I’ve been around the fire business for a long time (over 50 years) and I’ve certainly seen a lot of changes in firefighting operations.  Especially in the design and construction of running gear, or what they call PPE today.  Along with that has come advances in equipment design, procedures and apparatus construction.

Yet, despite all these technical and procedural changes, we are STILL seeing the same ratio of injuries and FF deaths, more or less, that we have been getting for decades.  If everything that we do and wear and use are better now, then the only thing that hasn’t been upgraded is the brain that we use.  You can spend scads of money on clothes, tools and trucks, but if you don’t upgrade your thinking and actions along with them, then you are endangering yourself and everybody else.

Safety, both on the fireground and in the station, is not being practiced to the level that it could be in a lot of departments.  Many departments now have appointed Safety Officers that respond to all fire calls and do nothing but observe and point out unsafe actions that should be immediately corrected.  All in the name of reducing injuries.  Between fire calls, the safety officers visit stations and review problems and conduct drills to highlight safety practices.  Does your department do this?

Ephrata, Washington FD photo

Oftentimes, smaller volunteer departments tend to leave niceties like this out of their fireground operations.  “Not enough people” is one of their excuses.  Or in many cases it’s just not a wide-enough planning ahead of time.  The recent report just issued on the house fire in Texas last year that killed two volunteer FF’s points out a LOT of necessities that were ignored that directly led to the fatal results.

Ok, so your little country department can only muster 8 or 10 fit bodies on a “worker.”  What about the “old-timers” who still listen to the scanner and show up to watch?  Who better to become the fireground safety officer than somebody with the experience to recognize unsafe actions in progress?  Or maybe you should consider a regional procedure where the 2nd or 3rd arriving department that is coming to assist you assumes that repsonsibility along with their R.I.T. assignments.  Please, don’t tell me that you don’t have R.I.T. assignments automatically programmed in.  After that disaster in Texas?

And do we really need to say any more about seat belt usage?  Everybody knows about that stuff.  But there are still a lot of fire and ambulance squads that don’t practice it, even though they know better.  As a result, we get a dozen or so needless FF deaths every year just because somebody didn’t bother to buckle up.  And the beat goes on.

Make “Safety” your business.  Demand safe procedures and dedicated safety officers in your department.  And every day check out FireFighter Close Calls (http://www.firefighterclosecalls.com) to see and be reminded of little things with big consequences that are killing and maiming our fire and rescue people.

After we check out the equipment this morning, I’ll have the coffee ready in the Day Room and we’ll take a look at this training video produced by the Denver Fire Department covering their new mandatory seat belt procedure:

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