The first day you enter the fire service, you’re already equipped with the most important tool you’ll ever need: your brain (although some of us tend to use it more frequently, and with better results, than others). Your brain allows you to overcome the fear of running into a burning building while everyone else is running out. Obviously, this isn’t a normal reaction to a building fire, but it’s what firefighters do every day, and it makes the fire service a very dangerous profession.
Every time you get on a fire truck and leave the firehouse, you put your life at risk. Disagree? Just read the warning on any new fire helmet, which states: “Firefighting is an ultra hazardous and unavoidably dangerous activity. This helmet will not protect you from all injuries, illness, diseases, conditions or hazards.”
Once you acknowledge the dangers of your job, you can work with your fellow crewmembers to increase your level of protection. One way you can facilitate this kind of cooperation and teamwork is through communication. Understanding how to effectively communicate and, specifically, how to perform radio communications, is crucial to fireground operations, because it helps ensure everyone goes home at the end of the day.
Don’t Be Afraid to Be Afraid
Communication on the fireground starts when you use your brain to process vital information about your surroundings. Each firefighter should understand their comfort zone; in other words, they should have a heightened level of situational awareness. Knowing the limits of your comfort zone helps you protect yourself because it alerts you to danger and lets you know when you should tell someone that you can’t, in good conscience, put yourself in a certain situation.
If you’re on scene one day and one of your crewmembers looks at you and screams, “Let’s go! Get in there!” what do you think will happen if you’re beyond your personal limit? If a fire scene looks bad and gives you a bad feeling, that’s your situational awareness telling you something is wrong.
If you ignore that message and don’t tell anyone how you feel, you jeopardize your life and the lives of your fellow firefighters. The last thing you want to do on the fireline is allow fear to take over and lose your head or start screaming. Part of working as a team involves keeping your wits about you, and helping others keep their wits about them. You can do this by knowing what’s going on around you, understanding and utilizing the messages given to you by your comfort zone and putting your training into practice. Remember: Each individual’s comfort zone will differ, and they should never go beyond it without good reason.
Missed Messages
One thing that constantly affects our level of comfort and helps us stay on top of any fire is information, most of which is given and received via radio communication.
At a fire, radio communications fly back and forth all the time, from the beginning of the incident to the very end, and most of the time, things go fairly smoothly. But occasionally, a radio report will go unnoticed or missed. And a radio communication that’s not acknowledged is one that was never made. If you radio to command that you and your partner are making entry into the second floor of a burning building from the rear porch roof, but they don’t acknowledge receipt of the message, then it wasn’t received. You must then repeat your message a second and possibly a third time, if needed. If you’re not acknowledged after the third attempt, you must make contact with another chief or deliver the message in a different way, such as face to face.
Remember: All communication must be received and replied to. A simple “10-four” response, or even a “K,” short for OK, which is used by the FDNY, is all that’s needed.
One example of simple yet effective fireground radio communication: You place a ladder to the second-floor rear bedroom window, and you want the search team to know the location of that ladder for their safety. So you call them on the radio and say that a ladder is on the second-floor window, exposure 2, or B side, rear bedroom. You then receive a reply from the search team that states, “Second-floor, exposure 2 side, rear, 10-four.” You now know without a doubt that the interior search team understands the location of the ladder.
If you receive a radio transmission that indicates a problem, the team leader must assign a seasoned firefighter who understands the nature of the problem to constantly monitor the radio, because when things go bad at a fire, firefighters get hurt. If we have saws working and a lot of noise on scene, the FDNY sends a member of our RIT team with a radio to a quieter location away from the front of the building so they can give and receive communications more clearly.
A Lost Art
Unfortunately, despite its importance to the success of most fireground ops and the safety of fireground personnel, talking on the radio is becoming a lost art.
When making radio communications, use the following guidelines to make your messages clear and concise:
- Slow down. Take a few seconds to process what you want to say before you say it. The slight difference between a radio report of heavy smoke coming from a top floor window and a report of heavy fire from a top floor window might make the incident commander (IC) change operations, which would affect not only their actions, but also the actions of the other responders on scene.
- Keep your messages brief and to the point, giving only the necessary information. Some people get on the radio and just talk, giving a report that goes something like: “The rear of the building is two stories high and a lovely shade of green, with three double-hung windows and smoke showing from one of them.” No one cares about the color of a building, but you do need to know which window has smoke showing from it.
- Be as specific as possible. For example, when instructing my crew on how to communicate the location of a ladder, I tell them to first state the side of the building where the ladder is located, then the side nearest to it. For example, if we put a ladder on the rear of a fire building, second floor, near the 2 or B side, I would say: “Portable ladder on the 3-2 side, second floor [or on the C-B side, second floor].” Doing this helps the brothers and sisters on the inside of the fire building create a mental map of the ladder’s location.
- Drill on radio communications with your crew to build their confidence and trust in their own abilities. Radio discipline training should start as soon as a person joins the fire service. If possible for your department, I highly recommend retrieving radio communications from a real fire and using them during a drill. If you’ve never done it before, you’ll be amazed at how you sound on the radio; it’s an eye-opening experience.
The Mayday
The most important radio communication you’ll ever make on the fireground is a mayday. Does your department have specific guidelines for the transmission of a mayday? If not, you should begin working on mayday communications right now (see “Mayday 101” by Homer Robertson, April 2007, for two mayday drills your department can use).
You should declare a mayday whenever you:
- Become lost;
- Discover you’re low on air or out of air;
- Fall down a hole; or
- Become entrapped or something falls on top of you.
If you don’t call a mayday during any of these situations, you put yourself and every other firefighter on the scene at risk. On the other hand, if you happen to hear someone else call a mayday and nobody reacts, you must take it upon yourself to confirm the mayday, obtain all possible information and contact the IC immediately.
While at a fire years ago, a friend of mine thought he heard a mayday call on the radio. No one else heard it or did a thing about it, so he let it slide. Ten minutes later, his crew found a downed firefighter who had succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning. My friend still thinks about that fire and questions his actions. Would you be able to live with that memory?
Conclusion
On the fireground, firefighters must receive all the facts and information about their surroundings and the operations taking place to make informed decisions and, more importantly, to stay safe. Remember: Listen to what your gut tells you, and maintain effective radio communication at all times.
