Tactics Coloring Book, Part 2

BY ALAN BRUNACINI

Attaching a set of fire conditions to the basic layout of the fire area can be a big help in evaluating tactical needs and then organizing and assigning resources. The three basic conditions are involved, exposed, and uninvolved. Giving each its own color—red, yellow, and green, respectively—creates the capability to mark these conditions right on a sketch of the fireground. This creates a simple color-coded graphic of fire conditions. If we add a gray color for smoke, we will have a color for all the basic fire parts.

For pretty cheap, we can pick up a half dozen colored marking pens, colored pencils, or a box of crayons (my wife’s favorite). Or, we can just go eat at one of those yuppie, fern bar restaurants that use butcher paper for a tablecloth and have a little glass of crayons for the kids (and me) to entertain themselves. While we are waiting for our toast points and watercress sandwiches, we can draw an outline of the fire area and start to color it. In less than two minutes, a fight will always break out between my truck company son and his engine company father—and viola! The family that argues tactics together stays together.

The color-picture system can be used in a variety of ways. Let’s say you teach firefighting tactics and strategy. You must help your students understand how fire (the products of combustion) starts, spreads up and across, and eventually fills up the fire area.

To begin, we use a black color marker to make a heavy line to outline the fire area—this shows the playing field that the fire will involve unless we control it. The instructor must use the red/yellow/green/gray colors to describe fire conditions. A blue marker is used to draw in supply and attack line placement and where water is being applied. This shows how firefighting operations must be conducted so they connect to, cut off, and overpower fire conditions. All the colors are bouncing around and bumping into each other inside the black line. Now we have a way to visually show, using the contrasting colors, the critical place where fire and water come together. The teacher must help the student better understand that whichever color, red or blue, is bigger wins. Simply, the colors displace each other—fire cannot exist in the same place with an overpowering amount of water; conversely, fire will always burn past inadequate water application.

To create a graphic description of tactical support, a purple marker is used to show forcible entry and ventilation, providing access into concealed spaces and areas that have been searched (little purple Ss). The drawings can also be used to create a simple ongoing description (and critique) of the various stages of a firefighting event. By making copies of the basic fire area layout and then coloring in both fire conditions (red/yellow/green/gray) and operational action (blue/purple) that occurred at that stage (i.e., time), we can create a “motion picture” of the firefight with a set of ongoing scenes that describe what occurred at each critical time (“tactical mileposts”) as the operation evolved. Being able to use a real simple graphic to direct a classroom or kitchen-table discussion class becomes a robust teaching/learning process that leads to better understanding.

When taped up on the wall in order, the row of sheets creates a beginning-to-end description of the ongoing firefighting (operational) moves and the corresponding counter moves of the fire. Looking at the pictures quickly shows the incremental and ultimate outcome of those moves. It doesn’t take long to see if (and many times why) the red or the blue won. This multiple-picture approach improves our ability to understand the execution dynamics of how we respond to fire conditions and how fire conditions react to us.

Looking at the row of pictures of the critical operational stages shows basic stuff like how many backup chances we have to expand an offensive attack. If after reinforcing the initial attack one or two times (two is iffy) and the red is not going away, the incident commander must quickly move and regroup the troops farther back into the yellow or just go to the green outside and protect exposures. Another example would be when we have a side view of the fire building and can see how the fire is assaulting the attic; we also can quickly see (graphically) that attics that are mostly red become very difficult to keep from extending to the rest of the structure.

Although the system is low tech, it enables us to see all this using a standard set of colors to recreate what can or did happen. This approach produces messy looking, nonprecise drawings that are meant to be messy and nonprecise—just like the fire. When they are finished, they look like an overhead projector transparency that Gordon Graham just finished (brilliant, but messy). The color-coded system is a simplified way to characterize and learn how basic fast and dirty structural fire behavior occurs. It is not an absolutely accurate way to do this. Fires are highly dynamic and do not have conditions that have definitive borders that neatly separate the colors. In fact, the colors run together, sometimes stratify, and come in shades that range on a tactical condition color chart from light to dark and the “picture” is constantly changing at a rate from lazy to explosive. The system uses a simplistic graphic layout of the fireground to create a very practical conceptual understanding of how the fire and the firefight come together. We don’t take the marking pens into the fire—we take the conceptual understanding and the skill we have developed (although they would probably work on a tactical worksheet). Using the color-coded training gets loaded into our mental “slide tray” and sharpens our focus on the familiar pattern that goes with a particular slide of a previous experience.

Retired Chief ALAN BRUNACINI is a fire service author and speaker. He and his sons own the fire service Web site bshifter.com.