A question posted recently on Quora asked, “Does direction of handline rotation matter during interior firefighting?” George Kellerman, a former firefighter, gave his opinion on the topic below. Check it out and add your own thoughts in the comments.
I would challenge any firefighter or instructor to prove that direction of rotation makes a difference. The real purpose of training people to use a specific direction has more to do with training them to move the hose around and hit everything. If you didn’t give people a memorable pattern, then they would just do whatever came naturally to them — which may or may not include hitting everything.
Unfortunately, many fire academies train firefighters like they are in the army — it’s not for you to think for yourself, just do as you were trained and you’ll do fine. That may work for simple fires, but fires are dynamic and often take on a life of their own. My own personal bias would be to teach them to pick a direction and just stick to it.
That said, however, when I was in the fire academy they did not teach us to move in a circle. In fact, we were taught to focus more on the ceiling where the super-heated gases are. One quick blast at the ceiling will convert the water to steam (and cause one cubic foot of water to expand into 1700 cubic feet of steam), which will fill the entire room with steam and smother the fire. In which case, it doesn’t really matter what direction you move the hose. You’ll be surrounded by smoke and steam no matter what you do.
I can remember going to one house fire where all I did was blast the ceiling for about 10-15 seconds on a semi-wide pattern and the fire went out. I didn’t wave the hose around, but I could tell the room was filling with steam and the fire was going out. Later, crews soaked the area with water as part of mop up. The real fire was basically out in the first 60 seconds, and then we just had to ventilate the smoke and check for hot spots and flare-ups.
