By JESSE QUINALTY
While responding to the Sawtooth Wildland Fires, a series of wildfires that occurred in California's San Bernardino County in the summer of 2006, my engine crew and I became trapped inside a garage in a burnover. At the time, I was a captain with the Twentynine Palms Fire Department near Joshua Tree, California. While we were setting up to do structure protection on two homes, a 50-foot-high flame front approached, and we had to retreat into one of the garages. After a few harrowing moments where the fire began to ignite the garage, the main fire front passed, and we exited the structure by crawling out a side window.
After the incident, I thought about the incident's human factors and how they affect our performance at various emergency incidents. As I started to learn more about human factors regarding things like crew resource management, the Swiss Cheese Theory, and the Abilene Paradox, I came up with the "Six Ts" of fire service learning, which follow. They show how we can try to change the way we train to prepare for the worst and how it affects us later in our careers.
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