The annual safety stand down — now known as Safety, Health and Survival Week — is upon us. It’s a time to continue to discuss what safety really means to a dangerous profession. That debate is critical and important.
But we should put aside our differences in philosophy for the Week, step back from our “higher order” debates, disengage from our kitchen table rhetoric and ask ourselves this: What will it take for me, yes me, as a single individual to make things safer?
This year’s Safety, Health and Survival Week should be about independent reflection. Make time to look at yourself, independent of your organization, and ask if you do everything possible to reduce the likelihood that you will be injured or killed on the job.
There is no need for a show. The grand eloquent statements, the passionate pleas for compliance, the graphic pictures of crashed fire trucks; they have done nothing to close the gap. Organizations can write as many rules as they want, and they do, but the gap is not closing. My gap analysis says that the problem, at least part of it, is me. Each person who looks at the issues must admit that they too are part of the problem.
Right now, today, someone somewhere is going to get injured in the line of duty. Based on the average statistics, someone else is going to die in a fire or going to a fire in the next few days. Those are just facts. But an individual making personal choices can have an impact on whether or not his/her name is added to a memorial that they will never get to see.
One of my reflections this year was about time. You can take from it what you want. Be careful though, I might be wrong.
Recruit school
I think we should locate and destroy every stopwatch used to evaluate firefighters. We start out in recruit school enforcing the lesson that “speed” is what matters by timing everything and then we are amazed when people drive fast or don’t think. Timed evolutions and safety are mutually exclusive. Speed is a function of proficiency and proficiency is developed via repetition.
There are only two time intervals that should factor into how a fire department conducts its business. Why? Because there are only two time intervals that a fire department controls without much outside influence.
The first is call processing time. We control how fast a call is received, processed and dispatched. We must do everything we can to minimize that interval.
The second is turn-out time. How long does it take us from the time we are alerted until we are on the truck and moving? After we leave, we have to deal with traffic, road conditions, weather, etc. — we have no control over those variables.
So my argument is that a discussion about safety without a concurrent discussion about how we measure performance, both culturally (can’t get beat) and officially (response times) in relation to time, is a circular discussion. To make progress we sometimes have to give something up. This year my offering is the stopwatch. That may not solve the whole problem, but it’s a start.
