You’re dispatched to a report of a fire in a single-family dwelling at 0400 HRS on a chilly night. You respond on your engine company with your normal complement of firefighters and will be by yourself for the first 3—5 minutes. Upon arrival, you discover a fire venting from a single first-floor window of a two-story, wood-frame residence, with smoke pushing from the eaves and other small openings. Upon exiting the apparatus, you’re met by the neighbor who called 9-1-1; he informs you that a mother and her children are upstairs. There is a car in the driveway, bikes and toys in front of the house, and all the doors are shut. What tactics do you choose: fire attack or rescue?
This situation may seem complex, but it’s actually fairly simple. The challenge will be making a decision instantaneously, as every second counts. To make that decision, you’ll need to consider the total number of people that usually staff your engine, not the number of people you may have at that moment or want to have. In this article, we’ll discuss this scenario and help you make the decision here so that you’re better prepared to make the decision on the fireground.
What Research Teaches Us
Before we make any decision, we’ll discuss a few important fire behavior considerations. For years, NIST and UL have been conducting scientific studies on tragic fires, fire modeling, fire behavior, building materials, construction hazards and affects of ventilation on fire spread and growth. The results of these efforts are starting to have a major impact on our actions on the fireground. Due to the efforts of these organizations and sponsoring fire departments, the fire service is learning more about the speed at which a fire grows, how it reacts to ventilation openings, survivability of occupants, the best practices for attack, fire stream considerations and required gpm.
Some simple points that recent research has taught us:
- Fire doesn’t double every minute like many of us were taught early in our fire service careers; fire grows exponentially when it’s provided with all components of the fire triangle (heat, fuel and oxygen). As long as all three of these components are available, a fire with modern fuel loads can quickly become overwhelming.
- Water puts out fire. Overpower the fire with an ample quantity of water (gpm).
- Ventilation (the oxygen part of the fire triangle) greatly impacts fire growth and spread. Ventilation-limited fires seem to be more manageable than fires with unlimited ventilation. One door or window can greatly change the ventilation and therefore the amount of oxygen fed to a fire, which can lead to very rapid fire progression. Example: You have a contents fire in a kitchen on the first floor of a residence. The rescuer performs vent-enter-search on the second-floor bedroom as you open the first-floor front door to stretch a hoseline. This creates a flow path for fire gases that also allows oxygen to be drawn in low on the fire. You can expect rapid fire growth and spread if water isn’t applied to the fire in a timely fashion.
Note: For more information on NIST and UL research, visit www.nist.gov/fire or www.ul.com/fireservice.
Decision 1: Put Out the Fire
Now, with a brief review of the scientific information, we can put our knowledge and experience to work in making our decision: fire attack or rescue? If you don’t know the exact victim location, then your decision is easy: Put out the fire. The single best thing you can do on the fireground is put out the fire, not only because it eliminates the problem, but also because it’s usually the best rescue tactic.
Putting out the fire makes everything better; it reduces heat production/release, dangerous fire gases and smoke particulates. However, it does take some time. The engine company has to stretch the line, charge the line, don final PPE and then advance on the fire. So, depending on the difficulty of the stretch, it may take several minutes to control and extinguish. For the fire on the first floor in our original scenario with no obstructions or terrain issues, two firefighters should be able to deploy their hoseline and don their PPE to initiate an attack in roughly one minute. Of course, if you can perform these tasks in one minute, they’ve become second nature to you–which requires lots of practice.
Decision 2: More Fire Attack
Now here’s where the scenario changes and the decisions may not be as easy. Let’s say you can see someone at the second-floor window or the neighbor says they “just saw them there.” What decisions do you make then upon arrival? If that second-floor window is open and smoke is pushing from it, you don’t have much time to search that room and remove the occupant. Finding the occupant is much easier than finding them, moving them to the window, lifting them 2—3 feet to the window sill and then handing them off to someone on the ladder. This takes two firefighters, because even the strongest firefighter isn’t going to lift a victim to a windowsill, climb onto the ladder and carry the victim down by themselves. Also, how many victims are in that space?
If you’re in this situation, we still believe that the best thing you can do is put out the fire. With smoke pushing from the window, you’re going to have fire there at some point. And with its recent studies, UL has proven that the fire will draw in that direction.
Decision 3: Enter/Search the Room
If you enter that second-floor room, your first action should always be to shut that room’s door, do your search and then leave the same way you came into the building. If you need to search another room, enter from another window, shut that room’s door and then search that room. If you have a four- or five-person engine company, you could send a couple of firefighters to place a ladder and search while others deploy a line. But remember: Review this scenario in your head with the typical staffing on your engine and ask yourself, do I always have four or even five firefighters?
Taking this one step further: Is your engine set up to rapidly deploy a ground ladder? In today’s fire service, many apparatus are bigger and taller than ever before. Ladders are placed on hydraulic brackets, require a foothold to reach or are in a slide-in compartment off the rear. Where are your ladders? Are they easy to deploy? Can you rapidly remove the ladder from your apparatus and get it to a second-floor window? If so, how long does this take? If you don’t know, practice and figure it out, then do it until you know you’re doing it as fast as you can. In our scenario, it should be obvious that deploying a hoseline would be faster than deploying a ladder, forcing a window and then searching an area on the second floor. Again, put out the fire and everything gets better.
Personal Experiences
In the past couple of months, our department has had a couple of similar scenarios unfold on the fireground. In one scenario, there was a fire in a basement apartment of a brick, three-story, multiple dwelling. Smoke was pushing from two bedroom windows and the front entrance to the building. Occupants were at their windows in the adjacent basement apartment and on balconies in the apartments above. With the volume and velocity of the smoke and the fact that the basement apartment door was left open, the fire had all the air it needed to rapidly progress. The best thing to do in this situation was to put out the fire.
During advancement, the bedrooms flashed over and were auto-exposing fire to the two floors above; however, a well-placed, high-gpm 1¾” hoseline kept the fire from the common stairwell and the adjacent apartment, and extinguished the two rooms that were on fire. At that point, all things got better because we put out the fire. The outcome would’ve been much worse if we had focused on rescuing occupants upon arrival rather than extinguishment.
In another incident, fire took over a bedroom on the second floor of a three-story wood-frame residence, and charged the second and third floors with dark, pressurized, superheated smoke. The fire had flashed over in the bedroom, and flames were extending onto the second floor because the door was left open. Upon arrival, occupants were trapped on the third floor.
As the engine, we had a choice to make: put out the fire or try to rescue the occupants. The decision was made to put out the fire and protect the means of egress. This proved to be extremely beneficial for the second-arriving company, which removed two trapped occupants. If we hadn’t put out the fire, it surely would’ve extended, cut off the second-floor stairwell and hallway, traveled through the path of least resistance to the open third-floor stairwell and overtaken the rest of the second and possibly third floors.
Do the Most Good
With limited staffing and highly volatile modern fuel loads, it’s probably always best to put out the fire. We know that all things get better when we’re able to put water on the fire, so the best thing we can do to prepare for that tactic is to become extremely proficient at getting the first hoseline in service. If we support that effort and assist the first company when needed in difficult stretches, we’ll be doing the most good for everyone on the fireground.
Practice all aspects of your deployment until those gross motor skills become second nature. We should know how long it takes us to put a line into service at the front door, at the second-floor landing, at the third-floor landing, etc. Practice until everyone is on the same page. Remember: Your first time stretching a hoseline or performing a rescue should never be on the fireground.
