Many of you have heard the tongue-twister “How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” Tongue-twisters of this sort are designed to test a person's ability to get around the unique combination of letter and sounds; as you rapidly repeat the phrase it often begins to sound garbled.

Personally I haven't heard any new tongue-twisters, so I thought I would throw one on the table for discussion. It starts off like this: “How much fire can a firefighter fight?” Go ahead, finish it for me: “if a firefighter could fight fire.” Well, that may not be as much of a tongue-twister as the old woodchuck rhyme, but it points out an interesting dilemma that we have in the fire service.

I'm referring to the ongoing debate about exactly how many people it takes to put out a fire, which often leads to a round of jokes that fall into the “how many blank does it take to screw into a light bulb?” category. But firefighting isn't a joke. It's a lethal business that can result in either success or failure in a very short period of time. Contemporary wisdom focuses a great deal on response time as an indicator of how much firefighters are capable of handling. However, that misses a major point: Once firefighters are on the fireground, they have to perform or the fire — or other emergency — will continue to escalate.

In the emerging field of standards of response cover, this particular component is often referred to as setup time, which starts when the wheels stop in front of an emergency and ends when the fire officer in charge declares the emergency under control and that further threat to life and property has ceased. Setup time is every bit as important as response time, and there's a methodology to evaluate it.

In the literature on standards of cover you will hear the term “critical tasking.” If you have been an instructor for any period of time in your fire service career, you probably will recognize that critical tasking looks an awful lot like job analysis. In fact, there are many corollaries. The significant difference is that job analysis used to break down a job for the training environment so that someone can learn the various components needed to complete the task. Critical tasking is using that same job analysis to predict the performance of an individual or group upon arrival at an emergency scene.

Those fire departments that take standards of response cover seriously also are focusing on critical tasking as a key element of determining their response performance. This is a field of endeavor that we in the fire service should be spending a great deal more time on because critical tasking is the petri dish of performance. This is where an organization can determine its likely capacity to do a job.

Despite its similarities to job analysis, critical tasking isn't the same as a training evolution. When we teach firefighters how to pull hose, raise ladders, operate breathing apparatus and perform the various skill sets that are used on the fireground, we present each as an independent skill set. Critical tasking is the combination of those skill sets into a flow of performance that's reflected in an outcome, such as getting to the fire, removing a trapped victim from a crushed vehicle, or restoring airway circulation and life to a potentially terminal patient.

The petri dish becomes even more appropriate as a metaphor because critical tasking is like experimentation. In the world of science, doing something one time might be interesting — even miraculous — but science relies a great deal on repetition, redundancy and replication. But where is the science of what we do? Time and motion are both scientific concepts. In the fire service we use both to achieve our objective. Therefore, it makes sense that in studying time and motion we might be able to restore some scientific reality to what we do on the fireground.

One of the lessons I learned in this field was in a United Airlines first-class cabin. I was sitting in my seat minding my own business when the plane turned onto the runway in preparation for take-off. I noticed that the gentlemen to my right had a briefcase on his lap and a stopwatch in the palm of his hand. I thought that was somewhat strange but didn't say anything. As the aircraft started down the runway, I noted that he was staring intently at the sweep hand as we began to accelerate. When the front wheels of the aircraft came off the ground as part of what's called rotation, my seatmate punched the clock, opened up his notebook and started writing. It piqued my curiosity.

In short order he advised me that he was an FAA accident investigator on his way to the site of a helicopter crash. I asked him what he was doing with the stopwatch, and he said that every time he gets on an aircraft he notes the type of aircraft and how long it takes to engage in rotation. One of his reasons for doing this was to know the performance of the average plane during take-off for his analysis of crashes. He said that if an aircraft hadn't rotated by a certain time, it was likely that it would not rotate and instead would crash.

We have the same phenomenon in our business. Those of you who have studied standards of cover know that we have a cascade of events with various time points and intervals in which things either occur or don't occur, resulting in a positive or negative outcome at the scene of an emergency.

Putting this theory to test, I have personally engaged in a considerable amount of effort to evaluate time stamps and activity intervals, beginning with the wheels stopping on the fireground. One recent study increased my understanding of how this type of research could contribute to our increasing knowledge of fire company efficiency and effectiveness. This particular study was conducted by a metropolitan fire agency as part of its overall department deployment planning.

As an aside, many firefighters today have heard of the Dallas study, which has been used by many individuals in support of staffing levels. The Dallas study is now very antiquated and may not be particularly relevant to today's fire service. However, the inquiry that was made in the Dallas study remains relevant: What can be done in a certain time frame by a certain number of individuals?

Central to this whole concept are some simple truths. There are only 60 seconds in every minute. There are only 60 minutes in every hour. Individuals can use up the element of time as a function of their own motion. Therefore, using these simple core values, if you arrive on the fireground with one person who has five minutes to achieve an objective, there are only five minutes to get it done. If you show up at that same event with two people, you have 10 minutes of time and motion. Adding another person gives 15 minutes. Much like with tongue-twisting woodchucks, critical tasking becomes a matter of just how much activity can a given number of firefighters do if they are being asked to do a specific set of activities.

Before we start to analyze how those units of minutes can contribute overall to performance, perhaps we ought to discuss an element of practicality. Most all of us know that emergencies are like snowflakes. They're all slightly different from one another, yet often look alike. Critical tasking doesn't mean that you've developed time and motion analyses of every possible emergency iteration. However, there are certain bread-and-butter events in most fire departments that are subject to public scrutiny and therefore are representative of the community's expectations.

For example, I would submit that fighting a fire in a single-family dwelling, responding to the scene of a medical emergency, and dealing with a person who is trapped in a vehicle accident are extremely well-represented in most fire departments' experience. Therefore, these are likely scenarios where the concept of critical tasking could be used to demonstrate anticipated performance.

The following is a brief description of single-family dwelling scenario from a critical-tasking perspective. You'll note that the list doesn't describe who does the task as much as it notes the time points and intervals that affect the department's ability to reduce an emergency back to a state of normalcy.

• Size-up/report.
• Execute fast attack with 200-foot preconnect to the door.
• Provide for two-in/two-out compliance.
• Lay dual supply from first engine to hydrant.
• Place 150-foot preconnect backup line in service at front door.
• Ladder two sides of building.
• Secure utilities.
• Perform vertical ventilation.
• Place exposure lines to rear and roof.
• Perform search and rescue.
• Establish rapid-intervention crew at door.

Once a fire agency has identified a set of critical tasks of this nature, its next step is to go into the field and validate the tasks. This validation process has two distinct elements. The first is to look at real fire scene data, and the second is to measure anticipated performance using the drill ground. In the case of the former, a department that's attempting critical tasking should look very carefully into its own experience base and review how fires have been fought in the past.

The single-family dwelling scenario is pretty straightforward in its evaluation of what should happen in about the first 12 minutes of a working fire with several existing conditions, specifically no immediate danger to life and health, no immediate need to enter the building to perform a rescue, and an expectation that firefighters would take appropriate safety precautions. Unfortunately, training evolutions don't always match what happens on the fireground. There are fire departments that have a serious gap between the way they train and the way they fight fires.

In terms of critical tasking, you are after system performance reliability. Therefore, it's important to evaluate a scenario, not once, not twice, but a sufficient number of times to be able to say without fear or reservation that this is what you would expect a fire company from your department to be able to do in a given time frame.

The next step is field validation, which is what that FAA investigator was doing with his stopwatch. You need to go out to the drill ground and run the same series of events over and over to determine the exact level of predictability. Without belaboring the specifics of the study mentioned earlier, there are some very specific observations that can be drawn from observing critical tasks.

First and foremost is that you practice what you preach. A critical-task exercise often will point out that operational procedures, tradition, and even the technology of how you have designed your fire apparatus and how you have equipped each fire company to operate will be reflected in time and motion conditions. Returning to the concept of the number of minutes that are available to perform tasks, there's a significant difference in the performance of a one-person fire company in comparison to a two-person fire company in comparison to any other staffing level that a local agency chooses to deploy.

There's tendency for us in the fire service to support the idea that more is better. What critical tasking points out is that it isn't always the number of people on the scene that determines what you're able to accomplish. Many times the difference results from the sequence of what you choose to do and how appropriately you use the people you have.

There are many people who don't like to hear this, but I believe it's possible to demonstrate through critical-tasking exercises that a greater number of people on the fireground who aren't very well organized are less effective and efficient than fewer people who are better organized. I am very much aware that this fuels the fire of staffing debates, but it does get back to the science of it all. If we expect to obtain community support for what we consider to be our minimum staffing requirements, we have to make sure that we have done everything possible to be as effective and efficient with our resources. A postposition on a fire truck today is an expensive proposition for the community. Asking for that kind of investment on our part should be based on more than the fact that it is a good idea.

As more and more fire departments buy into the idea of writing up a standards of cover document for their communities, we will have a better idea of how critical tasking plays itself out. There's a wealth of information to be obtained in critical-tasking studies, but they are blank pages in the fire science notebook today. We need to do more of this kind of experimentation; we need to document more of this kind of information.

If we were going to measure what a woodchuck could accomplish, we would start with a standard measurement of volume, such as a cord of wood. Critical tasking should be able to produce a standard measurement for the fire service. This standard would be containment time, that final time interval in the cascade of events. The less time it takes between the initiation of an emergency event and the containment time, the more likely it is that firefighters' lives will be protected, civilian lives will be saved and property loss will be held to an absolute minimum.

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With more than 40 years in the fire service, 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. A Fellow of the Institution of Fire Engineers, he has an associate's degree in fire science, a bachelor's degree in political science and a master's degree in vocational education.