Latest / Fire Engineering Podcast / In the Books: Episode 22 - Learning to Burn: Live Fire Training for the Modern Fire Environment

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In the Books: Episode 22 - Learning to Burn: Live Fire Training for the Modern Fire Environment · Fire Engineering Podcast

• Nat Kapustin: Hi everybody, I'm David Rhodes and welcome to In the Books. Honored to sit down with Battalion Chief Ian Bennett today, and he's a distinguished figure in the modern fire service training, and he's the author of a brand new book, Learning to Burn, Live Fire Training for the Modern Fire Environment. We published it with Fire Engineering Books. And Ian as the founder of West Coast Fire Training. he's dedicated his career to bridging the gaps between theoretical knowledge and the high stakes reality of the fire ground. With thousands of hours of experience conducting live fire training in both fixed facilities and acquired structures, he has become a leading voice in evolving our approach to live fire instruction. His work focuses heavily on utilizing modern scientific research to create safer, more objective-based training. environments that accurately simulate the complex fire behaviors encountered by today's firefighters. And anybody that's burned in a class A burned building knows the struggles of trying to get realistic fires with pallets, hay, straw, and OSB. So welcome. thanks for having me. I'm I'm excited to be here. So it's been out just a couple of weeks, already doing well. already sold several hundred copies and and growing. Awesome. That's great to hear. So give us a little bit of your background and r and history with the fire service. so I've got twenty years in the fire service this year, just got promoted to battalion chief. the whole time I've been with the Seattle Fire Department and I've been doing live fire training for about fourteen years now. Started at the State Academy and then I started doing recruit training stuff with our department. That led to some opportunities locally, and once we started doing what we were doing with the team, it attracted a lot of attention. And now I've been doing classes kind of all over the place from time to time, mostly about how to do live fire training more effectively. I've been on the NFPA 1400 committee, which governs 1403 since about 2002, as an alternate voting member under Brian Brush. And I'm a current member of the FSRI panel on multi story residential buildings. Cool. So other than the fact that we twisted your arm really, really, really hard, why why this book? well, so I kind of fell into the live fire training thing out of you know, just personal passion to get better at the job. And once we started me and the team started putting on classes, at least locally everyone was telling us like, hey, this isn't like what we normally do, how do you guys do this? What what are your processes? What what are you guys thinking about? And so I put together a basically a train the trainer class. Started doing that locally, then around the country. And as part of that I wanted to be able to leave folks with something like, Hey, here's some documentation, here's some best practices that you don't have to remember when I'm gone. And I'd been kind of toying with the idea of writing a book and then I did a train the trainer with Brian Brush out in Midwest City and he basically said, Look, man, you you you gotta write a book. Like if you want this knowledge to last, if you want to s stick around, you gotta write a book. And so here we are. And to my knowledge, there's not another book on the market that is specific to live fire training for instructors. yeah, there's only two other books that I could find written in the fire service that about live fire training and both of them emphasize heavily how to comply with 1403 but ne none of those books were dealing with the problems that I was dealing with as an instructor all the time. Where do I put myself? How do I prepare the students? How do I deal with the risks of an acquired structure? Why do people run into issues with retained heat in a concrete building versus a steel building? How do we change the fuel loads, alter the ventilation to get things to look the way we want them to look. how do we progress training so that we're not crushing new students while also challenging our more senior students, all all that stuff. Like none of that was coming out. And so that that's what this book addresses. I mean it does address the standard a little bit, but it's mostly about The mental framework you should have and then best practices to achieve both the conditions you're looking for, where to put your people, where to put the instructors, sample evolutions, all kinds of stuff. Yeah, I'm sure you had the same experience as I did when I was doing tons of live fire training, is that every building is different. And you can't just take your your plan from the building you're used to burning in and your hometown fire department and take it and put it right into another building and per expect the same fires and the same performance. So you you find that to be true. Yeah, every building is different. Every building has a different vent profile. Every building has a different layout. what I did try and do in the book is distill some principles down, both for fixed facilities and acquired structures. There are principles in terms of fuel loads and vent control. that will at least give you a strong place to start your process. You i especially if you have a fixed facility, you're gonna have to spend time playing around in it to discover exactly what you can get, but the principles in the book will give you a strong foundation to start from and hopefully avoid a bunch of mistakes, wasted time that you could run into by accident. So a lot of firefighters have heard about recent research and they may not be able to connect the dots. Some, you know, you hear some say, that's, you know, that was all done in a lab. That didn't make any that didn't make any practical sense to the to the real world out here. but a lot has been learned over the last ten, fifteen years with a lot of the studies that have gone on that are really applicable not not only in the training environment but in the o out on the street too. How does how does your book help instructors translate the modern fire behavior science into actual actionable items and realistic training drills? Well, I would say that a lot of the reason I think the reason a lot of people have a hard time connecting training to the research results is most of the training we're creating doesn't accurately or even closely replicate the modern fire environment. And so if you never create conditions that require you to use best practices, why would you use those best practices? How are you going to justify getting low and looking in that little gap under the smoke if you never create a condition that requires them or rewards them from doing that? how can you emphasize, hey, you should apply more water on the advance to the fire room if they've never ever had to do it in training? so I think The book helps in that sense. One, a lot of the research from FSRI is cited in the book, especially their training research, but it shows you how to generate conditions that justify the stuff that they suggest. Very difficult to get event limited fire in a in an academy burn building without some modifications or some shrinkage of the room. Or larger fuel loads. that I think that is Which can get out of hand sometimes. It's about Out of hand, I would be curious what people mean by that. is I think people I mean, we send people into real houses with modern fuel loads that are hundreds of times larger than anything we'll ever use in a training burn, even the ones that I do. And we expect firefighters to operate in those environments safely and successfully, and they usually do. And so how can we not create Training fires that are similar. It's about the approach to how we create those fires and where we put our people in relation to the fires when once they're created. You know, you would never put someone if you if you were gonna create a simulated flashed over bedroom fire with h fire in the hallway. What we tell firefighters now is that yeah, you cool the hallway, you flow on the way to the fire room, and then you flow water in the fire room. You don't walk down the hallway and burn the crap out of yourself and then go into the fire room where it's on fire. Why would we do that in training? It's we're we're we're doing things in training that we would never do in real life. And then we wonder why people get hurt. Yep. My my old favorite was as soon as you open the line, the instructor would say, Shut it off, shut it off, don't put my fire out. So then you get to calls and you see people like squirting little bits of water on the on the fire and you're like please open the Please just open the does flow water. It it's interesting, people often complain about we don't get to put the the base coals out. But when we do that in fixed facilities, we often tell the students don't put the base coals out because of the exact same thing, reset times. But when you create a approach condition that is high heat, zero visibility, roll over fifteen feet from the fire room, and they have to flow on move Would move on the advance, suddenly no one's really worried about like, hey, I didn't get to put the base coals out. They actually got to experience that they've knocked all the visible fire down. Yeah, they got to experience an actual fire attack that actually demanded their skills. I think the reason we obsess so much about putting that base coal fires out is that we didn't get to do anything else. Right, because you were doing one room. When it said one room fire, it was literally one room fire. And it was really a pump cam fire. Right. It was really a pump camp fire and so if you're not gonna let me do anything, then why am I even here? So you emphasize objective based an objective based model for live fire training. What do you mean by that? I think we need to think more critically about what live fire training is for. What it what are we trying to get the students to learn? So most of the training that we do in the fire service is skills development. We're trying to teach you to force a door, advance a charge line, flow and move, and and that's as it should be, right? Most of what we do skills. But we try and do skills type training, which is high repetition, all hands-on in live fire. And live fire isn't good for that. it takes a long time to get right, takes a long time to s set up, it's expensive. So we need to use it what it's good for what it is best for, which is Showing you when to apply your skills and how to apply them in the target environment and getting used to the target environment. So many new students or folks who don't go to a lot of fires, they're not exactly sure when to flow water. They're not exact exactly sure how much fire can my gear withstand so that I can close this door with my tool. Those are the questions we need to answer for them with live fire training. Doing sixteen reps of you know, a flow and move advance on a pumpkin fire, that's a waste of time. We should just do the flow and move advance with no fire at all. Same thing with any high rep live fire training. I would rather do four hyper realistic fires where they got to do skills that really conform to the environment that we're showing them. and they'll get way more out of it. we think that everyone has to do the physical skill manipulation and that's not actually true. it would be ideal, but it's more valuable for them to see the right skill done at the right time in the right way. in a realistic condition. I mean, psychology sh ha teaches us that if I see someone who looks like me with the same skill set as me perform a skill successfully in the target environment, my own skill and my own belief in my skill goes up. So I can have five students. Sit at the top of the hallway, create heavy fire in the hallway, and have one person do a flow and move attack to the bedroom, and all five students got almost the exact same value in terms of establishing a cue for when to do the skill, showing them how to do the skill in the right time, and even seeing errors and seeing those errors get fixed. So it's much we need to emphasize quality over quantity in live fire training. And we make the mistake. that we need to emphasize quantity, high reps instead of quality. Yeah. And when they're looking, they're they're probably actually learning even more than the person on the on the nozzle because they're seeing it like from they're seeing the whole effect. And they're totally relaxed. They're not stressed at all. There's no performance anxiety, none of that. I got a a story I often tell in relation to this is when we were doing acquired structure live fire operations training here in Seattle. There was a he's now retired, but there was a really salty old truck lieutenant. Been around forever, seen a bunch of stuff, and we brought his crew down and they didn't do anything. We said, Hey, we're gonna start you here in the living room. We're gonna move back through the kitchen once the fire grows, and then you're gonna end up in this little transition space, and then the nozzle's gonna flow and move past you, and you're gonna watch what happens. And that's that's all we did. And he came out. After doing two rounds of that, and he said that is the best live fire training I've ever had in my entire career. Because he got to spend time with the fire, we actually flashed the living room over. But because of the distance, the safety lines that we had in place and the instructor positioning, it was all safe and controlled. But he and his crew got to spend a lot of time just inside with the fire, and it was a very realistic fire. So as a truck company officer. Trying to teach new truckmen like this is what you can take, this is what how close you can get, this is the effect that different headers are gonna have, this is when the stairwell to floor two is no longer tenable. Like those lessons we can't just we can't teach those any other way, and we can't teach them if we're super obsessed on like, hey, let's get a skills rep in. Just run upstairs as fast as you can and bounce through those rooms as fast as you can. So when we say modern fire environment, we're really talking about the different fuel loads than we had years years ago where everything was natural fibers and woods and then that has really changed the the interior fire environment over the last thirty, forty years. So knowing the restrictions on the materials that we use in these training scenarios, how should instructors adjust their live fire setups to try to maximize that? That same same look or or feel that they're trying to get. And what's some of the tricks of the trade that you found? The biggest thing is you have to limit limit ventilation as much as possible. If we're trying to create vent limited conditions, which is what the modern fire environment is, we need to create vent limited fires. So closing up your windows, your doors, sealing up, you know, all your little penetrations in your steel containers. The other thing too is a lot of times in fixed facilities, you just have to use larger fuel loads. And people again, they worry about that because of the additional heat. but if you're doing fewer repetitions, higher quality burns, and actually sp you know, having the attack line cool the walls, the ceiling, the floor on the advance as they would at a modern fire, you actually, in my experience, deal with less heat issues. you'll have way more heat problems in a fixed facility if you do twelve to sixteen high repetition burns because the box never cools off. Whereas if you do, you know, five, six burns in a day, highly realistic, large fuel loads, lots of rollover down the hallway or in from room to room, but then the hose line is actually making the advance, you're cooling all the surfaces, you deal with much less r retained heat in general. How about the building itself? Like the thresholds, the door jams, things like that. Do you you see any any differences with that type of fuel load? generally no. You're gonna in a steel facility you're gonna run into all the same issues. Track welds. Yeah. I mean any time you heat and then cool steel, it it it's gonna change shape and you're gonna have those issues. You'll sometimes deal with a little bit more flex because of the your cooling more and more off more intensely. But the heat in the actual burn cell itself is often lower or not as high for as long, because again, you're cooling those surfaces and resting between burns. I've never had, you know, flooring on the the box above catch on fire doing the style of burning that I recommend. You do a pump can class with twelve, sixteen fires, that flooring on the level above is gonna catch on fire. So you you also say that the instructors the difference between control chaos and and true learning. What's the most critical responsibility of an instructor during a live burn and how does your book help them manage that role? Well clearly the most important role of the instructor is to keep the students safe. And a good instructor can lead I say this often, a good instructor can lead the most junior student through very intense conditions and a poor instructor can endanger your most advanced students. And there's a bunch of different strategies that we discuss in throughout the book, starting from how you prepare your students, the right attitude for your instructor your instructors, bad attitudes that you might run into in instructors. the most important one I think is in is instructor knowledge. They have to be well educated. Like instructor one is not enough. I think we all know that. And a good attitude is not enough either. And so I personally think of Live Fire Training as kind of an unrecognized minor technical discipline. If we look at high risk training, you know, swift water, rope rescue, tunnel, collapse, these are all very high risk training events, potentially. But we do them often and they're successful because the people involved and the people running a show are actually fully prepared To conduct that thing. They can look at a knot across the training drill ground and be like, that's wrong. They'll see a student do something and be like, Hey, hey, have you thought about this? You know, they're they're catching problems, they're predicting issues well ahead of time because of their education. And it's it's it should be the same in live fire. We think that because we're good at putting out fires, we're good at teaching and creating live fire conditions, and that's not true. Like the The skills of the coach, the skills of the instructor are not the same as the skills of the operator. There's there's bleed over there for sure. I mean if you're a really good firefighter, your ability to teach, your ability to predict conditions in live fire will be will be much better, but it's not the same. But you gotta be able to create those conditions to show you can't just say, Now in a real fire, this is what it would look like. It would look more than more than these two pallets. Yes, yes. If you find yourself saying if if we could In real fire it would look like this. It's already over. You've already lost. Yeah. So what are some of the most common mistakes that you see instructors making with live burn and what do they do to correct those? so I think one of the most basic is not having a plan. I think a lot of live fire training is just, hey, let's just throw some stuff together. and or going wildly off plan. Like, hey, we got these plans, they may not be ideal. And I don't like the plan, so I'm just gonna throw you know 17 more pallets on here. So it'll look like something. the other one is bad instructor positioning. you and that by that I generally mean letting the student get too close to the fire. so I mean students will hurt themselves out of either ignorance or a desire to get their gear salty or show how brave they are. And instructors need to be in a position where they can feel Heat at the same time or ahead of the student so that you can protect them from themselves. And then another common one is that you see instructors who try and make training stressful in a way that is not related to live fire training by and it's usually by yelling at students or degrading them or berating them in in ways that don't really relate to what you're trying to accomplish. Now, you can add additional stress by yelling and all that stuff in the right. circumstances. I'm not against that type of thing if if it's for the right reason, but if you're bringing in recruits or, you know, junior firefighters and then you're just yelling at go faster, you sway up to that. Why why are you so awful? your mom would never want you to come to your I mean that that's not helpful. it's it it's a misunderstanding of how stress exposure training works. In fact there's a whole chapter on that in the book. Yeah. That's not something you start out with the with the recruits. Yeah. So fuel management. It's been an ongoing debate about different fuel loads and fuel types, especially with all the cancer concerns and stuff. tell us your thoughts on the importance of understanding the difference between wet and dry fuels and how that knowledge changes the instructional outcome. I'll address the fuel types. as a minor number of fourteen hundred, we debated this a bunch. There was the whole OSB, no S no OSB conversation. the fourteen hundred committee has landed that we are gonna keep OSB as part of the discussion. And really, if you dig into the research from FSRI and what they say, and you know, I got this from multiple scientists' mouths, is that when you burn anything in a vent limited state, it creates smoke. And all of that incomplete combustion is toxic. It's just a it's just different toxic. Byproducts of combustions that that are created. So which one do you want? OSB got cited out for a specific reason. But if you look at the different results and you look at the error bars, they're all they're all in the same pallets. Straw, hay, OSB, they're they're all in the same area. And truly, if you think that burning OSB is so toxic that we shouldn't do it anymore. The only moral choice when it comes to exposure is that you can't burn class A fuels. You need to go to gas props and fake smoke. and I I disagree with that in terms because I don't think you can create the training that firefighters need with using that. so where we've landed is that you need to really be on top of your decon. I mean, all the research is also there. Just look at the stuff that's getting put out by FSRI. All the work done by guys like Frank Leib, like guys gotta be using their doing their wet decon, they gotta be using their wipes, they gotta be swapping their hoods, showering within the hour. There's so many effective processes that can reduce the amount of exposure that we do get. that's where we need to be focusing our efforts when we're doing the live fire training. And then on top of that, are you getting your annual annual physicals? Are you taking care of yourself personally? Like We have annual physicals in my department and it saved more lives than any training that I do. So Yeah, I I was actually involved in that that study with all the different materials for the flashover chambers and it was interesting that you know, sometimes the hotter the material burned, the less of certain certain chemicals and exposure you had. So in some cases the OSB was better. Then the pallets were a little more slow burning, but in the end, they all put off the same the same stuff and it's all in there. And what's your thoughts? something I've always pushed to to chiefs that were sort of on the bubble or kind of against live fire training was that look, you don't need to worry about your your rank and file that are coming to the class. If you want to limit exposure and have policies then have for your instructors. They're the ones that's going in there day to day. Your students coming out once or twice a year, they're not getting enough exposure to to really worry about. It's negligible. But your but your instructors which is addressed in the standard about the number of reps and and stuff. So talk a little bit about that. Yeah, there's what the standard says and then I think from an an individual organization perspective, extra sets of gear. You know, all of the lab fire instructors, at least in my department, generally have a third set of gear, so you can make sure that you're getting good rotations. You're always in a clean set, at least at the start of every day. And then expanding expanding your cadre. That's a delicate balance, of course. you want to keep the experience level high, but you also need to have enough so that folks aren't getting overexposed. And so just in investing in that way. And, you know We as instructors, I'm sure you feel the same, are we're the worst. Right? I mean, we wanna be the in as long as possible. We wanna go to every single training event. I'm you know, I'm not gonna swap my hood this time at lunch because I'll I'll just get it dirty again later. Like we need to set the example. And so that's where I would start with that. Yep. And you you mentioned like the class B buildings, the fuel fed props and the and the smoke machines. It's like There's a place for that in the r in the reps, but you're not gonna get the same you're not gonna get the same effect as you are with the class A materials. You and and they're super expensive to maintain those things. But logistically you can get some reps in and I mean that especially with the smoke, even the digital panel stuff can get you some good reps and stuff in. But at some point You've got to get it to where you're in that class A fire environment if you want your people to see what it's really gonna look like out there in the field. Would you agree with that? A hundred percent. And there's also a huge part with personal confidence, you know, in that I can create zero visibility conditions with fake smoke, but the students know it's fake. And so they can get used to being blind, but it's not gonna build the confidence when they're in a living room and they can't see anything because the smoke's to the floor and it's kinda warm in there. Kinda warm. But if I can do that in a class A building with even with pallets and hay and OSB, they'll feel real heat, they'll have real visibility. It will actually move in front of their face piece and their flashlight. And that the confidence that builds is just something you can't create any other way. At least not yet. So what do you say to the To the folks that argue that the realistic training is too too dangerous? I would say there is risk there, but that risk can be mitigated. And there's risk everywhere. If we a well trained firefighter is at less risk at on real responses than a poorly trained firefighter. And if I lower the risk to my people by lowering the quality of training, I have I haven't actually lowered their overall risk. I've just reduced training risk. And in training I can control all the variables. But I've increased their risk in the operational world where I can't control any of the inputs or very few. Now sometimes you can control risk in the operational world by not going inside. But now I've transferred the risk to me from me as the firefighter to the civilian who didn't get to participate in this part of the discussion. And so you just just gotta ask where do you want to have your risk. And I would much rather have the risk in an area that I can control all the variables from instructor preparation to fuel loads to all that stuff so that there's less risk in the operational realm. Always use the comparison as they don't let even though they have phenomenal simulators, they don't let airplane pilots take passengers up just because they're good at the simulator. Yeah. They gotta get some actual flying time in. without passengers. Yeah, a hundred percent. You would never ask a soldier to go into combat never having shot their gun. That's it. For for the new generation coming into the fire service, how does the training philosophy outlined in the book specifically pair them for the unpredictable nature of a modern fire structure? In other words, like what are you putting together for these instructors that they're passing along that makes a difference in the in the new person coming in? ability to process and understand. Yeah, they're getting t they're getting to spend time with actual, realistic fire conditions that simulate closely what they'll experience in the real world. Not fully, right? We're not at a posit place yet where we can fully create those conditions. And I it's interesting you you said the unpredictable nature of modern structural fires, but the I personally would argue that Modern fires, as fast and as event limited as they are, are highly predictable. Fire dynamics are governed by the laws of physics, airflow, and the the stuff that we as firefighters have to understand is actually pretty simple. What makes it often seem unpredictable timing is that we're not it we're not used and we're not used to it, right? Unless you're at a super busy department, the number of times that you actually get to go in and spend a lot of time inside the burning building is pretty low. And so if we can put them in realistic conditions regularly in training, they'll actually be able to read the conditions that they're in. And so what seems crazy and unpredictable will become much more predictable. So if they you know if if they come through like you see it a bunch, guys will force the front door and there's smoke coming out at knee level and then they just rush inside. They never like put their head on the ground and look under the smoke real quick. Just takes like one second. But it's a cheat code, right? You can see, you could generally get the lid out of the whole living room and find out where the halls are. But if you've never been put in a condition that allows you to do that and rewards you to do that where there's no time pressure, right? Hey, just take a second, look around. Sit back up again, look around again. Everybody come up and take a look. then you'll never do it in real life because all you've been taught is hey, just get on your knees and won't and move forward. same thing, you know, if if a nozzle firefighter crawls over a victim on the way to the fire room and doesn't even notice, well it's because they're super overwhelmed by the scenario. But I what I could do is I could create a vent limited condition, put a you know a soft roof lee dummy in the hallway. And then have them feel that so they can actually get used to the feeling of different materials as they move over them. And suddenly it will stick out to them like, hey, this isn't this isn't normal. So that they can actually learn to to process. I think the I think the unpredictable kind of comes from my generation of seeing we s we still had plenty of like mill town type structures that had did not have carpet and modern stuff in it. So we would still go to those true class A fires, sometimes and a lot of them were vacant and they didn't have anything in but they were true class A fires that you could pop a hole in the roof and spend all day, you know, and they're waiting on the fire to grow. But the the the firefighters that have come along in the last twenty years or so, pretty much all they've seen is the modern fuel load. And y and you are right. I mean there's always unpredictable things like You know, you might go to a fire on you know floor thirty of an apartment building in some downtown and the fire will not go out because it's actually two EV bikes that caught on fire in the living room. And that's unpredictable. Or you might be trying to put out the fire in, you know, the living room or the you know in the kitchen and it's not going out because actually it's a descending hillside home and the fire's on the floor below and it's burned through the floor. But the more used to normal that I am, the more likely I'm able to predict, like, hey man, this is this apartment fire is not going out. Like I don't know what's going on here. Yeah. Something's something's different here. But I've been pulling water for 45 seconds and the fire is exactly the same. And now I can actually understand that that's different somehow. Maybe that whistle I'm hearing from that propane cylinder in the kitchen means something. Yeah, exactly. As opposed to just being part of the cacophony. The more normal we can make the inside of the burning building. the more people will be able to differentiate between the different signals that they're getting. So what would be something that you would change to the way the fire service approaches live fire training on a national level? I know you've been worked on the standard, you know the the results, and I know from from my perspective, I've always been a proponent of acquired structures as much as possible. But it's more and more difficult. Almost impossible in some places to get the permitting and stuff done. But what's what we what would you like like to see for the future? Man, there's a bunch. If I can only pick one, I would say it's what's required of the live fire instructor. going back to that education piece, a good instructors and a good cadre can get a lot out of a very basic building and they can take students through very intense conditions. They can They can alter conditions based on student ability and understand why that's important. And again, bad bad instructors can take the best designed building or any an acquired structure and just waste their time. So that's where I would start. I mean there's there's others I can I can go on for a while if you want. I'll hit a couple more just for good sake. I think we should be designing most of our fixed facilities differently than we do. I I think we design generally for durability. rather than for presentation or for ease rather than presentation. So if we want to like I'll just take convex boxes for an example. It's very common to use just a 20 foot connex box as your burn cell. Now that makes your life as a live fire instructor much more difficult because I have to fill the entire 20 foot connex box with fire, smoke, and heat before it will move into the next box. Whereas some of the best designs I've seen, the burn cell itself is very, very small. Or for instance, in in brushes building floor two, there isn't even a burn cell. The the burn cell is just at the end of the hallway. But what that does is it allows you to create a hallway fire instantaneously. And so I can create a hallway fire that with various approaches which simulate many of the common building types in that district. And for an or on the opposite end, you know, there was a very expensive fixed facility that was built and many of the departments that use it conduct BES, window initiated search, whatever you want call it. Not a single room in that fixed facility, which was three stories tall, supported that operation because none of the rooms were designed to feel like a bedroom. You know. Window layouts were all wrong, door positions were all wrong. And so if you wanted to conduct one of the most basic fire ground operations, it's very useful and popular, how are you gonna support that in that building? and so I think, you know, fixed facilities are the future, right? Love acquired structures. Amazing. Would do them all the time if I could. But that's just not the reality. And so if we're gonna be designing fixed facilities, we need to design them correctly. So th those would be my two. Yeah. And there's this it's tough to get a nice modern open floor plan in a connex building too, even though they're durable and and cheap comp comparatively, again they're they're not they're not as realistic floor plans as what we're encountering on houses, today for sure. what else you got? Any final thoughts here? We're about forty minutes in, kinda Wrap it up a little bit. Anything about the book or what you've seen out there? I've definitely seen a lot of interest in live fire training. I think people understand the value. I think the biggest hurdle that people sometimes have is they don't have a mental model for what actual good live fire training looks like. all they've seen is high rep stuff and what they've read in the line of duty death reports. And so when people talk about larger fuel loads, more realistic pre presentations, they are rightfully concerned and worried about the risks that presents. And so it's hard for them to model what that would look like. I think also our focus on high rep training skills development gets in our way. If people could look more into kind of the association of how we apply skills in target environments, it would make it easier to understand. why we need to do fire live fire training differently. Do you do other than like flash over flash over chamber type stuff, do you guys do any like fire behavior in the actual class A building? that was kind of a staple here where I'm at is like for your first live fire. You everybody gathered in the room, they lit the fire, you watched it progress all the way through all the stages, you watched the smoke bank down and it was really a fire behavior. class, no line I mean there was a line in there for the instructor and they would they would open it up on a straight stream, hit the ceiling, a little Z pattern down, knock it down a little bit, and then they'd let you watch it come back, let you see the smoke layer rise. Then they'd hit it with a fog pattern and bring everything down on you and you had to crawl out. Now when when we did that back in my early days, there was you didn't you didn't have an air pack on when you were in there. You were just down underneath the smoke. When they changed it to require an air pack We w we were upset because you did not get the same like feel. you know, you couldn't really see the environment, kinda like you were falsely in a safe environment, but obviously we understand the reasons why. But do you guys do any type of fire behavior stuff? I know you talked about, you know, having the crews watch the fire attack, but what what's your what's your take on that? I I'm not against I mean I think you're gonna learn a lot from flashover chambers or an evolution like you described. But generally I we don't do that partially because most of the facilities that we're teaching in don't have big rooms like that. And also because while that is useful with the time that we have, I find it more useful to do what I would consider consider room fires, where you're watching the fire behavior from outside the room, either from the the room outside or the hallway outside. Because if we think about the reality of what most firefighters face Finding early incipient stage fires, because that's really what what they are when we put them in the room with the fire itself, unless you're in a flashover chamber, if you're in the room on the same plane, it's either and you're in the room, it's an incipient stage fire. It's not it it's not truly banking down unless and so I think it's more useful to hold them outside the room, show growth from the door, and then you can bring up to the door and show stuff through there and then door control, showing them what That is, I think that's more useful. I think that might be another reason why people have a hard time conceptualizing more realistic presentation is because they're used to just being in the room with the fire as opposed to, hey, and we'll we'll start people really close. You might even start them in the room with the the fuel package itself. But you know, once you start to get ceiling jet, then it's pull back to the hallway. Now we'll show door stuff. And then as Conditions intensify in the room itself, we pull you back to the next room. And you might actually bounce two rooms back, three rooms back, and then forward again. Just continue watching. Yep. So that you can see how conditions progressively change based on headers, based on room size, based on whether or not the door from the living room to the the hallway is closed. I think there's so much more value. We want to stick firefighters right next to the fire because it's visually Impressive, right? We all like to see the flames. But there's often a lot of value farther back. What about pre pre going to the live fire? how important is is some type of classroom preparation to use video to to get ready for the ready for the event, fire behavior training, anything like that? a hundred percent. Absolutely. Absolutely. They sh they should have that. I mean in the op in the open classes we teach or when we go to departments, we don't usually have time for that. I'll rely on the department to do it. But if if you're in-house, absolutely. I mean, people should be watching, you know, all the videos from FSRI, like they should be seeing rooms flash over, they should be seeing off gassing of couches and carpet and all that stuff. All none of that should be a mystery at all when they go in. And they should you should be ensuring that their skills are adequate or You know, maybe not they won't be able to get to mastery level without live fire training, but they should be at competence. And that's another big thing that we talk about in training and in the book is we often ask students to do things in live fire training that they aren't actually ready to do. Like, hey, we're gonna create these conditions for a flow and move attack. Well, we just did flow and move for the first time yesterday, and I'm still trying to figure out where to put my right hand versus my knee. And so we're asking people to do things too too early. Again, back to that kind of technical discipline, right? We don't ask people to do rope rescue when they can't even tie a bowling. What kind of advice do you have for somebody who's a up and coming fire instructor but they haven't quite moved into the to the live fire instructor ranks yet? How do they how do they get started? What's some what's some good advice for them? How do they get started in their own department or or State level. I I would say, you know, you you have to stay a student yourself, right? Go to as much live fire training as you can, see what you like, see what you don't like, see what works, what doesn't work, because there's good training and bad training out there, and you can learn sometimes just as much from bad training. you really have to dig into the science of adult education and the science of fire itself, right? As a like as a nozzle operator. You don't need to dig deep necessarily to be good at the job, but if you're gonna be an instructor, you gotta dig deep. You gotta know the science, you gotta know the skills. you gotta be super dialed in on all your basics and otherwise you won't be able to tell the student how to apply that basic in in the time that it needs to be applied. Get out there and you know, help out with the existing live fire instructors and you know, you might just be you you you might be on the fire load side. for a minute, but that's where you're gonna learn it and then and then work your way work your way up through by building those relationships. Yeah, a hundred percent. All right. Well this book is a must for anyone who's a live fire instructor or wants to be a f live fire instructor, academy director, safety officers, be sure to look for Ian's live fire class at FDIC in twenty twenty seven on fire loads. You can get your copy of this book at fireengineering books dot com. So on behalf of everyone at Fire Engineering Books, I'm David Rhodes with Ian Bennett asking you to remember that every day is a training day and this one is in the books. Thanks. Thanks everybody.