SAFE Fireground: Flowing

SAFE Fireground: Flowing By: Nick Ledin As we’ve already mentioned in previous articles, the key to fast water and a SAFE fire ground is SAFE (Stretching, Advancing, Flowing, Extinguishing) training. Fires are getting faster, and so should our water. Fast water is dependent upon all four elements of SAFE being performed proficiently since a smooth attack truly is more than the sum of its parts. This article will focus on flowing water for the win. Specifically, focusing on the "why", "when" and "how" to flow when you are advancing on a covered fire that you can’t immediately reach with your hose stream. Let’s start with the all-important "why". We’re all aware that smoke is fuel, but we must understand that smoke is energy too. Many think of the seat of the fire as a heat pump, producing huge amounts of convective, conductive and radiative energy, with all of this energy released into the building. While this is a great analogy, we must think of the smoke throughout the building as a secondary heat pump, releasing large amounts of energy to the ceiling, walls, contents, and anyone inside the building, as well. Predictably, when left unchecked, this secondary heat pump can lead to rapid fire progression and untenable conditions. While it’s imperative that we get to the seat of the fire, we have to have a plan when we can’t reach the seat. We can still begin to control and cool the environment around and ahead of us, buying some time and creating more tenable space and time for anyone still inside. This cooling will also make our advance to the seat safer and may be our only chance to reach the seat in a timely manner. Now that we’ve discussed the "why" let’s move on to the “when”. If you’re advancing a hose line inside a building and you can’t yet reach the seat of the fire because it’s hot, cool it. Seems pretty simple, right? By cooling the overhead you are buying some time. This action may buy you only a handful of seconds, and create only a couple of handfuls of square feet of space, but it should give you the time and space you need to make the turn and reach the seat of the fire. While we can talk in circles about what constitutes a “hot” overhead, the truth is that inside the fire building we have no specific, empirical trigger points that can define “hot”, so a good rule of thumb is to always, using good reason and solid judgment, cool the overhead. The concept of cooling the overhead is nothing new and many have been preaching it for decades. Although it has numerous names (gas cooling, protective cooling, smoke cooling, etc.) and techniques can cause quite a bit of confusion amongst even the most engaged firefighters. So to hopefully add a small bit of clarity and give an option to those of us that use smoothbores, or even straight streams inside the fire building, let’s explore the “how” of protective cooling. The attached video, shows ONE way to effectively cool the overhead as you make your advance to the seat of the fire. As with all things operational on the fireground, due to the dynamic nature of our "office”, we need to be able to be flexible with our tactics. Depending on your distance away from the seat of the fire, the power of the fire, the temperature inside the building, the size of the building or compartment, your equipment, the vent profile, and your technique, you may have to cool the overhead more or less often. While there are many ways to make this technique work, some general rules of thumb with the ceiling sweep are to: - Sweep the ceiling side to side across the entire width of the ceiling (within reason, we’re assuming the fire is in an average SFD), therefore the larger the room, the wider the sweep. - The hotter the environment and more powerful the fire, the more water needed with each sweep, so slow down your nozzle movement and keep the bale open longer. - The hotter the environment and more powerful the fire, the more often you’ll need to sweep. - Use the reach of the stream to your advantage, and if the fire is farther away from you, lower your nozzle angle a bit. - Everything else being equal, the more GPS (gallons per second) you’re flowing, the less time your bale will need to be opened. I could go on, but the specifics for this technique are much more important than the generalities. Like everything we do in this job, the gray areas require gray matter…and, of course, lots of sweat on the drill ground. If this concept or technique is new to you, get out and mess around with it and figure out if it works for you. If it does, use it; if it doesn’t, figure out another way to deal with the problem of a tough advance on a covered fire. Below are a couple of other flowing primers to serve as a template for your training. Flowing: - Know your flows (GPM); flow test your equipment packages (pump, piping, hose, and nozzle) - Location, size (flow) and technique (pattern, angle, duration) matter - Exterior attack (steep, straight, static…then the seat) - Cooling the overhead (gas cooling, protective cooling, smoke cooling, etc.) - Interior attack (ceiling, contents, floor) - Indirect/direct/combination attack - Push - flowing while moving forwards - Retreat – flowing while moving backward - When to close the bale? Kill fire, save people. I want to acknowledge a handful of my mentors that helped to shape my SAFE mindset and deserve ALL the credit for the content within these articles. I want to be clear here: none of this information is new to the fire service, this is just a resynthesis of information learned from brothers and sisters much smarter than me. Some of these brothers I have had a chance to actually sweat with, while others I’ve studied and mimicked from afar. A sincere and humble thank you to Andy Fredericks, Aaron Fields, Brian Brush, Steve Kerber, Jason Jefferies, Dennis LeGear, Jeff Rothmeier, Lars Axelsson, Ryan Torres, Ed Hartin, Paul Grimwood, and Dave Dodson.