As an old guy living in a brave (and nutty) new world, I struggle every day to somehow understand the never-ending parade of hot management topics as they go by. The current flavor of the month is SITUATION AWARENESS. As I read and hear about and then ponder the mysteries of situation awareness, I wonder, What am I supposed to be aware of? And (as usual) how does this awareness relate to firefighting situations? Thinking about and connecting my two questions quickly produces a no-brainer answer.
Understanding the current status of fireground conditions (where/how big) along with knowing how those conditions and operational action (also where/how big) are impacting each other is absolutely criticaland, it seems to me, all this quickly becomes a big part of what fireground situational awareness is all about. Establishing and maintaining this fireground awareness is easy to say but hard to do, because effective rescue and fire attack involves teams of firefighters performing a full range of assigned tasks, many times all at once in a lot of different places. This sequential, simultaneous, decentralized work must occur very fast and must be effectively coordinated, because operational action in one place must hook up to (i.e., integrate) and support what is going on in other related places.
在一起,必须分配的所有任务,accounted for, and managed by the incident commander (IC), so they (collectively) complete the basic tactical objectives: rescue/fire control/property conservation. Most of the time, one operating position cannot see the other, so we must depend on standard operating procedures (SOPs), portable radios, command support, experience, and intuition. Mutual trust drives the system and holds it together. “I’ve got your back” is not just a cutesy slogan to us. It means (as an example) that Engine 1 is stretching a line to the interior, and Engine 15 is bringing in a backup line to cover them. Everybody had better be situationally (and mutually) aware of how linear backup operations occur and how our survival depends on them.
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