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Yup.... We are going to the basement!
A simple and effective technique that every firefighter was shown in your very first firefighter class can and will save your life. The importance of sounding the floor is critical to firefighter safety. Often overlooked because we have our vision back with the use of a thermal imager. But do not abandon your other senses. By absorbing information from your sight, sound and feel, will afford you a better understanding of the conditions you are working in.
In the picture below, I snapped a couple of pictures showing a large hole just inside an exterior door's threshold. This is a building in my first due district.
This was found just inside an exterior door that would forced forced by the truck company. Remember your basics, sound the floor before crossing the threshold may save your life.
FETC
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Moose on
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This is sound advice. I had a house fire once where this almost happened to our attack crew. We had a guy in our district who set his house on fire because his dead mother was haunting him...(not making it up)...and he cut a hole in the floor just inside the front door to prevent us from stopping the fire, and threw a rug over the hole. The nozzle man in front of me started to go through the door and his whole upper body went through the hole and his feet went up, I grabbed his legs and was able to pull him up with help from another guy. He learned to sound the floor after that and I always remembered it as well.
The chief made the determination to go defensive due to not knowing if there were more traps set for us and the fire was rapidly spreading anyway due to the house being a balloon frame.
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Permalink Reply by FETC on
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Moose. Thanks for reiterating the importance of sounding the floor. Not many firefighters will think of sounding the floor until they are inside. The exception is VES and sounding the floor before stepping in through a window. So why should it be any different in an exterior doorway? You and your partner were lucky, there have been other case studies of brothers taking the plunge in the foyer area.
Side note - hijacking my own thread seeing this is not generating much response. Who here marks buildings from the exterior with known hazards? My department is heavy on computers in the trucks and these types of buildings blink a red hazard on the CAD address. We then click on the RMS info and it states whatever information has been entered.
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I wish we did both...but we dont. We dont pre-plan nearly as much as we should so we could red flag certain properties, and we dont have the computers in our rigs. It would save many injuries or worse. I am trying as Captain to get them to go out on slow drill nights for pre-planning areas but they dont see that as exciting, so I do it on my own.
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