FireFighterNation

Has your department preplanned the warehouses/storage facilities in your area? Due to their sheer size, these structures require a wide variety of resources and fully trained personnel. Greg Jakubowski offers many considerations and strategies for attacking a warehouse fire.

In his Wednesday FDIC session “Roles and Responsibilities of the RIT Company Officer,” Lieutenant Steve Robertson of the Columbus (Ohio) Division of Fire outlined rapid intervention duties for the company officer, and addressed issues related to size-up, job assignments, managing a mayday, staffing limitations and how to align your department’s RIT standards with mutual-aid departments.

What action would you take immediately upon arrival at the scene of a structure fire with victims trapped? Mike Kirby and Tom Lakamp help you answer that question by taking a look at staffing levels, victim location, fire behavior and other key fireground elements.

Positive pressure ventilation is often an effective and safe method for easing interior conditions and facilitating an offensive interior attack. However, as do virtually all fireground evolutions, they must be applied under the right circumstances, and only after proper evaluation of fire conditions by personnel who are sufficiently experienced to determine if it is safe to proceed.

After one of our firefighters partially fell through a roof during a vertical ventilation operation, we here at the Northwest Fire District in Tucson, Ariz., embarked on an analysis of our ventilation practices, and discovered that we only occasionally used PPA, which can be a very effective tool on the fireground. We began retraining our suppression crews to include PPA in their arsenal of tactics.