Robert Hoff has continued a family tradition of serving in the Chicago Fire Department. A third-generation firefighter, he has served the Chicago Fire Department for 30 years, rising through the ranks to his current position as assistant deputy fire commissioner for the Bureau of Operations. Hoff also shares his experience and knowledge by serving as a field instructor for the Illinois Fire Service Institute ath the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

The Chicago Fire Department really has taken a leap forward to become one of the more progressive metropolitan departments in the country.

From the fire side of it, [our goal] is to teach firefighters that when we go in a high-rise, we have state-of-the-art equipment. We have state-of-the-art equipment for fighting fire; we're dressed; we have ropes, radios, thermal-imaging cameras, floor plans on a laptop — we have everything we should have, but we still need to know what conditions we're going into and how to operate in those conditions.

Have you worked with technology-assisted accountability systems?

We've toyed with a few of them, especially when we did our rapid intervention training in the city and outside the city. What we found so far is that they're not perfected and there's a large cost factor. Until it's perfected, we're not going to buy into it because it's putting the firefighter's life on the line. That's the most important thing.

But when we go to push it up to buy it, it's a cost factor, and we have to say it's tested and it's effective. We went through this with the thermal-imaging cameras. It's a phenomenal tool — phenomenal. The military has tracking devices and the technology, but a lot of the technology they use that we've heard about is equipment that wouldn't hold up in the conditions we put firefighters in.

We have tried something similar to pass devices: tracking devices used for snow rescue when there are avalanches. The rescuers wear them in case they get trapped. The problem with those devices is that they're not entirely accurate inside of a structure. We're better off than a lot of departments are because of what they respond with, but it's not foolproof.

One of the most impressive speeches I've heard was out in California at a seminar. The safety division chief of the New York City fire department talked about the Father's Day fire where three firefighters were killed, right before 9/11 in the same year. He gave a fantastic speech about how Brian Fahey died. Brian Fahey was the firefighter that was on the interior of the hardware store when the explosion happened. The other two firefighters were buried on the outside. They were killed when a wall fell on them. Firefighter Fahey was at the top of a set of basement stairs and ended up in the basement after the explosion. He called three or four maydays.