Freelancing

Does your Department have any of that going on? If so what does your department do about it?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by John Bierling on January 2, 2012 at 3:57pm

Greetings Jonathon, In my experience, every department experiences freelancing at the emergency scene. Sometimes more or less depending on the incident and the strength and effectiveness of scene leadership. Scene leadership means incident command. In the fire service we say that we created ICS and we say that we use ICS on every incident. While all this is true it does not mean we create and use effective incident command organizations. When ICS is not used properly and with strong leadership, freelancing is the immediate and inevitable result. Freelancing leads directly to lack of accountability, comprising the safety of our responders, and command failure. Become as good as possible at ICS and you can begin to reduce the freelancing problem. Thanks for a good post.

Permalink Reply by Bill Anderson on January 9, 2012 at 1:19am

Our Chief and Captain have inbedded it into us that we do not freelance. For the most part our guys follow command, since we usually have around six members who show up on major events. Mutual aid companies are a different story. They will know who is in command and some of them will still just wander into the scene on their own.

Captain shut down one operation on a defensive house fire because of the freelancing of mutual aid companies. Once he read every one the riot act operations resumed.

Permalink Reply by Tony Merkel on February 21, 2012 at 5:51pm