Report Form Seeks Accident Cause
ROBERT J. FIRENZE
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An independent consulting firm has taken the lead in designing an injury and exposure reporting system specifically for fire fighters. After four years of research, RJF Associates, whose president is himself a former fire fighter, spent another three years working with the International Association of Fire Fighters and fire departments throughout the United States developing and field-testing its system. The IAFF/OSHA Committee has given its endorsement and unanimously adopted a resolution recommending that the RJF Fire Fighter Injury and Exposure Reporting System be the official reporting system for fire fighter deaths, injuries, and exposures.
The RJF system is different from any other developed to date. Its purpose is to discover how accidents are caused, not how many accidents occur, how much they cost, or who was at fault. The system satisfies the following needs of fire services. It provides information to promote better, cost-beneficial expenditures for equipment, apparatus, personal protective equipment, and so forth.
- It documents facts concerning the incidences of injuries, fatalities, and exposures incurred during emergency and nonemergency operations.
- It documents the relationship between manning practices and injuries, fatalities, and exposures.
- It documents information to improve training, engineering, and tactical changes in operations.
- It documents time and manpower loss resulting from job-related accidents.
- It determines operational problems responsible for losses and inefficiencies.
- It establishes the hazardousness of fire fighting.
- enables communication and data exchange among departments.
The reporting system consists of three major elements: (1) a standardized injury and exposure report form; (2) procedural guidelines for using the report form; and (3) analyses formats.
Causes of accidents discovered
The standardized report form is the mainstay of the injury and exposure reporting system. It is a means of gathering information about an incident in which a fire fighter is killed, injured, or exposed to disease-producing conditions. The form’s purpose is to identify what contributed to or caused an injury, not to pinpoint blame or fault on fire fighters or their officers.
Information requested falls into three general categories: (1) information about activities and operations at the time of the accident and about the nature of the injury; (2) information about tools, equipment, personal protective equipment, and apparatus in use at the time of the injury; and (3) information about the situational or environmental conditions at the accident scene. By studying the relationships among these three groups of variables, major contributing factors or causes of accidents can be discovered.
RJF Associates has taken a unique approach to organizing the fire fighter injury and exposure report form. How the form is used and how much information is given depend upon the mode of fire fighting activity being engaged in at the time of the injury—or exposure-producing accident. Examples of major modes of activity are at quarters, responding to/returning from, operating at, and overhauling. Different factors relating to accidents occur or emerge in these different modes of operation. Therefore, different kinds of information are called for in order to reconstruct the factors that contributed to the accident.
Objective record
The report form consists of three pages which describe the circumstances at the time that an accident or exposure occurred. This is an objective record of events. Over a period of time, combined records of a department can show patterns and trends in injuries and exposures. The purpose is to understand the source of the accident or exposure. Therefore, the name of the injured person is immaterial and is not requested.
All information on the form can be noted simply with check marks, lines, or a word or phrase. No narrative is required. Items which do not apply to the case being reported are left unmarked. There are no extraneous or “nice to know” pieces of information. No opinions are requested, only factual observations. Field tests indicate that the time needed to fill out the form is from one to three minutes, depending on the complexity of the operation and situation.
The report form should be used any time an injury or exposure occurs in fire combat, emergencies, and other departmental operations or activities. Departmental policies may require reporting only those injuries which result in lost time. But to obtain maximum benefit from this system, all injuries and exposures, lost time or not, should be reported. This is especially true for exposure cases, which must be recorded if the fire fighter is to be protected.
Numbers of fatalities and time-lost injuries are easy to count. By themselves, however, they do not reflect accurately the actual hazardousness of fire service operations. Exposures which subtly damage fire fighters’ bodies are seldom reported and therefore undocumented. Because conventional exposure reports usually require medical diagnosis, only the most extreme cases are recorded, representing only the tip of the iceberg. But irreparable harm may be caused by an exposure that cannot be attributed to a given time or circumstance unless it is documented at the time it occurs.
Data used for analyses
Data from the report forms is used for analyses of individual fire departments and for comparisons between and among departments. A depart ment can subscribe to this analysis service. While departments can request analysis of the relationship among any factors on the form, RJF Associates regularly examines certain factors and relationships. Among these are (1) failures of fire fighting equipment, personal protective equipment, and apparatus; (2) failures of respiratory gear; (3) seasonal variations in accident types, injuries, and exposures, and modes of fire fighting operations; (4) hazardousness of various modes of fire fighting activity (incidences of injuries and exposures during different modes of operation; (5) situational and environmental interferences in modes of operation and fire fighter activities; and (6) crew size and injury incidences during fire combat.
Two types of information
The analyses of RJF Associates are tailored to produce two types of information: (1) trends and patterns in departmental accidents and injuries, which can provide a department with the “big picture” of injury-producing accidents over a certain time period or a particular season of the year; and (2) critical events that should be corrected or examined quickly. An example of this second type of information occurred in one of the three cities now using the system. Fire fighters who had removed their self-contained breathing apparatus found themselves ripping asbestos insulation from the ceiling. RJF flagged a serious health problem: fire fighters were inhaling a cancer-causing agent during routine overhaul operations. RJF recommended specific modifications which were accepted and implemented by the department.
During March 1980, Donald Strietelmeier, chief of the Indianapolis Fire Department, implemented the system on a department-wide basis. He was assisted by Joseph E. Olofson, president of Indianapolis Professional Fire Fighters Local 415,1AFF.
Both Strietelmeier and Olofson agree that “existing personnel accident report forms did not accurately describe how injuries occurred or the extent of the injury.” They are convinced that the RJF system will “identify how or where injuries occur so that we can take preventive measures, record exposure to hazards that went unreported before,” and allow the department “to share information with other departments to improve working conditions for the fire service.”
Cincinnati was next to install the system, which already was familiar to Norman L. Wells, chief of the division of fire and Forrest Buckley, president of Cincinnati Fire Fighters Local 476, IAFF. For three years RJF worked closely with the Cincinnati department, developing and field-testing several early versions of its present injury and exposure reporting system.
Miami adopting system
As this article goes to press, the City of Miami Fire Department is in the final stages of adopting the system. Chief H. W. Brice, director of the Miami Department of Fire, looks to the system as a way to “pinpoint operations and equipment problems which are causing injuries to fire fighters.”
To use the copyrighted form, all that a fire department needs to do is to pay $1.00 for processing costs and to agree to provide RJF Associates with the unclassified report data (data which do not contain names, places, or other confidential fire department information). In essence, RJF Associates is donating its report form and instructional manual to those fire service organizations which want to use them.
Once permission is granted to use the system, the department is provided with photo-reproducible copies of the report form, an instructional manual, and suggestions for internal procedures to help in the administration of the injury/exposure reporting system. With a minimum of administrative work, the system can be fully operational within 30 days from the time the department receives permission.
