On March 8 2001, a local firefighter in my area fell through a hole in the floor of a residential structure fire while searching for a reported trapped victim. He plummeted 10 feet into a well-involved basement and was unable to self-extricate. After numerous heroic Rapid Intervention Team (RIT) attempts, the firefighter was located and brought out of the basement door to awaiting paramedics who administered outstanding care to him on the scene before he was transported to the hospital. The firefighter struggled for nearly two weeks before succumbing to his injuries. He was 38-years-old and left behind a wife and two young daughters. Thousands of his brother and sister firefighters were also grieving and vowed to not allow his death to have been in vain.
I was a relatively young firefighter at the time and the incident left an indelible impression that I will take with me for the rest of my life. As with any Line of Duty Death (LODD), we look for what we could do in the future to ensure that an incident like this never happens again. What followed was a push in training to address what we struggled with on that fire, specifically the rescue efforts of a downed firefighter. We practiced techniques that were developed after other LODDs so we would be able to get our brothers and sisters out of similar situations with better results. The Nance Drill and the Denver Drill were perfected so we could do them upside down or in our sleep. While hours were spent learning how to bail out of windows on rope wrapped around magazines, many organizations didn’t spend nearly enough time (or in some cases any) reviewing fire behavior, building construction and other topics that may have prevented having to use RIT techniques in the first place.
An unfortunate side effect of the training occasionally becomes the over confidence (and seeming reliance) of the self-rescue and RIT skills that were developed. The training led many to an unfortunate reliance on our reserve chute. We had some firefighters trained to believe that they were going to be able to get out of any circumstance that they would encounter. While this seems like a good thing at first glance, it made for a sense of complacency in the basics.
The reaction to this event is not unique in the fire service. Often times, we look at what we think is the best approach to improving our training but we fail to see the forest through the trees. For example, understanding more about the effect of flame impingement on unprotected, lightweight building materials is just as important as learning how to do a partial escape from your SCBA. Each one of them will have a profound impact of your fire ground mortality in their proper application.
This is no way a condemnation of the officers, firefighters, chiefs and instructors. In fact, I applaud them all for their selfless efforts to make sure that all of us have a fighting chance to go home at the end of the day. Through that training, we learned to think very quickly, not give up and the importance of the small things. It made us more aware of how quickly things could go wrong and what we needed to do in a reaction to that. RIT training always will and should have a very important place in the fire service-training curriculum. It is one of the most extreme examples of a high-risk, low frequency activity that we will ever be asked to perform. But that training needs to be tempered with other supportive and qualifying topics.
As fire instructors we need to be aware of the importance of recognizing all the factors that will aid in firefighter survival. Much like fire prevention as it relates to structure fires, the best RIT (or Rapid Intervention Company (RIC) for the NIMS police) is one that never has to be activated. The easiest “mayday” to handle is the one that is never called. We need to take a more analytical approach in dealing with any type of survival and rescue training. If you were to look at any NIOSH report following a LODD you will find a host of issues that are recommended for improvement. These aren’t just recommendations for the organization that was afflicted with the loss; its for the entire firefighting community. As such, we can use these issues to serve as a road map to help us design more comprehensive programs for our firefighters. By taking a more broad approach to our training, we may be able to prevent a RIT operation before it ever happens.
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Scott Knoll is the Assistant Chief for Florence Fire/EMS in Northern Kentucky. He is a 16-year veteran of the fire service where he has served as a Firefighter/ EMT, Apparatus Operator, Captain and Training Officer prior to his current position.
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