BY BOBBY HALTON
At the Everyone Goes Home Summit 2010, someone asked if the culture of extinguishment conflicted with the culture of safety. It does not. Both so-called “cultures” are not cultures at all but rather mind-sets or approaches that reflect a value statement about how one approaches our mission. Culture is defined by our institutions, artifacts, and values. In fact, these two mind-sets are not separate at all; rather, they are but two aspects of the path to mastery. The question was eerily resonant of a question asked of Captain Al Haynes of United Airlines. On July 19, 1989, Haynes and his crew were able to fly a DC 10 airplane for 45 minutes after the fan blades from the engine separated, tore through the plane, and severed all hydraulic systems. This has never been known to have happened before.
Without those systems functioning correctly, the plane should not have flown at all. But Haynes did fly the plane using only the thrust of the engines—a feat never before attempted or considered. He and his crew flew it to the Sioux City (IA) Airport, where it crash-landed. There were 285 people on the plane; Haynes’ and the crew’s expertise and mastery as pilots saved the lives of 184 of those people.
Several years after the accident, Haynes was asked how his crew was able to do what no one believed or thought was possible. He explained that he felt there were five important factors that contributed to the success of the crew that day; those five factors are the basis of the path to mastery. The five factors, according to Haynes, were luck, communications, preparation, execution, and cooperation.
We need both the culture of safety and the culture of extinguishment on the path to mastery. We must embrace them simultaneously to be true to our goal of zero line-of-duty deaths. Embracing/living a culture of safety fundamentally has to do with our internal motivation; it has to do with communications and cooperation. Preparation and execution are the two bedrock components of the culture of extinguishment; these have to do with our external motivation.
The fifth factor is luck. By luck, Haynes was referring to the environments, situations, or events in which we find ourselves. Whether it is a natural disaster, a man-made disaster, a fire, a collapse, or a medical emergency, luck has to do with where we find ourselves and what is going on. Anomalies, or things that never happened before, are happening all the time. As our world becomes more complex technologically, new crises and new types of disasters will increase, such as losing all your hydraulics.
What drives a firefighter in a relentless yet unattainable pursuit of mastery? It is the synergy of these two components of our cultural values. Whether we call it the culture of safety or the culture of extinguishment is irrelevant. What matters is how we approach our work and how we discharge our core responsibilities.
Every fire officer has two distinct responsibilities in relation to getting our work done. These responsibilities are addressed in our culture of safety and our culture of extinguishment.
First, we must look out for the welfare of our people at all times—not only in the context of the fireground and emergency situations but their total fitness and welfare as well. This is what we embrace and celebrate in the culture of safety. This is where our programs such as the Courage to Be Safe/Everyone Goes Home and the 16 Life Safety Initiatives provide us with mental toughness and promote cooperation. We know that we must be prepared mentally to meet the demands of our profession, and we must be brave enough to do the hard work to create that mental toughness.
We need firefighters who are mentally fit, mentally agile, and able to process the extremely emotional aspects of what we do in a healthy and meaningful way. Not all injuries are ones we can see: Many injuries, life-threatening injuries, are invisible, but they are injuries nonetheless. Those invisible injuries will kill as lethally as fire and smoke, and they are just as indiscriminate in their choice of victims.
A key missing component and what we are now embracing with our new IAFC- IAFF Peer Fitness and Wellness Initiative is the long-overdue element of physical conditioning. Knowing as we now do that firefighting is a trigger for cardiovascular and respiratory attacks, we must ensure that we are prepared physically to meet the demands of our profession. We must have the courage to tell our overweight and out-of-shape firefighters that getting everyone home requires a personal commitment first.
The second responsibility of every firefighter and every fire officer is to get the work done. In the profession of firefighting, that means getting it done with a degree of expertise that is absolutely unforgiving in many cases. Failure is not an option on the fireground, where lives are at stake and seconds count.
This is what the culture of extinguishment embodies: the knowledge, skills, and abilities to use our equipment, tools, and training at increasingly elevated levels. Forcible entry has not become easier; it has become more complex. Fires are more dynamic; they grow faster and release more energy more quickly than ever before. Pandemics are looming. Firefighters understand Haynes’ five factors; they synergize the two aspects of our path to mastery and use them to motivate and inspire themselves to be better every time.
We are not devoted to becoming masters of our craft for money or recognition but rather for the good work it enables us to do. That is our culture. We are devoted to becoming masters because mastery is unattainable, but only those on the path can fly without hydraulics.
