BY ALAN BRUNACINI
Last month we started discussing the natural competition that occurs between the incident commander’s (IC’s) brain and heart and how difficult it can be to stay calm while commanding an incident that is both tactically and emotionally challengingin fact, most events that are difficult tactically will also in some way beat up the IC’s emotions. Operating at an active structural fire has always been a big deal to us, and always will be (I hope). It is the event that, more than any other, defines who we are and what we do. The importance of being a capable firefighter on every level creates a great deal of pressure.
This is particularly true of the IC because how he performs is extremely visible. Most of the operating team go into the hazard zone and do a lot of their work inside in the “dark,” in the products of combustion, as opposed to the IC, who typically operates in the very visible command post position and also in a very “audible” position, on the radio over the tactical channel. Sometimes, the pressure to perform effectively can cause the IC to shift the responsibility of providing overall command and control professionally to the incident to taking responsibility for the incident personally.
During my life as a fire chief, I responded to a lot of incidents, and by the time I arrived, a command team (IC, support officer, and senior advisor) was generally in place inside a command post vehicle operating on the strategic level. The members of those teams were typically very capable and cool. My happy role in these operations was to stand in my corner of the command vehicle and quietly watch the team work and interact with the senior advisor.
Occasionally, when a young IC would seem to be taking a big (ugly) flame front fire personally, I would pat him on the shoulder and whisper in his ear: “It’s not your fault; it’s just your problem.” After the incident, the IC would generally thank me for helping him do a simple little perspective adjustment that made him more effective. After the incident, we would then get to talk about the challenge of simultaneously staying as mentally connected as possible, along with being a bit emotionally disconnected from the incident status. Over time, I noticed that this was an acquired ability that required practice, personal discipline, and refinement.
If you watch really coolheaded ICs operate at high-stress incidents, they develop the ability to clinically “disconnect” from the incident in a very special way. They have refined the ability to divert and redirect their emotional energy into an increased level of mental focus on their role as an IC. We don’t talk about the “disconnect” very much because while it may sound coolheaded, it can also sound coldhearted. The smart old soldier ICs have figured out that if they emotionally internalize the critical damage and destruction situational elements, it will completely overwhelm their ability to tactically focus and then to effectively deploy.
When the IC begins to personalize the damage and destruction, he begins to fall into a sucking vortex (!) of emotional quicksand. I heard an old guy say: “Son, if it becomes YOUR fire, you will end up running down the street with your hair on fire screaming ‘Fire!’ ” He was the same guy who told the homeowner who was screaming at him in front of her burning home: “Lady, I didn’t light it; I’m trying to put it out.” Sometimes, how we deal with making the emotional to mental disconnect to somehow stay cool can produce a somewhat sarcastic (sounding) response, given our natural gallows humor. Although this very internal response is an effective coping mechanism for us, the gentle souls outside our service must be sheltered from our somewhat esoteric sense of humorlike the inside-the-command-post, old-guy to young-guy comment I heard in front of a middle-of-the-night major fire: “Son, settle down, these are nice folks, and they are having a nice fire.” Simply, our internal stuff should stay internal.
We instruct the IC to temporarily separate himself from the (traumatic loss) part of the fire and to connect mentally with the tactical part, not because we don’t care what is occurring, but because we do care. We know that the IC with ice water in his veins will save a lot more humans, structures, family picture albums, and teddy bears than some IC sitting in the command SUV looking right at side A and sobbing hysterically because of the absolutely horrible effects of uncontrolled thermal insult on people, places, and things.
Although we have the responsibility to provide calm, effective, nonemotional incident command, we must realize the incident has a set of human dynamics that we must also address. This is where our standard incident organization kicks in. We must develop, use, and refine a standard Owner Occupant Support Sector/Group based on a local SOP. The IC implements this organizational element to assist the humans affected by the incident. A wide range of responders must be trained to set up and operate this function. It is the IC’s responsibility to identify the human support needs of the incident and to assign that function. Whoever receives that assignment gathers up those who need assistance and begins to provide short-term recovery assistance (food, shelter, transportation, possession recovery, connection to social services). The standard practice of using this function creates the really smart schizophrenic capability for us to do simultaneous cool command and warm customer support at the same time. I never received a letter thanking us for calm command, but I received a ton of letters about people, pets, pictures, and pills.
Retired Chief ALAN BRUNACINI is a fire service author and speaker. He and his sons own the fire service Web site bshifter.com.
