Bill Manning

The process of reducing non-cardiac-related fireground line-of-duty deaths should begin with the acceptance of certain truths, including: Most fireground line-of-duty deaths are preventable. It's understood that that firefighting is an inherently dangerous occupation, and there are, in fact, times when you can do everything right and still meet tragedy. But those cases are relatively few. The vast majority of fireground deaths occur in circumstances we should have or could have controlled or preempted. The hazards inherent to firefighting do not make tragedy inevitable or unavoidable. Tragedy is not our "fate." A few years ago, Chief Alan Brunacini of the Phoenix Fire Department developed a seminar entitled, "It's Not Okay to Die in a Structure Fire." The name of that class was very telling.

All members of the fire department, from the top on down, must contemplate firefighter life safety within the context of mission and operational details. Firefighter life safety should be the first mission priority and the primary concern in every aspect of every operation. "Thinking safety" should be elevated in the organizational culture and in the consciousness of every member. Not an apparatus should roll or a line be stretched without short- and long-range, working department plans for, and personal commitments to, getting everyone back safe from every call.

Acting in the preservation of known life hazards and acting in the preservation of property are two vastly different emergencies requiring vastly different operational mindsets. We must recognize the distinction and act accordingly. Furthermore, the extent to which we'll go to preserve life should, in an operational sense, mean different things to different fire departments with different operational capabilities. The fire service has to stop dying in unoccupied structures, and if it takes rigid policies and procedures to do it, so be it.

Routine incidents aren't routine incidents until the rigs are turned off and you're back at the firehouse. Fire service history is replete with tragedies in which seemingly routine incidents suddenly went bad, in a hurry. In a recent interview, USFA Deputy Administrator Charlie Dickinson, when asked his experiences as fire chief during the 1992 Bricelyn Street Fire in Pittsburgh in which three firefighters were killed, said, "There's one word that should be stricken from the fire service vocabulary, and that's "routine"….The nature of this business: One moment it can seem so…benign…and the next minute, so unthinkable, so terrible."

We must address the root causes of our line-of-duty deaths if we expect to change. Our typical thought process for examining our fireground deaths needs to change. Too often, we take an oversimplified cause-and-effect approach to these incidents, carrying the analysis only so far as to identify the most obvious mitigating factors and trigger points to the tragedies. Certainly, for example, incident command breakdown or poor fireground air management or bad tactics have been mitigating factors in firefighter deaths, but they are not the ultimate root causes for them. We won't see the kind of positive progress in death and injury reductions until these root causes are accepted, contemplated, and addressed in every aspect of fire department operations.

One of the great fire service thinkers and doers, Tom Brennan, said success and safety at a structure fire attack are intertwined-and even the same thing-and are achieved by enough well-trained, well-equipped, and experienced "thinking firefighters" correctly performing immediately necessary tactics support the correct strategy in coordinated fashion under the supervision of seasoned officers. Failure to actualize this basic truth jeopardizes the success and safety of the operation, along with our chances of surviving the fire building that we didn't, in Brennan's words, "make behave." And so our preventable fireground line-of-duty deaths and injuries continue.

In assessing or investigating a fire that "got away" (or worse), we might identify that, for example, "they didn't stretch a backup line for the second floor search," "ventilation wasn't coordinated with the advancing attack handline," or "they didn't locate the fire through size up." Such assessments beg for further discussion about firefighting operations within the context of Brennan's Law. However, in many cases, the remedy isn't as simple as "thou shalt stretch a backup line to the second floor" because often the operational failures or inadequacies were set up long before the fire ever occurred. And these fomenting operational failures reveal hard realities about your organization as whole in its ability to help protect its members through formal structures; about your ability to lead; about your preparedness and capabilities as a fire department and as firefighters; about your decision-making abilities in crisis mode; and about the seriousness with which you take your personal responsibility to your fellow firefighters, to your families, and to yourselves.

These five elemental areas-policies/procedures, leadership, preparedness, decision making, and personal responsibility-in some way underlie every fire department operation and action. And preventable line-of-duty deaths (and injuries) can be traced back to, either alone or in combination, nonexistent or ineffective policies and procedures, poor leadership, lack of preparedness, poor decision making, and lack of personal responsibility. These are the five root causes.

Policies and procedures reflect "must have," non-negotiable items for firefighter safety. The span the gamut from fireground SOPs to seatbelt regulations to policies on fire attack strategies for vacant structures. They must be adhered to and enforced.

Leadership takes many forms, from making the case (and fighting the good fight) in city hall for adequate personnel to personal conduct in the fire station to a firm gloved hand on a probie's shoulder to help get him through his first tough fire. Leadership is recognizing the right thing that needs to be done and taking the steps to get it done, within your power to do so, and encouraging others to join in it. Good leadership means you're a living example that firefighter safety takes second to nothing else in this business.

Preparedness refers to every individual and organizational ingredient, mental and physical, that results in enough well-trained, well-equipped, and experienced "thinking firefighters" correctly performing immediately necessary tactics that support the correct strategy in coordinated fashion under the supervision of seasoned officers-that is, everything that contributes to the adherence to Brennan's Law.

There are many theories and methods of decision making, but the bottom line is whether or not we're training firefighters and officers who can read fire buildings so well as to not be "surprised" by the "sudden" change building/fire behavior, and for whom conducting a rapid, organized decision process under stressful conditions is second nature. At the basic level, it might refer to say, the choice of what line to pull or how deep to go in when conducting a search. At a more advanced level, it might refer to strategic and resource decisions.

Personal responsibility is, of course, just that. You have to have it. You have to take it. Leadership must inculcate it within the organization. You are personally responsible for not becoming a victim and personally responsible to see to it that your brothers and sisters don't become victims. Personal responsibility is the foundation for safe fireground operations and the organizational systems that support them. Firefighter safety is everyone's personal responsibility, from the chief of department to the probationary firefighter.

Today's rapid dissemination of information and avenues for discussion bring into clearer focus the fire service's continual tactical and systemic failures at fireground operations. These failures, and the operational results from them (in failing to make the building behave), must be part of an analysis that leads operational correction and improvement. But it doesn't end there.

Manual firefighting is a human endeavor. Preventable line-of-duty deaths result from human behaviors and human decisions that failed in an unforgiving, dangerous environment. The fix-becoming better at making the building behave or knowing when not to try anymore-requires correction at the source, at the level of the five root causes. Behaviors then are modified and controlled to where they become engrained in the operational fabric. As scientific behavioral studies have shown, this yields a natural, positive progression in attitudes and beliefs about safety. And combined, safer behaviors and healthier attitudes toward safety create a "new" organizational safety culture that will appreciably reduce firefighter line-of-duty deaths and injuries nationwide-and, possibly, in your fire department.

The next question becomes, Do you have the courage to dig deeper? Do you have the courage to be safe?