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Interior Attacks or Not?
Does your volunteer dept do interior attacks on fire runs? Some volunteer departments do not do interior attacks. Does your department? Our department always look at safety first however if your department feels that they can safely go in do they? Some volunteer departments feel led to do only exterior attacks. What does your department do?
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by lutan1 on
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Be Waller wrote earlier, "That was exactly the mindset of virtually every South Carolina fire department prior to the Sofa Super Store fire. Afterwards, however...
To put it another way, load up your family - your spouse, kids, parents, and a cousin or two in the minivan. Drive around your 1st due area and point out a variety of structures. Then tell them "THAT is the building I'm willing to die for."
I'm betting that the reaction will be a little more pointed than the one you're getting here."
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Permalink Reply by John on
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It depends on scene size up when we get onscene sometimes its defensive others its interior offensive, and of course it may switch back and forth depending on certain situations during the fire.
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Permalink Reply by Joey "BigShow" De Piano on
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Of course we do interior first obligation is protection of life and property..can't save a room and contence from surround and drown
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Permalink Reply by Joe Stoltz on
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We operate in this manner also.
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Permalink Reply by Fire Chick on
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if it is safe enogh to go in and u have the right gear... go for it.... our dept. does
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Permalink Reply by Ben Waller on
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So, are you saying that volunteers don't have the ability to choose their level of committment? I think that's the first thing that goes with being a volunteer.
Once again, if the community is happy with the level of protection for the amount of money and support they give the fire department, who are we to question either the community's fire protection choices or the way the fire department chooses to provide it?
Ben
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Please define "an obvious save situation". If you're applying your department's resources and SOGs, maybe it is an obvious save. On the other hand, for some departments that are lucky to roll a single engine with less than the 4 interior-qualified firefighters that it takes to conduct a legal 2-in, 2-out interior attack, maybe it's not such an obvious save, after all.
And...barring a rescue problem or a fire that's hidden in an unreachable interior space, most single-family residential fires can be extinguished through an exterior window. Firefighters in the 1800's and early 1900s used to do it on a daily basis.
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Obviously there are those that do, or we wouldn't be discussing them.
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How about your neighbor's house that will burn if they don't protect exposures? How about the fact that they can protect your house from a wildfire without doing structural entry? How about if you don't pay them ANY money, and they subsist on the few thousand dollars that them make from bingo night and chicken dinners?
Once again, who are we to dictate that other people, especially volunteers with virtually no money, political, or manpower support from their community should risk their lives at all for your property. After all, they weren't the ones that started that grease fire on your stove.
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Lots of the heart-related deaths are secondary to heat stress directly caused by interior structural firefighting. Just because they're not directly caused by exposure to fire or fire products, smoke inhalation, or structrual collapse doesn't mean that the firefighting isn't responsible.
Firefighter heart attack deaths have been tracked for a long time. There used to be a lot less of them a hundred years ago or so. Coincidentally, there were a lot fewer interior structure fire attacks back then.
There's no way to prove a direct correlation due to the lack of scientific data collection from way back when, but there's no way to disprove it, either.
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Hazmatcap,
The attitude that we fight every fire from the inside no longer applies in this age of lightweight construction, non-dimensional lumber, and engineered systems such as OSB I-beams and glued trusses.
The structures today simply don't have the wood mass, solid component linkage, and craftsmanship as did houses even 20 years ago. They also contain lots more plastics and other artificial fuels that basically create a Class B fire inside the house.
So, you have a fire that burns hotter and faster, fuels that spread the fire more quickly, and structural components that come apart much more quickly. That equals quicker flashovers, quicker structural collapses, and - no surprise here - a higher firefighter LODD rate per thousand fires.
The old-school rules for interior firefighting no longer apply in a lot of situations.
And remember, we didn't start the fire...
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Here's a great presentation on the dangers of lightweight engineered systems, courtesy of Ted Bownas.
The linked slide show is "Must Read" information.
Folks, we need to change our default from "Why shouldn't we go in there?" to "Why should we ever consider going inside THAT?"
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