Several Good Reads

[papacheese]

If there's a copy laying around the station, I'd strongly recommend that everyone take a couple of minutes to read Chief Vincent Dunn's "Does Aggressive Firefighting Cause Firefighters to Become Caught and Trapped?" and former FDNY Lieutenant Joe Berry's "Engineered Wooden I-Beams" articles in the July, 2008 Firehouse magazine.

Chief Dunn's comments, which he subtitled "Has the Fire Service Obersold the Rapid Intervention Team Concept" cuts right to the core of the matter..that despite our best efforts, training, and motivation, there are certain key factors that cannot be band-aided or avoided which directly lead to injuries and LODD's. He isn't discarding the notion of being aggressive, but concisely pointing out why in many cases, it's simply ineffective and inherently dangerous.

I have long admired Chief Dunn's methodical approach to the art and science of firefighting; rather than simply accept the tradition, he identifies the factors that we really need to address, including training.

LT Berry's article summarizes the dangers of I beam/lightweight construction but adds the following informational tidbit that should have many of us thinking "Hmmmm"...

According to his article, two independent tests revealed the following information:

University of Illinois test: wood I-beams can fail in as little as 4 minutes 40 seconds.

California: wood I-beams can fail in as little as 3 minutes 20 seconds; the open-web, parallel chord type (the ones with gang nailers) in as little as 1 minute and 20 seconds.

As with anything, prevailing conditions will dictate the time factor; but unless you have specific knowledge of the construction features beforehand, it doesn't pay to consider the upper time limits, only the lower ones...






I'd highly recommend a read through.....

[WebBoss]

+1 Papacheese...

Those were 2 very very strong articles - just when I was thinking of dropping my subscription to Firehouse too.

That could be the basis for a good thread here Training Guru... What's Aggressive Attack and What's Defensive Attack

[voyager9]

The two subjects have some significant overlap as well. There's nothing wrong with aggressive interior attacks using sound/established practices as long as you know the building isn't going to fall down around your initial line.

From the other direction. With lightweight, or very lightweight construction you either have to be very quick and aggressive (within the first minute based on the above timeline) or defensive right from the get go.

[papacheese]

Boss...I agree, which was kinda, sorta where I was trying to go with the "Make the Call" thread. What factors should we identify to help us make the appropriate call? Lightweight construction is certainly one of them; if you read LT Berry's article, he's telling us that the time factor - the one thing we have no control over and cannot change, is the most important when dealing with any lightweight structure.

Here's the problem as I see it: unless there's a significantly bad outcome (someone gets hurt or worse), our strategies and tactics tend towards the aggressive, since that's what we've been taught, practiced, and swear by. In most cases, this approach produces satisfactory results....the fire goes out and we leave with the same number that responded. But like all things, it's about percentages and probabilities...we might see fires in 100 lightweight structures in which a bad outcome only happens in 1. Not a bad percentage - unless you happen to be the one with a "bad outcome" day.

[papacheese]

Chief Dunn's term - and explanation - of "defensive interior" (if memory serves....I don't thave the article in front of me) is a lot like the "transitional" mode I was trying to develop in the MTK series. Maybe the problem lies in the definition of what we call "aggressive".

To me, aggressive means making an active push to the seat of the fire....doing whatever's necessary to get the line in a position which will extinguish the bulk of the fire. Sounds simple, yet if that's our mindset, potentially dangerous IF the crew becomes so target-locked on getting there that they overlook or ignore indications that a change in tactics is needed. Think about the last time you were making a push...what was going through your head? "Come on...hurry up", or "Pull the %^&* hose, will ya?", or worse yet: "Wow!" Did you stop for even a second to assess things, look around and notice what's happening beyond the narrow vision field of your mask? Is it hot? Have I checked behind me to make sure the fire didn't get around in back? If you're on the nob, are you paying attention to how well the water is extinguishing the fire? Is it rapidly snuffing it out or does it seem to take a while? Do you have enough water?

I am a HUGE advocate of an aggressive interior attack when the odds are in our favor....the key question is this:

Will you notice or comprehend when things aren't going well? Is your mindset flexible enough to change tactics if the situation calls for it? Read a few NIOSH reports and it becomes obvious that in many cases, the departments involved continued doing what they were doing in spite of what was going on around them.