BY ALAN BRUNACINI
In the past several columns, we have presented some typical advice that might assist young firefighters in their preparation to effectively and safely operate during hazard-zone operations. We have discussed the current experience drain in our service and how that process has caused officers to now be promoted at a younger and younger age. When this occurs, veterans, like me, write columns giving the young and restless advice. Such senior pontificating is a little (or a lot) like saying: “Don’t touch the stove. It’s hot!” I know when I was the age of the firefighters to whom this column is directed, I generally listened to the advice and then summarily touched the stove. It generally takes awhile to get your listening/paying attention/learning skills to catch up with your touching skills.
I really believe that the folks who typically become firefighters are “touch the stove”-kind of guys/gals. This is not all bad, simply because what we do is mostly deal with “stoves” that are hot and, sadly, sometimes fatally hot. What I hope is that the young readers (regardless of age) will READ and that some of the material they read will stick in their minds so that on a dark and windy night when they encounter a stove they can’t untouch, hopefully, they will remember some of this advice and effectively solve the stove problem without the stove solving them!
While we are on the subject of reading, this is where I must give my schoolmarm library lecture. During my career, I have encountered just about every different character that plays in the fire service theater. They were all interesting (to say the least), and together they played all the roles that are required for us to do what we do. Most of them were smart and capable because what we do requires a lot of skill and knowledge—lunkheads get “invited” out pretty quickly. As I have watched, studied, came to know, hung out with, and worked around these folks, the one thing I noticed about the most operationally capable is that they all read a lot.
They have developed the ability to connect, apply, and integrate what they have read into training, drills, skill development, school, practice, and eventually actual performance. They developed the ability to leverage what they read into consistent, effective street execution. These people are not pointy-head eggheads who live in the library and understand only what is written in a book. They are both book smart and street smart and are operationally skillful and physically capable. They have developed the ability to use their knowledge to enhance their performance. There is no other way to refine the highest level of applied capability without reading the information that is timely and current and increasing their knowledge.
This information and knowledge are absolutely necessary to effective performance. Current decisions must be made with rapidly changing up-to-date information; much of that information is written and is not available in any other form. That reading is now on a computer. (The absolutely startling fact that I am writing this article on an iPad is objective evidence that just about every written word can be packaged, transmitted, and read electronically.)
We all live in our own little world and are challenged to connect with what is going on outside the “view” of our limited personal perspective. It is impossible to get smart and stay smart by attempting to try to personally and directly live through every local experience that produces a complete range of understanding of what is going on in the world outside us. We will never get to experience in our local place every situation and every possible permutation of that situation personally regardless of how busy and observant we are. A major part of cross-pollinating tactical and operational information that we can actually use to review and improve how we operate in our department is somehow getting enough detail to really understand that piece of information. In the nanosecond sound-bite world we live in, we might know only that something occurred. If we do not seek out and go through a written account of that material, we really won’t have enough information to connect to and improve what we do in our system.
Firefighters typically are people who express themselves by taking action. This is a very good thing because this is the very legitimate role we fill in our community—Mrs. Smith calls us to quickly and physically solve (not study) her problem. When her kitchen is burning, she does not call the library department; she calls the fire department. I am not suggesting that we suffer a major personality change. My objective is to direct you toward continual learning and then applying the most current, relevant, and practical information (however you obtain it) into your action based-performance process to deliver better customer service to the Smith family and improved safety support to Firefighter Smith.
Reading is a major way of loading the critical details of the relevant lessons into how you are going to operate at the next event. The point is this, to continuously improve your action-based performance process, you must continuously refine your current operational procedures and integrate those improvements into your regular response routine.
The “book” challenge is pretty simple: Action-oriented people typically are naturally inclined to physically engage the world around them, not to read about it. Most firefighters were on the football team, not in the Literature Club (including me). This is no reflection of their literacy or intelligence, only their natural inclination. I griped for 28 years as a fire chief about how difficult it was to get the troops to read any of the wonderful (written) stuff I regularly sent to them. I got a very positive reaction when I personally and directly engaged them and an even better response when someone showed them. We are a hands-on group that wants to directly engage the world around us. Many times, that direct, physical engagement creates an expansion in our curiosity that creates the internal need to read about what tweaked our curiosity. The more I followed the engagement first/reading second model, the easier my life as a boss became.
An area critical to both our ability to effectively operate and survive going into and getting out of the hazard zone (round trip) involves our examining incidents that have occurred that contain significant lessons we can learn and then apply to the situations we will encounter in the future. The most significant experiences in our service involve incidents that include line-of-duty deaths (LODDs). The permanent account of such fatal incidents is recorded in written form. We must read, internalize, and react to these lessons that were learned in the hardest and most tragic way in which our service learns. The first tragedy occurs with the LODD; the second occurs when we don’t learn from what happened and, sadly, sometimes repeat it. LODD incidents are particularly critical to our education because they are the events that are the most carefully investigated, reviewed, and reported.
Every firefighter should read and remember the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health LODD reports. They are prepared by experienced and highly capable investigators and describe the tactical events involved in the fatality. Many of the lessons in these fatalities are the result of recurring conditions and practices. The causes of occupational firefighter deaths are not new; they involve mostly dysfunctional long-standing operational responses to fatal tactical conditions. Many of the causes of these fatalities are the results of operational habits we can get away with for a long time until a dangerous and deadly combination of people, places, and things (conditions) come together and create the combination of those recurring conditions that are murdering us. The challenge for us is to respond to what the report tells us by integrating an ongoing awareness and response adjusted to fit the recommendations made in the reports into our local procedures and day-to-day practices.
Reading and remembering the LODD reports enable us to identify similar tactical places and conditions in our response areas. Being able to see a place or a situation and then (automatically) connect it to what you see or read produces a level of awareness that translates into a smarter/safer response. We generally do not think of reading in the category of “experience,” but who cares what we call it if we can read it, file it, recall it, and then effectively react to something that would have otherwise beat us up? This ability emerges when we see a big, old, unsprinklered inner-city grocery store and we think of what happened in Phoenix; or when we sleepily respond on the 25th (bells and smells) alarm and think of Memphis; or when we respond to a single-family house that is one level in the front and a completely different number of levels in the rear and we think of the Pittsburgh incident.
The fact that you are reading this column pretty much means that you are a reader, so I am singing to the glee club. Thank you for hanging out with us for this literary lecture. I started reading Fire Engineering when I became a firefighter, and I have not missed an issue since 1958. I thank the magazine for keeping me educated and entertained, for helping to get me promoted, and for the information I read that caused me to react in a way that kept me alive.
Retired Chief ALAN BRUNACINI is a fire service author and speaker. He and his sons own the quarterly fire service magazine BSHIFTER.com and the Blue Card hazard zone training and certification system. He can be reached at [email protected].
