Feel free to join us for our Sunday Evening weekly Roundtable Chat at 8:00 PM Eastern time.

We will be talking about what we will do this year, our fire service resolutions, what we expect to see in the service this year in terms of technology and procedures and tactics, and if there is anything we need to leave behind in 2013!

Watch live on YouTube and interact with the panel.

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Pete Lamb
Copyright 2013

How confused we sometimes get in the fire service when we try to overcomplicate things and we put a fire service spin on them because “WE” have to operate differently. This week I have some oversimplified thoughts for your consideration. Some of these are tactically related and some are in fact leadership and people related.

Use the ones you want, disregard the rest and feel free to send some of the ones you have thought of yourself.

I have been reading a lot about leadership and how to treat people. Good officers and bad officers. Hey I got an idea, treat others the way you might want to be treated. Ha! Stole that one from the bible I did. If people just treated others in a fair manner we would not have to have all of these complex management ideas and techniques. Just a thought.

Hold yourself and others accountable for your or their actions. If we started to do this more there would be a lot less problems in the fire service. The problem is that, holding someone else accountable can be an uncomfortable feeling for the moment, so we let it go. We need to do more. Simple.

Understand the new realities and science in the study of ventilation. Know when to vent, when to control the air flow, and always have a charged line available at the seat of the fire when you vent.

Preplan buildings and circumstances in your jurisdiction before the fire. They are a lot easier to view without all of that nasty smoke and heat. Good solid preplanning is a simple safety solution that is underutilized in the fire service.

Remember the fire doesn’t know how much manpower you have. Call the resources you need, from wherever you need them. No excuses. Operating with not enough people is our own fault not anybody else’s. Sure we all need more staffing but if your city, town or district wont give you the personnel, call for them at the fire when you need them.

Write disaster plans that are goal or resource oriented rather than incident specific. Forget that you are planning for a plane crash or a tornado, plan for the outcome. Mass casualties, big fires, wide spread destruction or what have you. Who cares what the cause was, plan for the outcome. You will have a better plan.

Train more than you feel like it.

Realize that your department wants to be full service to all of your people. realize that all of the special teams like haz mat and confined space are specialties and are exciting to do, but your department cannot be all things to all people. Do what you can with what you have, whenever you can do it. Sometimes all of these specialty functions take away from our core mission of fire and EMS.

Check on your people often and supervise them as you should. We often say in the firehouse that ” your mother doesn’t work here”. Maybe she should. She knew where we were, how to check up on us and made us tow the mark. Huh, what a concept for the fire service eh?

Riding lists are not accountability, really. I don’t know how this one got in here as a simple solution but I am leaving it in. A perfect simple accountability system costs about $ 100,000.00. The system costs less than $ 1000.00 and you should mandate and fire the first person who doesn’t participate in it. You will need the other $99,000.00 for legal fees but it will almost guarantee full participation in whatever system you choose.

Throw a lot more ladders than you normally would, it helps us get out of the building when we need to.

There are a million of these techniques and tips out there, but I truly believe the fire service is a very trendy organization steeped in culture and tradition. Just because there is some new procedure and technique out there, it does not mean we as the fire service should jump on it.

Let us be more concerned about simple solutions to complex problems instead of the expensive flashy ones with all of the glitz and glitter. We sometimes get too wrapped up in the “sex sells” and all that glitters that it blinds us from the obvious. When you have a problem in your department either operational in nature or personnel related, look for the root problem and the simplest solution possible.

It is a lot easier, and I have never known a firefighter that would not take the easiest solution to any problem.

Pete Lamb
Copyright 2013

Ahhhhhhh,……YAWN!….Stretch….

Salvage training what are you crazy, we don’t do that we barely have enough manpower to stretch lines, now you want us to throw covers! I want to throw up!

Wait………Don’t stop reading yet!

Salvage is an often neglected part of our job for those very reasons….we don’t do it often enough, and we can barely have the manpower to do everything else we are supposed to do.

This week I have some random disorganzied thoughts about salvage and a couple of interesting ideas for salvage drills.

Like all the stuff on this training page, I am trying to plant the seed for a training and you need to make it grow and do something with it.

Why the hell do we always teach and say Salvage and Overhaul? One doesn’t have as much to do with the other as we would believe and before I leave the fire service we might actually separate the two!

Some occupanices might require salvage to become a higher priority: These might include libraries, churches, city and town halls, museums where records and articatcs might in fact be irreplaceable. I am not suggesting that we lose any lives for property under any circumstances but it certainly moves salvage up on the priorities in any of the above mentioned occupancies.

Think about salvage considerations when you are shoveling out people’s possessions into the front yard. That couch with the quilt on it is a smoldering wreck and it’s in your way, but to the owner that is the quilt that now dead aunt Sadie crocheted by hand.

Salvage drills mostly consist of pulling the apparatus out, showing folds rolls etc., and maybe trying to cover some furniture strategically placed in the day room. While I know most of these are necessary and are recognized as skills we need, I have yet to be able to do the “two man, inflate a throw- balloon method” that they teach in the essentials manuals. Usually I knock over a precious vase and stain and or ruin the eight foot normal ceiling that prevents me from doing that in the first place!

Train on rolls and folds that one or two people can do easily.

Empty the apparatus room / bay. Take a 10 foot step ladder and have someone stand at the top of it with a garden hose. Have other members form teams. Give them a designated task like the following: This is an overhead light fixture or pipe leak and you are unable to shut off the flow: The water must be directed out a side door or window. After the instructions start a gentle flow of water from the garden hose and let the crews make chutes, use ladders, pike poles, and catchalls to direct and divert the flow. When they are done, roughly chalk out the amount of spill that hit the floor. Start the next team as the first and chalk out their puddle. The group with the smallest amount of water on the floor is the winner. Things like this make it interesting challenging and more real life and your personnel will become very creative in their methods.

Take a garden hose, adapt it to a piece of 3/4″ copper pipe about 10 feet long. Make an irregular slice in the pipe with a sawzall or make a series of pinholes. Have personnel control water flow. By rotating the pipe in different directions the problem becomes serious.

Use sprinkler props and leaking overhead sprinkler prop pipes for salvage drills.

Using a roscoe smoke machine have two firefighters enter an area that is moderately smoky and return with simulated valuable items they can carry: Have the area stocked with wallets, purse, phtographs, insurance policy documents, business records, leger books etc.and other props that you devise., and then review what areticles they retrieve and discuss them with the group. This gets them operating under a mask as well.

We do still say we protect life and property don’t we? Well salvage is the property piece and by a little creative thinking you can do some innovative salvage drills that will make your troops at least think about it and be prepared to act when needed.

And as always if anyone else has any valuable ideas how to do salvage training safely and effectively, let me know and we will share them with others.

Pete Lamb
Copyright 2013