NDOT Episode #55 W/ Garrett Crotty

Join the NDOT crew and Garrett Crotty as we discuss training and drive!

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:44

Welcome back. What is it? Episode 54?

SPEAKER_00 0:48

Sup, chip bags. Welcome back. Uh, yeah, yeah, episode 54. Thank you guys so much for watching. We'll hit this real quick, as always. Uh, a huge thank you to our show to our sponsors, Tactic Suppression, Krufers Culture, Taylor Sins, Job Tone Graphics. Um, awesome people. Thank you to you guys for uh listening and watching. Like we posted out on Facebook, we are really close to a thousand followers, so that is awesome. Um, but secondly, if you're watching the videos, hopefully you're tuning into YouTube because we aren't sharing them on Facebook anymore. But we've had a pretty great transition over there. So thank you guys. That's been pretty awesome seeing everyone uh seem to kind of seamlessly transition over to uh YouTube. So um thank you for that. And uh we'll stop blabbing and and bring in the guy because that's what everybody wants to hear anyway. So let's bring in Garrett. Hey Garrett, how's it going?

SPEAKER_01 1:41

Good, how are you guys?

SPEAKER_00 1:42

Oh, fantastic. Thanks for coming on, man.

SPEAKER_01 1:44

Yeah, appreciate you guys having me. Thanks for the opportunity.

SPEAKER_00 1:47

Of course, why don't you uh go ahead and get started? Uh tell everybody a little bit about yourself.

SPEAKER_02 1:52

Yeah, so I uh started in the fire service 2007, just recently graduated high school, was kind of trying to figure out where my life was gonna go and what I was gonna end up doing. And uh I started volunteering for a small department where I grew up, and then shortly after that I moved to college, uh, just kind of kept pursuing the fire service, volunteered over here, and now uh I guess it'll be next week, be been 14 years for the same agency and just plugging away, trying to uh take it day by day and just go to one more fire.

SPEAKER_03 2:24

Awesome. Congrats.

SPEAKER_00 2:26

Yeah, that's awesome. Uh, we'll go ahead and jump right into the questions because we got a lot of good ones for you. Uh, where did your passion for training come from?

SPEAKER_02 2:37

I think it was something that uh it was just kind kind of the constant desire to continue to learn things and learn new stuff. Uh, but I'll tell you the the two classes that I look back on the most that kind of gave me the aha moments, if you will, that kind of made me realize uh that there was life outside the four walls of which I knew about, or the four walls which I mostly understood or felt like I understood, uh, was back in 2015. And that was going to Nozzle Forward for the first time. And then the Brothers in Battle VS Beyond the Door class. And those were both uh I think Nozzle Forward was in August and Beyond the Door was in October, and really like kind of in that two-month window, uh, a lot of I don't want to say like myth, but a lot of like reality of realizing just exactly uh I thought I had an understanding. You know, you know, you just kind of get into a spot where you're like, yeah, I think I'm starting to get this, and then you go to something that totally changes your perspective on it. And like I said, ever since then, it really just gave me the reality or the you know, kind of the concept of what's happening outside the four walls of your organization, and it really just made me interested. And then I think from going to those classes and learning things and just wanting to bring it back and continuing to go to places, uh, that helped out a ton. And then I think one of the big things with it was was you know, you go places and guys would be interested in going, and uh there's a couple of guys on the job that I would just say to them, it's like, hey, I'll I'll you pick the class and I'll go with you wherever we're going. And as uh, you know, I think of like mile high fire conference or a couple of times where I'd gone down, like I said, took the Beyond the Door class, came back, talked about it next year in the same class, but with somebody from the department that went down. And I talked about this uh the other day in a uh a promotional exam, but really it kind of comes down to the fact of if mentors are willing to give you something and they're willing to share it, if it's just like kind of lorded and hoarded by you and just protected, like that's not that's not the objective of what it is. It's meant to be shared and shared freely and passed along. So, I mean, ideally, you hopeful that you're hopeful that you're at work, you know, when uh when shit goes down and things are going, but you never want to look back on something. And I personally don't want to look at it and think to myself, you know, if I would have shared this with these with this person or or this guy, would it have changed the outcome when I had the opportunity? You're never gonna have the opportunity to directly impact like every single person. But when someone's asking you about it, if you don't share it with them, you know, I don't ever want to look back and be like, I wish I would have said this in that conversation, you know. But I think that's kind of what uh drove a lot of it is when you go outside and you find good things and you realize that it can relate to what you're doing, uh, I think it makes it easier to want to come back and share those things and teach those things and just progress along. I mean, that's the ultimate goal, right? Is to take care of succeeding generations below us and uh grow your agency. So that's kind of where it all, I guess, in a summary, where it all started and hopefully where it's gone.

SPEAKER_00 5:51

Yeah, for sure. You mentioned in your bio that you really want to continue to drive the American fire service forward. Yeah. What does that mean to you?

SPEAKER_02 6:02

Uh well, it's the the running joke would be right, we're in Wyoming, so uh like I'm still working on the dial-up, still dialing up out here, and we're kind of the world. But no, I think the reality of it is is just trying to share the message. Um, and when we talk about that, it's just whatever needs to be addressed, whatever needs to be passed along. Like to me, it's kind of crazy. We go some places and you ask people if they're familiar with the firefighter rescue survey, or you know, 5,000 rescues on the board now.

SPEAKER_00 6:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 6:35

And there's places where they kind of look at you like, uh I'm not sure about that. And I always reference kind of the uh FSRI studies between the interior exterior attack on victim survivability, the firefighter rescue survey, like people want data of everything, but it seems like there's places that are neglecting what I believe is the most important data, and that's going out the door and going to fires, right? We're studying other things and stuff like that as far as like timestamps and um really it's just at your fingertips. So by you know driving the American Fire Service and pushing it forward and things like that is like I said, you're never gonna get everybody on the same page, but just continuing to educate places that it's not as open of an opportunity. You know, like I used the other day, I was uh in a different town teaching a class, and uh where my brother and parents live, one of the guys reached out and he's like, Hey, is there a chance that you know we could come to this class? I said, Yeah, I'll get you guys some seats in it. It was kind of uh close to a fire department only. Got him a couple seats, and then one of the uh deputy chiefs mentions he says, uh, hey man, we really appreciate it. And I just told him, said, Man, I think you guys are the most important fire department in North America, and I'll do anything and everything I could for you guys for free. You know, like I want them to be the most dialed-in fire department. If that means passing information along to them that I got places because they don't have the opportunity to go do it, like I said, it all comes back to that open sharing of information and passing it along and uh mentoring people up. Yeah, for sure. I think that's uh I hope that answers that. I feel like I can.

SPEAKER_00 8:09

Yeah, I'm gonna winner. I want to I want to circle back to like especially that firefighter rescue survey, because you know, we've we've talked about on here a lot. I mean, we've had Ladine on here, we've had all those guys there. I mean, we're from Wisconsin, so it's pretty cool to they kind of got a home base in there. But even in Wisconsin, there's not many people that are not I shouldn't say not many, but there's there's departments that won't even know it exists. Yeah, and it's seems like there's just a a shift, or at least there was for a while, of like the speculated data. It's like, well, if this happens, we could get really hurt. If we do this, this could happen, yada yada, yada. And then it's like you talk about firefighter rescue server, and you're like, okay, but it's not like look at look at this actual data about the most like you said, the most important part about our job is these are the rescues. This is where we're finding people, how fast we need to move, when we need to do these things and the operation. And then it's like, okay, yeah, but like what if this happens? Then we've got to do this. Like, there's just it seems very, very separate, uh, data-driven ideas.

SPEAKER_02 9:13

Well, it's interesting too, because like I remember uh having a conversation with Cody Trustrail, and we were someplace and it was just kind of after class hanging out at the hotel. We were, you know, kind of cussing and discussing some things, and it's interesting how he he kind of uh in a roundabout way. I'm paraphrasing what the conversation was, is it's like now the data is confirming what busy fire companies knew or what busy fire companies had as far as like a mindset of where things are going. And I think it's interesting in a multitude of levels, you know, whether you want to talk about what you're putting on the end of the line for a nozzle and what the different studies from the UL support and all these sort of things, there's always been busy companies or busy firehouses understood what worked and what didn't work. And everything else was kind of theorized because there wasn't the time and effort put into training to validate it was gonna work, or there wasn't the run volume to validate that that's how it was gonna go down. Now it's being studied at a different level where it's almost becoming the fact that like uh it's indisputable at some point, right? Like it's very, very hard to have an argument right now and tell somebody that you don't think to go to the bedrooms is the number one prior or the place to prioritize on a search when I can go to the internet and very quickly type something in and say, Well, these 5,000 rescues, 45% of the time they're there, so why not? You know, um, or just the analogy or the conversation of should we be pushing hand lines or should we be in the hit and move the entire time? And the the day old adage of like, well, I've never had to push a hallway. Did you leave the building? Yeah, I've been pushed out of fires. Did you try and push the hallway?

SPEAKER_04 11:09

No.

SPEAKER_02 11:09

Then you went to a fire that needed to push the hallway, you just didn't quite have that skill set or totally understand it, right? Um, and so I think that's when when I, you know, back to this last question, when you talk about pushing the American fire service forward, uh, it's all out there at some point, and I don't say this in a negative way, at some point, ignorance just becomes negligence and the inability to just go look it up and find the information for yourself to know, like, like I said, it's out there. The UL is spending more money than any fire department could ever replicate a study off of. The rescue surveys getting more data than one person could probably get into now. Brian Brush is crushing it with the entire thing of finding those things and stuff like that. Uh, and then on top of it, you add the next one into it. You know, you look at data, not drama from Bill Carey. Yeah, and it's like we're making this many rescues. Here's where our interior line of duty deaths are happening, and it really starts to make that separation of you know, it's not a hundred firemen dying on the interior of buildings, there's four 2025 interior line of duty deaths, and the rescues are continuing to just go up and up and up and up. So, like I said, as we continue to progress along, we just kind of continue to what I think, and to use Cody's words, it made the most sense. He's like, Well, at this point, now it's just validating what we knew. It's just now it's not my opinion or my experience against his opinion or his experience, it's becoming more universal.

SPEAKER_00 12:41

Yeah, yeah. I think it's it's gonna be extremely important to see those the smaller, just kind of your busy, but not your extremely fire busy departments. That is the majority of the fire service take that data on. Because, like you said, it's it's the busy companies that knew that stuff, it's the smaller ones where we you know we still got time to to go around and just do the BS, we do our own inspection, the stuff like that, where it's like you kind of fill your schedule of busy days because you're busy but not busy, or you're not going to a hundred fires a year, that it's like, oh, you know, we don't we don't go to fires, we don't need to do this training. It's like, no, we still go to fires and we should be paying attention to this data more than anybody else because we don't have that confirmation, we don't have that experience to lay back on. We've got to rely on these busy companies that do go to fires every shift that can tell us what we need to be doing.

SPEAKER_01 13:34

Yeah, no, I agree.

SPEAKER_00 13:36

Uh moving on to the next one that we've got. What are some training topics that the fire service should focus more on?

SPEAKER_02 13:44

Oh uh are we talking just like in general terms or are you talking like specific to like places I work or what are we looking at here?

SPEAKER_00 13:57

Uh I mean we're talking about for your experience, so kind of kind of a mix of both, either general or or where you what you've experienced most.

SPEAKER_02 14:05

Yeah. So I think uh I I can say this because I can put myself in the same category, I feel like. And uh really what it comes down to is uh kind of wraps back up into the other the other question or the last answer I gave is I think there's kind of uh there's three camps, if you will, for the fire service. And unfortunately, all of us want to work in that just incredibly busy firehouse where, like you're saying, you know, like every time we come to work, the expectation is, you know, like we're actually gonna go to a fire, not just like hoping to go to a fire, you know. Yeah. Uh and those are the guys that they just they're experienced because of where they work and the amount of runs they go to and the amount of fires they get a year. If you don't work in an incredibly busy firehouse and you're not going to fires every single week or every single month, or however you want to like break it down and things like that. If you're if you're proactive in the firehouse, oftentimes a lot of that stuff until you prove it is theory driven. So an example being we're talking about, like I'm gonna use an example where I work. Uh the first end for the engine that I drive is plenty of three-story center hall, garden level apartment buildings, unsprinkler, built in the late 60s, early 70s, didn't need it, things like that. Okay.

SPEAKER_04 15:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:28

It's a 300-foot stretch to the center apartments on the third floor, and even the apartments off of that. And right now, the longest uh line on our engine that we don't have to take two lines that build together is a 200-foot line. So, in the works of potentially making some changes and writing some proposals and things like that to help facilitate that. But at that point, oftentimes talk around the kitchen table turns into theory. So, hey, if we go to a fire today and it's on the third floor, this is how I think is the best way we can handle this. So guys sit around, they theorize what it is and how it's gonna work and how it's gonna work for their company and things like that. And in the presentation I give, this is where I kind of talk about, you know, these are expectations, right? We're sitting at the kitchen table, the uh officer in our system, the captain, says, Hey, if we go to fire on the third floor, this is my expectation, this is how we're gonna handle business. We're gonna stretch this line, add this off the end of it, or whatever the case is, right? However, when you talk about the training side of it, theory can only take you so far. And theory, oftentimes, when the alarm goes off and we go out the door, and that's the first time that we vetted or tested theory, is most likely not gonna do well for us, right? And so the training I think that can be missing is you can probably look anywhere in the map of North America right now, and every single weekend, if you had the time off and the funding, you could go to a fire conference 52 times a year right now. Yeah, every single weekend go to a different place. And I you can go get something from every single person and bring it back and things like that. But I think what it comes down to is uh that person you're taking the class from doesn't work in your agency, doesn't work in your shift, and doesn't work in your company. And so now when you go and you take a class and it's like, hey, here's how we can get to that third floor center apartment on the center hall building, but we just come back and talk about it and theorize it, and we don't go out the door and get permission to go test it or get permission to go work on it and vet it within the company itself, it's just theory. And the other thing, too, when it comes to expectations, is you know, the three of us could have a conversation right now and we could put some kind of word out there, you know, the it was very limited visibility or it was no visibility. And the three of us each have a little bit different perception in our head or perspective in our head of really what is like how bad is zero visibility, right? Well, when we take this theory and we talk about it, and like I said, cuss and discuss it, and then we go out and we we implement it even at just a training level, not a drill, where it's like we're gonna walk through it and train on it and get familiar with before we drill on it. If we're the company, we now the three of us share the same experience that we just found to be successful, right? Not oh, well, this comp this, that, whatever the case is. Like now we have it. Now we can kind of put it into drill form, do a little bit quicker. And then it's like, hey, does anybody have any ideas that would make this a better option? Or is this kind of where we're at with it? And then the goal is when you leave, it's like, hey, when we go to that, when we go to any three-story center hall, that's the A plan. If not that, then we're gonna go with this, and we can kind of, you know, if we have to, we deviate from it and things from that. So I don't think there's a lack of training going on across the country and things like that. Like there's plenty of fire conferences and plenty of classes happening left and right. Where I think the lack comes down to is taking what you've learned and what you understand and bringing it back to wherever your, I'm gonna put it in quotes, wherever your circle of influence is, whether it's your company, your shift, if you're big enough your battalion, or maybe you're the fire chief into your job, right? Is bringing those things back and vetting it for how it's gonna work for who you are and where you work based on the staffing you have and things like that, you know. So uh I was in, well, when I met JD, I was in Michigan, and I was very surprised to hear how many people come up and ask you about things afterwards, and they're like, You're talking about like a three-person engine company. It's like, yeah, what what is it up here? Well, it's two of us. I'm like, oh, like it's foreign world to me, you know. Like, take one, it's always interesting, like take one guy off our engine, and it totally changes our game plan. Where it's like, holy cow, like this is gonna be way different. Give us a guy, and we're like, wait a minute, what do I do with this guy? Yeah, like you get in your system, you understand it, and they understand how two-person companies operate better than most places, right? I don't work in a person with a four every once in a while. Now there's a fourth guy on it, but oftentimes where I'm at now, the fourth guy will just move over and make a third person on the truck.

SPEAKER_04 20:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:39

Um, but that's really where I think it comes down to is you got to take all this stuff, vet it for your company, take a look at it, figure out how it applies to your company, and then from there, like troubleshoot it. And there's sometimes you're like ideas are gonna come up and they're gonna be pitched, and it's gonna sound really great, and then you go mess around with it and it totally falls apart. And I think the reality of that is you look at it and you think to yourself, you're like, Well, shit, I'm glad we did it like that, and not pulling up with you know, fire blown out a window and like, well, we really shit the bet on this. It didn't it didn't really pan out. So I think overall that's where I would say there's probably uh taking everything you're learning and really vetting it and validating it for your company.

SPEAKER_03 21:23

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I I learned that taking stuff back from trainings to give the better buy-in is coming back, have a discussion at the kitchen table or with your crew, modifying it to our our needs and our equipment and staffing, and going out training on it. If it works, it works. If it doesn't, you know, we'll figure something else out. Um I just had a lot better buy than just going there and say, Hey, this is this worked there, it should work here, and this is where I stand on it, because they'll just say fuck you.

SPEAKER_01 21:59

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 22:00

If you actually, you know, modify to your needs and your staffing, you can actually say, Hey, it actually does work with us and train on it and get everyone comfortable because they don't know because they didn't go to the training. So you're training them up on it, you can get really b a better buy into your crew than the captain.

SPEAKER_02 22:16

Yeah. No, I'd agree with that. And that's the thing too, is like, you know, years ago, uh when I don't even remember where I first saw it, but had access to the uh FDNY forceable entry manual. Reading through that, I remember someone asked me, like, well, why are you reading that? The FDNY does, you know, quite a bit more different force stuff. It's like, yeah, I get that. Like they have a five-man rescue company or however many are out there and all that kind of stuff. But it doesn't mean you can't take the chunks and pieces out of what they do for forcible entry and how it applies to the same thing with their same thing with their engine company manual. You know, when their engine company manual came out, it was just a matter of reading it and understanding how their engine works fast forward a year and a half later. Now the system I work in, the agency I work for, stretches the exact same high-rise bundles off of a high-rise hookup that the FDNY does, you know. And so uh yeah, there's nothing wrong with just getting education. And sometimes uh you go out there, and I'm not gonna say you don't gain anything from it, you definitely learn stuff, but you kind of take a seat back and you look and you're like, I learned some stuff, but it it doesn't directly translate to what my department is capable of doing, you know. And I have those conversations with guys sometimes you ask them some things, and you know, they're like, uh, it's simple. I just get on the radio and tell the chief I need a second alarm. And I'm like, that's not happening where I work. You know, like I need a different game plan than what that is.

SPEAKER_00 23:49

So awesome. Uh last uh specific question that we have for you. What do you believe separates departments that perform well on the fire ground for from departments that might struggle?

SPEAKER_02 24:03

Well, I think anytime you just you straight up look at it from an aspect of a busy company, right, is probably by default going to perform well and perform better uh just because, like I said, they're gaining that experience. So going back to kind of the previous one, if you're not getting the experience from the fact of you're just working at a busy firehouse and you're going to a fire every single week and things like that, like how do you generate your own, I'm gonna call it like experience in quotes. Like my buddy Romagus says, right? Like, man, we can't schedule experience or there'd be fires all over the country. But at the same time, like to an extent, I can schedule opportunities to go out and do those things, right? So uh kind of what I see with it is is people that have standards, all right. And when I say people, I'm referring to like companies, like, hey, this is how we operate as a company, and how we get to how we're gonna perform to that standard or how we're gonna operate as that company is we have to go out, like I said, we got to vet some of these things. I know for a fact I've brought things up uh in the past where on paper it looked great and we went out and messed around with it. And it's like, yeah, this this just doesn't pan out quite like we thought it would. And sometimes it's as simple as like I say simple, but your rig spec alone could hinder your ability to do something of how you want to do stuff. You know, an example being we were looking at changing what uh model of inch and three-quarter we were going with. And you know, one of our pre-connects is a 200 and one of them's a 150, and then the 200 comes off the rear. All the space in the world in the rear, get to talking about it. It's like, well, yeah, if you want, in my opinion, you know, the top of the line, like the best hose on the market, like we get true ID and we put it in there. Well, 150 feet of true ID fits in the rig spec we have, 200 feet doesn't. So now it's gonna impact operationally how we operate. So when you go to them and say, Well, we gotta, you know, go from a 200-foot pre-connect to a 150 pre-connect, and they say, No, we're sticking with a 200, now we're right back into that, you know, vetting phase and things along those lines. So, and then I think more than anything, when it comes down to it, and I don't I can't speak for everywhere because I'm not listening to everybody's fires or hearing what's going on on the tailboard after everybody's fires and things like that. But the reality of it is when when you go to a fire, like uh it's not gonna be perfect every single time. Like shit's gonna happen, things are not gonna go as well as you can. Uh, you know, a buddy of mine who's a battalion chief here getting ready to tire retire out, he calls it kind of fumble time. You know, like you're gonna have fumble time and might have to punt on first and ten. But at some point, we've got to sit down and we've got to take ownership of the things that didn't go well and use those as our opportunities to get out and build those single company trainings. Like if we're honest with ourselves after a fire and we kind of look back and everybody comes up with one thing that they're like, yeah, I, you know, I'll admit I sucked at this, or this didn't go as well as I planned, or it wasn't as I predicted it to be, and things like that. If one person on that company each says one thing, it just gave me three things that we can go do as a company. It doesn't have to be I gotta go bang all three of these things out in one tour at three hours apiece and things like that, but we can take opportunities to do things. Hey man, Mike, my stretch sucked. Sounds good. If we go to a residential alarm on this deal and there's nothing showing, I just want you to stretch a line anyways to get one more rep in the front yard, right? But when we sit back and we think to ourselves, like, yeah, I didn't go well, but I, you know, if I say something in front of the company, like I'll be embarrassed or like we're hesitant to bring things up and just take ownership of it, that's when things continue to kind of go to shit, and nobody really takes ownership for it or says, like, hey, this is how we could be better of it. And that's where I think we start to lose that edge. Uh, like I said, as that company of trying to really hone things in. And I don't know that anybody out there as a company officer has expectations for their crew that every single fire they go to or every single run they go to, that there will be no mistakes and nothing, like nothing could ever possibly go wrong. Uh, I just don't think that's the American Fire Service, right? Like, that's just not gonna happen. Yeah. Um, and so, and then on top of it, like being that officer, being that ACO or those people that are willing to say, like, hey man, we can't just sit around all day and expect ourselves to be better. You know, at some point we're gonna have to, if we want to be a better company, at some point we're gonna have to, you know, get out and go do some things. And uh, in my opinion, all right, and it's just that, like, there's no better, there's no better way to get in the game when the alarm goes off than the chief knowing that you're out putting in work to be better about what is happening, right? And they, I don't say this negatively, they can say what they want about how they assign things and everything like that. When they pull up and this thing's shitting and getting and blowing and going and everything like that, and they're giving somebody a critical assignment that they want done, taken care of in a timely fashion. When they key up that mic, it goes through the back of their head who's riding that engine that day or who's riding that truck that day, right? Like it goes through it. And if you want to get in the game on things, you got to get out and get caught training and working on things and being able to explain what you're doing, not just sitting at the you know, kitchen table or uh hanging out every time the chief comes by and is like, well, you know, we were gonna go work on some things, we just hadn't got around to it yet. It's been a busy day. It's like got one run on the books, you know. Like, what's the hold up here? So that's just kind of like I guess my perspective on it. And like I said, everybody wants to work in a busy company, uh, but sometimes you got to create your own busyness in vetting those things and making your company better. And how I think that can happen is is it can I don't know if the right term is this, but you can kind of organically have that happen by just taking ownership and saying, hey, these are the things that I made mistakes on on the last fire. And sometimes it's simple, like when I say simple things, simple things can lead to complicated deals. It doesn't have to be this crazy elaborate. It's like, dude, I just absolutely got jammed up masking up. It's like, yeah, sounds good. Like, let's everyone grab your stuff. We're just gonna do 20 minutes worth of mask ups. Maybe it's in a workout. Like, I kind of like doing skill sets post rounds of a workout and things like that. And we can talk about that if you guys want, but uh really uh at some point it could just be as simple as like, yeah, I just kind of messed this up. And it's not a hey, that's your problem, like you figure that out. If he messed it up, I can mess it up on the very next fire. So let's just work on it together and get it taken care of. And like I said, it could easily lead to you know 20, 30 minutes. I remember we carry uh Gustin packs on our engines, you know, 100 foot, inch and three quarter, essentially loaded like the New York, and that's kind of our game plan for going long when the 200 doesn't meet it. Uh, the driver will bring that bundle up once the line stretched out, the firefighter grabs it, makes the stretch, and goes from there. And uh that was a deal one time kind of to wrap it up. And as an example, and I talk about it in the the classes, you know, we're talking one morning with a brand new guy, he rides the engine with us now. And uh we were talking about, hey, if we go to a three-story breezeway, these addresses, 200 feet's not gonna cut it. So we need you to basically go vertical with 100 and drop it down the well hole in the exterior stairwell, and the driver's gonna stretch the liney and make the connection. It's like, okay, sounds good. And he's like, I've I've got some questions on it. And really, what it turned into is the captain that day is like, just get on the rig. It's like, okay. So we get in, we drive up there, you know, 30 minutes later, we're four to five stretches in on the entire thing. We've answered his questions, and now it's like we got some impromptu training, everyone would have the opportunity to rush up on it, and now we pull up to that three-story breezeway anywhere we're going. And like, here's the A plan, here's the B plan. And like we talked about, everybody has the same experience. We're all on the same page now. We know how we're operating.

SPEAKER_00 32:33

So absolutely. But circle back a little bit when you're talking about the that like after action, because we've talked a lot about um on here in previous episodes of that the fire, no one got hurt and the fire went out. Like it's just that crutch. Like, kind of like you talked about being able to talk about your your failures, maybe, and can be big or small, but because the flip side is you're gonna lose that experience to learn from if you don't. Because everyone saw everyone sees everything on the fire ground, you know, maybe not everything, but 90%. So if you fumbled on your mascots, somebody else saw it. You you know, we're at the after action, everyone's talking, hey, every no one went hurt, fire went out, great. Well, now a week later, that person told everyone, hey, did you see at the firehouse? He just totally messed up his mask up. Like now it's just a rumor, and now it's not progressive. It's just like it's just oh hey, he messed up, he did this, he did that. Like, it's just you gotta you gotta catch it right away, I feel, because everyone it goes everywhere in the fire service, it seems, you know, it's everyone's gotta kind of look, and whether it was nefarious in nature or not, it gets brought up. Someone's like, Oh, hey, look at that. And yeah.

SPEAKER_03 33:42

Yeah, some things that are something new that's come around this year that we're doing is every fire, the crew that was the first thing crew on that fire, and the chiefs that if they're there or not, we sit down and have a conversation, like your after action report, um, say, Hey, what did I feel as a yeah at the chief level down? And then something funny. I use I my camera on, and the last one we did, you see me come around the house and face plane because the stupid Christmas decorations are in the front yard. But you can see, hey, this is what I messed up on. Here's a camera of it, here's my a four or a video of it. And then you get also in that video, you can see other people working and say, Oh, you can actually bring the picture together because nine times out of ten you're gonna forget something because your adrenaline's so high.

SPEAKER_01 34:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 34:29

So just watching the camera footage back, and kind of like a professional sports team watches their plays, we can watch that camera footage and hey, this is what we gotta work on. It took this how many minutes to get the line stretched or whatever. I think having the cameras in place to to kind of watch that game footage to really hone in on the skills that we need to work on. I think that's how you create a company level training.

SPEAKER_02 34:56

Yeah, no, I agree. And uh the first place that I saw it where it was really kind of taken off was with Brush, uh Midwest City. And I know Caleb Bryant helps him out with it and things like that now. And uh we have a captain on our department trying to work on some kind of a policy uh with uh helmet cams, whatever you want to call it, like a body cam, however, we're gonna put it on you and things like that. But uh we're not quite to that level, but you're right. The uh the the video never lies, like it tells the truth and things. And one of the things that started in 2026 here, uh right now we're two fires in on it, but started something called basically the Casper Fire Search Survey. And in last year, we started a search SOG, and that SOG says for a single family dwelling from arrival to calling that we're going to the interior. Our system is once you go on scene, you'll give your assignment either in route or when you get there by the battalion chief, and then you basically do a par entering the building, giving them your unit, your assignment, and where you're entering from, and things like that. So, what our system says is we have 90 seconds from air break to entering the building. And then if I'm assigned search, I have eight minutes from air break to a primary all clear, or we're reporting that victim, removing them, and then headed back into search or the backfill, it just you know that's kind of case-by-case basis on it.

SPEAKER_04 36:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 36:25

So one of the things we've done is we don't necessarily have the cameras, but we have access to every uh mic transmission on both our uh dispatch station alert and our tack channels, along with the 911 call. So took the content out of the rescue survey, eliminated everything that directly relates to the questions for the rescue, and then added two questions at the end, like basically three questions at the end of it. So the rescue survey questions are designed to give us the demographics of the building we're going to, the conditions of the fire, the which we found when we got there, the smoke, all those sort of things. And then it wraps up with you're supposed to report your time in 30-second increments. Did it take you zero to 30 seconds to get inside, zero to one minute, one minute to 130? And then it kind of breaks it down a little less and less on that. Uh, and then same thing, like what's your primary all clear is. And so we don't right now have the cameras to go off of it, but the goal is a year from now to take a look at it and say, here's what's really jamming us up on getting the eight minutes, and it's these demographics right here. You know, the it's a well-involved fire on one on a two-story, and we're having problems getting to the second floor to search because we're doing it with one company versus the opportunity where when we split the truck, takes the fire floor and the rescue takes the floor above, or however it looks, now we're meeting the expectation of the eight minutes or less. And then the other one, too, that gets talked about, or you know, that I can see being a topic of conversation as it grows is you know, hey, it took you, we're sitting afterwards, like we're looking at this. It's like, hey, Bryce, it took you two minutes to get to the inside. We got a 90 seconds, what went down. You're like, well, we showed up and the whole front of the house was off. So we went to the rear to see if we could make the rear and we couldn't get back there either. So we decided to go with the hand line in the front. So it just took me an extra 30 seconds to size this fire up to make sure I knew where we were going. And yeah, it's like, okay, sounds good. So we're the hang up with it was was a decision-making model versus, you know, we pulled in and I asked you, hey, it took you, you know, two minutes and 30 seconds to get inside. What happened? Well, we were on the wrong tack channel in the cab. So when we got there, I had to face to face with the battalion to get my assignment and like things that are fixable, right? And I'm like, like you're talking, Brennan. Like, here we go. Now we're gonna have a conversation. And it seems like the simplest thing, but that could be the training of the day of making sure everybody's in the right page doing all those things, how to get on the right tack channel as you're putting your air pack on and just things like that. Um, man, we've had some of the simplest trainings in Firehouse before where guys just ask, hey, we have a seatbelt policy. I have to wear my seatbelt, and I don't want to do my bottom waist strap because it gets hung up until I get off the truck. It's like, yeah, sounds good. You know, five, like not even that. We're talking like three minutes of instruction of here's how you can get your air pack on with your seatbelt on, 30 minutes total, and 10 reps later, and now they're like getting off, like it's one less variable they have to worry about getting take care of things, you know. So we're not to the point of body cams and things like that here, helmet cams, however we want to look at it. Uh, but it's interesting when you ask places how much people are wanting to track information and seek information out and things like that, specific to where they're at to see kind of where they're um lining up with other places. And really, I think more importantly, the gold standard with that is is you know, the eight minutes for us was directly decided off of the data from the firefighter rescue survey.

SPEAKER_00 40:15

Yeah, gotcha, yeah. Yeah, that's I mean, that's a great application of that data, certainly all the way back to the beginning of this when we were talking about that, because data is just data unless you turn it into something. So that's awesome.

SPEAKER_02 40:28

And I'll tell you this if if the agency I work for waits to get 10 confirmed rescues to build a data set of that, we're we're gonna wait quite a while.

unknown 40:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 40:39

But the one thing I will say is, you know, in in commercials or not, or things like that, if we fill out a survey for every time we search a building with the mindset that if we would have found somebody based on this pace right here, excluding outside variables, like this is the pace of which we're searching that we want to to be able to make the rescue and get it out within that timeline that supports what the rescue survey is saying. So we're using the nation as the rescue survey to build all the data points that we don't necessarily have or are going to be able to just gather in a quick amount of time. And now we're taking our searches and being like, how do we stack up with where this is? And then, you know, the goal being when it happens, you know, we're meeting the expectations of which we've set. Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 41:32

That's awesome. Well, Brendan's got some uh generic questions for you now that we can go in before we wrap this up.

SPEAKER_03 41:38

All right, so the first kind of generic question we got, uh you can take this however you want to take it, but it is why are we here?

SPEAKER_02 41:48

So I'm uh I'm a big quote person. Uh like if you guys sit in my presentation, there's I don't know, I think like seven or eight different quotes. Uh and for me, quotes are a couple of things. One, it's to cite my sources. Uh the quote itself is oftentimes something that gave me the wavelength, if you will, to kind of go down that way, but it's also what I heard from somebody. So one thing that's uh I kind of put out there, and I wish I could remember who said it, is like you you were never drafted to the American Fire Service, right? Like nobody put a gun to your head and said, Hey, you will join the fire department or else type thing, you know. So uh when it really comes down to like why are we here, uh, I think that's more of like a deeper personal question for every single person to like the more importantly, like answer within yourself is to find out, you know, like why am I here? And the goal being is we're there for the right reasons, right? We're there to protect the citizens and all the things that we take in our oath. We're not there because the fact that, you know, the schedule kicks ass or the meals are great, or like all the things that go with it. Um and I think that on top of that, you know, kind of like the the why are we there, uh that if it's not for the right reasons, that will be vetted and showing as time progresses along and things like that. You know, like uh it's it's pretty hard to bullshit bullshitters, and uh as a result of it, like things will see through. And um, I don't know, I guess just that's a little bit different route than just your traditional, like uh I feel like when I saw that one when you guys kind of kicked it over. Um I just want to want to repeat what a lot of the people said, you know. But really, I think what it comes down to is you gotta find your why, you know. I think more importantly, like when you can find your why of why you want to be on the fire department and why you want to be involved in these things and stuff like that, like that is a driving force of what. What's going to drive your career in a direction that you can look back on later on and look at it from two to one of two ways? Like, hey, I had a successful career because this matched my why, and this is what I did to meet it. Or, you know, you might look back on it and think it's not as successful because you couldn't identify, you didn't do what you thought was necessary to be able to come back and say, you know, like I answered all the questions, like I took care of all the business of why am I here when I left that place and uh you know, hung it up for the last time.

SPEAKER_03 44:35

I think having your why kind of pushes you further into your career or past challenges a little bit or better. So falling back to your why, why am I doing this? Why am I waking up at three in the morning to pick grandma up because you have to fall back on your why? And I think yeah, has a positive attitude going forward.

SPEAKER_02 44:55

Yeah, and then like one of the things that I touch on in uh, like I said, the the presentation is it I like to ask people right from the get-go, you know, like, hey, like what what is your culture? Like the agency you work for, what is the culture of that place? Or you can even bring it down to, you know, what if you're a fire chief, what's the culture of your fire department? If you're a battalion chief, what's the culture of your battalion? If you're a company officer, what is the culture of you know your company? And uh what I find interesting is oftentimes you get mixed messages back from people that work in the same crew or agency or shift and things like that. And then when you look up what a culture is, the very first thing it talks about is shared values, goals, beliefs, and practices. And it's like that's not shared amongst anybody when you go in and you say, Hey, Bryce, what's the culture of your crew? And you're talking about it, and then Brennan, you're like, Well, wait a minute. I I thought it was this, and you guys work on the same crew, right? And so I think the from uh outside of just a personal perspective, and your why towards the mission probably will never change. Meaning, like you are there for the citizens, you're there for all those things. That's what we're hopeful for, right? But as your career progresses and you move, you know, from the backseat to the driver's seat, the driver's seat to the officer's seat, and you progress along and things like that, uh, the why that continues to drive you forward may look a little bit different outside of the runs when you're talking about the firehouse itself and things like that, right? Like as a company officer, your why of why you do things the way they are in the firehouse is to, you know, mentor the crew beneath you and do all the things that you would have wanted when you were a younger guy or to be taken care of and things along those lines. So uh I don't know that the why changes necessarily for the the mission of why we're here, but I do think it's worth it when you take a look back of as you progress through your career, you know, your why can vary with things and go from there.

SPEAKER_00 47:13

For sure. Absolutely. Uh that brings us to our last two questions that we have here. So the first is the question from our previous guest for you, and then uh the second will be you coming up with a question for our next guest, Jared Sergei. So, first question from our last episode with Jonathan Jarvis is do you have a three to five minute drill that covers multiple disciplines for your engine, truck, whatever company?

SPEAKER_02 47:40

So, yeah. We talk about uh like three to five minutes. Uh, I get I'm gonna put a little asterisk next to it. It's uh three three to five minutes repeatedly. Um but the one thing that we will do from time to time as a company is uh I work in Wyoming, the weather's not always the greatest, and you know, we get into uh things like that. But oftentimes, if we don't have like let's say we'll go back to stretches or things like that, when we're talking about a single skill set, one of the things that I enjoy doing is we'll write some form of a workout that is often a three to five minute round with the idea that I'm gonna take this skill set we talked about, and like I'll give you an example. We were talking the other day on the truck, there was two of us on there, and that's common for us is to run a two-person truck. And we were like, hey, if if we're the I can't even say the first in truck because we're the only truck here, but like if we're showing up with the first in company, if we're ahead of the hand line, the driver's responsible for a can and irons, and the officer is gonna be responsible for a hook and a halligan. And because we're ahead of the hand line, we're taking the can, we're gonna go to the front door and start to work our way back and attempt to locate the fire and then kind of uh push it back or you know, like communicate it back and kind of go from there. If we're not ahead of the hand line, the engine's out in front of us, we're gonna take, we're dropping the can off. So the officer or the sorry, the uh driver's responsible for irons, the officer's taking the same hook and a halligan and now grabbing a ladder for access. And the reason why I say a ladder for access is if it's a two-story, we're taking, we carry 16 and a 24. So we take the 24 for that. If it's a one-story trailer house, things like that, we carry a rescue pit ladder anywhere from you know seven to ten is what we can get out of it. So we're just taking a ladder to gain access into a space if we're choosing the VS and go from there, right? This is all theory based. This is kind of what we thought was gonna pan out. So how we vetted it was we would do a workout to the point where we would get to a point, like I said, we felt like we would spike our heart rate up to where we get off the rig, it's a mirrored heart rate, and now we have to go find the tools, we'll carry out on a small evolution inside the firehouse. And again, we're trying to hit that three to five minutes. Now, if that's just a single one, that's fine. But oftentimes when we incorporate in a workout real quick, we'll have as we're putting it away, it's like, hey, what are your thoughts on this or this? Yeah, let's try it this time. And that's oftentimes like five to six rounds. So it translates somewhere between 20 to 30 minutes with a workout skill set at the end of it, and we're trying to vet what we believe worked out when we can't go to the out of the firehouse to go do these things and just show up at a single family house and start throwing ladders to windows and doing things like that. Um, so that being said, that's kind of where it leads to, and uh the skill set just basically changes from time to time. Um, we have found that it kind of I shouldn't say kind of, like it vets things and takes, like I said, that theory away from it with the idea of like, hey, how far do you think if we're exhausted, or you know, we pull up and our heart rate's high, how far can we carry a 35 with a 20 ladder package to go to the roof with two saws on it, and you take off after sprinting, you know, 15 calories on the bike, doing a sled push and like a farmer's carry back, and now you build this ladder package and take off walk-in, and you're like, this sucks, you know, like this isn't realistic, or things, you know, along those lines. Um, so I would say that three to five minute deal, that's kind of what I uh I think I kind of stretched the rules on a little bit, but that's really what we're trying to get for that goal is to repeat it a couple of times. And the idea is when we show up on scene, that now in that first three to five minutes, we're still at a point where at that point we're not so exhausted of just getting in and doing things that we're still able to like work on it and uh kind of progress and go from there. Outside of that, my other one too is just taking uh like three to five minutes in the beginning of the day and just masking up with your gloves on and moving. And I think really it just kind of gets you in the groove on some things, uh, inevitably by changing variables of how fast I'm moving or walking through things or you know, just kind of going through that, I'm indirectly gonna slip up on something. And when I slip up on that, my hood gets hung up, things like that. Now it gives me something just to focus on and practice with and kind of go from there. Um, but that's kind of my uh like quick three to five. And if it's not one of those, if we're on the engine or we're doing something and we leave a medical call and somebody makes a comment about, like, you know, man, that's a that'd be a difficult stretch with all that shit in the yard or kind of whatever the case with it is. If we can't make that stretch there, we can go back to the firehouse, try and replicate as best we can, take all the snowblowers and lawnmowers and that kind of stuff back and give that newer guy, like, here you go. You know, like training doesn't have to be overly complicated an hour. Sometimes getting something that's 20 minutes long, or you know, go into a medical call, and like I said, in those three-story center halls, the ambulance takes off, and it's like, hey, question for you how how far is it from here to the rig? Well, I'm not sure. Okay, well, let's talk about how we can figure it out, and you just talk about how to estimate stretches based on apartment doors and floors and things like that, and then it dawns on them, they're like, Well, we don't have a 300-foot pre-connect.

SPEAKER_04 53:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 53:39

So now let's talk about how this is gonna happen. Yeah, okay, sounds good. You're available for the next run in your area, and you're just using the medical calls that come in to give you the next things you can do. And so uh, kind of a long like I guess my uh answer took longer than the five minutes I had to do the drill, but uh just kind of a couple of them there that you know, kind of take what you run into in the day-to-day world of things and just put it on fire and uh see what it looks like.

SPEAKER_00 54:07

Absolutely. I like it. That's awesome. Well, last thing that that we have is uh your question for Jared. So let's uh let's hear what you got.

SPEAKER_02 54:15

Yeah, uh well, I can use this one because I know Jared. And uh if I didn't know who the guest was, I don't think I could use it. But uh I think you guys should ask him uh what inspired him or what motivated him to write his book.

SPEAKER_00 54:33

All right.

SPEAKER_02 54:34

See if we can like uh dig into the brain of what transpired there that led to because I I don't like I've never debated writing a book. Like I don't know if anybody I don't matter of fact, I know nobody barely read a book. I don't know if I can write it. Uh but I I don't think that writing a book is something that you just decide you're gonna do, and in like a couple weeks you're like, hey, here it is, like it's all kicked out. Like I'm sure it's a pretty uh lengthy process, and at times there's probably times where you look at and you're like, dude, is it like is this worth all of this of all the different readings and things like that? So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 55:12

Brennan, I think you can make a killer uh coloring book.

SPEAKER_03 55:15

I can fucking call her, dude.

SPEAKER_02 55:20

Also, when you make one, send one out here. I got some guys that'll eat the crayons.

SPEAKER_03 55:24

So I do too. I do too. We got a couple guys, Marines animal.

SPEAKER_02 55:28

I'm being sarcastic with that. I work with a lot of really good dudes, so yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 55:33

Well, uh, the last part we have here is what we just call the kitchen table. So it's just where you can shoot the shit. Either any shout-outs that you want to give, any uh topics you want to dive a little bit more into that uh that you didn't get, uh trainings to shout out, people to shout out, any of that. The rest of the uh the time is yours.

SPEAKER_02 55:49

Yeah, uh well, there was one I think in the questions of uh like trainings or places you've gone to you'd recommend or something like that. Yep. What was that one again?

SPEAKER_00 55:59

Uh what training or conference has been your favorite to attend?

SPEAKER_02 56:03

Yeah. Uh so I'll tell you guys this uh shameless plug for firemanship. Uh, dude, when I first went to uh Beyond the Door for the first time, and then things uh kind of progressed in a few more BIB classes, and then my first year at uh firemanship 2019, and have gone every year since then that it's happened, you know. Uh, if there's, in my opinion, a one-stop shop of all the places you could go to get a little bit of everything possible. Uh, I think firemanship's the place to go. But I really want uh I also wanted to touch on in October last year, I had the opportunity with three other guys from our department. Uh, we were able to get into fire combat at FDTM out at Jim's place. And that's a good class. Man, there's uh there's no place like that. There's no place like uh FDTN. And if if you're on the now there, I hold on, let me preface this, right? Like when I say if you want to go test your skills and things like that, somebody could say, hold on a second here, like I could go to smoke divers, I could go to one bad two, where I could do all those things. Like, I I can't speak to those. I've never been to either one bad two or I've never been to a smoke divers program, anything like that. But if you want to test your basic fire skills of going to real fires in conditions that you know, you're kind of like, yeah, I've been to some good fires, and then you go out there and you're like, Well, these are good fires, you know. And it doesn't have to be the fire combat, just uh any of those. Uh, if you get the opportunity to go, go. Like, I you'll I don't think you'll ever look back on and regret uh a trip to FDTN or a trip to uh firemanship based on how things happen, you know. So those uh those are definitely some places, like I said, if you're listening to this, this is kind of like uh maybe newer stuff to you, and you're not, you know, you haven't left the four walls of your agency or haven't got out and about and explored new things and stuff like that, like do it. Uh I understand that it's not cheap at times. Uh your department might not have the budget to take care of things and stuff like that, but ask around. What I mean by ask around is very few of these conferences have the mindset that they wouldn't do something to help somebody out and you know, help them get a hotel room or room them with somebody or help out with tuition costs. I mean, if people remember the first time firemanship came back, you could go back for a dollar. All right, like it was never about making money. Five days of training, three days of lecture, two days of hands-on for one dollar. Like it's never gonna be cheaper than that, you know. And yeah, you know, uh, I've been fortunate enough to help Kurt and the CFT with some CFT green team stuff, things like that. When he launches those conferences for$200, you're not even paying a hundred dollars a day down there. Yeah, you know, so it's all right, like uh work an overtime shift, get outside the four walls of your place, go take a look at some things and uh just kind of continue to grow it and go from there.

SPEAKER_00 59:20

Um absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 59:22

So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 59:23

Well, thank you very much for taking some time to to come and share some knowledge, Garrett. That was that was awesome, and we really appreciate any time of uh anytime people come on and and share some of that stuff.

SPEAKER_02 59:34

So yeah, well, I appreciate you guys having me. Thanks for the opportunity, and uh hopefully something somebody gains something from it. That'd be the goal.

SPEAKER_03 59:42

Yeah, thanks for coming on. Take a time out of your day, man.

SPEAKER_02 59:45

Yeah, anytime.

SPEAKER_00 59:46

Yeah, thank you everybody for listening and watching. Again, thank you, Garrett, for coming on. And uh, as always, don't be a shit bag.

SPEAKER_03 59:53

Don't be a shit bag.