the rural v urban debate.

How many times have you watched a YouTube video or seen a picture of fire that has taken place and seen someone ripping into the department at hand.

You shouldn’t be on the roof UL says so.
You should have hit that thru a window first everyone goes home.
Why don’t they man up and get inside for an interior attack.
Search should be done at the same time as fire attack.

I’m sure we have all heard these statements in reading the comments of a fire video that was done put up on the Web or some pictures that made their way to Facebook. But the thing that I often look to is the backgrounds of the firefighters commenting on aforementioned. You know how many times I see rural firefighters picking apart urban departmental operations? Or urban guys picking apart rural departments on the way they do business?

More often than it should!!!!!

Often times this results in many arguments and heated discussions to occur and in many of the cases both parties are right but are also wrong.

How’s that work

The things I see are from “their perspective” and that’s going to be based on their bread and butter operations. For instance rural guys saying that they need to hit that fire before going in on a video of say Detroit firefighters, but what are they evaluating, I like to think that they are comparing it to what they do based on their situation, such as inexperienced crew, little to any staffing, little water supply, etc. In those cases are they wrong?

No!

Are they wrong for calling out a department that is familiar with their own methods and does it multiple times a shift?

I wouldn’t call them out on it.

But it’s not just rural guys calling out inner city dudes. I have seen multiple times over where some small rural town in the Midwest or deep south etc. post pictures or helmet cam videos of their attack and there will be some inner city guy saying how they don’t consider the victim way to go you just the trapped occupant, or some of my favorites you’re a disgrace because you don’t go interior right off the bat like we should.

Again I look at their backgrounds to see where they have ran as a firefighter…

It seems like we have too many rural guys telling urban guys how to fight urban fires and to many urban guys telling rural guys how to fight rural fires. And this is where the disconnect is going down to many are putting out their thoughts without having facts . Fact I don’t know high rise fires or understand them so why would I comment on them as if I did I may ask questions etc. But in the same respect I don’t expect a guy from inner city only fought fires in the hood to understand a farm house fire with one 3 dudes of varying training levels and your nearest help is still 15 minutes away and no hydrants with 25% involvement…..

At the end of the day I leave you with this tad of advice Chief Rick Lasky left me with and I won’t ever forget it….. he says to me when I started writing “stick with what you know, when you don’t the guys who do understand it will pick you apart and you loose credibility”

Maybe we all could take something away from that message