Money Doesn't Buy Safety!
I read an awful lot of fire service periodicals and journals to try to stay current. I have actually even written for a couple, so I am aware that everyone has an opinion and it should be respected.
I recently read a piece in a fire service journal that implied that the deaths of many firefighters had been an impetus and helped in the procurement of fire grant funding. Further that money had been used to buy thermal imaging cameras and provide rapid intervention training among other things.
Those statements are indeed correct and the legislation that worked toward getting us some grant money has been written with the blood of our brothers and sisters firefighters who have lost their lives.
I will submit however and at the risk of losing even more friends, I will tell you that I remain solidly unconvinced that the lack of thermal imagers has been killing us.
In the past ninety days we have killed firefighters at least twice fighting fires in auto body facilities. We have killed them while overhauling and we have once again lost firefighters to injuries succumbed from falling from a piece of apparatus.
I was able to see pictures of a couple of these incidents on the Internet.
If you start in the parking lot you would see a $300,000 equipped pumper, and new lightweight 1 3/4" hose attached to that pumper stretching into the building where it was probably attached to a state of the art several hundred dollar automatic nozzle.
I would like to believe (but I obviously don't know in the above specific cases) that either at the end of this line or nearby there was a firefighter wearing a thousand dollar set of bunker gear and a $2500.00 airpack with built-in PASS device and redundant air alarm.
...but they were dead.
I have heard enough about how money and technology are going to be the answer to our safety problem, it is BS and I think we should be tough enough as a group to finally admit it.
If you think getting a fire grant is going to make you safer than maybe you need to re-think your position a little.
Discipline and adherence to the training that you have received, and proper risk assessment will save more lives than all of this money will.
If you received money from a grant then you should certainly make sure your personnel have all the resources and technology they can possibly receive. All of that must then be solidly backed up by changing your department's culture, so safety is valued.
Here is my point plain and simple....I am aware of a larger fire department that suffered a LODD several years ago. There have been some significant changes in many ways in that department and there was an investigation into the loss of life that occurred there. To this day major improvements in accountability have yet to be implemented. Simple low cost procedures and checklists have not been provided as yet. Money and technology and training on issues that would have had low to mild impact on the actual LODD have been plentiful. Discipline and simple survival tactics are not valued. It will happen again.
I just had occasion to review a department's standard operating procedures and one of the procedures was similar to this but not exactly..." an aggressive interior attack will be the first mode of operation..." or something like that. I fully understand why this is this and I am more than aware of how it got there. My question is....Isn't it time we re-think what we are doing here in this country?
In the article I read it indicated that we as a fire service "get it".
I humbly disagree.