The Drills in NFPA 1410

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Permalink Reply by Bob Carpenter on April 4, 2009 at 12:13pm

Miami-Dade (Metro-Dade) has been using the 1410 drills for about four years. As a district training officer I was often contacted by new officers for "drill ideas" or access to acquired buildings for upcoming drills. When asked what they planned to drill on, they often didn't have much of a plan. So I suggested and began distributing a 1410 package as a starting point.

We then began a fireground evolution series. In this program, the Training Division would pick two of the evolutions and send an announcement to Operations for the Monthly Drills. Companies then had a month to drill on those two evolutions. In the following month, companies would be notified at random to report to a drill site to perform one of the evolutions. They would have to practice both because they didn't know which evolution would be the evaluation evolution. Not all companies (we have over 65 stations so it is impossible to catch them all) get summoned for the evaluation. At first, no one minded not being called out. But as more and more companies bought in to the drill of the month concept more would train harder so that they shined on evalutation day. The next thing we know, people are getting upset because they didn't get called out to the drill. This is a good problem!

We just completted the first annual "Benchmark Competion". What a success! Firefighters being a competitive lot, jumped at the opportunity to train, work on teamwork, efficiency measures, and we even found some equipment storage issues that we can change to make deployment safer and faster. \

The evolution for the competition was drill #1 Forward lay, two attack lines. Slight adjustments were made to facilitate staffing and apparatus. NFPA recommended time for the evolution is 3:00 minutes. The winning company took the trophy with a smoking 1:08! The fastest time was actually laid down in the semi-finals at 1:06! Check out the video clip by Robert Hernandez in the communities section. The footage was from the preliminary rounds.

Using NFPA 1410 as a cornerstone for ongoing training and evaluation is a good place to start. It emphasizes the basics and gives members and commanders a good idea what to expect when developing incident action plans and strategies.

Permalink Reply by Todd Sweeney on June 17, 2009 at 11:27am

We are using the 1410 drills every year during training. I took all of them and separated them into engine company operations (Chapter 6 on handlines and Chapter 7 on master streams) and ladder company operations (Chapter 9). We have not tried the Chapter 8 sprinkler system ones due to lack of a good place to do it. I made two packets out of them and thew our department logo on the front. For the past three years we have been using them during drills. We do not always do all of them but we do pick a few of them each time.

We typically meet the standard. There are some issues from time to time when someone makes a mistake and cannot overcome the mistake in time but that is human nature. This is why we train right? For theChapter 6 and 7 ones, usually the crews get a game plan together before the drill starts and it goes smoothly. This summer I am not going to tell them what drill they are doing until right before the drill starts. I would like to tell them what drill they are doing, then give them 15 seconds or so together while in the apparatus to prepare, then see how it goes when they don't get to "pre-plan" what they are going to do. These are outstanding drills to use for recruits as well as long as you have more experienced firefighters working with them.

Permalink Reply by Nate Quartier on June 20, 2009 at 10:01am

This is a great post that has been started. I'm a new co. officer in a dept. (like many) suffering from low morale/budget cuts, etc. I have been trying to come up with hands on drill to help get our members (at least my company) back in the spirit, but have been having trouble spelling out lesson plans/objectives/etc. I had no idea NFPA had this document. I'll get my Chief to pull up a copy of it on Mon. As far as implementation, does anybody have any tips or experiences to share about how these were implemented in their dept.'s? I like the drill of the month concept, as our current "monthly" FF skills training is just a paper drill or power point that no one takes seriously. Thanks in advance for any insight.