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Remembering The Bret Tarver Incident · B Shifter

• 0:43
  Speaker 1: Hello John Vance here from B-Shifter.
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us today for a very special B-Shifter podcast.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: Today's date is March 14, 2024, and today commemorates the 23rd anniversary of the Southwest supermarket fire in Phoenix, arizona.
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: While this incident resulted in the death of firefighter Brett Tarver it's important to note 13 total May days were transmitted and deep scars for many working in the Phoenix Fire Department.
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: It also resulted in a transformative change to the American fire service.
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: Through unparalleled leadership and vision.
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: A five-year examination of what actually occurred took place.
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: The focus of the examination, most importantly covered why it occurred.
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: As a result, fire Chief Alan Brunassini recognized critical changes needed to be made on all levels on the fire ground.
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: A diligent team worked to uncover, refine and implement significant changes that ultimately led to what we know as the Blue Card Incident Command certification system today.
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: This certification system is designed to establish a standard, provide training and give a mechanism to measure performance in the streets for over 4,000 fire departments across the world.
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: The lessons learned have not been lost or forgotten, and we continue to apply them today.
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: So, first of all, we'll be joined here in the studio by Nick Brunassini, terry Garrison and Chris Stewart.
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: They're going to talk about as members of the fire department that day and what occurred Then.
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: We'll also go to clips of Chief Alan Brunassini recording that was made several years ago at the National Fire Academy.
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: It was facilitated by Chief Dennis Rubin, who you'll hear talking about that, and Chief Brunassini will talk about the Tarver Recovery process as well.
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: We appreciate you joining us today and let us never forget the sacrifices made by Brett Tarver, those on the scene and as we continue to fix ourselves every day.
• 2:56
  Speaker 2: You know I'll go ahead and jump off here, because I just happened to be in an acting deputy chief position at the time.
• 3:04
  Speaker 2: I had a staff job.
• 3:05
  Speaker 2: They assigned me there to a staff job for a couple of months and in those days the staff deputy chief would respond as a senior advisor to incidents.
• 3:15
  Speaker 2: And so I responded to that call.
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: And then, route to that call, I heard the May days.
• 3:22
  Speaker 2: So the May days had occurred prior to me arriving on the scene.
• 3:25
  Speaker 2: And when I arrived on the scene so my role was pretty much to support the inside commander and wait for the command van to show up the command van had already got, already just arrived, I think prior to my arrival.
• 3:40
  Speaker 2: And so I went over and I got in a command van and when I walked into the command van John Hinton was already in the command van and he was ready to kind of take the incident while the IC number two was in his suburban.
• 3:59
  Speaker 2: So that was kind of John's role at the time.
• 4:03
  Speaker 2: And I think and I'll let other guys jump in because I don't want to monopolize the front end of this too much but what had happened was for us, the May days were occurring, the building was extremely volatile.
• 4:17
  Speaker 2: The smoke was coming across.
• 4:18
  Speaker 2: It was a wind driven fire.
• 4:20
  Speaker 2: The command van and the first suburban, which is the first IC vehicle, were parked where the smoke was headed.
• 4:27
  Speaker 2: We were on the smoky side of the building, the actual windward side of the building.
• 4:34
  Speaker 2: Is that correct, windward?
• 4:35
  Speaker 2: Sorry, I know that.
• 4:39
  Speaker 3: You were leeward.
• 4:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we were the leeward.
• 4:41
  Speaker 2: The wind was coming from the west and we were on the east side.
• 4:44
  Speaker 2: How about that and so I walked in the command van.
• 4:49
  Speaker 2: I saw John Hinton there and he had his partner, who was his driver at the time, was like where's the IC?
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: He's over in the suburban.
• 4:59
  Speaker 2: I've tried to get him over here a few times.
• 5:01
  Speaker 2: I've told him to come on over, we're ready for him.
• 5:03
  Speaker 2: And just because of the nature of the call and the way we operated back then, it was difficult to get Richard Boeft, the IC, over to the command van because he was incredibly busy.
• 5:17
  Speaker 2: And I could understand that, because we all would have that same problem back then moving from a server into the command van, and so we physically had to go grab him by force and bring him to the command van and sit him in the command van.
• 5:35
  Speaker 2: John Hinton took over the radio operation from there he became the IC until Richard Boeft got in the command van and then we kind of operated it as a command team from that point on.
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: And this was before or after the May Day.
• 5:48
  Speaker 2: This was after the May Day.
• 5:49
  Speaker 2: The May Day is actually.
• 5:51
  Speaker 4: It was the initial May.
• 5:52
  Speaker 2: Day.
• 5:52
  Speaker 2: Right, yeah, the initial May Day actually occurred while I was en route to the Incident.
• 5:56
  Speaker 2: I was listening on the tactical channel and I could hear the May Day.
• 6:01
  Speaker 2: I couldn't hear it very clearly as I was driving, I was making my way through traffic in a staff vehicle, don't know the best I could, but I did hear the May Day.
• 6:11
  Speaker 2: So this was after the May Day.
• 6:14
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I actually wasn't at the scene.
• 6:17
  Speaker 4: I came in and I relieved.
• 6:18
  Speaker 4: It was a C-Shift fire.
• 6:19
  Speaker 4: I was a B-Shifter and I came in and relieved engine six.
• 6:24
  Speaker 4: Rudy Demos on engine six and they had been the company that actually had them in ladder one have their hands on Brett blast.
• 6:30
  Speaker 4: They were the ones that actually got him out of the building.
• 6:33
  Speaker 4: So I don't have any personal experience actually at the scene, but I did speak the ladder one that night.
• 6:38
  Speaker 4: I got the download from engine six that night and kind of the kind of the raw emotion really of that and you know what had happened and and folks that I've known for a long time and worked with and who I knew to be really, really competent Firefighters, you know, looking at you with the most serious eyes you can imagine, saying that was the hardest thing we've ever done.
• 6:59
  Speaker 4: It was, it was unbelievably difficult to get him out of there.
• 7:02
  Speaker 4: So that's kind of my connection to it and then and then then everything that went on the recovery afterwards and my participation.
• 7:10
  Speaker 3: Say.
• 7:10
  Speaker 3: But none of it started that way.
• 7:13
  Speaker 3: The call started off.
• 7:14
  Speaker 3: It was kids walking home from school.
• 7:17
  Speaker 3: There was a dumpster and some trash by it and they lit it on fire.
• 7:22
  Speaker 3: So when the first cruise got there it was an outside fires what they were fighting, so and they were kind of taking it that way.
• 7:28
  Speaker 3: But they had, you know, they had covered all their tactical positions.
• 7:31
  Speaker 3: They put lines where they needed to, but it became very difficult to tell that the fire had actually extended into the building.
• 7:40
  Speaker 3: So I think that kind of kept sucking them into the thing.
• 7:44
  Speaker 3: So in the very beginning they thought they had a fire that was more outside.
• 7:49
  Speaker 3: And then, even when, like Rich got there and transferred command is, they had called for more help and they were getting ready to cancel that because he thought he had fire control.
• 8:00
  Speaker 3: I mean, that's what it was starting to look like, but the smoke wouldn't stop.
• 8:03
  Speaker 3: So they thought that something's still going on.
• 8:06
  Speaker 3: So you just couldn't get around the whole thing to figure out exactly what you had going on.
• 8:11
  Speaker 3: And they had already come back with an all-clear on the grocery store before there was ever a May day.
• 8:15
  Speaker 3: I mean some of the first crews.
• 8:18
  Speaker 3: They went in to the grocery store and then the two Occupancies that were built into the grocery store got all clears on them.
• 8:26
  Speaker 3: No fire, nothing in the attic and those two exposures and then in the big store they just had a little haze here and there and so they cleared the store.
• 8:35
  Speaker 3: There was nobody inside the grocery store anymore and then it they had called, they had balanced, got more help and I want to say it was engine 3 was staged in level 1 staging and the, the captain on the truck, watched the fire flash in the back of the grocery store and and got on the radio and said did you see to called rich?
• 8:59
  Speaker 3: So you see what just happened?
• 9:01
  Speaker 3: Yeah, we're on it.
• 9:01
  Speaker 3: So now it's like okay, we know.
• 9:05
  Speaker 3: And so now they start taking lines in places and that's where it, yeah, the act to is really what kind of sucker punched them in the thing right and you know about that, is rich.
• 9:15
  Speaker 2: But rich had a really good plan the way he was operating around that incident prior to the May day Because, like you said, the way the grocery store had been there for so many years.
• 9:26
  Speaker 2: But they built those two structures on the I think the south Excuse me- yeah, the southeast side yeah and it looked like it was originally.
• 9:37
  Speaker 2: It looked like it was part of the building.
• 9:38
  Speaker 2: They did such a great job with the facade and making a match so well.
• 9:42
  Speaker 2: So when rich sent guys in there to check, he sent a crew in there and pulled sill and make sure it's not above us.
• 9:47
  Speaker 2: They went in there, they pulled sill in and those two occupancies there was no fire, no smoke.
• 9:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we were clear up here.
• 9:55
  Speaker 4: I think it was in 21.
• 9:56
  Speaker 2: Yeah, everything should be pretty good.
• 9:57
  Speaker 2: We're doing fine in here.
• 9:59
  Speaker 2: So he's feeling pretty comfortable about about everything.
• 10:02
  Speaker 2: Little did he know that the fire was being when driven above the, the fault-sealing or up in the plenum space in the grocery store the whole time that they're in there, and it grew to the point where there was no more space for it.
• 10:18
  Speaker 2: The smoke starts Banking down, you get the flash and you got firefighters way back in the store.
• 10:25
  Speaker 3: There were chiefs in the back of the building I think it was Gomez was back there and he kept trying to get on the radio to tell him you got smoke pouring out the Scuppers on what was essentially the Charlie side of the building.
• 10:37
  Speaker 3: You had no access to it, you had to walk, you couldn't drive, so he's on the back and he knew.
• 10:42
  Speaker 3: He said it's in the attic man.
• 10:44
  Speaker 3: You got to and at that point you you got a Well-involved attic fire of a 25,000 square foot grocery store.
• 10:52
  Speaker 3: That set of critical factors equals defensive strategy.
• 10:55
  Speaker 3: Sooner than later.
• 10:57
  Speaker 3: Now you know you're inside, you're going to finish what you're doing and get everybody out and do an orderly withdrawal, maybe not an abandon.
• 11:03
  Speaker 3: But that information couldn't get in because at the point they're all starting to figure it out at the same time and people are In in like positions screaming for things now.
• 11:13
  Speaker 3: So Gomez says I was locked out of radio I had.
• 11:16
  Speaker 3: I went to go talk to him and that's about the time I think you guys came over and grabbed rich and said no, you got to come to the command van.
• 11:22
  Speaker 2: And Rich's plan was going.
• 11:24
  Speaker 2: He was going defensive and yeah remember that well, he was defensive, yeah, he was going defensive and then he hears Brett Tarver on the radio say, hey, don't leave me in here.
• 11:34
  Speaker 2: Type conversation.
• 11:35
  Speaker 2: I know Chris probably most recently spent the most time reading about this and really study in it, so he probably has some information about how that actually occurred right there.
• 11:46
  Speaker 4: Yeah, from what I understand they were, they had already gone defensive.
• 11:50
  Speaker 4: It was actually the initial mayday.
• 11:53
  Speaker 4: Is them leaving the building?
• 11:55
  Speaker 4: Right and the stuff that they had Employed, the volume of hose that was in the building, and then getting out Cause them to be him blow on air and then get to the point where he needed to call a mayday and but 21.
• 12:11
  Speaker 3: Well, no, he was on 14.
• 12:12
  Speaker 3: 14 came out of the building and gave a par to rich.
• 12:16
  Speaker 3: He had a par on everybody.
• 12:18
  Speaker 3: And that's when he transitioned to go defensive.
• 12:21
  Speaker 3: At that time, see, and the Tarver's captain he all four of them went in.
• 12:30
  Speaker 3: So the engineer went in with him.
• 12:31
  Speaker 3: When they left, she was the last one on the line and the first one out.
• 12:37
  Speaker 3: The captain was the last one out.
• 12:40
  Speaker 3: He thought he saw her through all the smoke and so he figured I was the last out, you're the first out.
• 12:47
  Speaker 3: And he just assumed that Tarver and side joy were already out, because that's the way we operated.
• 12:53
  Speaker 3: When you came out of the building it was all y'all, I am from free.
• 12:56
  Speaker 3: So the crew would split up.
• 12:58
  Speaker 3: He just assumed they were going to air or whatever else it was.
• 13:01
  Speaker 3: So he gives a par.
• 13:03
  Speaker 3: Well, rich is okay, I'm going defensive.
• 13:06
  Speaker 3: And that's when par Tarver came back and said no, don't leave me in here, I'm lost inside.
• 13:12
  Speaker 3: And so that's at the time.
• 13:14
  Speaker 3: That's when Higgins and then Nolan and everybody else is out front thinking god damn, he's still inside the building.
• 13:21
  Speaker 3: And they went in and got him.
• 13:23
  Speaker 3: He, they found him and he had been breathing so much smoke that he was, he wasn't thinking clear.
• 13:30
  Speaker 3: And so at one point they're trying to get him out and he he basically Breaks free, assaults them, leave me alone, runs back the wrong way into the back of the building, hits the floor and he's dead.
• 13:44
  Speaker 3: Right then he died a CEO poisoning.
• 13:47
  Speaker 3: When I hit the floor, 725 was leaving.
• 13:50
  Speaker 3: Hetzel had his crew going out through the, the, the storeroom there, and he said I'll be last one out and he heard Tarver's pass Pre-activate chirp.
• 14:04
  Speaker 3: Okay, so he go.
• 14:07
  Speaker 3: Tarver was never Lost for more than probably 30 seconds and separated from somebody, wasn't what exactly?
• 14:16
  Speaker 3: So whether it was this cat?
• 14:17
  Speaker 3: His Captain put him back on the line a couple times trying to get out the building.
• 14:21
  Speaker 3: They kept it was.
• 14:22
  Speaker 3: They're leaving during defensive fire conditions and so you can't see anymore.
• 14:26
  Speaker 3: They pulled the line in.
• 14:28
  Speaker 3: It is clears about they're leaving 10 minutes later and it is getting ready to go.
• 14:33
  Speaker 3: So that piece of it is.
• 14:37
  Speaker 3: They all went back in to get them hands on him.
• 14:40
  Speaker 3: He Freased himself that the Discombobulates a couple of them and then they find 725 has hands on him immediately and I want to say that's like the 24 minute rescue time.
• 14:52
  Speaker 3: It took over 24 minutes to get him out of the building.
• 14:56
  Speaker 3: Once they and he was never lost.
• 14:59
  Speaker 3: His past chirped and they hands on him right now.
• 15:04
  Speaker 3: So the deal that we can, the.
• 15:06
  Speaker 3: He would have been the big guy grabbing you and running out with you again.
• 15:10
  Speaker 3: They weren't gonna do that with him, it was so.
• 15:13
  Speaker 3: Then you got the.
• 15:15
  Speaker 3: Then the story unfolds and that's where people get far away looks in their eyes and yeah, there's multiple May days involved in the rescue thing.
• 15:23
  Speaker 3: Oh yeah, leaving respiratory arrest one May day caused 15 May days.
• 15:29
  Speaker 3: I think, if I remember right, it was 13, I think was whatever it was they, they lost track because of people covering each other and things.
• 15:36
  Speaker 3: But it was within about three to five minutes of not being able to solve the first one, and so we kind of took that out with us a thought no man, if you, if you got hands on you, can't solve it immediately, you're gonna get more May days behind it.
• 15:49
  Speaker 3: It's just the nature of what you, where you're working and the recovery showed it right.
• 15:53
  Speaker 3: Yeah, very clear.
• 15:55
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, it happened to me during the recovery first out of jail.
• 15:57
  Speaker 4: I absolutely.
• 16:00
  Speaker 5: The difficult and confusing part of that fire was that up until then, like most of the fire service, we had done the whole series of save, save your own training evolutions the, the ladders, the forcible entry stuff going through walls, moving firefighters who were down.
• 16:24
  Speaker 5: So we we had been through that whole training program and all the experiences in it when, when Tarver went down in that grocery store they had to take him across the storage utility area.
• 16:40
  Speaker 5: This store and it was probably Across this room was maybe a hundred feet.
• 16:46
  Speaker 5: They had 14 May days and probably 15 minutes of firefighters who were involved in that In, in trying to take him out, who ran out of air, well, and and they were at the point where the safety officers in the command System was about to call off the rescue and actually it was actually a body recovery.
• 17:14
  Speaker 5: It wasn't a rescue because it took 45 minutes almost to do that, but it was kind of bewildering to our system of why that it was so difficult to get him out.
• 17:25
  Speaker 5: Now, tarver was a huge man.
• 17:26
  Speaker 5: He was a 260 pounds big, tall guy of athlete Paul somebody called him Paul Bunyan.
• 17:34
  Speaker 5: So immediately after that fact the next day we started to schedule of taking all the Firefighters actually in the automatic aid system there was probably almost 25 fire departments Then in three days all toured that that site in, or, as they and they they figured out a way to Describe what happened they actually Mark some of the of the of the areas that were critical to it.
• 18:02
  Speaker 5: They put some signage up and so on.
• 18:05
  Speaker 5: And when, when you went through that facility, you sort of went from well, why didn't they get him out?
• 18:14
  Speaker 5: Bubba and I would have got him out To sort of reversing that and saying I don't see how they got him out at all, because you couldn't imagine an area that was any more congested than this storage area.
• 18:25
  Speaker 5: They had just delivered the.
• 18:27
  Speaker 5: Apparently, the fire occurred in the afternoon of the day of the week, whichever one, it was where they delivered, they made the delivery to this grocery store.
• 18:36
  Speaker 5: So the storage area was completely packed with food little narrow aisles, pallets, stacks of Sacks of vegetables.
• 18:45
  Speaker 5: I mean just, it was just a, just a.
• 18:47
  Speaker 5: It looked almost like a pack rat, single family residents that we've all been on, where they just loaded the thing up and they had just little narrow ways to get through the thing.
• 18:57
  Speaker 5: They had a drop ceiling that they had they had used for storage above it and we ended up that the ceiling came down so you had about a foot and a half of water and fire debris.
• 19:10
  Speaker 6: I mean it was just a horrible Area to somehow try to operate and why was it important, chief, to get the firefighters on Location and walk in the steps that that tarver was rescued in?
• 19:26
  Speaker 5: There was a feeling and let me be honest about it that if we couldn't impress them In the reality of where they had to operate, I think that the workforce would have torn each other apart Because they were sad and frustrated, confused because, again, we had practiced taking firefighters out of fire areas under fire conditions completely invalid in the sense of where they had to deal with Tarver.
• 20:03
  Speaker 5: That place outperformed any training that I think that anybody has ever done.
• 20:08
  Speaker 5: A lot of rumors Well, they were starting, even probably as the fire was burning.
• 20:17
  Speaker 5: But, yeah, rumors, misinformation.
• 20:23
  Speaker 5: You can imagine all the compressed time stress that everybody is under during that.
• 20:30
  Speaker 5: So the fact that everybody got to see it, I think was a very simple kind of thing, but I think it was a powerful thing.
• 20:38
  Speaker 5: I know some other fire departments have taken that same approach.
• 20:44
  Speaker 5: I think you did recently in your system where you sadly had a firefighter that ended up being fatal.
• 20:51
  Speaker 5: I think that firefighters do the best when they have information.
• 20:58
  Speaker 5: Chief Dickinson described a role of leaders.
• 21:02
  Speaker 5: I think part of what you try to do is to provide that information to them which is not complicated, to say here Go look at it, there's no mystery to it, here's exactly what happened.
• 21:12
  Speaker 5: A lot of the people who were actually at the event I mean they were players in the event.
• 21:18
  Speaker 5: We asked them if they would take these other crews through this.
• 21:21
  Speaker 5: They became kind of the authorities in our department in the recovery process because they were authentically the players who were there.
• 21:32
  Speaker 5: And these are downtown fire companies.
• 21:35
  Speaker 5: They're busy companies, they do a lot of fire duty.
• 21:38
  Speaker 5: I mean they're good firefighters, they're just typical big city downtown characters.
• 21:43
  Speaker 5: I mean they don't wave a white flag at a fire.
• 21:45
  Speaker 5: These became the experts in what actually occurred there and I think that was enormously therapeutic to them.
• 21:59
  Speaker 5: In other words, the system didn't do anything wrong in the sense that the firefighters used the system and applied the procedures that we had developed up to that time.
• 22:13
  Speaker 5: It's just that that was a very, very sad and a very educational day to us when that situation outperformed those procedures.
• 22:22
  Speaker 5: So it wasn't as if somebody made a mistake.
• 22:25
  Speaker 5: It's just that we really had not developed procedures to take hose lines inside a commercial building offensively.
• 22:36
  Speaker 5: It isn't any more complicated than that.
• 22:38
  Speaker 5: The command team that operated at that fire was, I would say they were, and still are, probably the most capable incident commanders big city incident commanders that do structural firefighting that I'm aware of.
• 22:55
  Speaker 5: We supported those people in the sense that we wanted them to positively and energetically look at that event and say what did we learn from this and how do we change the system Not throw the system out, but change the system and add the kinds of things that give us this offensive commercial firefighting capability.
• 23:18
  Speaker 5: From the standpoint of command, we ended up building a command training center.
• 23:22
  Speaker 5: I had a chance, probably after Tarver, for a couple of years.
• 23:29
  Speaker 5: Mostly what I did was meet with firefighters in Phoenix, the whole area.
• 23:34
  Speaker 5: We had a study group of about 25 of us.
• 23:37
  Speaker 5: It was about half of them were older, experienced command officers and probably 10 or 12 of them were captains who were on the battalion chief's promotional list and would become battalion chiefs soon.
• 23:50
  Speaker 5: We probably met 25 times for half a day.
• 23:56
  Speaker 5: In fact.
• 23:57
  Speaker 5: The notes that I ended up from those meetings all got mushed together in the command safety textbook that we wrote.
• 24:08
  Speaker 5: But in that we looked at the strategic responsibility of the incident command system to somehow protect firefighters in those kinds of situations and changed a lot of the strategic command system and management system that we used as structural fires.
• 24:24
  Speaker 5: Now there was an effort too, on the tactical level, to look at what is the dynamic of tactical supervision on a structural fire, and one of the things that the firefighters told us was that when we can add battalion chiefs as sector officers at a structural fire, it completely changes the dynamic of managing that fire.
• 24:56
  Speaker 5: So soon after that fire on a commercial event in Phoenix, we dispatch five battalion chiefs and you'll hear our shift commanders say that when they get three companies in an operating position they will make that a sector and put a battalion chief and their chiefs aid and the battalion chief manages the operational part of it and this chiefs aid manages the safety.
• 25:22
  Speaker 5: We have embedded safety in the command system in a very, very integrated, connected kind of way.
• 25:29
  Speaker 6: Chief, I know you made a statement to the staff about retirements.
• 25:34
  Speaker 6: Would you recount that for us?
• 25:40
  Speaker 5: After the fire, soon after the fire, and I made this statement and obviously I took some license because I said all retirements are canceled.
• 25:52
  Speaker 5: Why?
• 25:54
  Speaker 6: What did you mean by that?
• 25:59
  Speaker 5: Well, it was no more complicated than that.
• 26:01
  Speaker 5: Tarver was a casualty at that fire.
• 26:07
  Speaker 5: That fire killed Brett Tarver.
• 26:09
  Speaker 5: We did not want to have any other casualties and there have been systems where when you lose a firefighter, you will have command staff who were involved in that fire will similarly retire.
• 26:22
  Speaker 5: Those systems are.
• 26:25
  Speaker 5: It's almost impossible for that system to recover when that occurs because the people who can really help that system the most are gone because they're the ones who were involved in it.
• 26:38
  Speaker 5: And again, rich Wolf is a terrific incident commander.
• 26:42
  Speaker 5: The people who managed the command training center said that Rich Wolf is probably the best incident commander in our system, with a lot of other really capable incident commanders.
• 26:53
  Speaker 5: We've been in Fossil with Incident Command for 35 years, so it wasn't that you had.
• 26:58
  Speaker 5: Steve Christ was the operation chief.
• 27:00
  Speaker 5: He was in the command post.
• 27:01
  Speaker 5: John Hinton was a terrific incident commander.
• 27:03
  Speaker 5: If you looked at the command team, if I was going to pick a command team, I would have picked those people who were there that day.
• 27:10
  Speaker 5: Honestly and I'm not just saying that either Somebody said this is the A team.
• 27:15
  Speaker 5: Again, as we were processing this, we said it was no more complicated than we had a bad ass fire in a bad ass building.
• 27:26
  Speaker 6: There was no attempt to find escape code or place blame or hanging around someone's neck, do you?
• 27:32
  Speaker 5: want to speak to that no one did anything wrong.
• 27:34
  Speaker 5: I mean it was not really, and we've all processed fires that went wrong.
• 27:40
  Speaker 5: I mean now it can't go any more wrong than losing a firefighter and almost losing five or six of them trying to get him out of the building.
• 27:46
  Speaker 5: So no one would say in the system well, if we had it to do over again, we'd do it the same way.
• 27:53
  Speaker 5: I mean that is just eminently stupid to say, particularly for a fire chief to say that.
• 27:59
  Speaker 5: But what are we going to do about it?
• 28:02
  Speaker 5: Now?
• 28:03
  Speaker 5: We basically reviewed every word that we had in standard operating procedures.
• 28:08
  Speaker 5: We enlisted every member of the Phoenix Fire Department to participate in the recovery Anybody who had it.
• 28:13
  Speaker 5: We processed thousands of ideas.
• 28:15
  Speaker 5: We changed equipment.
• 28:17
  Speaker 5: We changed procedures, we changed deployment.
• 28:19
  Speaker 5: We built a training center for command officers and officers.
• 28:22
  Speaker 5: We changed the dispatch process.
• 28:27
  Speaker 5: I don't think there was any part of our system that wasn't affected by it, by the recovery.
• 28:31
  Speaker 5: We changed it operationally.
• 28:33
  Speaker 5: We changed the way we train.
• 28:35
  Speaker 5: We leased commercial buildings.
• 28:38
  Speaker 5: We went and taught ourselves that rapid intervention is not rapid and it doesn't intervene Most of the time.
• 28:46
  Speaker 5: It exposes more firefighters.
• 28:47
  Speaker 5: In those days, right after the recovery, we discovered.
• 28:55
  Speaker 5: It takes 12 firefighters 22 minutes to get a firefighter 75 feet inside the building, out of the building, and in those 12 firefighters, two of them will get in trouble.
• 29:05
  Speaker 5: They're no different than the person that you're trying to save.
• 29:09
  Speaker 5: I mean, they're trained the same, they're recruited the same, they're equipped the same, they operate in the same system.
• 29:14
  Speaker 5: So there was an enormous amount of reality therapy for us after that fire and we discovered some operational things that were habits that we had developed as an organization for years and years that led up to that, and it just took a dark and windy day for everything to come together.
• 29:36
  Speaker 5: Yeah, there was a perfect storm, I guess you could say the way we use our resources and to not be bashful about looking at problems in that system, In other words, to make it legal for people to be unacceptable and supported that people speak up if they say we say it now as if you see something, say something.
• 29:56
  Speaker 5: Well, that we mean that broadly too.
• 29:58
  Speaker 5: I think we need to be more cosmopolitan.
• 30:03
  Speaker 5: I think and I think we're starting to be that we need to look at experiences, other places, and bring them back into our system and process them and say how would we react to that?
• 30:12
  Speaker 5: What would the effect of our resources in the system that we use be in this kind of a situation and so on?
• 30:18
  Speaker 5: In other words, we need to be and that's a lot of work to do that, and I think that's something that the system needs to support on every level.
• 30:31
  Speaker 5: I think one of the things we learned were that the levels the strategic, the tactical and the task level are connected and integrated but they're separate, in other words, that the levels can't make up for a problem that is occurring in the other level.
• 30:47
  Speaker 5: In other words, if the command system is out of balance, all the firefighters can do honestly is protect themselves from that.
• 30:54
  Speaker 5: Now they can help command and they can reinforce good recon and reporting and following procedures and so on.
• 31:01
  Speaker 5: If firefighters can't lay hos and raise ladders, sending the command officers to radio school isn't going to fix it.
• 31:07
  Speaker 5: So we sort of learned that there's well, those universes are connected closely, that there's a set of things that have to go on in those levels to make that system balance itself and be sort of totally effective.
• 31:21
  Speaker 5: Huge issue for us was tactical supervision, is that we really had never spent much time or energy in looking at sectors, divisions, groups Now, in other words management subdivisions in that process that are both functional and geographic.
• 31:35
  Speaker 5: All the standard ICS stuff is that we really had not invested much in that level and it's been interesting to see the effect of that.
• 31:43
  Speaker 5: Completely different outcomes.
• 31:48
  Speaker 5: When you watch those events they're smoother, the stress level is down.
• 31:55
  Speaker 5: You'll hear incident commanders say like shift commanders say, once we get sectors in place, you can go to sleep in the command post almost.
• 32:03
  Speaker 5: So they call it low stress command.
• 32:08
  Speaker 5: And some of what we talked about earlier is it's just as simple as saying and I hear it all the time so I'll repeat it.
• 32:14
  Speaker 5: They say we get three companies in a position.
• 32:16
  Speaker 5: We put a sector officer in Chief and an aide.
• 32:19
  Speaker 5: They do operations, they do safety, they do an integrated.
• 32:22
  Speaker 5: If there's enough activity that's going to go on for a long, we actually make a safety section.
• 32:26
  Speaker 5: We think that safety is critical enough that it's actually a section responsibility.
• 32:31
  Speaker 5: It's a little bit different.
• 32:32
  Speaker 5: We added to the regular section process in ICS, so it's been interesting to sort of see that.
• 32:38
  Speaker 5: But no, I think we just need to be more critical of ourselves, and I mean that in a constructive way, I don't mean it in a mean spirited way at all.
• 32:48
  Speaker 6: With the discussion about Brett Tarver's father-in-law, I think most folks would cringe at the idea of interacting with someone that the perception would be there was so much harm, not out of fear of retribution, but would feel very uncomfortable.
• 33:07
  Speaker 6: How did that go at first?
• 33:07
  Speaker 6: What would have caused you I'm thinking out loud here to get out of the box, to open up that relationship, which has probably allowed a lot more of the healing to go on?
• 33:18
  Speaker 6: You know, it would have been the natural tendency to avoid him instead of to embrace him.
• 33:25
  Speaker 5: I think Tarver's wife was a very analytic woman.
• 33:32
  Speaker 5: She was a mathematician and a computer correction specialist, so she was a very technically trained and capable person.
• 33:45
  Speaker 5: She said very early in this she said quit moping around and figure out what you're going to do to keep this from happening again.
• 33:57
  Speaker 5: And my response to her was yes, ma'am, and I think that as we showed her that we were doing that, she connected to that.
• 34:08
  Speaker 5: Her father was a very and is a very warm, smart, responsive guy.
• 34:21
  Speaker 5: He was able, I think even more than she was, to connect to the emotional part of the event.
• 34:26
  Speaker 5: She was pretty analytic, so it was interesting between the two of them.
• 34:33
  Speaker 5: They actually helped us a lot in the sense that she was very business-like about saying your role now is to keep this from happening.
• 34:44
  Speaker 5: She said we're obviously all heartbroken because it did.
• 34:49
  Speaker 5: I mean she had not to say that she wasn't affected by it at all, she was.
• 34:52
  Speaker 5: He was again a lot more emotionally connected to it.
• 34:57
  Speaker 5: So it's kind of an interesting combination, which was unusual, dennis, when I think back on it Once that door was opened, they ended up being more supportive, is what I'm hearing you saying they helped resolve more of the problems and issues than what they cost.
• 35:15
  Speaker 5: And I told the staff I mean I'm not remarkable I said take yes for an answer, in other words, and we reported to her pretty intensely for three or four years about the recovery.
• 35:30
  Speaker 5: She honestly probably got sick of the recovery because she got to see a lot of standard operating procedures that probably didn't mean a whole lot to her and we connected her as much as we could, which was a lot with the planning and the changes that we made as we evolved in that recovery and I think that even though she probably OD'd on some of the details that we did, that probably didn't again that'll mean it critically she's just not a firefighter Probably didn't make much sense to her.
• 36:01
  Speaker 5: I think that she saw that we were serious about keeping it from happening again.
• 36:05
  Speaker 5: And it changed the recovery, changed the way that we operated tactically almost across the board, because we figured out, unremarkably, that what we did every day developed a set of habits that we took into major events.
• 36:23
  Speaker 5: So if we were going to fix it, in other words if we were running out of air at house fires, we were going to run out of air at a commercial building, so the place that we were going to fix it was at house fires.
• 36:32
  Speaker 5: So it became a pretty energetic kind of a process to say let's go back and clean up the 10% that got us in trouble.
• 36:45
  Speaker 5: And I think that's probably what it was.
• 36:48
  Speaker 5: 90% of the system was sound, well done, well established procedures and habits and practices and just the way that we operated.
• 36:58
  Speaker 5: But there were some things that we needed to change and we did.
• 37:02
  Speaker 5: But it's a high-risk business for a boss Is that you're using resources to go in and intervene in problems that are underway.
• 37:14
  Speaker 5: In other words, that supermarket was burning and again we have an obligation to go perform what we do at those places and again you try to do it in a sensible, safe, standard kind of way.
• 37:28
  Speaker 5: But it's an interesting business when you look at it.
• 37:35
  Speaker 6: Chief, I can't.
• 37:36
  Speaker 6: I know that it's just starting to experience this event.
• 37:39
  Speaker 6: Unfortunately, it seems like we'll kill about 100 firefighters every year, and that number tends, I guess, to have stabilized or go up very slightly, but nonetheless, there'll be others behind you, chief, that'll have this unfortunate, horrible, unbelievable, unmanageable experience.
• 37:55
  Speaker 6: What advice would you leave them with?
• 37:56
  Speaker 6: What would you tell them that'll get them through the day?
• 38:03
  Speaker 5: Well, I think our service has a pretty natural inclination to do rehab, and that's a good thing.
• 38:11
  Speaker 5: I think, though, it needs to be balanced with prehab, and I've heard Chief Dickinson say it is that you're not going to come out of that event when you lose it.
• 38:23
  Speaker 5: Let me be sadly, let me talk about losing a firefighter is you're not going to come out of that with any more than you go into it with.
• 38:31
  Speaker 5: So if you want to know what's going to go on in an organization two weeks after a sad event, look at what was going on two weeks before, and I think, if you looked at it, certainly we had problems, and always will in Phoenix, but it was a terrific organization, a great city, and we had healthy relationships in the system.
• 38:48
  Speaker 5: I think the people cared about each other, we were open to new things and had been, I think, for a long time.
• 38:54
  Speaker 5: I don't think that there were big issues of trust or relationship problems or so on.
• 39:00
  Speaker 5: We had a good relationship with the union, and I think that's really what got us through, in other words, that we used the systems that were in place.
• 39:07
  Speaker 5: We used, basically, the relationship by objective system that we had with our union, and the recovery.
• 39:13
  Speaker 5: The recovery was managed within the labor management process.
• 39:16
  Speaker 5: Well, that's a pretty tough time to start a relationship with the union if you haven't, I mean.
• 39:23
  Speaker 5: So we had 25 years of developing that process.
• 39:26
  Speaker 5: Now I wish that the process could have been more proactive to look at the habits that you were doing every day and say which habits are we engaging in routinely that are going to get us in trouble if we don't fix them.
• 39:38
  Speaker 5: I think that that caused us that experience.
• 39:41
  Speaker 5: That Brett Tarver experience caused us to be a lot more sensitive or responsive to that kind of a surveillance system.
• 39:50
  Speaker 5: In other words, that awareness in the department that it was a lot more acceptable and understandable to say you know, this is screwy, this doesn't make sense, we've been lucky.
• 40:03
  Speaker 5: And when the holes in the Swiss cheese all line up, somebody's either going to get really beat up or they're going to get killed.
• 40:10
  Speaker 5: I think you use the system when that occurs.
• 40:16
  Speaker 5: Charlie talked about delegation.
• 40:19
  Speaker 5: I think you're overwhelmed with all the people, places and things that are coming together when that occurs.
• 40:29
  Speaker 5: So if you don't have sort of the habit and the set of experiences where you can delegate very quickly, I think that's certainly going to be a tough time for you.
• 40:40
  Speaker 5: I think letting the.
• 40:44
  Speaker 5: It was interesting to me because we had lost, sadly, firefighters before Tarver.
• 40:48
  Speaker 5: There was never.
• 40:50
  Speaker 5: The community response that that produced Is his death in Phoenix disrupted the community for a week or 10 days.
• 40:59
  Speaker 5: I mean big city, it has a lot of news going on every day in it.
• 41:03
  Speaker 5: I mean it's a really active, energetic place.
• 41:07
  Speaker 5: So there is a lot of news, if you may, and news displaces itself During the funeral festival that you end up with, in that it kind of shut down the city.
• 41:19
  Speaker 5: It was really kind of impressive and people who studied in the community said that it was the relationship that the firefighters had developed with the people in the community, one call at a time.
• 41:30
  Speaker 5: I honestly I don't know.
• 41:32
  Speaker 5: I wasn't surprised, I guess, but it was really an interesting experience.
• 41:37
  Speaker 5: So there, I think, let the community act out the way they feel.
• 41:39
  Speaker 5: Tarver had a beautiful family, had a beautiful wife and three little girls just gorgeous little girls, and obviously the community embraced them like they do.
• 41:50
  Speaker 2: So that was 23 years ago, right?
• 41:52
  Speaker 2: And there's probably this week there's going to be a whole lot of firefighters in Phoenix that will remember where they were and exactly what they did that day, Because we had a lot of firefighters that I'm going in.
• 42:06
  Speaker 2: I got a quarter air in my bottle.
• 42:07
  Speaker 2: I don't care, I'm going in anyway.
• 42:09
  Speaker 2: You got an instant commander who's really focusing on the hazard zone, trying to make it all come together.
• 42:15
  Speaker 2: You got what we didn't have.
• 42:18
  Speaker 2: You had an IC with a plan.
• 42:20
  Speaker 2: You didn't have sufficient information to know that that structure until it was too late that the smoke was coming down on top of them.
• 42:29
  Speaker 2: When you charge the lines, the lines make a lot of movement in there.
• 42:33
  Speaker 2: Knock everything off the shelf.
• 42:35
  Speaker 2: Now it's dark.
• 42:36
  Speaker 2: It's not the same as when you went in.
• 42:38
  Speaker 2: You got firefighters after the May Day that said I'm the guy that's going to get them out, my crew is going to go get them out, let's go.
• 42:46
  Speaker 2: We get 13 May Days from that.
• 42:48
  Speaker 2: What we didn't have is we didn't have and Nick likes to talk about it because it makes the most sense to me afterwards is one of the biggest changes we made is we didn't have tactical bosses effectively operating in that fire ground.
• 43:03
  Speaker 3: We just didn't do a very good job with that.
• 43:05
  Speaker 3: No Well, and Chris said it, chris went there later on to relieve engine six.
• 43:09
  Speaker 3: Rich Wolf made engine six.
• 43:12
  Speaker 3: He assigned them to set up a treatment sector on that south entrance in preparation of tarver coming out.
• 43:19
  Speaker 3: The next time he heard from engine six it was a May day that they needed help getting out of the building.
• 43:27
  Speaker 3: You're getting ready to get tarver out and then all of a sudden your treatment crew is May day in you that they need help getting out of the building, and that was like that discombobulated them.
• 43:37
  Speaker 3: They thought that they're just freelancing.
• 43:39
  Speaker 3: But, to your point, there's no tactical bosses.
• 43:41
  Speaker 3: If there was a tactical boss and engine six comes over, they're like no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, treatment sector does not wear an SCBA mask, so there would be a tactical level supervisor and until there was, you guys got shit in the command post.
• 43:58
  Speaker 3: As far as information, it just happened by default.
• 44:01
  Speaker 3: Ultimately, right, exactly.
• 44:03
  Speaker 4: It's really important for my position at least that we talk about this and we remind people the things and stories and why this incident's so important to us and why it's so important to blue card now.
• 44:15
  Speaker 2: Just think about now we talk about the recovery 23 years later.
• 44:18
  Speaker 2: The recovery took how many years, nick we?
• 44:21
  Speaker 3: were doing it when he retired in 2006.
• 44:23
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it was five years.
• 44:24
  Speaker 3: Yeah, five years and he says it's never done.
• 44:27
  Speaker 3: That was his deal.
• 44:29
  Speaker 2: So now you talk about a recovery, like it's a word that's been in the dictionary forever, but he applied that recovery process to Phoenix for the first time.
• 44:38
  Speaker 2: I think it had ever been done like that and it changed our entire organization.
• 44:43
  Speaker 2: Everything, every conversation we had and pretty much everything we did focus on how could we improve and not let this happen again.
• 44:52
  Speaker 3: We're all as well, that ends well, man.
• 44:54
  Speaker 2: We're all here talking about it today.
• 44:56
  Speaker 3: We're all just really rolled into the.
• 44:56
  Speaker 3: In fact Vance said it he had more effect leave and then he had stay in.
• 45:00
  Speaker 3: When it was all said and done, how many fire departments, blue card Over 3,000.
• 45:05
  Speaker 3: Well, there's more that.
• 45:07
  Speaker 3: I mean Shetfire Command was the law of the land, for they determined about 85% of it.
• 45:13
  Speaker 3: I mean it was the only thing out there.
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: Well, and at the time too the media was fire engineering, fire rescue, firehouse, and I think there was a Bruno Sene article in all three of those, or a Phoenix fire article.
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: Steve Christ, I mean, you were writing, Terry.
• 45:30
  Speaker 1: Were you writing at all at that?
• 45:32
  Speaker 1: I?
• 45:33
  Speaker 3: learned it right after.
• 45:34
  Speaker 3: Well, Fire Rescue Magazine was the Phoenix Fire Department Journal.
• 45:39
  Speaker 3: There was like six people writing yeah.
• 45:44
  Speaker 2: They were stealing our stuff and writing and Mercury and whatnot.
• 45:47
  Speaker 1: And you guys were writing about the recovery process at the time though we were writing about so much more than that, Vance we were learning in real time.
• 45:55
  Speaker 1: The fire service was learning in real time what was going on.
• 45:58
  Speaker 1: We didn't have to go to a conference.
• 45:59
  Speaker 1: Blue card wasn't around, but we were reading it every month in those magazines.
• 46:04
  Speaker 3: Well then, when we started doing blue card probably about 2008, I mean, that was who you were you were going into places and it was the safety officers and rapid intervention instructors.
• 46:14
  Speaker 3: You'd argue with them for two days and then by the third day everybody else would agree with you and they would go do something else and you'd do blue card for a couple more days and then go and yeah, all right guys.
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: great conversation today.
• 46:31
  Speaker 1: I think it was a great way to remember Brett Tarver.
• 46:33
  Speaker 1: 23 years later, we continue to educate people on what happened that day and I think it's continuing to have a very serious impact on the American Fire Service, because today, as we go to class here at the ABB CTC, we're talking about the Tarver recovery process.
• 46:52
  Speaker 4: They did Thursday on the anniversary.
• 46:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and which is why we're getting together to talk about it today.
• 46:57
  Speaker 1: So thanks for sharing and thanks everyone for watching this.
• 47:01
  Speaker 1: Be Shifter.