The fire service should delete terms like preincident planning, preplanning, and preplans from its vocabulary. These preparedness phases certainly have made little or no impact to better protect building occupants and firefighters. Fire suppression units by no means have been fully engaged in understanding their district buildings to effectively manage a fire or other all-hazard emergencies. This vulnerability goes beyond the fire station response district that leaves the covering units and mutual-aid units exposed to guessed-based building knowledge (photo 1).
Book: High-Rise Buildings: Understanding the Vertical Challenges
- Rethink Battle-Ready Intelligence
- Jack J. Murphy and Jerry Tracy: Battle-Ready Intelligence
- Podcast: Fireground Strategies: High-Rise Vertical Challenges
Navy SEAL Battle Intelligence vs. Firefighter Battle Intelligence
The fire service has a basic understanding that the building is “our enemy” as it is undergoes destruction during the various time lapses of an incident. Having pre-event building intelligence will enhance tactical priorities to safeguard the fireground.
“If you ask a Navy SEAL if they would go into battle in five minutes from a dead sleep to an unknown battlefield, facing an unknown enemy, for an unknown target, with little or no intelligence and with other soldiers they may not know. They would say ‘That’s crazy,’” says Anthony Kastros, retired battalion chief from Sacramento Metro (CA) Fire Department. “Yet firefighters do it every day. We go from our dorm at 0200hrs. to a Code-3 response of a reported building fire in three minutes that we have not seen before, to face an enemy whose whereabouts are likely unknown. We do this without knowing what fire units will be with us at the moment, and to top it off, many in the battle have little to no experience.”
Building intelligence for future battlegrounds with more decision-based knowledge not only helps the incident commander, but all firefighters with a known battlefield, a known enemy, a known target and analytical building data to maneuver on the fireground, especially the vertical challenges within a high-rise building.
The Priority: Tactical Building Intelligence
Fire departments must pivot from a non-preplanning “do little or nothing” stage to a more robust critical building intelligence phase as a tactical priority for preparedness and firefighter safety. Adopt a “Know before you Go” (KbyG) mentality to do building recon training and gather building intelligence today to help your firefighters operate more effectively on the fireground.
See Jack and Jerry Tracy at FDIC International 2023 on Thursday, April 27.
JACK J. MURPHY, MA, is a fire marshal (Ret.) and a former deputy chief of the Leonia (NJ) Fire Department. He is the past chairman of the Fire/Life Safety Directors Association of Greater New York. He is a principal member on the NFPA High-Rise Building Safety Advisory and the 1660 Emergency, Continuity, and Crisis Management: Preparedness, Response, and Recovery committees and a representative on the ICC Fire Code Action Committee. In 1997, he was appointed an FDNY Honorary Battalion Chief. He is a member of the Clarion Fire and Rescue Group Advisory Board and a presenter at FDIC International. He was the recipient of the 2012 Fire Engineering Tom Brennan Lifetime Achievement Award.
