What would you do?

Ok I have a question that is pretty good. Here it goes. If a crew was inside of a working fire and IC,Safety Officer orders the air horn normaly three long blasts to evacuate the building and the crew of three inside does not here the air horn and no one has radio contact with the crew how can you get there attention to inform them to get out of the building? Just remember there is no wrong answer. I just want to find out what others would do in this situation.

Thanks and Be Safe,
Robbie Cox

0 members like this

▶ Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by John Crabbe on August 17, 2009 at 10:12pm

I agree with Ben...it really does depend upon the dept and the situation. In some cases having a charged line just is not feasible. I do agree with being safe and operating as safely as possible, but I also believe in many tools in the toolbox and don't agree with limiting such tasks with saying you will always have a charged line and so forth.

For us, we have had several larger apartment complex fires and while there was a attack crew and backup at the fire, we still had to send crews in to do primary searches and they had to move quick. You can cover a lot of ground without dragging hoses with you. Again just different tools in the toolbox.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Ben Waller on August 17, 2009 at 10:23pm

We have many condos, hotels, and apartment building with dozens of apartments or hundreds of rooms. If we had to drag a hoseline everywhere we went, we wouldn't have enough hose or firefighters to get a lot of those places.

Check with departments that run lots of multi-occupancy residential, taxpayer, or strip mall fires and you'll find departments that routinely search over and next to the fire without a hoseline, and do it well.

VES is another "go without a hoseline" situation, even for single-family dwelling fires.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Michael J. Garcia on August 17, 2009 at 10:45pm

I have been in that kind of situation but without coms and with the noise of the fire you sometimes can't hear the evac warning since we are more concern about what we are searching for in a house or building that we can have the tendiecy to overlook our own emergency..I beleive RIT should be always ready to deploy at a moments notice. I know that PASS devices are for our protection but it shouldn't used as a warning device since your could endanger more than one crew if alot were going off.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Todd on August 20, 2009 at 2:29pm

There's enough radio chatter during an interior attack that the interior crews should realize if all of a sudden they don't hear any radio traffic there's a problem. They should also be giving periodic PAR/status updates, or if not the IC should be prompting them for them.