The fire service is constantly finding new buzzwords and phrases to describe what we do and how we should do it. One of the newest, trendiest, phrases around is “victim survivability profiling” (VSP). The phrase was coined by Fire Department of New York Captain Stephen Marsar, who presented his view of the topic in multiple articles.,2The difficulty with buzzwords and phrases is they attempt to distill complicated ideas into nugget-sized bits of information.
垂直地震剖面的核心理念是消防员conduct a thorough size-up of a structure fire and an analysis to determine the likelihood of a victim’s potential to be rescued. This is a perfectly reasonable idea. We should be conducting a dynamic, ongoing size-up regardless of our position on the fireground. If we hope to maintain situational awareness, we must constantly observe conditions. We must use our judgment to decide what we are willing to risk.
I take issue with the application of VSP as a way of approaching the fireground operation. In the 2010 article, the very first statistics that Marsar presents are correlations of civilian fire deaths with firefighter line-of-duty deaths (LODDs). For the three-year period that he discusses (2007-2009), 102 firefighter LODDs and five civilian fatalities occurred in structure fires.
If you are a current subscriber,login hereto access this content.
If you would like to become a subscriber, please visit ushere.
