You can participate in Jennie Collins’ and Richard Bowers’ Common Threads and Missing Links in Firefighter Tragedies session at the International Association of Fire Chiefs’ FRI conference that runs Aug. 17-20 in San Antonio.
By Cathy Sivak, contributor
Line-of-duty death or injuries are among the most difficult scenarios fire department officers face. Even worse is the post-incident discovery that an injury or death was preventable.
The compartmentalized nature of departments that make up the fire service makes it difficult for those on the ground to understand the common threads that can threaten firefighter safety.
Extensive case study review and more than 70 combined years of fire service experience is the driving force behind co-presenters Jennie Collins’ and Richard Bowers’ Common Threads and Missing Links in Firefighter Tragedies session at this month’s International Association of Fire Chiefs’ FRI conference that runs Aug. 17-20 in San Antonio.
“When we lose multiple firefighters in an incident, it certainly is an immense tragedy. But we also lose a lot of firefighters one by one,” says Jennie Collins, the recently appointed chief of Dare County (N.C.) EMS.
Collins has been a fire service leader for 31 years that includes serving as Prince William County (Va.) Department of Fire and Rescue battalion chief. Collins also frequently provides technical and leadership assistance to fire/EMS agencies, speaks at national, regional and local conferences, and was lead technical writer for the Medical Director Handbook published by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and FEMA in 2012.
“The fire service has an ‘it will never happen here’ attitude,” Collins says. But post-incident reviews reveal individual department injuries and deaths could have been prevented if commonalities had been shared across the fire service.
Gathering, sharing information
“We keep killing and injuring firefighters in the same ways, but nothing is done about it. We weren’t learning as a global — or even a national or a regional — fire and EMS entity,” says Richard Bowers, fire chief of the Fairfax County (Va.) Fire and Rescue Department, and former Montgomery County (Md.) Fire and Rescue Service fire chief.
His 39-year career includes leadership roles with various FEMA, state, county and regional task forces and advisory committees, with deployments to the Oklahoma City bombing, the 9/11 Pentagon attack, and Hurricane Katrina.
“We are reactive in the fire and EMS service,” Bowers says. “This is a proactive ‘here are the facts; here is what happened; here’s what we can do to prevent it in the future’ approach.”
One reason the fire service fails to learn from the shared, preventable mistakes is that there is no centralized collection point that assimilates all of this information with a clearinghouse for trending and review, Collins says. Indeed, when tragic incidents occur, departments struggle with resources to assimilate their own situation, she says. “When something bad happens, they close ranks.”
The presenters’ joint study of case reports from multiple states and jurisdictions found that the need to make common details behind line-of-duty deaths and injuries part of the collective fire service consciousness. While media coverage of tragic incidents is widespread, lack of incident report collection and review corresponds with a lack of objective analysis to identify trends.
Their review of case studies revealed that when certain sets of policy, procedure, training, operational, supervisory and operational discipline align, multiple challenges can arise, Bowers says.
“When you line them all up, the linkage becomes similar, if not identical,” Bowers says. “We put them together and identified the common threads, and then created strategies to help departments prevent those types of injuries from occurring.”
And that, they say, can lead to preventing injuries and deaths.
Better training
“There’s not a single person that walks into the station wanting to make a bad decision with a terrible outcome. We walk in with training and expectations,” Collins says. “When something goes wrong, we tend to focus on individual actions. We need to look organizationally to make sure there isn’t a chain of events that needs to be broken.
“We spark the memory bank so that the attendees realize that what we are talking about is not theory. When you take the (department) patch off, the types of events we are talking about are relatable.”
One trouble spot revealed by case analysis is departmental training or techniques that no longer align with today’s fire and rescue environment, Bowers says.
“Training is so important; if it doesn’t match the need, it affects tactical fire ground operations,” Bowers says. “Fire spread is completely different than it was 25 years ago. It’s OK to put water on the fire from the outside to stop fire development on the inside.
“If we really want to focus on reducing injuries and line-of-duty deaths, we have to learn from unfortunate incidents. We want attendees to leave the session talking about how it translates to their department.”
During the session, the chiefs will urge departmental leaders to balance studies, operational policies and training to understand that the fireground changes over the decades and that a less-aggressive approach saves lives, Collins says.
“We risk a lot to save a lot. That can get overused to include attempts to save property that will be bull-dozed the week after the event,” she says. “The risk needs to be in saving a life. It sounds simple, but it’s not.”