Firefighter Philosophy

It has been a rough couple of months for the fire service.  Two firefighters were recently killed in Chicago while battling a vacant warehouse fire.  Last week a Baltimore County (MD) firefighter lost his life after rescuing a resident at a garden apartment fire.  The Big County FD has not suffered any Line of Duty Deaths (LODD) in a quite of while; though of course it is not due to lack of effort.  I say that because our service (like the fire service as a whole) seems to be irrevocably split between those that would rush foolhardily into any building that was on fire and those that tend to be more analytical in the name of safety.  And as there are no shortage of egos amongst my brothers, at times the debate gets rather heated.

Witness the recent deaths in Chicago; within days there was an editorial on the website of a respected trade journal vehemently questioning the wisdom of having firefighters go into a reportedly vacant building.  A short time later, the editorial was pulled with an explanation from the senior editor that its too soon for hard questions in chicago.  Other media sources have suggested that there was clear evidence that the building was occupied by vagrants and that the building collapse wasn't clearly foreseeable.

So where do I stand on this issue?

Some food for thought:

• The old mantra that Big Water + Big Balls = Fire Goes Out is usually true (in my experience).  

• The USMC has a tactical philosophy that a 80% plan executed rapidly usually succeeds better than a perfect plan that is delayed.  

• A young firefighter was killed a couple of years ago in Prince William County, VA due to his officer's failure to circle the building and realize that the fire was burning up the rear exterior of the house.  

• Also in my experience if you put the fire out a lot of problems go away.  As an example I once ran a fire in a garden apartment where one of the basement apartments was blazing away.  The door to the apartment had failed filling the stairwell with thick smoke and trapping the residents upstairs.   There were three people hanging out on different balconies calling for help as I arrived.  There were four of us to start operations.  Normal firefighting doctrine places rescues first so according to doctrine I should have ignored the fire and used my personnel to throw ladders to the balcony.  However, I realized that while the apartment door had failed so had the windows and most of the fire, smoke, & heat was venting to the outside.  This meant that the people on the balconies were not in immediate danger.  We stretched a line to the apartment and put the fire out within minutes - and the people on the balcony were able to walk themselves out of the building.   

So after a few years of doing this job, my view that it is sometimes inherently dangerous.  We make the best decisions we can on the basis of experience and quick judgements.  Sometimes that is not enough and firefighters get hurt or die.  I am suspicious of those that rush into danger based on sheer bravado; I am also suspicious of those that fail to ever go into danger because of safety reasons.  On this (as in politics) I am a pragmatic moderate.  We serve to protect life, sometimes we must risk ours to do that, but there is no law that says we must do so foolishly.  

Thanks for reading.