Monday evening, we heard about the fire at the LaSalle Bank high-rise in Chicago when it was a three-alarm fire. Within minutes, we had two retired battalion chiefs, one retired chief, a nurse, and one fire buff fully-involved with their respective televisions. The fire quickly escalated to a five-alarm and two specials. We tuned our scanners to Chicago Main and lined up the Chicago television stations that were preempting Monday night football. This was live reality TV.

As it turned out, on-duty, off-duty and retired fire personnel across Chicagoland were glued to TVs watching the Chicago Fire Department, under new command, take on a downtown high-rise incident.

A multitude of news teams reported that the fire department had the latest high-rise procedures in place and was following them. In response to Chicago's six-fatality fire at 69 W. Washington 14 months earlier, new Fire Commissioner Cortez Trotter had recently instituted a series of aggressive attack procedures for high-rise incidents. The media focused for more than four hours on this fire. Coordination of operations between fire, police and EMS appeared seamless.

Before this incident, I had interviewed Commissioner Trotter for an article in the upcoming January issue of FIRE CHIEF. He said the aggressive use of Rapid Ascent Teams, or RATs, was key.

"The operative word here is 'rapid,'" Trotter said. "We take the baseline of two trucks --that's 10 people -- and we can inject as many other RATs as would be driven by the height of the building and the amount of square footage we have to cover in a short period of time."

The dispatcher at CFD's 911 Center was incredibly calm. Communications were constantly clarified by repeating the commands between dispatch, the officers and Incident Command. We heard a dispatcher deliver an order to Truck 25, which was then repeated back to dispatch. Transmissions on the scanner were understandable and in accordance with one of the new directives.

Fourteen months earlier, the high-rise fire on Washington Avenue killed six people, who were found in the stairwell. This time, there were only injuries. Thirty-five people were transported to area hospitals, most suffering from smoke inhalation, among them 22 firefighters.

Training and physical fitness have to be the message that comes with the low number of injuries from this incident. Fire drills within the high-rise building were also important. According to LaSalle Bank employees, a fire drill had recently been completed. In addition, exit doors were not locked, as was the case in the previous fire, preventing victims in the stairwell from re-entry.

I'm sure more lessons will be learned and more training will be needed, but Commissioner Trotter and the Chicago Fire Department deserve credit for their efforts.

As phone calls followed in the post-incident critique the next morning, those of us who watched the television coverage agreed that Chicago Fire Department is a department to keep watching.

Janet Wilmoth, Editor
jwilmoth@primediabusiness.com