By Robert Stumpf
Do you look forward to Sundays, glued to the tube, hoping your teams will cover the spread? Recently, while listening to a fellow firefighter describe the pointspreadof a given National Football League (NFL) game, I started to wonder about another type of gambling; one that hit close to home for me as I had found myself playing the odds at work.
消防部门的职业是由risk-taking; you cannot do the job without taking some chances. With training, education, and experience, those risks are calculated and weighed for their potential benefit before we blindly rush in to “do our duty.” But how much of what we do every day contributes to our becoming complacent about our job?
考虑一下您的最后一个回应。这是一个活跃的alarm? A motor vehicle accident? A civilian with chest pain? How did it go?
Too often, we respond on the so-called “常规“很多次,我们陷入常规。所有的us have been there, when the third or fourth call to a building musters feelings of discontent, and we look at making the run as a burden that gets in the way of our plans. Our guys sometimes joke that our motto should be a variation of the cops’ mantra, “To Protect and Serve,” only ours is “To Protect and Reset” because of the large number of activated false alarms from the university we protect. It is sometimes difficult to be motivated to don your personal protective equipment when you are responding to the same student housing building that you’ve been to three times today.
I work for two different fire departments in two very different capacities. I am a营chief/training officer for a municipal fire department, and a part-time firefighter for a township fire department. Balancing my time between both jobs provides me the opportunity to take an active role in progressive change in my role as an administrator and while maintaining a “boots on the ground” approach to continuing to learn the job as a tail-end firefighter. As the training officer, I am constantly preaching to the membership on the importance of safety, self rescue, survival skills, and being properly equipped on the fireground. I have pleaded with firefighters on a number of occasions to make the $5 investment in a pair of wire cutters, to carry some extra webbing and a carabiner, and to treat each call as if it is the next “big one.”
Three months ago, I lost my Gerber Multi Tool that I carry in my turnouts on a run to an apartment building just off the campus that our department protects. The initial dispatch certainly sounded like the real deal: “Caller is in abasementapartment and is trapped by smoke in the hallway.”
In the end, it turned out to be steam from a burstwaterheater. When trying to prop open a window to vent the steam, I left my pliers behind. Then, a month ago, I broke my right-angle flashlight during a training exercise. During this same exercise, I borrowed the carabiner I carry with my webbing to demonstrate securing an anchor for a window bailout. Individually, these seemingly innocuous events probably wouldn’t amount to much, but during my last shift with the township department, it occurred to me—I had become the very thing against which I have preached.
As a tail-end firefighter who is responsible for entering into limitedvisibility和高风险的环境，我已经看到不适合自己配备割台，登山扣和工作手电筒。当我失去钳子时，我回想起我需要更换它们，但是三个月的时间，我什么也没做。当我的灯光破裂时，我做了一个心理记录，以抓住我在地下室的备份，然后将架子上的油漆罐放在架子上。但是再次，在这里，我的出现没有光明。我怎么到这里了？
After being the guy who preached against this very thing, how did Imanage落入同一个陷阱别人?我哈ve always railed against those whose “lack of dedication” or “professionalism” had allowed them to sleepwalk their way through the job I love so much. This hit me like a gut punch.
Then and there, standing on the仪器floor, I made a conscious decision to not work another shift without coming to work properly equipped. The next evening, when I showed up for the night tour, I placed a new pair of wire cutters into my chest pocket of my coat and a pair of medic shears into my left pants pocket. I brought the Army surplus flashlight from the basement and the carabiner I had loaned to the training tower.
满意解决我设备短comings, I started to wonder again how my complacency over the course of 3 months had taken root almost unnoticed. A call at 0300 hours would serve as the hint I was looking for. We were dispatched on a mutual-aid assist for tanker operations at a working fire just north of our district. With my newly placed tools, I set about mentally preparing myself for what I would be doing on arrival. What might have been a chance to “get some fire” in another department’s jurisdiction turned out to be a two-hour exercise in fill-and-dump operations. I stood watching our chauffer and asked myself out loud, “What behavior is this run reinforcing?” Two hours later, we were back at the station, and I realized that the nature of the alarms to which I had been responding and the lack of alarms altogether had manifested themselves in my being content with not carrying the appropriate tools in my turnouts. The lack of any response for which I had a need for any of those items created a mentality that justified not carrying them at all. It just isn’t that often that you are going to be tested.
So, what does any of this have to do with you? Our behaviors—good or bad—are the result of reinforcement, positive and negative. And what happens to us each shift provides the reinforcement for the behavior we exhibit on the next alarm. If the majority of your run load is active alarms, service calls, mutual-aid assists, and so on, then you start to exhibit behavior that demonstrates your expectations of those types of calls. For me, given that I work only fill-in shifts as a part-time firefighter, it had been several shifts since I had even made a run. I had come to expect that each shift would be much the same: Socializing, TV, maybe some training, and a full night’s rest. Why on Earth would I need to carry all that extraneous equipment when I wasn’t ever going to need it?
考虑一下您进行的最后一步。它加强了什么行为？这是另一个错误警报，再次告诉您外套，头盔和独立的呼吸器（SCBA）是过度的吗？是在同一时间出现的医务人员，并且您设法退缩或获得婴儿床，因此您对患者护理和评估的缺点仍然没有发现？在任何给定的时间，都有可能（而且很自然）让您的警卫失望，以使自己采取简单的出路。不幸的是，我们从事一项可能令人难以置信的服务。
您在哪种类型的社区中生活和工作？您知道普通公民对其第一响应者的期望吗？There are many taxpayers out there who, as long as they can drive by the firehouse and see a shiny red truck inside, feel all “warm and fuzzy” and otherwise don’t want to be bothered with the ins-and-outs of emergency response. This usually manifests itself in short staffing, uphill struggles for funding and equipment, and so on. Sound familiar?
其他社区期望金钱可以购买的绝对最高水平。这些期望通常每隔几年就在新卡车中表现出来，最先进的培训设施以及现场足够的消防员可以扑灭大多数火灾。如果您的社区对您作为第一响应者的期望，那么您的部门非常明显，并且您拥有满足这些期望的必要资源。这些社区预计，消防员在技术救援，消防，危险品和许多其他学科的各个方面都有熟练的熟练工人。188金博网网址多少但是其他社区的期望要低得多，这是允许对工作的自满情绪的地方。如果公众对所提供的服务的类型和质量感到冷漠，那么提供者最终将有同样的感觉。
Even in the most progressive of departments, there are some issues that manage to slip through the cracks, that don’t keep up with their training, that aren’t diligent about fighting the battle against complacency. The most headstrong and dedicated firefighters sometimes find themselves bitten by the same bug. The odds being played are no different than the roll of the dice that some politicians are willing to make when they short-staff engines or close firehouses. More often than not, they will get away with it, no major catastrophe will occur, and there will be no public outcry. But when they do, the price is typically high, resulting in negative press for entire organization, and ill-will from the community.
Becoming complacent about the runs we make doesn’t make you a bad person or a poor firefighter. It is a natural and human reaction to a set of reinforcers that we come to expect not to have to do certain things, use specific equipment. If, over time, we get away with not wearing our SCBA, our seat belts, or our hoods, then we develop a rationale that tells us that nothing bad can come of it. Complacency can creep in, take root and, before you know it, you aren’t checking your pack at the start of the shift, your batteries in your light are dead, and maybe your hood is missing. Then, you quit reading the articles and the books, stop going to the fire schools, and start to see the tones dropping as a nuisance.
想一想您每次旅行的十二件事中的任何一件事，因为有时不便或耗时。你能证明对你的家人做合理的理由吗？您能想象一些首席执行官告诉您的妻子和孩子，如果您只检查了SCBA或更换电池，今天就在这里？这么认真！任何人都可以发生。
It happened to me, and I am no better than anyone doing this job, but thankfully I caught myself committing the sin of complacency. You have to fight everyday to keep it out. Make a commitment to yourself, to your community, and to your department to not be one of “those” guys. For every shift you work, for as long as you do this job, you will have to resist the urge to skip the truck/equipment check, put off the training drill, or replace the worn out bunker coat. It is a battle you have to fight; you have to rage against it every time you show up at the firehouse.
选择与自满作斗争将使您成为更好的消防员，并成为其他人遵循的领导者。如果您要打赌，请坚持周日的大型比赛；不要与您的工作或生活差异。
Robert Stumpfis a 17-year member of the fire service, currently in Berthoud, Colorado.
