Aggressive Fire Fighting Demands Attention to Safety

Aggressive Fire Fighting Demands Attention to Safety

DEPARTMENTS

The Volunteers Corner

When statistics show that fire fighters have the highest death rate of any occupation in the nation and an equally serious injury rate, the need for greater attention to safety in the fire service should be obvious. If other hazardous occupations can reduce their death and injury rates, why can’t the fire service?

The key to a safety program in any fire department is the chief of department because only he can give safety the importance it must have. However, this is only the start. The next step is to improve the training program in several areas that contribute heavily to deaths and injuries. These areas include officer responsibilities, building construction, hazardous materials and rescue operations.

It is important to recognize that not only is safety an important ingredient in aggressive fire attack, but it is vital to the success of the attack. When a man is seriously injured on the fireground, it takes four men to remove him and that means at least one company goes out of action. You must prevent injuries if you are going to maintain an aggressive attack.

Company officers must be trained to know the importance of exercising supervisory control to enforce safe working conditions during any fire department operation. It is the officer’s duty to anticipate hazardous conditions and take action to ameliorate them while leading an aggressive fire attack or rescue operation. Through training, company officers learn that they must be supervisors and not higher-pgid hosemen.

It follows that chief officers, supported by the chief of department, must insist that company officers enforce safe working procedures.

Structural collapse: Each year, a sizable percentage of the number of fire fighters killed is the result of structural collapse. There are cases on record where deaths from collapse were the direct result of faulty sizeup by officers because of their lack of knowledge of building construction, fire behavior and rate of water application need. Again, a good training program can provide the knowledge needed about building construction and the weaknesses to expect during ‘demolition’ by fire. Does your department provide information on fire behavior and water application rates?

In hazardous materials incidents, fire fighters rushing to where angels fear to tread is one of our problems. Learning specific characterist ics of a large number of hazardous gases, liquids and solids is a waste of time. Learning the characteristics of the most commonly stored, produced or transported hazardous materials in your response area can be useful.

Most useful of all is the knowledge of how to obtain the information about a hazardous material involved in a specific incident, the development of a local information retrieval system at the fire dispatch center and the use of CHEMTREC and other information sources.

Officers must learn how to evaluate hazardous materials incidents in terms of the life safety of fire fighters and civilians, as well as damage to property. An LPG railroad tank car involved in a derailment fire amidst the wheat fields of Kansas is a quite different situation from the same type of incident in a heavily populated city area.

Rescue operations: This principle of evaluation also applies to rescue operations, whether they are on the fireground or in a situation that does not include fire.

A hose line must be used in a rescue operation where the victim is seriously endangered by fire. It is stupid to attempt, under such conditions, a rescue that will probably fail when the few additional seconds needed to get a line into the building will ensure success—or greatly increase the chances of success.

Charged lines also must be present during vehicle extrication and other rescue operations where the use of power saws and other tools can result in the ignition of flammable materials, liquids or gases. Rescuers must anticipate fire hazards.

Fire fighters have lost their lives trying to make water rescues. They have not comprehended the power of flowing water. Whenever a water rescue is attempted, lifelines must be used and life jackets must be worn by the rescuers. In fast-flowing waters, a line should be secured to the boat and controlled from the shore or riverbank so the small boat can be pulled out of danger. If a boat capsizes—and too many have—the occupants can cling to the boat as the crew on shore pulls it to safety.

Evaluate risks: Fire fighters have lost their lives trying to recover a body beneath turbulent waters. This is inexcusable.

The officer in charge at any rescue operation must evaluate the risks against the results that can be expected. Certainly, the recovery of a body is not equivalent to the loss of another life.

Basically, safety in the fire service is based on the use of common sense and firm discipline that ensures the application of common sense.

A department that insists on determining WHO is responsible for an injury in addition to determining what caused the injury is well on the way to reducing the number of injuries. For example, a cut on a hand without a matching cut on a glove of a fire figher could result in a reprimand to the company officer who failed to see that the fire fighter was working without gloves during overhaul.

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