The “Other” Situational Awareness

A few years ago, the term situational awareness wasn’t used or even recognized by the fire service.  Today, you can ask just about every firefighter what it means, and they will be familiar with the term and the concept.  The ability to determine one’s own safety and look ahead at protecting yourself is invaluable and will help us lower the number of firefighter injuries and deaths that occur each year.

After we protect ourselves, our next step should be the attention to the “other” situational awareness, that is, the safety and well-being of our co-workers.  As an example, consider coordinated attack actions, ventilation and water attack on the fire are timed to occur simultaneously, reducing the danger inside the fire structure.  However it’s more than one example and involves the incident from start to finish.

Take a recent fire in an abandoned hoarder house.  The fire was on the second floor and had a good start.  The windows in the building were open and there was plenty of air for the fire to grow.  The attack crew made the second floor by the only staircase from the rear of the house and were attacking the fire.  The back-up crew was positioned at the top of the stairs.  Unfortunately, things were not getting better.  The fire load was substantial.

Here’s where the incident gets a little dangerous.  The next couple of crews were trying to gain access to the second story.  Their intent was well-meaning, they were an aggressive group trying to help.  The problem was, the stairs were narrow and there was only one flight available to use.  Now there are two companies behind the back-up attack crew.  Had something gone wrong at this point, there was no where for the primary attack crew to go, the egress was bottlenecked.  The supporting crews had lost the awareness of the safety of the first couple of crews. 

If the additional crews would have taken a second and assessed the situational awareness of others, alternatives could have been used, and the staircase would have been available for emergency egress.  Fortunately in this case, it wasn’t necessary for the interior crews to bail-out.  It is a good lesson to discuss and consider.

There is a quote attributed to General George Patton and it goes something like, “No decision is difficult to make if you will get all of the facts.”  The missing fact in the hoarder house fire was that the stairs were the only way out.  Add that fact to the supporting companies considerations and the “other” situational awareness helps make for a safer fire scene.