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Comment by Todd Fetcho on January 17, 2009 at 10:30am

FETC thanks for the clarification. I totally agree with your comments. The leadership should have not allowed untrained firefighters to be demonstrating a live fire interior attack on prevention week. Especially if there were no live runs before this. These guys were at a clear disadvantage and they are lucky nobody was killed. All the more reason to stress proper training preparation on both fire attack and incident command.

Comment by FETC on January 14, 2009 at 2:05pm

This video has been posted upwards to a dozen times under different titles...

Do not assume what you see is stupid, this is an old video that has circulated for some time now.

This was an open house demo - possibly during fire prevention week? There was an Emcee on the audio tape who was describing the evolution to the public. I was told the entry people seen in turnout gear were non-certified firefighters who were walked through what they were "supposed to see and do" on the big day of the demo. The walk through SIMULATED the scenario, this dry run evolution was without the use of ANY fire or smoke.

Being new, wanting to please everyone, family-friends, their officers.... and being put on display for the public are huge stressors that should be considered before saying stupid or WTF. It is obvious that they were untrained and unsupervised, as nobody in their right mind you would crawl into that fully involved box., Even the outside firefighter (FF #3) who waits at the door, doesn't recognize that the first two entry firefighters are in big trouble...

No fault to any of the injured, they were UNTRAINED and clearly didn't understand the limitations of our PPE, SCBA, Fire Behavior and Hose Streams. This has been my stance on non-trained firefighters making entry in small rural departments, because the end user has no clue what is right or wrong until it hurts!

Ultimately the fault or blame for this incident should be placed solely on the department's leadership and lack of supervision. But before anyone hammers the guys in the video, think about it...