Jarrod Sergi's Blog – September 2015 Archive (3)

Not long ago I posted some videos and pictures on social media that included a tour at my old firehouse. They were pictures of fires, the firehouse, and of the guys in front of the truck after a “good job”. Most of the firefighters on the thread had a good amount of time on the job, or had retired. Some comments were mostly in jest, and meant to just mess with us a little. Although some of the comments were essentially…

It is not uncommon for me to occasionally hear firefighters say “we don’t need to ventilate, its already venting”. In some cases, yes, this remains true. Maybe there is no more property to save and we can get away with saying that. One thing that I hope doesn’t get missed is that we ventilate the buildings to control the way that fire behaves inside that structure. We want to make that fire do what we tell it to do; especially given certain types of building construction. Yes we also…

The other day at work, I was standing in the apparatus bay having a conversation with one of my firefighters. He is currently working on his acting officer development book and we were having lots of discussion on a variety of topics. One subject in particular was size-up. We were discussing the importance of practicing size-up when responding to automatic alarms, whether they are residential or commercial. I explained the value of taking every opportunity to size-up buildings when going on…