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The Role of Fire Control in Search & Rescue Operations · B Shifter

• 0:42
  Speaker 2: Welcome to the B-Shifter Podcast You've got today John Vance, nick Brunicini, chris Stewart, steve Lester and Josh Bloom.
• 0:51
  Speaker 2: We want to welcome everyone, and today we're just talking about some of the recent items that have been in the news with the fire service, items that have been in the news with the fire service, particularly some of the extreme views that we've been seeing lately when it comes to line of duty deaths, what's acceptable, what's not acceptable, and we wanted to add a little bit to that conversation today and again looking to be more moderate than some of the things that we've seen lately.
• 1:23
  Speaker 2: So, to start off with Chris, we'll start off with Chris talking about some of the facts that we have right now.
• 1:30
  Speaker 2: I mean, what are we looking at as far as line of duty deaths inside of structure fires?
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: And that's really been the specific talk, correct?
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah Well, first of all, I'm going to say I see the irony with saying that blue card is the more moderate position in the American Fire Service.
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: I think that's actually pretty entertaining, right?
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: So I think a lot of the question I think in conversation that's been going around the fire service right now is the fact that when you start looking at this the data and the information about the number of fires, and we compare that number with the number of fire ground fatalities you know victims that we may have you're seeing kind of general, either flat or decreasing number of fires throughout the United States.
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: But if you look back over the past few years, you're seeing an increase in the number of fire, fire ground fatalities that we're having, not non firefighters, but the community members, right?
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: So the questions are is number one what does that mean?
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: Where's that coming from and what is the fire services role in that?
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: Right, and it can't just simply be that we are not necessarily doing our job good enough, like there's other things that are impacting it and UEL has done a great job of putting that forward.
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: So what's in our houses?
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: How are homes changing?
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: How is construction changing?
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: So that you know, I think UEL and the fire administrator.
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: They're saying that you know it's never been more dangerous or you've never had less time to get out of your home from a fire, because we're seeing flashover times between three and five minutes.
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: So what is the fire service's response to that?
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: And then we start connecting is all right.
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: What's the information about firefighter deaths and firefighter injuries that then get connected with that kind of simultaneously?
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: So there's like three or four things running along here in parallel that I think the fire service is wrestling with and commenting about and there's a lot of feelings about it.
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: But that's kind of what I see the question as right now.
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: Josh, are you?
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: Are you?
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: Are you?
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: Are you there with me?
• 3:48
  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I think that's accurate, and I think, to throw some other things out there, you know the the idea of civilians not surviving when in an IDLH smoke-filled environment, you know isn't anything new.
• 4:07
  Speaker 3: I don't know how old it is, I'm sure Nick knows, but, like 25 years ago, the Phoenix physicians, right, you know there's video of them saying you know, exposure to this much carbon monoxide, chances of survival.
• 4:21
  Speaker 3: You know this percentage.
• 4:23
  Speaker 3: And you know, exposed to 212 degrees, one breath, you know it's over.
• 4:29
  Speaker 3: So, and, chris, that ties back to what you said.
• 4:32
  Speaker 3: You know there is less time.
• 4:35
  Speaker 3: You know conditions are, you know, getting worse faster.
• 4:40
  Speaker 3: You know flashover conditions, toxic smoke, you know whatever that is.
• 4:44
  Speaker 3: So the one thing I want to make sure that we talk about on here today, though, is, you know, there's always a focus on line of duty deaths, but it has to start way before that.
• 4:55
  Speaker 3: I mean, it really has to start at every single incident.
• 4:57
  Speaker 3: What could we do better?
• 4:58
  Speaker 3: But I mean, if we're not looking at the incidents where we're injuring firefighters every year and that data we don't learn from line of duty death reports, because they all say the same thing and we just keep doing the same thing over and over again and you know that number of firefighter injuries on the fire ground 16,412.
• 5:26
  Speaker 3: Is that right, chris?
• 5:26
  Speaker 3: Is that what the numbers were in 2022?
• 5:28
  Speaker 3: Is that what you came up with?
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: Yeah, in 2022, there were a total of 65,000 or over 65,000 injuries firefighter injuries but then when you look at the things that are just associated to burns smoke inhalation, thermal stress and they had a different, another smaller category that was burns and smoke inhalation, thermal stress, and they had a different, another smaller category that was burns and smoke inhalation.
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: So I don't know why that isn't counted, but that accounts for 25% of those injuries.
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: So that's roughly 16,000 total injuries in 2022, just in those categories.
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: And so if you look at that by a per day occurrence, that's 45 burn, smoke inhalations or thermal insults that firefighters are, injuries that firefighters are experiencing from those environments a day.
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: Again, yeah, 45 of those a day, that's a lot, man.
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: That's not something we need to ignore or disregard.
• 6:25
  Speaker 4: When I was tracking this and looking at it closer, there were about 1,000 structure fires every day is what the NFPA reported.
• 6:35
  Speaker 4: Houses were burning 1,000 house fires a day and then every year annually, there was between 3,500 and 4,000 fire deaths in the country associated from that.
• 6:51
  Speaker 4: So you got 400,000 fires and then 4,000 deaths.
• 6:57
  Speaker 4: Basically, what is that?
• 6:58
  Speaker 4: One percent is what happens.
• 7:01
  Speaker 4: One percent is what happens.
• 7:03
  Speaker 4: And while I was doing it, most of the time when you responded, typically if there was a fire fatality it occurred before you left the station.
• 7:16
  Speaker 4: So by the time the call came in and you responded, whatever's on fire has a dead victim or two in it.
• 7:24
  Speaker 4: So that's kind of my history with search and rescue and dealing with victims.
• 7:36
  Speaker 4: So in my fire department I was taught in the academy that we did fire attack and so we didn't search ahead of the fire.
• 7:43
  Speaker 4: So that wasn't really an issue for us all the time.
• 7:47
  Speaker 4: And we're a big metro system, so when we got to the scene you could do simultaneous tasks at the same time and the premium throughout my career was to attack the fire, the first engine on the scene.
• 8:00
  Speaker 4: If you had a working fire, they were going to put water on it.
• 8:02
  Speaker 4: That's what they were going there to do.
• 8:04
  Speaker 4: They weren't doing wall searches or doing anything else, they were doing fire attack, which kind of makes sense.
• 8:09
  Speaker 4: You're the fire department and really, when you look at it especially with what you were talking about earlier, chris, with the modern fire compartment going from like 25-minute flashovers to three-minute flashovers is you have to do fire control first, because if you're putting firefighters in to search for people and you're not addressing the fire is you're going to kill everybody.
• 8:34
  Speaker 4: That's what happens as you get a flashover in two or three minutes, there's not time to do anything else but to put the fire out.
• 8:40
  Speaker 4: So I think that disconnect comes as think the disconnect comes is is it's not an either or is you're doing fire control in the name of life safety?
• 8:51
  Speaker 4: As I am saying, the best thing you can do when you get on the scene, if there's somebody stuck in a building, is to dump water on it as quickly as you can.
• 8:58
  Speaker 4: Every time we look at that, you put water in from the outside to the inside.
• 9:04
  Speaker 4: It drops the interior temperature, sometimes 90%, and so if you're going to save somebody, that is the best first initial action to take.
• 9:12
  Speaker 4: There is no other thing you can do on the fire ground that has the same effect of attacking the fire and knocking it down.
• 9:19
  Speaker 4: Knocking it down, you can have 10 teams searching and they're not going to be as effective as a fast fire attack that stabilizes that situation, reduces the hazard and then allows everybody to come in to complete that operation, which includes searching all the building.
• 9:35
  Speaker 4: So it's just, I think we're in violent agreement with each other when you really get down to it, think we're in violent agreement with each other when you really get down to it.
• 9:46
  Speaker 4: And I mean you guys did the two in, two out podcast and it's like no if when we get to the sea we shouldn't be standing around outside take effective action that restores public safety.
• 9:56
  Speaker 4: So every time the fire department puts a fire out in a building, they save all the people and property that are exposed to that.
• 10:04
  Speaker 4: I mean that's just part of it.
• 10:05
  Speaker 4: And at the same time, as I said, when you attack the fire, you're helping the people inside.
• 10:12
  Speaker 4: If there are victims, if they're in the same fire area with the fire, they're dead.
• 10:16
  Speaker 4: That's who you find in active flashed-over fire areas.
• 10:20
  Speaker 4: So the way we search the most endangered, well, really, we go to the dead first because we're putting the fire out.
• 10:29
  Speaker 4: They're the most endangered, or located just outside of that, in open spaces between the fire and where they're at the safest.
• 10:37
  Speaker 4: Victims are behind closed spaces, doors, walls, whatever that separates them from the fire.
• 10:41
  Speaker 4: Then you move from outside.
• 10:43
  Speaker 4: It's the remote places in the building and then the exposures.
• 10:46
  Speaker 4: So that's kind of the priority in the hierarchy of doing search and rescue.
• 10:51
  Speaker 4: But life safety for the fire service starts with the fire code and Alan Brunicini used to say it.
• 10:59
  Speaker 4: He says we live and die by what's in the fire code and in all of that.
• 11:03
  Speaker 4: And so you put a sprinkler system in a building.
• 11:06
  Speaker 4: You pretty much have guaranteed you're not going to have multiple deaths in it from a fire.
• 11:12
  Speaker 4: That's kind of the statistics of sprinkler protection.
• 11:15
  Speaker 4: So you start there and then just kind of work backwards from that.
• 11:19
  Speaker 4: You got smoke detectors.
• 11:21
  Speaker 4: Well, what was it?
• 11:23
  Speaker 4: Twelve years ago Peter Van Dorp, the training director for the Chicago Fire Department, testified in front of Congress Unfinished basements in the Midwest.
• 11:33
  Speaker 4: By the time the smoke detector sounds in a basement fire, the first floor is suspect before you can get out.
• 11:42
  Speaker 4: So the and that's what he told Congress you can't.
• 11:46
  Speaker 4: The fire department has no role in this at all.
• 11:49
  Speaker 4: Three minutes after the fire starts, the people in the house can't get out because their first floor is collapsing.
• 11:55
  Speaker 4: So what they did is they changed the building code.
• 11:58
  Speaker 4: You can't have unfinished basements in the Midwest.
• 12:00
  Speaker 4: Since then they said we're going to change the law, so you buy a house, it's got to have drywall in your basement.
• 12:06
  Speaker 4: So it doesn't.
• 12:07
  Speaker 4: So that's kind of where you start.
• 12:08
  Speaker 4: Well, sprinkler systems are the next.
• 12:10
  Speaker 4: Well, probably even ahead of that, you're better off putting a sprinkler system in an unfinished basement than the drywall ceiling.
• 12:17
  Speaker 4: So, and I think it just kind of goes from there.
• 12:21
  Speaker 5: Yeah, I think the I think the real key to what you said there, nick, was fire control in the name of life safety.
• 12:29
  Speaker 5: I think that's huge.
• 12:30
  Speaker 5: My organization we just had a fire last week where there was a significant body of fire.
• 12:37
  Speaker 5: It was a split foyer type of home where there was a significant amount of fire on the Bravo Charlie corner but all the living rooms were on the the Charlie Delta end of the of the structure.
• 12:49
  Speaker 5: So, pulling up with two apparatus, an engine and a ladder, the engine could quickly stretch the line, knock down the bulk of the fire to performing a quick hit from the exterior on the Charlie side.
• 12:59
  Speaker 5: Meanwhile, the truck is performing VIS into the bedroom windows and, uh, you know, that's, that's what we're talking about right there.
• 13:08
  Speaker 5: It's knocking down that body of fire, taking away that critical factor and making it safer for everyone inside yeah, I mean that's.
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: That's what the fire department's supposed to do and so I think we're getting like the fire service.
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: The conversation is becoming about all right.
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: Well, let's look at the data.
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: What is the data telling us?
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: And then we interpret the data, saying that searching without lines or searching ahead of the fire or searching in whatever way people describe is really not that dangerous, right, is really not that dangerous right?
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: And it's and with or without or I guess in most times it's without a fire attack or without some form of water, or prior to water being put on the fire.
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: And it's really not that dangerous, because we only had nine line of duty deaths in 2022 because of interior fire operations.
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: So it's not that dangerous.
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: But when you look at the injury stuff, well, first of all, I would argue that just nine fatalities is not inconsequential, and you can look at the details of each one of those incidents and see it's not a mystery as to why those happened.
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: And then you start looking at the injury data that's connected to it and it is way more dangerous than I think we're saying and what people are trying to teach us.
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: And we have to connect what you're talking about with fire control to that, because that's what's making it better for us to do that work.
• 14:37
  Speaker 4: The same people that say we need to search without an attack line because it slows us down.
• 14:43
  Speaker 4: Ask them why?
• 14:46
  Speaker 4: Why do you have to search so fast?
• 14:48
  Speaker 4: Why do you have to get in ahead of the attack?
• 14:49
  Speaker 4: What's the answer?
• 14:51
  Speaker 4: Why do they do that?
• 14:52
  Speaker 4: Because the fire's hot, because the fire's going to kill the people.
• 14:55
  Speaker 4: It's going to kill everybody if I don't get in there and save them, if I don't get in there and put my hands and bring them out and cradle them.
• 15:02
  Speaker 4: Well, no, have the first engine, go in and attack the fire and then you can go in and do whatever the hell you want.
• 15:07
  Speaker 4: I mean, that's what it is.
• 15:09
  Speaker 4: In fact, you can't do search and rescue without an attack line, having just the firefighters run into the building to pick up, to go through a closed door, to get people to take them outside.
• 15:22
  Speaker 4: Either you're going to throw them out a window or you're going to drag them back through the products of combustion.
• 15:26
  Speaker 4: So see, an incident action plan is for the whole incident, not just the search and rescue piece.
• 15:33
  Speaker 4: Life safety is the most important thing we do.
• 15:36
  Speaker 4: That's why fire control went to the first tactical priority, because it's the quickest, most absolute way the fire department protects life and property, it's by putting the fire out Period.
• 15:49
  Speaker 4: Otherwise, if you're doing search and rescue in an out-of-control fire situation, it's almost like performing CPR on somebody that's being mauled to death by a bear, as it doesn't make much sense.
• 16:08
  Speaker 4: Well, no, I love you, I have to save you.
• 16:11
  Speaker 4: Well, kill the goddamn bear first and then do what you're going to do.
• 16:15
  Speaker 4: You got to eliminate the hazard.
• 16:17
  Speaker 4: That's why we'd wear all the stuff we wear.
• 16:20
  Speaker 4: So we have a full protective gear and the weak part is the SCBA face piece will start to fail about 300 degrees.
• 16:30
  Speaker 4: Right, that's about maybe 20% of what a flashover is.
• 16:36
  Speaker 4: So we have this very robust gear that we wear to go in to protect ourselves from the products of combustion.
• 16:43
  Speaker 4: The victims don't have that on.
• 16:46
  Speaker 4: Josh said it to start.
• 16:47
  Speaker 4: People that have suffered clinical death from carbon monoxide and cyanide poisoning are dead.
• 16:54
  Speaker 4: They're not coming back, they're dead.
• 16:57
  Speaker 4: It's like decapitating somebody and trying to put their head back on.
• 17:00
  Speaker 4: It works just as well, it's.
• 17:02
  Speaker 4: So you have to understand the mechanism of what's killing them, and when you talk to trauma surgeons and burn doctors, that's what they tell you.
• 17:12
  Speaker 4: They said people that you rescue from fires that suffered severe injury from the products of combustion do not fare well.
• 17:21
  Speaker 4: We asked the doctors what's that mean?
• 17:22
  Speaker 4: He says they all die from the products of combustion do not fare well.
• 17:22
  Speaker 4: We asked the doctors what's that mean?
• 17:23
  Speaker 4: He says they all die.
• 17:25
  Speaker 4: He says if you get so far, he says first of all it shuts all your organs down.
• 17:30
  Speaker 4: And he says the only way to get your blood supply back is to be put in a decompression chamber for 12 hours.
• 17:36
  Speaker 4: Well, your organs can't go with blood for 12 hours.
• 17:39
  Speaker 4: You're dead.
• 17:39
  Speaker 4: That's what happens.
• 17:40
  Speaker 5: So you know, and I think the only advancement we've really seen in that over the years is the advent of the cyanokit, the implementation of that.
• 17:49
  Speaker 5: I mean we have seen some success with that.
• 17:51
  Speaker 4: Yes, If it's cyanide-based, that's a treatment for it.
• 17:56
  Speaker 4: But carbon monoxide, there's decompression chamber.
• 18:00
  Speaker 4: That's all there is for it.
• 18:01
  Speaker 4: You're right.
• 18:04
  Speaker 5: You know I quote a friend of mine, uh, on one of my social media friends, andy starnes.
• 18:07
  Speaker 5: You guys know him, but he he has a quote.
• 18:10
  Speaker 5: He says you know, if you're pushing down a hallway with a closed nozzle, you know jermaine and his spider-man pajamas would beg to differ with you about your definition of heat.
• 18:19
  Speaker 5: You know we're we have on protective equipment.
• 18:22
  Speaker 5: We don't feel anything till it gets, you know, 400, 500 degrees and he's dying.
• 18:28
  Speaker 4: You know, gotta have we gotta open that nozzle and put that fire out well, we used to say well, we're not going to do it because we'll steam the victims.
• 18:35
  Speaker 4: You know, back in the day, in 1983, it is no, don't put water on it, you'll kill the victims.
• 18:39
  Speaker 4: And you're like well, my gear I'm watching shrivel up.
• 18:43
  Speaker 4: Right now, my SCBA bag that it goes in is on fire, steaming the victims.
• 18:50
  Speaker 4: That's the last of their worries.
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: Well, we've changed the way we put water on it and, knowing all the stuff about our water application and how critical extinguishment actually truly is, josh, what else you got for that?
• 19:05
  Speaker 3: You can look high and low and try to find it, and except for your, your personal experiences and connecting with the people who you connect with.
• 19:12
  Speaker 3: Another interesting thing to this whole water application piece of us, um, with line of duty deaths and us getting burnt or, you know, critically injured, or or the 2,619 disabilities over five years from Project Mayday, how many of those people were in an area that was unprotected by water?
• 19:35
  Speaker 3: They were, they were, they were not, water was not flowing where they were.
• 19:40
  Speaker 3: And I know the five of us you know on here today have all talked about this and all have, you know, personal experiences of shit gone sideways and it's like, why weren't they putting water on the fire?
• 19:56
  Speaker 3: And you know there's a list of reasons why, but it goes back to that.
• 20:00
  Speaker 3: We have to be, we have to be doing something about the big problem right when the fire department, they called us to put the fire out and then you know it lets us do all of those other things better.
• 20:15
  Speaker 3: It makes it better for us, better for the victims, better for their building, better for their pets, better for every single thing right, every single thing right.
• 20:25
  Speaker 3: So, as we talk about the line of duty death piece and the injuries.
• 20:28
  Speaker 3: I think it's important that we keep that in mind.
• 20:33
  Speaker 3: About the water application piece what does that really look like?
• 20:38
  Speaker 3: What are we doing to solve the problem?
• 20:41
  Speaker 3: What are we doing to make it better for us?
• 20:42
  Speaker 3: Because, when you start reading, most all events, water was not flowing when shit went sideways, so it's just another one of those pieces.
• 20:54
  Speaker 3: Right that the fire is a critical factor that we have to address.
• 21:00
  Speaker 3: No ands, ifs, buts about it.
• 21:03
  Speaker 4: Without a doubt and right now we're talking about houses, single family residences, move it over to like a six-story apartment building that has 500 residents in it.
• 21:13
  Speaker 4: You have to put the fire out.
• 21:16
  Speaker 4: If you don't, it's negligence on the fire department fault Decide To allow a fire to burn into that setting.
• 21:24
  Speaker 4: You know that's why the building's sprinklered, but even then the concealed spaces aren't.
• 21:28
  Speaker 4: So if you get on the other side of the interior finish of those buildings, you will have a fire burning through basically the structure of it, the floors, the attics, the walls, the rest of it, and there are plenty of examples of those buildings burning to the ground because of the thing.
• 21:48
  Speaker 4: So the bigger the building and the more risk there is, the more important it becomes to control the risk by eliminating the hazards.
• 21:59
  Speaker 4: I mean, that's what the fire department does.
• 22:00
  Speaker 4: That's how you restore public safety is by making the fire go away.
• 22:04
  Speaker 4: That's kind of the role of fire department in the thing and that allows us to do all the other stuff.
• 22:10
  Speaker 4: Everything else is support work.
• 22:12
  Speaker 4: Outside of that, fire control becomes the king in it and then, and until you can control the fire, searching becomes more and more difficult.
• 22:22
  Speaker 4: So the faster we control the fire, the faster we can search and the more efficient and effective the whole thing is, and what it is is if we get distracted by searches.
• 22:34
  Speaker 4: There was a when we were going through this and rewriting procedures.
• 22:37
  Speaker 4: There was a fire in a nursing home in Tennessee and this is like 20 years ago.
• 22:44
  Speaker 4: It was like a five or six-story nursing home and the initial rigs get there and like 20 minutes into it, two engineers talking said there ain't nobody flowing water, my gauges ain't moved a bit and the fire is going crazy.
• 23:01
  Speaker 4: And these two engineers threw a ladder, drug a line up and put the fire out.
• 23:06
  Speaker 4: They killed about 20 people during that incident.
• 23:11
  Speaker 4: Like two years after the incident was over, it was over a billion dollars in liability and I don't think it's been settled today.
• 23:19
  Speaker 4: And it all happened and came undone because they were so distracted with the life safety problem of actually clearing the building of the occupants that they ignored the fire.
• 23:32
  Speaker 4: If they would have put the fire out, which two engineers did from the outside, they got their stuff on, climbed up on a ladder and one line put the thing out that if they would have done that in the first 10 minutes they would have been golden, the fire department would have.
• 23:47
  Speaker 4: They would have saved the day, they would have stabilized it, they would have saved as much life and property as they could have and they would have been excused from the legal proceedings afterwards.
• 23:58
  Speaker 4: So I mean you, just that's why we take command is so we can take more effective action, the most effective action possible, and that means you get fire control that much quicker.
• 24:09
  Speaker 4: So an incident where you let fire control go is going to go longer and longer, more and more damage, destruction, loss of life, all the rest of it.
• 24:18
  Speaker 4: Fire control is king.
• 24:21
  Speaker 4: That's why we design engines around pumps and put hose on them and we have evolutions for getting water, uninterrupted supplies of water.
• 24:31
  Speaker 4: That's who we are.
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: And we're not measuring the number of times we made an effective fire attack and then measuring the number of lives that it's saving or the number of maydays that it prevented.
• 24:45
  Speaker 4: No, you don't get credit for that.
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we're not doing that.
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: So to take it to where you went, nick, is what is the incident command system's job?
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: What is the blue card system's job?
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: It's to organize the incident and direct the incident, utilizing critical factors, ensuring we're applying the right amount of risk and in the right strategy so that our plan matches all that stuff to do the best thing we can for the victims, right, or the property owners or whoever we want to qualify them as.
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: But it can't be showing everybody showing up with their own idea of what they think's best for the fireground.
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: No, and uh, um, I I love task level training, man, it's so important that they're good at it.
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: But the incident command system has got to manage all that and it's got to happen in a way that that may actually make sense yeah, yeah you know you got to base it on your resources too.
• 25:43
  Speaker 5: I mean, you know you.
• 25:44
  Speaker 5: You know when you're in an apartment that can put four engines and two ladders on a house fire in 12 minutes.
• 25:51
  Speaker 5: You know that's a much different model and a much different mindset versus middle America, where you have two guys showing up on an engine and the second dude's 20 minutes away you know, that's a completely different tactical format than what we're seeing here.
• 26:08
  Speaker 5: So I think that you have to take that into consideration when you make any kind of global statement versus a fire control, versus.
• 26:16
  Speaker 4: But it becomes even more critical if you have less resources, if you have less deployment capability to take the most effective action you can in the very beginning, because that's going to minimize the amount effective action you can in the very beginning, because that's going to minimize the amount of work you have to do and it's going to stop the loss the quickest.
• 26:32
  Speaker 4: So again, in my system we would respond and on an average you would have fire control before you had a 10-minute elapsed time notification.
• 26:42
  Speaker 4: I mean, that's what an offensive fire looks like, is I'm going to knock that thing down.
• 26:46
  Speaker 4: An offensive fire doesn't go, must pass two or three minutes.
• 26:49
  Speaker 4: Once you engage, once you start throwing water in the fire, you get a line or two on it.
• 26:54
  Speaker 4: It's now or it's not.
• 26:56
  Speaker 4: And like through my career when I was younger, it's like, well, we're going to have these 30 minute firefights and we're going to do this.
• 27:02
  Speaker 4: You're like that's all bullshit.
• 27:04
  Speaker 4: I mean every now and then you'll get a fire in a big building that makes cooler pads a hundred years ago.
• 27:11
  Speaker 4: You watch it burn for a little while before everything starts falling down and you run out.
• 27:14
  Speaker 4: But the quicker you knock it down, I mean we would, you'd have a structure fire.
• 27:20
  Speaker 4: You'd assign two engines, a ladder, somebody be staged.
• 27:24
  Speaker 4: 20 minutes later is a wet spot in the middle of the street and we're all gone, it's over.
• 27:28
  Speaker 4: I mean, that's what it looked like and it was really a professional operation.
• 27:32
  Speaker 4: Everybody there wasn't a lot of running, it was brisk pace and the fire was done.
• 27:37
  Speaker 4: You had fast fire control and then all the support work happened around that, see, and you can do a lot of dumb shit if you want, if you knock the fire down quickly and then you can shake your saber and say this is the reason this happened, because we did this, or we did X, y, z, or we did this tactic, or Jimmy did this with his SCBA.
• 27:59
  Speaker 4: This time you trace it back and you do the after action review and it's like no, they put water on the fire and it went out.
• 28:05
  Speaker 4: That's kind of what it's supposed to do.
• 28:07
  Speaker 4: So that's what it looks like.
• 28:10
  Speaker 3: Part of the challenge.
• 28:10
  Speaker 3: I'm all about it.
• 28:11
  Speaker 3: Right, everybody has to do their part.
• 28:13
  Speaker 3: The task level has to work at 110% at the task level and tactical bosses need to do their job and strategic guys need to do their job.
• 28:24
  Speaker 3: But I think sometimes we get caught into this piece and this term of mission myopia.
• 28:28
  Speaker 3: I just get focused on this one thing I'm going to do and I miss everything else.
• 28:34
  Speaker 3: No matter what I'm going to make this happen, and it's like sometimes it's just not going to happen and you know we did it a hundred times and it worked.
• 28:43
  Speaker 3: Well, that doesn't make it right.
• 28:45
  Speaker 3: So I think that ties into something that Nick just said, the after action reporting piece, like so we need to be looking at ourselves all the time, not just when somebody gets hurt, not just when somebody, you know, when we have a line of duty death, not just when somebody else has a line of duty death.
• 28:59
  Speaker 3: We should be looking at our organization all the time.
• 29:02
  Speaker 3: How do we do better?
• 29:03
  Speaker 3: Every fire we go to?
• 29:04
  Speaker 3: We should be looking at how do we do it better in the ems system.
• 29:09
  Speaker 3: They, they, they love that red.
• 29:13
  Speaker 3: Well, not red ink now, but the automated piece on the on the computer, right, they, they love the red ink.
• 29:19
  Speaker 3: The shit out of that ems report about you didn't do this or you didn't do that for you started an IV just because, for whatever reason, you started an IV.
• 29:29
  Speaker 3: But we won't look at a fire unless something went sideways, somebody got into a fight, somebody was pissed, which really is about every fire, but we should be looking at that right.
• 29:41
  Speaker 3: There's always something to learn that we should be able to say we can always do better, but we're stuck in this.
• 29:49
  Speaker 3: We just keep doing the same stupid shit, which is why we've said it a few times in the last few podcasts the line of duty death reports mostly all look the same because we're doing the same things.
• 30:01
  Speaker 3: It's the same factors that are lining up that are the problem and we're not doing anything.
• 30:05
  Speaker 3: We're not doing anything about it.
• 30:07
  Speaker 3: So we can't continue to measure success just because it works and you know that's the that Johnny Peters comment, that's in parts of our program and he writes in our magazine, and all that of you know, just because it hasn't killed us basically doesn't mean that it's right that we should be looking to do something different.
• 30:25
  Speaker 3: So Josh.
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: Well, everybody, what do we agree that right is?
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: Or we got to be looking for better.
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: So what is the better?
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: And that seems to be the disconnect.
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: Because everybody is better at searching or better at a component, there's a better overall outcome for the customer period.
• 30:52
  Speaker 5: I'll start that my organization.
• 30:55
  Speaker 5: I recently was involved in an after-action review committee where we actually are starting a formal process of doing an after-action review now, of doing an after-action review now.
• 31:08
  Speaker 5: One of the main reasons why I wanted to get involved in that committee and what was assigned to me as part of that committee was to come up with a formal hot wash to do on the scene.
• 31:17
  Speaker 5: And what used to just really tick me off back in the day as a company officer is I knew something went wrong on that scene and I knew it needed to be talked about.
• 31:26
  Speaker 5: And then the chief would be like OK, let's all gather around the driveway, all right, boys?
• 31:31
  Speaker 5: Well, the fire went out and nobody got hurt, let's all go eat supper.
• 31:35
  Speaker 5: And it's like come on, man, you know, let's learn here, let's talk about this, let's put our feelings to the side and let's let's have a grown up-up discussion so we can learn from it and walk away and do better next time.
• 31:47
  Speaker 5: So that was a big motivation for me and so I developed an actual hot wash flow chart in the driveway after the fire.
• 32:08
  Speaker 5: They'll be able to follow a diagram and discuss that in a format where everybody can talk openly and discuss things, because that's how we learn.
• 32:12
  Speaker 5: Guys, we don't go to near the fires we did 30 years ago, so the ones we go to, we have to learn from.
• 32:19
  Speaker 4: We ended up using the same system, the strategic decision-making guide.
• 32:23
  Speaker 4: It's okay, this is what the IC does in the process they push all this information through to figure out the best actions to take.
• 32:30
  Speaker 4: Well, when we did the after-action review, that's all we did.
• 32:33
  Speaker 4: As they asked the IC number one what were your critical factors?
• 32:37
  Speaker 4: And they boom, boom, boom, boom and it was beautiful.
• 32:41
  Speaker 4: As the system would just validate itself every time.
• 32:43
  Speaker 4: You did that.
• 32:44
  Speaker 4: And then what happened is the workforce saw the success of that.
• 32:48
  Speaker 4: So I guess, to answer your question, where's your start?
• 32:50
  Speaker 4: Well, if something's on fire, put it out, control the fire.
• 32:54
  Speaker 4: That's where you begin.
• 32:55
  Speaker 4: Now, putting water on it isn't always right, it is 99.9% of the time.
• 33:00
  Speaker 4: But if you've got combustible metals or a gas-fueled fire, you want to control the flow of gas and you don't want to put water on things that rack poorly with water, which are usually in industrial settings and not house fires.
• 33:14
  Speaker 4: So on the scene of a house fire, electricity would be the biggest thing not to put water on.
• 33:20
  Speaker 4: But, all things being equal, if there's fire burning, put water on the fire, and that's a very good start.
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: That strategic decision-making deal.
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: It actually made it really easy to figure out what was screwed up, yeah, and like the individuals involved in the incident would figure it out, and they're like, oh yeah, all right, I get why that was.
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: I should have made that decision, for whatever reason.
• 33:43
  Speaker 4: It's really almost self-correcting at that point.
• 33:45
  Speaker 4: You just need, like Steve said, an adult, as far as whoever the ranking officer is, to be the advocate for the whole response.
• 33:55
  Speaker 4: In managing that after action review and a lot of times you're not saying a lot, it's just the key participants are telling the story and you're kind of keeping them clean from the rest of the group.
• 34:07
  Speaker 4: I guess You're just the moderator, exactly, you're curating the experience for them.
• 34:14
  Speaker 2: So you're the first arriver on the scene.
• 34:17
  Speaker 2: Let's go to this, because I don't think we really addressed it.
• 34:19
  Speaker 2: I think it's a tough question.
• 34:21
  Speaker 2: You're the first arriver on the scene and you have a known rescue, so then what?
• 34:29
  Speaker 4: Put arriver on the scene and you have a known rescue.
• 34:31
  Speaker 4: So then what?
• 34:32
  Speaker 4: Put water on the fire?
• 34:34
  Speaker 4: I mean, if you, if there's somebody hanging out a window, there's a certain set of things you can do, I suppose.
• 34:37
  Speaker 4: But if you're already, you get on the scene and you're doing all the things, stretching lines, you've established the water supply, let's say, and you're getting ready to go in with an attack line and somebody comes up and says there's a victim in there, the best thing you can do for that victim is continue with your attack.
• 34:54
  Speaker 4: On the way to the attack, you're going to pay attention to the area you're in and then you're going to put water on the fire.
• 35:00
  Speaker 4: The only thing that would stop that is, if you come across a victim, then you need to remove that victim.
• 35:06
  Speaker 4: But I would say that's where staffing comes in.
• 35:09
  Speaker 4: If there's two of you you're not, put water on the fire, put water on the fire and then try to do what you want with the victim.
• 35:20
  Speaker 4: But if you let that fire burn, you're going to kill everybody inside and you're going to screw yourself up.
• 35:24
  Speaker 4: Don't be in a building that's on fire without an attack line.
• 35:30
  Speaker 3: Right, I mean command function.
• 35:31
  Speaker 3: One is deployment.
• 35:32
  Speaker 3: So how many resources do you have?
• 35:33
  Speaker 3: What can you really do?
• 35:35
  Speaker 3: What's the order of arrival as far as like, how far is that next company really behind you?
• 35:42
  Speaker 3: And then obviously you know it's the critical factor-based driven decision making.
• 35:49
  Speaker 3: There's a known victim and a known location is much different than somebody just says there's somebody inside of there and you're there by yourself.
• 35:56
  Speaker 3: So I mean there is no answer except for that first due company officer, knowing how many people they have, what their capability is and what the capability is of the rest of the response.
• 36:07
  Speaker 3: So I mean, yeah, the next piece of the there's somebody in there.
• 36:13
  Speaker 3: Well, shit, you better not just go on a big search, not putting the fire out if they just say somebody's in there, well, okay, well, we're always going to fires thinking that somebody might be in there, right, so we still got to put the fire out.
• 36:29
  Speaker 3: And then the big critical factor of what is their exact location, if we know.
• 36:34
  Speaker 3: And then where's the rest of our resources?
• 36:36
  Speaker 3: And then you know the hanging out the window thing is a whole other piece.
• 36:41
  Speaker 3: We have simulations that have that and it's amazing to watch people run that simulation of we're not sure exactly what to do and it's like well, you should have.
• 36:51
  Speaker 3: That goes back to your thing, steve.
• 36:52
  Speaker 3: Right, the round table sitting around talking about you pull up and there is a victim.
• 36:56
  Speaker 3: What are we going to do with that?
• 36:57
  Speaker 3: Well, the engine's right, two companies pulled up at the same time.
• 37:00
  Speaker 3: What are you going to do versus?
• 37:01
  Speaker 3: You're going to be there for five minutes.
• 37:02
  Speaker 3: So it all comes back to you have to use the strategic decision-making model to make decisions about what's the biggest priority right now, based off the resources that I have, to solve this problem.
• 37:15
  Speaker 5: Yeah, you know I'll say this, and it's no secret.
• 37:18
  Speaker 5: Cobb County Fire Department has made a lot of rescues in the last several years.
• 37:23
  Speaker 5: Two or three of those have been featured here on this podcast.
• 37:26
  Speaker 5: Um, I've I've reviewed a lot of fire ground audio from my department.
• 37:32
  Speaker 5: Um, unless I'm missing one, I can't think of a single one that we've made in the last five or six years that water wasn't being applied on the fire at the same time.
• 37:43
  Speaker 4: Yeah, it's critical but there are some people that say, no, you shouldn't be applying water, yeah, you should just be searching, and you know that is not true and I haven't run into a lot of people, to be honest with you, that have had that opinion of the thing.
• 38:04
  Speaker 4: Now they, they're out there clearly, and if you have an opinion, the Internet was built for you, so I'm sure we're going to hear them.
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: Well, so I want to take what Nick said.
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: So if you've got limited resources, you show up first John's question.
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: You've got a victim or high likelihood of a victim.
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: So let's take firefighter rescue survey data.
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: So what they're saying in single-family homes is, when we find one victim, on average there's 1.6 victims.
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: So that means there's more than one victim.
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so if those initial few folks make their initial attack come across a victim, it's so much more and they're the only ones doing work.
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: It's so much more important for that second victim or third victim or whatever.
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: That water went on the fire that actually controlled it and slowed it down.
• 39:02
  Speaker 1: That is the only way we're going to be able to do anything else about them until more help arrives.
• 39:09
  Speaker 4: When I got on the fire department, they taught me in the training academy how to buddy breathe with my SCBA.
• 39:14
  Speaker 4: They don't do that anymore and they said it's the most hazardous, dangerous thing you can do.
• 39:19
  Speaker 4: And when they said you can't do it, there wasn't an internet.
• 39:23
  Speaker 4: Then If there was, it would have been a sea of tears.
• 39:26
  Speaker 4: You know my brother's going to die Now that there's fire departments that found out.
• 39:31
  Speaker 4: They both died because they did a procedure that didn't work.
• 39:35
  Speaker 4: It wasn't safe, and so that's what happened.
• 39:37
  Speaker 4: And so are safe.
• 39:39
  Speaker 4: A lot of people think we're disposable.
• 39:41
  Speaker 4: You know that that's just part of the thing.
• 39:44
  Speaker 4: Well, you did take it.
• 39:45
  Speaker 4: We took an oath.
• 39:46
  Speaker 4: I took an oath to become a community college instructor that I would defend the Constitution.
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: I never took an oath for the fire department and you and I both didn't.
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I signed a payroll form.
• 39:57
  Speaker 4: So they paid me and I put fires out.
• 40:00
  Speaker 4: That kind of was the deal.
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: So I'll throw one more thing out there, just that folks can actually look up.
• 40:07
  Speaker 1: So there's a.
• 40:07
  Speaker 1: There's a battalion chief from the FDNY that wrote an interesting paper in 2008.
• 40:14
  Speaker 2: And it was a comparative paper of during a time period.
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: I want to say it was like 15 or 20 years, right, Josh, that he was looking at 19.
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: 19 years- yeah.
• 40:25
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so he's looking at this 19-year period and he's comparing the number of FDNY deaths.
• 40:32
  Speaker 1: I think it was 34, maybe.
• 40:34
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I think that sounds right.
• 40:35
  Speaker 4: Yep, same time.
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: The number of those fires where an FDNY firefighter was killed.
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: How many of those fires were victims present?
• 40:45
  Speaker 1: And I think it was four.
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: Yeah, four of the 34 times of an FDNY firefighter.
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: They actually found a victim at that fire.
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: So, while I'm not saying that it's the life safety thing and our ability to manage that, that's why we exist.
• 41:05
  Speaker 1: But there are oftentimes, in the name of life safety, we are doing really really dumb, dangerous shit that doesn't have anything to do with putting the fire out, that is getting us in trouble and so and that's man, that was a pretty ballsy thing, I think, for that chief to write, especially in the FDNY during that time period.
• 41:25
  Speaker 1: And I'm sure he's a tough son of a bitch, probably was a tough son of a bitch then and he's way tougher now because of it.
• 41:32
  Speaker 4: Right, and so sometimes they got to put you a witness protection for your own good.
• 41:37
  Speaker 1: Right, yeah, so that paper is out there and exists, I'm sure.
• 41:41
  Speaker 4: It was an EFO paper.
• 41:42
  Speaker 4: Yeah, it's the best one ever written, if you ask me.
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: Has the ability to look those up.
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: You'll find it.
• 41:48
  Speaker 4: It's a fantastic read well look at like, uh, it's different than us, but cops.
• 41:55
  Speaker 4: Cops go into a place where there's somebody shooting people.
• 41:58
  Speaker 4: They're not treating anyone.
• 41:59
  Speaker 4: They're going in to to eliminate the threat.
• 42:03
  Speaker 4: That's the first thing we have to do Eliminate the threat.
• 42:07
  Speaker 4: The building's on fire.
• 42:09
  Speaker 4: The first people in should have an attack line in their hands, and then anyone coming in behind them can do what they need to do.
• 42:15
  Speaker 4: Once we start making, the other thing is like vent, enter, isolate search is one thing, but just to get in a building and start opening things up, and especially if they're in safe places, so I mean it's got to be a calculated, intentional decision of what you're doing.
• 42:35
  Speaker 5: You've got to train on it Exactly.
• 42:36
  Speaker 4: You've got to train on it and know exactly what you're doing.
• 42:38
  Speaker 4: See, and a house is one thing, and we can train and do certain shit in a house, but, like when you get into, like more urban dense areas, there was an incident in Chicago years ago where they put all the victims and sent them up because coming down they couldn't, they'd have to go through the fire and they put a bunch of people on a stairwell and the smoke got them later on.
• 42:55
  Speaker 4: So you have to be aware where you're sheltering people in place during this thing.
• 43:00
  Speaker 4: But that's a whole different animal when you're dealing with bigger, wide open buildings like that.
• 43:05
  Speaker 4: Hospitals is another one.
• 43:07
  Speaker 4: Life safety is so important in some structures they make you put a sprinkler system in it.
• 43:12
  Speaker 4: That's why it's to protect the people in the building.
• 43:17
  Speaker 4: When the fire department shows up to a building that doesn't have a sprinkler system, the way we protect people is to put the fire out first the victims and the human being, firefighters that went there to save them.
• 43:31
  Speaker 4: If you disregard that fire, it's going to get you.
• 43:34
  Speaker 4: I mean it just happened in Oregon last week.
• 43:37
  Speaker 4: Same thing searching ahead, no water burned up, boom, you get stuck in it.
• 43:41
  Speaker 4: It is a disposable protective gear we have Once the fire hits you.
• 43:47
  Speaker 4: If you get hit by a flashover, you'll be lucky to survive that and you may end up being done for the rest of your career.
• 43:53
  Speaker 4: You don't want to get stuck in those conditions.
• 43:55
  Speaker 4: The way not to get stuck in them is stay out of them or put the fire out before they can evolve into that and get on you.
• 44:02
  Speaker 2: Now, this is a dangerous job.
• 44:04
  Speaker 2: There are things that just go wrong.
• 44:07
  Speaker 2: You might lose water pressure, there might be a hole in the floor, the building's booby-trapped, whatever.
• 44:12
  Speaker 2: I mean that kind of stuff happens, but we can't dismiss it.
• 44:16
  Speaker 2: We just can't say, oh well, it's going to happen.
• 44:19
  Speaker 4: You know, there's people that say that Presenters, we all know who they are and they would get up on the evangelist.
• 44:30
  Speaker 4: Yeah, they're like, they're tactical evangelists, as you know.
• 44:32
  Speaker 4: We should be doing this and this and they, they get animated and yell and scream, and you know the higher order and the rest of it, and you know what?
• 44:36
  Speaker 4: They're all a bunch of liars, because they're all alive.
• 44:38
  Speaker 4: Not one of them died in a fire.
• 44:40
  Speaker 4: They think it's so great to do it.
• 44:42
  Speaker 4: Well then, buddy, you had your chance.
• 44:44
  Speaker 4: You never did quit trying to sell it to the rest of us.
• 44:47
  Speaker 4: Pal, yeah, you know.
• 44:48
  Speaker 4: Yeah, enjoy your pension.
• 44:49
  Speaker 4: I thought we were the liars apparently.
• 44:53
  Speaker 5: Yeah, we were just talking earlier today.
• 44:54
  Speaker 5: Uh, chris was telling me that he knows an agency where part of the the battalion vehicles checkoff on the checkoff sheet is a folded flag.
• 45:05
  Speaker 4: Jesus.
• 45:06
  Speaker 5: And I was blown away by that.
• 45:07
  Speaker 5: I can't believe it that they actually keep that as a checkoff on their apparatus.
• 45:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think there's multiple places.
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's pretty interesting, huh.
• 45:19
  Speaker 5: As an organization that's saying that we expect you to die.
• 45:21
  Speaker 5: Yeah, to me that's just unacceptable.
• 45:23
  Speaker 4: That we expect you to die.
• 45:24
  Speaker 4: Yeah, uh-huh.
• 45:25
  Speaker 5: You know, to me that's just unacceptable.
• 45:27
  Speaker 5: We should train and formulate plans and have things in place where that should never happen.
• 45:35
  Speaker 5: We should never prepare for that.
• 45:37
  Speaker 4: Imagine if you're just a regular family and it's you and your wife are sitting at home one day and your child goes off to become a firefighter right, and you're so proud of them because it's selfless and all the rest.
• 45:50
  Speaker 4: Firefighter is the greatest occupation in the history of occupations, probably, truly.
• 45:54
  Speaker 4: And let's say that they're going through the academy and they're learning training and they come home one night and, son, how did your day go?
• 46:02
  Speaker 4: And well know, I learned today about searching above the fire.
• 46:06
  Speaker 4: And then, if you're up there and the conditions get real bad, they taught us that you run as fast as you can at a window and you dive headfirst out of it Because there's a ladder placed at an incorrect climbing angle and I can slide down to freedom and then go home to my wife Morgan Freeman, my wife Morgan Freeman.
• 46:26
  Speaker 4: Now, if you weren't in the fire service and you were just like a normal person who understood like math and English and all the rest of the things, and your kid told you that, what would you do?
• 46:35
  Speaker 4: Would you think maybe you need to find another place to?
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: do that?
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: How did I fail you?
• 46:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's what I'm thinking.
• 46:43
  Speaker 1: What happened?
• 46:45
  Speaker 4: Yeah, you blame it on your wife or she blamed it on you Back and forth, but you think it's idiotic.
• 46:51
  Speaker 4: Well, there's still people that profess that they have folded flags and things and you think this is.
• 46:56
  Speaker 4: It's cultish, almost really, if you look at it and you can't defend it.
• 47:02
  Speaker 4: Try to take that to a city risk manager lawyer and say this is what we're going to do and then get a defense attorney once, like you, jump out the window.
• 47:12
  Speaker 4: Now you're paralyzed.
• 47:13
  Speaker 4: I don't think that's very smart.
• 47:20
  Speaker 2: Other things happen, aside from rescue.
• 47:24
  Speaker 2: You know they weren't even trying to rescue.
• 47:26
  Speaker 2: We've got line of duty deaths during defensive fires because of wall collapse.
• 47:30
  Speaker 2: We've got serious injuries because of gas explosions in a building they knew was full of natural gas, and because we get this inclination as firefighters that we've got to rush in and take care of this thing as soon as possible instead of waiting for the gas company in a building that we know is evacuated.
• 47:48
  Speaker 2: Let's talk about some of those other instances where good decision-making will help us prevent that as well.
• 47:55
  Speaker 1: Aside from the rescue, Well, every single one of those requires firefighters, officers everybody to make decisions when they show up.
• 48:04
  Speaker 1: One of those requires firefighters, officers, everybody to make decisions when they show up.
• 48:08
  Speaker 1: They should have a standardized system that utilizes consistent training and exercise to be able to do that once the real thing happens Right.
• 48:16
  Speaker 1: And so if you show up and you don't have that and you're just making decisions, I would, I guess I would say or I would argue the point that a vast majority of the ones that just happened you know, structural collapse and those types of things they started out with the notion of we're going to go in there and save somebody.
• 48:35
  Speaker 1: We're going to go in there.
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: We got to put this out because there could be somebody in there and I got to tell you.
• 48:42
  Speaker 1: So the picture that pops in my head is Stricker Street in Baltimore City, no-transcript.
• 49:07
  Speaker 1: What did you do?
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: Why did you do it?
• 49:10
  Speaker 1: And now, looking at it, do you think it was worth it?
• 49:14
  Speaker 1: Because they can't answer those questions.
• 49:16
  Speaker 4: You know, like EMS, you go on an EMS call and somebody's got a broken leg.
• 49:22
  Speaker 4: It would almost be like, oh, we're going to CPR on you and somebody's got a broken leg.
• 49:27
  Speaker 4: It would almost be like, oh, we're going to do CPR on you.
• 49:29
  Speaker 4: No, my leg's broken.
• 49:30
  Speaker 4: No, we're going to do CPR on you Because if you're dead, this is going to save you.
• 49:37
  Speaker 4: No, you'd like do the signs and symptoms, you do a patient survey and then you treat them according to what's wrong with them.
• 49:40
  Speaker 4: It's the same thing at the scene of a burning building A gas leak.
• 49:44
  Speaker 4: Usually it comes in as a gas leak.
• 49:46
  Speaker 1: They dispatch a gas leak, Okay 75% of the Maydays and Don's deal that involved an explosion.
• 49:53
  Speaker 1: They knew it was a gas leak.
• 49:55
  Speaker 4: Yeah, and what it is is.
• 49:57
  Speaker 4: I hate gas leaks.
• 49:58
  Speaker 4: They're a son of a bitch, because we show up and we turn the gas off and we leave it.
• 50:02
  Speaker 4: Nothing ever happens.
• 50:03
  Speaker 4: And like a hundred of them, and then a hundred and one it blows up.
• 50:07
  Speaker 4: You're like, well, you spin the wheel and so we'll be that.
• 50:12
  Speaker 4: Well, no, it's like a revolver that has a hundred bullets and I've just put one in and now we, I have a one percent chance of killing myself.
• 50:20
  Speaker 4: Well, go to a hundred of them and you're going to, yeah, and the outcome is worse.
• 50:27
  Speaker 4: So you didn't save anyone.
• 50:30
  Speaker 4: You killed more people and you burnt the building to the ground.
• 50:34
  Speaker 4: Yeah, but we died and you can't talk bad about us now.
• 50:36
  Speaker 4: We're not talking bad about anybody.
• 50:39
  Speaker 4: We're trying to fix this ourselves.
• 50:42
  Speaker 4: Somebody said it you always got to be fixing yourself.
• 50:45
  Speaker 4: That's it.
• 50:48
  Speaker 4: You got to, because nobody else is going to do it for you.
• 50:49
  Speaker 4: What they're going to drag your ass to court when you screw up bad enough and they're going to whoop you.
• 50:53
  Speaker 1: You can't defend it do we come close to answering that, jay?
• 50:58
  Speaker 2: yeah, I think so and I think our moment of truth.
• 51:00
  Speaker 2: The next point too is if we don't fix it ourselves, they are going to regulate the hell out of us and they, meaning the federal government, is going to fix it.
• 51:09
  Speaker 2: And I think there are people right now who are looking at some of the things that happen and we can do a comparison state by state, and it's culturally different in different areas that you go.
• 51:20
  Speaker 2: I can show you a state that has had 26 line of duty deaths since 1997 in structure fires.
• 51:25
  Speaker 2: I can show you other state that has had 26 line of duty deaths since 1997 in structure fires.
• 51:27
  Speaker 2: I can show you other states where there's been three or four.
• 51:30
  Speaker 2: So that's a culture deal.
• 51:32
  Speaker 2: Right, that's something going on within those states and maybe the way they're trained or the lack of training and I think some of the cases that really create those environments for people and that's where the inconsistencies are.
• 51:47
  Speaker 3: Before we, before we wrap up, I just want to circle all the way back around to this, the comparison between line of duty deaths and the fire ground injuries.
• 51:56
  Speaker 3: And I think there's I mean there's a list of things that you know, I think probably line up of why line of duty deaths are down and why those injuries, you know, stay the same or sometimes are or or going up, you know here and there.
• 52:13
  Speaker 3: But, uh, you know the whole fact of our gear being better.
• 52:17
  Speaker 3: Well, yeah, you're, we survived some of those fire conditions probably, that we wouldn't have survived before.
• 52:24
  Speaker 3: So you know, I think that's a factor when it comes to how many firemen are dying versus how many firemen are potentially never coming back to work.
• 52:34
  Speaker 3: And then you know the medical system.
• 52:36
  Speaker 3: I mean, they can fix about anything.
• 52:39
  Speaker 3: It seems like, right, steve brought up about, you know, siano kits.
• 52:43
  Speaker 3: So you know us, us doing that.
• 52:45
  Speaker 3: You know that that's probably having an impact, the fact that when you go to the hospital I don't know it's been a long time since I heard it, but like 25 years ago, you, the hospital, and you were having a heart attack you might not come out, and today it's like you're going to, we're going to fix you and you're going to be out walking tomorrow.
• 53:03
  Speaker 3: So you know the whole medical system as far as line of duty deaths down.
• 53:07
  Speaker 3: But what do these injuries look like and what are these permanent disability pieces look like?
• 53:12
  Speaker 3: And again, I'll go back to the.
• 53:14
  Speaker 3: You know some Project Mayday data from Maydays and data that was reported into that system out of five years 2,600, and I think it was 19 permanent disabilities from Mayday events of injuries.
• 53:25
  Speaker 3: Out of five years 2,600, and I think it was 19 permanent disabilities from mayday events of injuries at a fire ground.
• 53:30
  Speaker 3: And it's like you know we need to be looking at all of that.
• 53:34
  Speaker 3: It's not just about line of duty deaths.
• 53:35
  Speaker 3: But you know we hear that line of duty deaths are down.
• 53:37
  Speaker 3: Line of duty deaths are down.
• 53:38
  Speaker 3: Line of duty deaths are down.
• 53:39
  Speaker 3: Well, that's fantastic that they're down, but there's more to it than just looking at line of duty death.
• 53:44
  Speaker 3: So I just I didn't want to wrap this up today without putting that out there for people to think about, like and really we should be learning from again every event.
• 53:54
  Speaker 3: Nobody even should have to get hurt or nothing even has to go sideways.
• 53:58
  Speaker 3: It's just we should learn from every single thing we do it's like oh, that was close, we're not going to do that again, or there's a better way.
• 54:06
  Speaker 4: Josh, I'm going to pick up right where you left off.
• 54:08
  Speaker 4: There's a group of people that say firefighter line of duties are down.
• 54:13
  Speaker 4: We need to be able to do more risky shit so we can get them back up where we think they should be.
• 54:18
  Speaker 4: I spent the last 12 years of my career as a response chief.
• 54:24
  Speaker 4: My number one goal was everybody that started in my shift, went home on my shift and within that is, we were going to deliver the very best service we could during the course of the shift.
• 54:37
  Speaker 4: So in my world that meant if, when we show up to the structure fire, we're going to put that out as quickly as possible and restore safety to the community, along with the people that are inside that building, if there are any.
• 54:51
  Speaker 4: My main concern was the workforce doing that.
• 54:54
  Speaker 4: That's why we took command.
• 54:55
  Speaker 4: That's why we did everything else was to protect the worker.
• 54:58
  Speaker 4: So sometimes you just got to tell them no to protect themselves and they're going to be pissed off about it and that is just too bad.
• 55:05
  Speaker 4: You're going to be mad.
• 55:06
  Speaker 4: We did it with a number of things.
• 55:11
  Speaker 4: People wanted to do crazy stuff with support work and I worked for a fire department that said no.
• 55:16
  Speaker 4: In fact it was the fifth largest city in the country.
• 55:18
  Speaker 4: I worked there about 30 years.
• 55:19
  Speaker 4: We had one structural firefighter going to do that during my career because of the way the fire chief managed us.
• 55:27
  Speaker 2: All right, you have a good quote for us.
• 55:29
  Speaker 2: Our timeless tactical truth for today is going to come from Josh.
• 55:33
  Speaker 2: What do you have for us from Chief Brunicini?
• 55:37
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so this is actually in Project Mayday and I've seen it a few other places.
• 55:43
  Speaker 3: So the chief said the capability of our protective gear can now consistently outperform the natural limits of our anatomy and physiology.
• 55:52
  Speaker 3: Just because you can go someplace on the fire ground doesn't mean you should go there.
• 55:57
  Speaker 3: Simply, our modern turnouts can live a lot longer than our old-fashioned bodies.
• 56:03
  Speaker 1: And we've never had more data and information right now for the people that are preoccupied with that information that clearly demonstrates it.
• 56:12
  Speaker 1: So it might have been before anecdotal and now we can actually measure it and we actually need to be teaching it and it actually needs to be part of the fire ground decision-making that incident commanders and division bosses and company officers are actually making their decisions based off of.
• 56:31
  Speaker 4: You know, it's like the B-shifter astronauts.
• 56:33
  Speaker 4: And they said where are you going the moon?
• 56:37
  Speaker 4: They said, no, we're going to the sun.
• 56:38
  Speaker 4: Anybody can go to the moon.
• 56:39
  Speaker 4: We're going to the sun.
• 56:40
  Speaker 4: They said you can't go to the sun.
• 56:42
  Speaker 4: They said, yeah, you can.
• 56:43
  Speaker 4: You take a rocket to the sun.
• 56:45
  Speaker 4: We're going to do it.
• 56:45
  Speaker 4: And they said, well, you'll burn up.
• 56:46
  Speaker 4: And they said, no, we're going to go at night.
• 56:53
  Speaker 3: All right.
• 56:54
  Speaker 2: I think with that one we can wrap it up boys.
• 56:56
  Speaker 2: Hey Josh, thanks for joining us remotely from your lair.
• 57:01
  Speaker 2: We appreciate it.
• 57:02
  Speaker 2: You think they're going to kill me with Bibles this time, vance?
• 57:07
  Speaker 2: Oh they might.
• 57:07
  Speaker 2: They're always looking to.
• 57:08
  Speaker 2: Until next time thanks so much for listening to B-Shifter.
• 57:16
  Speaker 1: Thanks guys, We'll see you next time.