Chief Marc A. Muench
Everyone Goes Home® Kentucky State Advocate
I would like to take this opportunity to recognize Tim Brumfield as the newest Kentucky State Advocate to the Everyone Goes Home® program. Tim is originally from Nicholasville, KY, and serves as the Deputy Chief in charge of Staff Development, Compliance, and Safety with the Danville, Kentucky Fire Department. Recently, Tim and I were able to attend the Everyone Goes Home® Safety Summit at the National Fire Academy in Emmitsburg, Maryland. It was a great experience with a lot of learning and a lot of networking. During our stay, we were invited to submit a proposal on how to better spread the Courage to Be Safe® program across the entire Commonwealth. The Courage to Be Safe® program addresses the most serious threats to the health and safety of all firefighters. There will be more to come on this project as we work to develop this program for statewide delivery.
In this issue, I will address Initiative #7 - "Create a National Research Agenda and Data Collection System That Relates to the Initiatives" - as it relates to the collection of data to line-of-duty injuries and deaths and the circumstances that lead to them.
There is a saying that goes something like, "experience is the best teacher," which is very true, however, in the fire service many of those experiences come from being placed in life threatening situations. Whether it is during an interior fire attack, a haz-mat incident or operating on an interstate, the situations we encounter everyday teach us through our experiences. The "classroom" that we learn in is extremely dangerous. What if we had the opportunity to learn from the experiences of others, without being placed in these situations? What if we could discover some of the circumstances surrounding line-of-duty injuries and deaths so that we could do something about them before they happen? Could we learn from the experiences of fellow firefighters who were placed in life threatening situations and lived to tell about it? We have all heard the stories around the kitchen table. These stories are shared information that is experienced by only a few members of a shift or a department. What if this same information could be collected and placed in one location so that all of us could reference these experiences to learn what went well and what went...not so well. That is the proposal made by Initiative #7 - that we might be able to go to a central source to read and study the experiences of others before we are exposed to these same dangerous situations. By being able to study these experiences beforehand, we may be able to prevent getting into these situations to begin with, as well as examples of how we might react if we are placed in a life threatening circumstance.
While not a mandatory reporting site, there is a website that you can visit to review the experiences we have discussed here. www.firefighternearmiss.com is supported by the IAFC, the IAFF and Aid to Firefighters Grants. The site has a search engine that allows you to search for and drill down to just about any specific incident type or situation that you can imagine. Topics include: fire events, health events, training events, responding events and haz-mat events, just to name a very few. There are thousands of events listed for your reference and learning experience. An additional website is: www.firefighterclosecalls.com. This site will also supply you with hundreds of examples of how to prevent firefighter injuries and death. Both of these websites also allow you to submit your own stories so that your fellow firefighters from across the nation can learn from your experiences.
Firefighting is a dangerous job and unfortunately, we have depended on experience as our primary learning tool for many years, however, if we can study the experiences of others, we can use their lessons to assure that each of us "keeps going home, after each run and after each shift."