In the movie Patton, actor George C. Scott, as Gen. George S. Patton, shouts out after a tank battle; "Rommel! I read your book." The reference was to a book authored by the German Gen. Erwin Rommel on warfare, who had written about his approach to tactical operations based on his experience in World War I. Patton apparently learned a lot from it.
In celebrating his victory, Patton paid homage to a phenomenon that often gets minimized in the flush of victory, which is the role that planning and preparation plays in improving performance under stress. You probably know of the fire-service version. It is called "pre-incident planning."
NFPA 1620 addresses this topic. Perhaps you have read it. More importantly, I wonder if your department is practicing its recommendations. If you are not, there is a possibility that your department could contribute to a future on-the-job injury, or at the very worst, a line-of-duty death. I purposely used the words "possibility" and "contribute" in the previous sentence. They are hedge words. You could go for years and years and not engage in any pre-fire planning efforts and never see a catastrophic event that results in a casualty.
Then again, it could happen tonight.
The objective of this column is to convince you to make a commitment to improve your department's use of preplanning processes and techniques as part of your department's overall safety program. NFPA 1620 "provides criteria for evaluating the protection, construction, and operational features of specific occupancies to develop a pre-incident plan that should be used by responding personnel to manage fires and other emergencies in such occupancies using the available resources."
Chapters 1-10 of this document provide general information, philosophies, and principles that might or might not be applicable to all occupancies. But that is not the point. What occupancies should you be looking into right now? Do you have any abandoned buildings? Do you have any overcrowded public assemblies? Do you have any buildings with a record of having fires?
The standard notes that the authority having jurisdiction should determine the level of planning appropriate for the jurisdiction and the property being preplanned. That means this is a discretionary decision for someone to make. That someone is you.
Chapters 11-20 provide information that addresses special or unique characteristics of specific occupancy classifications. Have you conducted an inventory about your special risks?
What prompted this column is a series of observations made when visiting fire officials and their departments. In each case, I noted that they had discontinued pre-fire planning or had not invested in it in the first place. Both inspections and preplanning are time-consuming activities that are easy to defer. Meanwhile, some departments are allowing a general malaise to fall over the operation folks because of bad economic times. Neither excuse is adequate.
Concurrent with these observations has been recognition that many fire agencies are seeing a general reduction in the number of working fires. This doesn't mean we aren't having fires. We are. What appears to be happening is that the frequency of fires, compared with the frequency of EMS calls, has resulted in a greater emphasis being placed on EMS rather than fire readiness. That's not right either.
Preplanning must be part of your department's risk-assessment program. Use the tool box provided by NFPA 1620. Review preplanning programs created by others. Then create your own system. Someday you might be able to say after a serious fire, in which there were no casualties, that "you read the book" that allowed your firefighters to go home when their shift ended.
Ronny J. Coleman has served as fire chief in Fullerton and San Clemente, Calif., and was the fire marshal of the state of California from 1992 to 1999. He is a certified fire chief and a master instructor in the California Fire Service Training and Education System.
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