By Mick Mayers
Firefighters never stop learning. If we want to be good at what we do, we don’t really have a choice, because every day brings something new. We may be faced with something routine more often than not, but along comes that call where you have to employ really creative thought to make it all work out okay. Some of us take a lot of pride in the details of the job. I happened to be teaching for a group I work with and got to witness a fellow instructor with a real love for his niche.
Sean is a Lieutenant in the Fire Department of New York City, which in and of itself is a very honorable position in life. He takes his livelihood a little farther though, teaching his craft around the nation to other firefighters in places far remote from the Big Apple. We happened to be teaching in Gulfport, Miss. where the brothers there were amazed by some of the things he could do with the tools we traditionally carry on the ladder companies, or “truck” companies, as we call them.
While I am a proponent of scientific knowledge, there is a lot to be said about anecdotal evidence when you work for a fire department with 11,000 firefighters distributed over 198 engines, 143 trucks, 7 squads and 5 rescues. Last month in New York, for example, there were 1,945 structure fires. In one year, the FDNY runs more than 124,000 structure fire calls of which over 25,000 of them meet the definition of an “incident”. To put that in perspective, my own department, which stays busy compared to most fire departments in the nation, ran a total of around 6,000 calls last year. And that’s also counting our medical calls, which account for around 70 percent of that number.
So while I am an instructor based on my credentials, my skills and my knowledge, and my ability to convey that into learning for others, I still always consider myself a “student of the game.” When I can be around someone with this kind of knowledge, like Sean, even I’m paying attention to see what I can take away.
Whether it’s subtle little things like where your hands are placed when using a certain tool for best leverage, or the reason why you should open a door a certain way, these are views into an art honed by heroic men long gone. We do have to view things that people tell us with a certain amount of skepticism, especially in these days of “internet expertise,” but when Sean tells the stories of how he personally learned a certain trick, at a certain alarm, or with a certain group of people, it brings the best practices of what we do into a new light. It binds what we continue to do with the traditions of our storied past.
