We recently had an officer’s meeting. During the meeting, we asked, “What do you have your nozzles set at?” The answer was surprising. Many officers said they set them at 95 gpm because the hoselines are easier to handle. Now, granted, most room-and-contents fires can be handled with 95 gpm, but what about those fires that necessitate larger flows?
Most would think that it would be easy to simply “dial up” the gpm setting and let ’er rip. Well, we found instances where the nozzleman (and officers) neglected to dial up when necessary, probably because of anxiety and stress.
-John “Skip” Coleman, deputy chief of fire prevention, Toledo (OH) Department of Fire and Rescue, is author of Incident Management for the Street-Smart Fire Officer (Fire Engineering, 1997) and Managing Major Fires (Fire Engineering, 2000), a technical editor of Fire Engineering, and a member of the FDIC Educational Advisory Board.
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