Recently there has been a lot of discussion about the first arriving officer completing a 360 check of the building upon arrival. In his article “Situational Awareness and the Three Sixty”, Christopher Naum makes the following statement, “The effective assessment of the incident scene is much more than the three-sided size-up methodology of past fireground practices. In fact the term size-up doesn’t align with the newest directions in firefighter safety and incident command management.”[1] The problem with this statement is that size up is not just a tool used by the first arriving officer or Incident Commander. Chris goes on to say the following, ”The 360 degree assessment has become the generally accepted standard from which risk assessment is performed and incident action plans derived.”[2] 

The problem with this thinking is that it doesn’t focus on the other facets that make up the process formerly known as size up. Size up includes many factors, one of which may be a 360 degree evaluation of the structure. But if we eliminate size up from our vocabulary, then what do we call the assessment that is supposed to be performed by the rest of the responding firefighters? Are we expecting everyone to conduct a 360 degree assessment?

Read the rest here:

http://backstepfirefighter.com/2010/11/30/sizeup/