: Command is a nomenclature, command is radio ID.
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: Command to alpha division.
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: Alpha division go ahead, command.
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: Give me a roll call of your division.
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: Be advised, I've got engine seven, ladder four and engine six Inside the building doing fire attack.
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: I got engine three and engine two on deck right now.
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: Copy boom.
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: Writes it down any needs?
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: Now we're good.
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: Good to go.
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: Command to Charlie division.
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: Same routine.
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: Write it down.
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: Hands it's a support officer.
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: Support officer hands it over to the, hands it to the senior advisor who then hands it to the support officer who's maintained in the sheet.
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: So now we have up to date accountability.
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: All the time before it wasn't a, and it's still not a big deal, because you have a division boss who's in charge of it.
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: Ultimately the buck stops with the division boss because that's who those resources belong to.
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: It's just in the command van.
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: We have a better sense of who's in and who's out because it becomes so Dynamic as time goes on and they're not calling in, so divisions not telling the IC.
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: Hey, engine fives coming out and engine two is going in.
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: They don't need that level because they're the boss.
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: Now See, that's the reason you have a true tactical level boss running divisions and not working company officers, because they're they're nomads, they're static, they're hooked to air.
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: They're not good choices to be in.
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: They're not good choices to be tactical level bosses.
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: It doesn't work.
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: Which makes those go ahead just so.
• 21:06
  Speaker 3: The whole, everything we've been talking about comes back to the system, right, no one person makes it safer, so it's everybody.
• 21:15
  Speaker 3: You know they're working together.
• 21:17
  Speaker 3: And when you put that embedded safety officer there and what you just explained, them being on a separate frequency, it's another layer.
• 21:26
  Speaker 3: And that, that piece of having the safety officer in the command van, if they're gonna do a roll call, because some people might, you know, raise an eyebrow to well, why are they doing that?
• 21:36
  Speaker 3: Because of you know, the tactical boss is there and they got accountability.
• 21:39
  Speaker 3: But that piece comes down also to forecasting, right, which comes down to a safety piece of the incident commander realizing, oh, they've been through two cycles of companies now and we might need more resources, or how deep of a deployment Do we really have?
• 21:52
  Speaker 3: So you know, no one person, you know can do all of those roles.
• 21:56
  Speaker 3: I mean, we don't let anybody work in the IDLH by themselves.
• 21:59
  Speaker 3: We prefer not to have incident commanders work by themselves.
• 22:02
  Speaker 3: And you know, division bosses is no different, because you know they're, they're out there, they are a forward boss, they're dealing face-to-face with with companies and evaluating, you know a little closer to the incident, what exactly is going on.
• 22:18
  Speaker 3: So it just goes back to having a System and and that's everybody tied together, working together to be safety.
• 22:29
  Speaker 3: Not, I'm here and I am safety because it says that I am.
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: Well, and that was the issue, one of the issues we had going into it is what do you do?
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: A safety, because safety did not record.
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: The safety division did not recognize that the IC was the ranking officer at the scene.
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: No, we get there and we're in charge, and you're like, no, you're not.
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: And Alan Brunisini was our fire chief.
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: He said, no, you're not in charge, the IC is in charge, you guys work for the IC.
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: Well, we all know the fire chief will say one thing and then they all go back to their office and say, yeah, well, my happy ass.
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: When I get there, the problem is they're all captains.
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: So they go out and they exercise this as captains.
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: Well, they're dealing with operations, bcs, who.
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: You know how that's going to end.
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: So it became this highly dysfunctional thing.
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: Well, I think when we started doing command training like you said, the system is somebody with a very robust system.
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: Historical use of the system is we would have these problems.
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: So periodically you would have to do a set of things to reengage everybody, and what that looked like the best it ever worked in that fire department was when we had a command training center as you could walk through it so, and it became a huge bonus for the operationally minded.
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: Because you would get like these ranking officers, like assistant chiefs, ops chiefs, from other departments, coming in and saying we don't like what's going on.
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: Well, what, explain to us what you don't like.
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: We don't like getting rid of Rick, so we don't like getting rid of safety officer, like you have, and it's embedded.
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: And now you got on deck and this and that it's okay, sit down, let's do some Sims.
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: They would do Sims and they'd say at the end yeah, it's better, but we still don't like it.
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: And it's like, well, you're not comfortable with it yet because you haven't done it enough and you never will, because you're an operations chief who's 30 miles away from here and this is the only time you're going to be here in a year, and now you're going to leave here and say I don't like it and you're going to so the next session.
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: The fire chief came in and then he gave them the strategic pep talk about.
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: This is the way this works and you kind of all report to this.
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: This is where the volume two gets done.
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: So if we change it, it changes out of this building and that was enough.
• 24:43
  Speaker 3: They never came back again A lot of them, of those outside people and the embedded safety thing in our system is I mean, if you have Alpha and Charlie, then you have safety and Alpha and Charlie.
• 24:54
  Speaker 3: And yeah, I mean, if you're going to a fire and you have one safety officer, then you have one safety officer only in one place.
• 25:00
  Speaker 3: And I think it comes back to we put people to monitor work and evaluate work and manage work where the work is happening.
• 25:09
  Speaker 3: And I think another piece of it is is that safety officers often that are working by themselves end up where the work is happening anyway.
• 25:21
  Speaker 3: So I think a lot of it does come down to a misunderstanding.
• 25:26
  Speaker 3: No different than not to get, not to derail this whole thing.
• 25:29
  Speaker 3: But when people say, oh, blue card doesn't do it and it's like well, bullshit, the first thing on the slide for on deck is you, first and foremost, you're RIT, right, you are, you're the rapid intervention team.
• 25:41
  Speaker 3: So I think it's that you know misunderstanding that people have of all those no safety officer or that they don't do safety.
• 25:50
  Speaker 3: And really you know blue card is an entire safety system.
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: So you know, that's what I love about it is it's like okay, you guys, we hate blue card because it's this Uber safety system that you use that slows it down and we can't do this and we can't do that, which is incorrect.
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: First of all, you're.
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: The most aggressive firefighters I've ever worked around were blue card people.
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah, A minute after they set the break, you're flowing water inside.
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: That's not slow, so that's where they begin.
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: Is we don't like it because of that?
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: And then the next breath, they say plus, you don't have safety officers in RIT.
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: And you're like well, you just beat it up, Make your mind up One way or another in the thing.
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: But the biggest antagonists for a while were the RIT instructors.
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: You can't, you got to stop doing this.
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: You're screwing up our side gig.
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: You're like, well, no, you're, everybody's a RIT now, so you got to train them all again.
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: We're helping You're.
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: You don't understand the work enough to be doing this, probably yourself.
• 26:58
  Speaker 2: In your system, josh?
• 26:59
  Speaker 2: How are you fulfilling the embedded safety officer?
• 27:03
  Speaker 2: How do you get that person on the scene and implement them now?
• 27:09
  Speaker 3: So in our entire region, in Hamilton County, there's nobody in our region has a driver, so you're getting multiple chiefs.
• 27:17
  Speaker 3: So that's what ends up happening is we fulfill those positions based off the need, based off the factors.
• 27:23
  Speaker 3: What's really going on?
• 27:24
  Speaker 3: So on, on a routine incident residential building fire we'll just say you know, at a bare minimum they're getting two chiefs.
• 27:33
  Speaker 3: But if they need more, it's just listed out on the alarm card.
• 27:36
  Speaker 3: So in our county it would not be unrealistic to say that you could get seven or eight chiefs within 15 or 20 minutes, you know, to an incident.
• 27:45
  Speaker 3: So what we're doing is we just pair them up.
• 27:48
  Speaker 3: So if there's a priority to get a support officer to the strategic IC, then that's.
• 27:55
  Speaker 3: That's where the strategic IC would have that first or that next person come.
• 27:59
  Speaker 3: But if they need somebody to now for division three or on the Charlie side, they're going to send them there and then as as companies arrive.
• 28:05
  Speaker 3: Just like we assign companies right, we assign them based off the critical factors.
• 28:08
  Speaker 3: There's no real predesignated thing.
• 28:10
  Speaker 3: It's a chief gets assigned the same way as a company.
• 28:15
  Speaker 3: And Nick said it earlier.
• 28:16
  Speaker 3: You have to be thinking about that and forecasting it as a strategic IC.
• 28:20
  Speaker 3: What am I going to do with those companies?
• 28:22
  Speaker 3: No different than we talk about the initial IC doing the size up plus three.
• 28:26
  Speaker 3: They should be thinking about where am I going to need companies and where am I going to use companies.
• 28:31
  Speaker 3: Well, when the third chief arrives, I'm going to assign them to be the support officer for Alpha.
• 28:37
  Speaker 3: And you know they get dressed and they just go report to Alpha and they support them as the embedded safety officer.
• 28:43
  Speaker 3: And when you really break that down, that role of that division boss, I think I think it's 12 or 13 things that they're responsible for.
• 28:51
  Speaker 3: And on a working incident that that we're really pushing to try to get ahead on that, where they got three to five companies working in a division, maybe with two of them on deck, that one person, it's going to take everything that one person has to try to do all of those tasks and they're probably not going to do all of them.
• 29:08
  Speaker 3: So that's just another piece of pushing somebody forward to help them.
• 29:12
  Speaker 3: So you can break it down.
• 29:13
  Speaker 3: So the support officer can do accountability role, do some air management, managing on deck companies, make sure we keep people rotating through the recycle.
• 29:22
  Speaker 3: So that's how we do it in our region so it can be done in some other places we've been.
• 29:28
  Speaker 3: You know they keep their safety officer in a separate vehicle, but when the safety officer gets there they get assigned to work with them.
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: So, just looking at, what do you expect the safety officer to do?
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: What's the safety officer's job when they get there to make it safe?
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: Right, I mean, it's the most generic, open ended thing you can imagine.
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: Every single thing a safety officer does is tactical in nature.
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: That's what they're looking at.
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: Is the conditions and the actions you're taken based on the tax or the tactics appropriate for the conditions you're in Period?
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: That's what they do.
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: So what is safety officer's supposed to do is monitor the hazard zone for firefighter safety and survival.
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: Right, who's got more juice than a safety officer as a division boss?
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: And they become a static person.
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: They're not a rotator that wonders around in a circle.
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: Well, the safety officer's got to be mobile.
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: Well, they're the biggest freelancer on the fire ground.
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: They report to nobody.
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: Everybody works for the IC.
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: You said it.
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: The safety officer position is no different than an engine or a ladder.
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: Do I need to assign the third company now?
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: No, I got fire control.
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: Well, I don't need the safety officer.
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: Probably I don't need a division boss.
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: Is I don't need to transfer command?
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: Is the first three companies got here and by the time the first tactical strategic officer showed up, they had fire control.
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: I have fire control in a par.
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: I got it all clear and under control.
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: We've got about five minutes of back end property conservation needs and decon and leave.
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: Well, there's nothing to take command of or put a safety officer in charge of that.
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: We don't?
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: Oh well, we have them.
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: We have to use them.
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: No, that's not the way it works.
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: Uh-uh, you use what you need.
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: We're all tools in the public safety domain, so that's kind of how it goes, and sometimes in other domains.
• 31:29
  Speaker 2: True, exactly.
• 31:30
  Speaker 2: I think right now, if we were to go to our region and say we're not going to embed safety officers anymore, we would get more pushback on that than when we instituted the embedded safety officer.
• 31:43
  Speaker 2: Because once you're a division boss and you have the safety officer there with you, your job becomes much more tactical.
• 31:49
  Speaker 2: Because they're actually looking at the accountability, they're monitoring the air and how long crews have been inside, they're getting on deck companies ready.
• 31:57
  Speaker 2: That's all those things that come off the plate of the division boss and the division boss can concentrate on tactics and communicating with the interior teams.
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: Something so simple Embedded safety officer in a division.
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: You got, josh, had the situation Three crews in, two crews out.
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: One thing that that safety officer position should be doing is we ain't got enough spare air cylinders here.
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: I need a utility truck in this division right now.
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: The hell with the air cylinders.
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: Get me a utility truck Back at hand.
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: We'll just transfer right there.
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: It's stuff like that.
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: I need more hydration here for my crews that are cycling that kind of thing.
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: It's too hot.
• 32:37
  Speaker 1: No, we're going to send them right to rehab now.
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: It's one work cycle and you're done.
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: You go to rehab.
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: It's that kind of shit.
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: If it's snowing where it is you are today, josh.
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: No, we need to get some heaters or whatever you got.
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: I've never had that problem.
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: So, however, you make it warm when it's too cold.
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: That's the safety officer deal.
• 32:56
  Speaker 1: So it's almost like you got the resources where I can start doing rehab right within my division and we can keep.
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: I want to make Alpha Division almost autonomous.
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: They got to check in with the IC to keep their thing, but I want to give that division boss all the tools they need to run that division.
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: That's what it is.
• 33:19
  Speaker 2: Anything else, Josh, on this.
• 33:22
  Speaker 3: Oh, I don't think we beat that up.
• 33:23
  Speaker 3: I think we circled around a couple of times on it.
• 33:25
  Speaker 3: Okay, big city, big city model, and then you know suburbia, yeah, exactly, and that's it.
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: That's the thing about Blue Card and I think we say that too is Blue Card is you.
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: You grow it and shrink it based on the critical factors in your needs.
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: That's what it is there's, and so it's going to look different in a big metro than it is, and like a suburban, a rural, the wilderness it's.
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: You got to, you got to make it work with what you got, and Blue Card gives you the best shot of that because you kind of identify it ahead of time.
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: Here's my critical needs.
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: This is what those look like to get rolling.
• 34:04
  Speaker 2: Let's do a timeless tactical truth by popular demand.
• 34:14
  Speaker 2: The timeless tactical truth from Alan Brunassini, the five of clubs and this one says 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.
• 34:30
  Speaker 2: 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.
• 34:42
  Speaker 2: So we see these systems that are driven by rank rather than function, and there's been fire chiefs out there that have lost their jobs because they did not take command, because that was the way their system ran.
• 34:57
  Speaker 2: But I think what he's saying here is is when you've got somebody lower rank and they're in charge and they're doing fine, why, why are we going to mess with that at all?
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: My dad wrote that based on an experience he had a really long time ago where he he made the statement.
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: He said I was the captain that got there, you know, engine one, and we had a lot of fire and we had this kind of fire and I requested a second alarm and he said it like the initial report, which you never did back in the day.
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: And so the BC was responding.
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: He got on the radio and said car one to alarm, hold that greater alarm till I arrive to the scene.
• 35:42
  Speaker 1: And so Alan Brunassini said, after he like cleared, he said you shouldn't do and say what I did next over the radio to your boss.
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: And so he and I'm sure there was probably a fist fight when the boss got to the scene, because that's just what they used to do back in the day, they loved to fight with one another.
• 36:02
  Speaker 1: Anyway, that was so.
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: That was a piece of scar tissue that he kept in his back pocket and then when he got to the position where he could redesign it all, he says no one person's in charge, and if you want to be in charge, you got to get to the scene and transfer command from that one person.
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: But until you do that that person's in charge, no one else's.
• 36:25
  Speaker 1: And that became the most powerful part of implementing a new system is.
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: The company officers in the Phoenix fire department took that to heart.
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: They said, no, I'm the IC, and they were serious about it.
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: So as a group, you had more than 90% of the company officers that wanted to do a very good job in that capacity because they had lived through the same thing with their boss, who was just a raging asshole.
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: That means just the way it worked.
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: The higher you went, the more you yelled and screamed and I said, no, it's not the way to do the best work.
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: So they tweeted Josh said it earlier it's a system you got to have, a system.
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: You use that you all the time and it just builds that trust among all the responders.
• 37:08
  Speaker 2: We only transfer command to improve it.
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 37:12
  Speaker 2: And I think, as a boss, you should really come in and support your employees, rather than come in and either micromanage them or rip it away from them, because they're never going to learn that way.
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: Well again, josh said it earlier there's like 13 things a division boss has to do.
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: Well, if you got two or three companies, you can do them flipping a coin and smoking a cigarette.
• 37:31
  Speaker 1: You put three more companies in that division.
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: I need help, man.
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: So there's plenty to do.
• 37:38
  Speaker 1: We don't have to wait for you to get here.
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: When you get here, you're going to have a lot.
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: So, yeah, just support what we got going and that way you keep building.
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: You don't have.
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: It's a better use of your resources because you don't have to rearrange it later on.
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: It's a strong foundation you keep operating on top of, and those things truly, for most of us, an offensive fire is over at less than 30 minutes.
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: So I mean, that's so you time it and that's just kind of oh no, we're going to be here all day.
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: That's what this one's going to look like.
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: So I'm going to have more set up.
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: Whatever that is, it's driven by what you need at the time.
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: It just makes the most sense.
• 38:16
  Speaker 3: I just think that as we grow that organization, that initial size up and establishing command, the strategic ISE is getting there to support and reinforce that operation.
• 38:29
  Speaker 3: If it needs to grow, then we grow it, and if it doesn't, then we don't.
• 38:35
  Speaker 3: And it's not a I'm in charge or I got more bugles or whatever.
• 38:40
  Speaker 3: It's there and we're building out the system for a reason no different than we don't need to put a strategic ISE there.
• 38:49
  Speaker 3: You know, if this thing's, you know deescalating just like we don't put a division boss there if I don't have, you know, work that needs to be managed in that area, and I don't put the company there.
• 38:59
  Speaker 3: So I think that just that whole mindset of you're there to support and reinforce what's already been established.
• 39:07
  Speaker 3: That's just my two cents on it.
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: Well, like the example I gave, where the chief cancels the greater alarm, well, you're screwing yourself because it's like I'm going to get there, I'm going to transfer command, I'm going to have no resources to assign.
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: That's why I'm going, there is to make this go away, and I make that go away by assigning engines to make it go away.
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: It's no, they strike that when I was a PC, when they struck another alarm, you're like, oh kid, we're going to be here a bit.
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: I mean it sent you a message that this.
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: Well then, you look out on the horizon, it looks like World War Two.
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: You're like we're going to make the news.
• 39:49
  Speaker 2: Yep, Right, that's another good one.
• 39:52
  Speaker 2: Hey, happy new year, guys.
• 39:53
  Speaker 2: It's good to be back in the studio with everyone, even though Josh couldn't be here because of the weather in the Midwest.
• 40:00
  Speaker 2: But I escaped it.
• 40:01
  Speaker 2: But I'll be going home to single-dentured temperatures.
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah, Vance, but you're going to have a lot more options in about two weeks.
• 40:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, that's true.
• 40:10
  Speaker 1: And Josh is here with us electronically.
• 40:12
  Speaker 1: His electrons are here, yeah.
• 40:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah, just a.
• 40:16
  Speaker 2: I think I, as of right now, eight more days in the office being a fire chief and then off to new adventures.
• 40:23
  Speaker 2: Eight days, yep, not that I'm counting or anything like that.
• 40:27
  Speaker 2: We're looking forward to that, john.
• 40:29
  Speaker 2: Well, thanks, I am too.
• 40:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah, well, it's going to be something.
• 40:37
  Speaker 2: Well, with that, I think we'll go ahead and bail out of this one.
• 40:40
  Speaker 2: Thanks so much for listening to B-Shifter.
• 40:43
  Speaker 2: If you have questions for us, make sure you send them in.
• 40:46
  Speaker 2: And until next time, thanks so much for listening.
• 40:48
  Speaker 2: Make sure you subscribe too.