Front or rear door?

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Permalink Reply by chance on March 27, 2009 at 1:18pm

if fire is pumping from soffits and the eves more than likely its in the attic. why not place a verticle vent h*** above your supposed fire room that should lift the smoke enough that you can see the first two feet off the ground. that facilitates your search and your attack and slows fire extention. if you are traing often and are comforable with your crew you should be able to cut the vent and approch from the c side to make your attack in less than 5 min. that is with a pumper crew and a truck. or in our rural area we run two pumpers on shift and are expected to preform every aspect of firefighting and all rescue ops. just food for thought

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Permalink Reply by Jason Hoevelmann on March 27, 2009 at 1:45pm

I agree with most here, front door. Eliminate the hazard (fire) and all will be better for everyone. Great posts and very good reasons why to use the front door. I know a lot of people that would automatically stretch to the rear because of past classes. However, since we are using the front door, we need to get somebody to the rear for checking those conditions and OVM. Stay safe.

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Permalink Reply by matt days on March 29, 2009 at 11:20am

I'm with Tim Sitz!!!

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Permalink Reply by Brenda Tenney on April 1, 2009 at 3:01pm

This would require where the victims are at.It all depends how you size up the scene.

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Permalink Reply by Marc Brown on April 1, 2009 at 4:55pm

I would send my first company in the C- side entrance with a line, while making their way to the living room they have a good chance of finding the victim in a common area. If the victim was to be in the A- side of the dwelling ( where the fire and smoke is ) the likely hood of servival would be low due to the intense smoke. My second company would also enter from the C- side to do search and rescue, the hose team would be pushing the heat and fire out a living room window. This would create some ventalation for the search team giving them better visibility. Our dept. SOG is to streatch a 2.5 inch line to the rear door and then use our high rise pack for the attack. This removes the problem of figuring out the lengths of attack lines.

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Permalink Reply by Tim Linke on April 2, 2009 at 10:31am

Truck crew to the roof, minimum 4' x 8' vent h*** over living room and hallway...two guys can do this as the line is stretched and charged to the front door. Move in when ventilation occurs and put the fire out. Front door access to the fire area is the quickest and easiest way to get to it...with appropriate ventilation, the fire can be isolated to the area of origin.

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Permalink Reply by Tim Williams on April 2, 2009 at 5:03pm

I agree with Ray McCormick. Front door, own the hallway and blow it out the front window. Good truck crew does the search and thens pulls ceiling in fire room.

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Permalink Reply by Antiquefirelt on April 8, 2009 at 7:51am

We would go in the front door. I say we as this is a FD SOG, for PD's, for all the reasons Ray has pointed out, and we have shamelessly used his FE articles in the past to prove this point. We know our first due and 99.9% of the homes easily allow for front door access to the main hallway and/or stairs. The one noted exception is in single wide mobile homes, for which there is a specific exception.

Will, I think you have proven that you did the right thing by using sound judgment and valid tactics, sadly not everyone is savable and Monday morning quarterbacking can be informative, but sometimes with an outcome such as this can cause serious heartburn.

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Permalink Reply by Jason Gennaro on April 9, 2009 at 8:04pm

It's hard to make a decision over the internet without a pic showing all 4 sides but I'll go with most......enter side alpha for rescue/fire mitigation. There could be an issue with fire above but as long as you use a pike pole to check conditions/construction stability with an access h*** you should be good to go. My opinion.

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