By Jerod Levin

You’re the officer of a three-person engine company. Most of the fires you respond to are in single-family homes, but you do have commercial occupancies in your district, too. Does this sound familiar? Do you pull a pre-connect to handle most of your fires? If so, you should ask yourself, “Is my engine company prepared for a fire in a commercial occupancy or a multi-story building?”

Pre-connects are a fast, efficient way to handle most of our fires, but what do we do when the pre-connect won’t reach? Is your crew preparing for these calls, drilling on unique or “outside-the-box” engine operations?

Sure, we tour our district and notice the standpipe connections, and we even get into our buildings and note the stairwells where the standpipes are located. But have you considered what to do if the standpipe fails? How do we get water to the upper floors?

Here’s a scenario for you: Your engine pulls up to a five-story building. You see smoke coming from the fourth floor. When you enter the building, you take the usual equipment: hand tools, high-rise hose packs, a thermal imager, a flashlight and maybe even the water can if you have enough hands. You instruct your engineer to get his own water supply and hook to the FDC. As you’re hooking to the standpipe on the third floor, you engineer calls you and tells you that he can’t build pressure and it seems as though water is flowing somewhere. You check the standpipe and have no water pressure. Now what?

Following are three options you could use to get water to the upper floors. It may take a little longer, but if you’re prepared and have drilled prior to the incident, you should be able to accomplish your mission—extinguishing that fire!

Option 1: Extend the hose: This is a good option for any fire where a pre-connect won’t reach. It seems so simple, but some may forget this option. Either adding on at the pump or in the building can make a short hoselay save the day. Of course, just like any tactic, there are pros and cons to adding on to a pre-connect. If you add on at the pump, you have to pull that much more hose through the building. If you add on at the end of the line, you risk not having water when you need it. Another thing to think about is friction loss. As we add length to 1 ¾" hose, the friction loss increases quickly. If you think a quick knock-down will stop this fire, this is a great option, as it’s probably the quickest of the three. However, it doesn’t leave much room for error. If you need bigger water or more lines, your pump could be at or near capacity.

Option 2: Pull supply hose up the exterior of the building: One thing to make sure to take into multi-story buildings is a utility rope. When you encounter a problem with the standpipe, you can go to an appropriate window, drop the rope and pull up a 2 ½" or 3" supply line. One thing to remember when choosing a window: basic firefighting skills. You still want to start out on the floor below the fire. If things get bad on the fire floor, you should follow the hose to the stairwell to exit. If you’ve chosen a window on the fire floor, exiting could be much more difficult. Make sure to tie the supply hose off, connect your gate valve and call for water as soon as possible. Calling for water early places it in your hands and allows you to control the gate valve without having to call on the radio to the engineer later as you’re advancing hose. Hook your high-rise packs, and proceed to the fire floor. If you have a three-person interior crew, one person can wait at the gate valve and charge it when you’re ready while the other two flake out hose. This can usually be a verbal order as opposed to over the radio. Again, as with any tactic, there are special considerations to think about when using this method. Obviously, breaking glass, dropping glass below you and allowing wind to enter the building could all be issues. Plus, for this plan to work, you must take a rope with you every time you go above ground to investigate or attack a fire.

Option 3: Lay 2 ½" or 3" supply hose from the apparatus up the stairs: Stop at the floor below the fire and then hook high-rise hose packs to the supply. Once again, call for water as soon as you have your gate valve connected. One firefighter can lay hose out on the stairs as the other waits at the valve. Once the hose is laid out, charge the line and proceed onto the fire floor. There are many considerations to take into account when choosing this tactic. Is your 2 ½" or 3" line loaded on the apparatus so it can be deployed efficiently up a flight of stairs? At some point the crew can be overburdened with equipment. If you only have two firefighters carrying 3" supply plus high-rise hose packs and tools, are they going to make it to the fire floor in a timely manner and still be able to perform fire attack? Anytime we run hose in a stairwell, we make it more difficult to walk up or down the stairs.

In Sum
It seems that we never have fires in regular buildings. There’s always some sort of problem. If you are planning on always being able to use pre-connects and standpipes, you may be setting you and your crew up for failure. Standpipes and pre-connects are a great Plan A if they work—but what if they don’t? Does your engine company have a Plan B? Don’t be afraid to look outside the box when choosing engine company tactics. Just make sure you’ve trained on them before you need them. Ask yourself: Has my crew drilled on this? How long does this take? Will the other companies be able to support this tactic?

Jerod Levin is a captain/EMT-I assigned to Engine Co. 1 (C Platoon) with Casper (Wyo.) Fire-EMS. He has 10 years of experience with Casper Fire-EMS as well as an associate’s degree in fire science from Casper College, where he is an adjunct instructor in the area of fire service strategies and tactics. Contact him at jerodlevin@msn.com.

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