Pause then laugh!
This is not a debate on smooth bore vs. fog nor is it a male - female thing. It seems sometimes that the fire service can be broken down into two distinct camps. Some of the more popular Smooth Bore vs. Fog, Paid vs.Volunteer and PPV vs. VES.
Maybe there is another - Extinguishment vs. Failure
Extinguishment is at the heart of what we do. No other organization does what we do. Ask any firefighter how they felt putting out the fire and you will find the truest of answers. We must commit to extinguishment as we have recently to firefigher failure training. The fire service must realize that extinguishment saves the most lives. It is not always dramatic but what if it were delayed? The results would be different. Those different results helped to spawn failure training. Not that there is anything wrong with that.
Pause then laugh!
There is a tremendous amount of good information out there as well as self promoters that have an adgenda to push. These "progressives" will bend for any new technolighy breeze that comes along while offering your department "experienced" training on that topic.
Pause then Laugh!
Cottege industries have emerged all with keeping you alive because someone did not put out the fire. The fire services interest in fire extinguishment is low. From LODD reports that don't get it (put water on the fire) to grant money for exotic tools (that will rarely be used), from chief cars that "need" gold leaf "but unfortunetly" we don't have money for training.
Pause then laugh!
Yes its funny. Funny strange. How did we end up like this?
I believe that there is a silent majority out there that does see through the smoke and mirrors. Hang in there brothers and sisters one day the blinders will be lifted and all will see as you do. You keep training your people on all topics but you never forgot number one. Extinguishment!
We are seeing many sworn by tactics slowly disappearing, as well as new save the day tactics being debunked. Which is great news. While it is true that what works here may not work elsewhere. Having an informed impartial testing on a national level would go a long way in increasing operational safety. The results would be there for all to see and digest and possibilly adopt. No practice should be adopted without training on it first and verfying that it would be beneficial to your department. One tactic that would be beneficial to all departments is to put water on the fire.
Pause then laugh
Too many decision makers are drawn in by hype and the fire service info-mercial. Doubting Thomas needs to be in full gear to check out "New" solutions. Safety is a great theme and we should always look toward injury reduction but we should never forget that extinguishment comes first. Training on fire extinguishment not failure should be priority number one for all fire department. Remember "The fire you put out today may save your life"
Pause then laugh!
Comment
Nice post. It's true that extinguish is the goal.
But, just do a little test: put a piece of paper on the ground. Light the paper, and wait. The fire rise, then decrease and die. Can we say extinction is done? Yes. But... we've done nothing. Now repeat the same thing, and use a nozzle to flow water far away from the paper. You are flowing water, the fire die. But you don't touch the paper. Do you perform extinction? If you just check the result (fire die) you can say yes. But we must admit as we flow water far from the paper, the answer is more "No" than "Yes"...
In Quality Insurrance, in order to increase efficiency, we tend to avoid "human feeling" to search for "metrics". What we call "metrics" are method, element, details we can measure. For some job, that's easy: you break stone so you just have to count the number of time you smash stone with your hammer, and count the weight of stones. For computer science, finding good metrics is far more complicated. I was software engineers and we spent days and days to find what to measure. Time to create 10 lines of codes was one of the metric we were using and with that we start to discoverd think that, after more than 10 years of job, we were still ignoring. I remember of a terrific day: when you find the metrics you will use, you must indicate the value you think you will get, and indicate the value which will be correct for quality and the other which will indicate you are a bad guy!
For a small paper we had to fill, as it was very very very easy, we decided to indicate that 90% of theses papers should be correctly filled. And while writing 90% we were sure to be "cool". After a few days, the Quality insurrance manager did a meeting: we were really at 90%! But 90% of paper incorrecly filled... The "metrics" smash us hardly. But this was the truth.
Long speech? Link with the extinction? What metric do we use? None. Fire is on, we run everywhere, use nozzle, an
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