Fire Engineering Training Community

Where firefighters come to talk training

Overview
We do a lot of firefighter emergency training. At least four times a year we exercise our Firefighter Emergency Guidelines to assure they are up to date and that everyone is intimately familiar with its content. Recently we did a very basic Mayday drill that taught us a few very valuable lessons, the things we learned were somewhat outside of the established learning objectives and were so fundamental that we probably would never have designed a drill to evaluate these particular areas.
The Drill
A one alarm assignment answers a reported structure fire in a multi-story commercial building (our training tower). Upon arrival, there is no evidence of a working fire and the first-due is expected to go into the investigative mode with other companies staging. Upon further investigation, the first due reports smoke on the second floor (coming from an incipient phase fire), transmits a working fire and everyone goes to work as they would in this particular situation. During the early stages of the initial fire attack, an inside facilitator and an inside safety officer instruct a company officer to go down with a medical emergency. If during this initial Mayday a crew acts in a manner that may compromise crew safety, the interior safety and facilitation crew are instructed to set-up a second Mayday to reinforce the fact that one Mayday may easily lead to multiple Maydays.
Drill Objectives
Exercise our department’s Mayday checklist
Exercise our department’s Firefighter Emergency Guidelines
Exercise our ability to respond effectively to a firefighter emergency
Place a firefighter(s) in a position to respond to their officer going down
Exercise our ability to respond to multiple Maydays
Conclusion
Some of our firefighters are not prepared to assume the communications role once their officer is taken out ie. Direct RIT, answer PARs, quickly and effectively operate their portable radio. NOTE, every firefighter has a portable radio on them at every incident, yet they rarely talk on them
There were questions as to when to interrupt the PAR
Some of the critical information that was communicated face to face needed to be communicated over the radio
There were questions regarding how to handle a situation where a crew is providing hose line protection for the firefighter rescue effort and one of those members on the hose line has an air emergency during the firefighter rescue effort.
Unless you can confidently answer how your organization will consistently handle the above, this is an easy drill with many benefits. This drill created several mental markers for our organization.

Let me know what you think...experiences

Views: 202

Replies to This Discussion

Very interesting scenario and very likely to occur as we see the leading cause of LODD. I am thinking that you continue to think outside of the box with the event training that you continue to provide.
This also seems like an easy drill to set up and manage. Did you darken (night drill) and smoke the second floor forcing them to go on air before the officer is taken OOS?
Did they respond as a whole with a mayday declaration since it was medical, or did you find more emergency traffic announcements?
Good job, very thought provoking on this end. One thought...when will we conduct this drill?
Thanks for sharing and hope to talk to you soon.
What's up Brother?

Boy do I have you fooled. Really thanks for the kind words. I required everyone to be on air for the air management aspect and yes we had six groups do the drill and each declared the Mayday and we as an organization responded as such. Talk to you soon.

RSS

Policy Page

PLEASE NOTE

The login above DOES NOT provide access to Fire Engineering magazine archives. Please go here for our archives.

CONTRIBUTORS NOTE

Our contributors' posts are not vetted by the Fire Engineering technical board, and reflect the views and opinions of the individual authors. Anyone is welcome to participate.

For vetted content, please go to www.fireengineering.com/issues.

We are excited to have you participate in our discussions and interactive forums. Before you begin posting, please take a moment to read our community policy page.  

Be Alert for Spam
We actively monitor the community for spam, however some does slip through. Please use common sense and caution when clicking links. If you suspect you've been hit by spam, e-mail peter.prochilo@clarionevents.com.

FE Podcasts


Check out the most recent episode and schedule of
UPCOMING PODCASTS

© 2024   Created by fireeng.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service