Rural Water Supply in a Long-Lane Setting

BY MATT HANSON

OUR FIRE DEPARTMENT has established a simple evolution of rural water supply in a long-lane setting. The Elburn & Countryside (IL) Fire Protection District (ECFPD) sits approximately 43 miles west of Chicago and spans more than 64 square miles. The firefighters of the ECFPD protect a wide array of properties, in challenging geographical settings covering everything from small to massive residential homes, from balloon framing to bowstring truss, lightweight to custom, three-story apartment buildings, critical railway infrastructure, and everything in between.

• Rural Water Movement Operations
• Throw Back to Basics: Rural Water Supply
• Assessing Rural Water Supply: A Geospatial Approach
• Rural Water Supply: the Vacuum Tanker, the Better Way

A large portion of this district is rural and requires aggressive tender operations, drafting operations, and draft hydrants to maintain critical water flow (photo 1). Our firefighters must be excellent in rural water supply and train to deliver necessary gallons per minute. We’ve always faced the challenge of deploying aggressive fire attacks in long-lane rural homes. In our department’s fireground operations manual, The ECFPD Initial Arriving Response Force Fireground Operations Manual, a long-lane driveway is defined as any driveway that’s longer than 500 feet. These are marked by a small placard on the rural address sign. The actual length marked signifies the distance from the road to the front door (photo 2).

The default tactic for a long-lane structure fire response when I started my career with the ECFPD included the following:

• The first arriving engine will drive in (without dropping a supply line).
• The second arriving engine will back down and lead out (hoping you can finish your lead-out at the end of the driveway, without having to have a relay pumper halfway up the driveway).
• The lead-out engine will set up for drafting and await a tender to drop a tank of water for you to draft and pump to the attack engine.

We are now in a time of geographic information system (GIS) mapping, computer-aided dispatch (CAD) advances, and an administration and culture of open communication.

We encourage forward thinking and provide boundaries in which our fire officers are encouraged to make decisions based on the situation. Any firefighter with a few fires under their belt will agree that no structure fire will be the same as the last and that to be successful you will have to make decisions. It’s important to empower leaders to make decisions that will set their departments up for success.

Conversation Starters

Every January, our department hosts an in-house leadership academy. Officers and firefighters eligible for promotion participate in tactical simulations, demonstrate problematic employee simulations, engage in conversation with guest speakers, and hold roundtable-style group discussions and problem-solving exercises. It was during one of these simulations that our officers began to offer ideas and ask good questions about our rural long-lane setup. Interestingly, the command staff shared the concern; however, we had failed to address the issue.

Assessing Our Tactic

Perhaps the single biggest obstacle in the way of our original tactic was time. This tactic took time to set up and left too many unaddressed variables that would cause a longer delay. As we set up this operation, the fire grew. We were in a position of disadvantage. This was a textbook example of the fire service making things more difficult than they need to be.

We needed a simple, preplanned response plan to a rural long-lane structure fire that allowed us to bring the highest quality of professional firefighters with large amounts of water to the scene. This water needed to be immediately available for suppression. And our officers needed to be empowered to declare their tactic and put the team into action. We needed to stack all resources in our favor. We developed a simple plan to “stack the driveway.” Here’s a look at that plan.

1. Today, because of GIS mapping and preplanning, any response to a rural address in our fire district that has a long-lane driveway will, on original dispatch, produce a CAD ticket with the specific length of the lane. Now, while en route to the incident, our officers can formulate their plan. And they understand their roles. When the first officer arrives and confirms the fire, he is empowered to declare “We are stacking the driveway.”
2. The first engine arrives on scene and drives in. (Our hosebeds now carry 1,000 feet of five-inch hose, which allows us to cover a greater percentage of our long lanes.) Depending on the overall length of the driveway, the officer may decide to lead in.
3. The first-in officer will provide a radio report and answer the following questions:
   • Do we have room for the tower ladder?
   • Will we “stack the driveway”?
4. The second-arriving engine will drive in and supply the attack engine immediately. At this point the team should now have 2,000 gallons immediately available.
5. The first arriving tender (now staffed) will drive in and supply either the second-arriving engine or, based on the needs of the incident, will godirectly to the attack engine. This step results in 5,000 gallons of water on scene, making it readily available in the shortest amount of time possible. These firefighters will also be readily available to supplement any fire attack, rescue, or ventilation needs.
6. The incident commander will now evaluate everyone’s position and direct additional arriving automatic-aid tenders and engines. At this point, you can quickly add in a few more thousand gallons of water or decide to back down and lead out, to set up for a longer-duration firefight.

Firefighters have a long history of overcomplicating the actual needs of an incident. We can, on the scene of an accident with extrication, fully disassemble the vehicle. However, we should simply do the following:

1. Stabilize the car.
2. Create access to the patient.
3. Initiate care.
4. Get the patient out safely.
5. Continue care.

The same holds true with structure fires and water supply needs. We can drop supply lines and create a very complicated lead-out, or we can stack our resources and empower our officers to make decisions. Our officers and firefighters designed our “stacking thedriveway” response. We trained on it, we’ve put it into play several times, and we are seeing positive results (photos 3 and 4).

Empower your members, and you’ll see results as well.

MATT HANSON is a 22-year member of the Elburn & Countryside Fire protection District and the deputy chief in charge of personnel and administration. Hanson has a bachelor’s degree in social work and a certificate in case management from Indiana university. He also has a chief fire officer certificate from the Illinois Fire Chiefs Association.