Bonus Episode | Preparing for Large Events: Lessons from a First-Due Apartment Fire with Rescues

This episode is best consumed on YouTube via the Ops Talk channel for the full experience and video footage. Find it here: https://youtu.be/8yr0wwNE7g8

This bonus episode shares a presentation that was given at a regional officer development class on a challenging apartment fire response, highlighting critical lessons for first-due officers, incident management, and preparedness. Whether you're on the fireground or leading crews, these insights aim to improve your response strategies and decision-making under pressure.
Key Topics:

Accurate scene size-up and building identification
Effective radio communication and crowd management
Strategic resource deployment and incident scene organization
Lessons learned from VEIS, ladder placement, and firefighting tactics
Team relationships and cross-boundary training
Managing media, documentation, and post-incident investigation
Decision-making frameworks: recognizing cues and operating under stress
Building mental resilience and maintaining calm in chaos

Timestamps:
00:05 - Introduction and incident overview
01:01 - Why preparation and lessons learned matter
02:00 - First arriving officer responsibilities
04:46 - Building familiarity and pre-incident knowledge
05:48 - Importance of the first five minutes
08:10 - Incident details and building layout
09:20 - Response and initial observations
11:21 - Blue Card and communication systems
12:19 - Tactical assessment: fire conditions and rescue priorities
14:14 - Resource deployment
15:22 - Window rescues and scene chaos
16:57 - Fire behavior and decision points
19:20 - Tactics: VEIS, hose lines, and rescue operations
22:39 - Water supply and ladder placement
28:21 - Supervisory roles and scene command
30:37 - Incident size and managing multiple divisions
33:09 - Mastering fundamentals and decision frameworks
34:26 - Books and mental models for operational excellence
37:13 - Skill mastery: VEIS, quick water, equipment familiarity
39:07 - Decision-making under pressure
43:02 - Fireground mindset: System 1 vs. System 2 thinking
44:15 - Rapid rescues and firefighter rescue survey
48:15 - Leadership at the company level
52:38 - Cross-boundary training and regional cooperation
54:20 - Scene management: naming, positioning, communication
57:04 - ICS roles and operational readiness
59:04 - Recognition-Primed Decision making
62:45 - Building situational awareness through literature
63:52 - Detachment and leadership perspective
66:15 - Managing media and mental resilience
69:07 - Scene size-up, water supply, resource staging
71:56 - The critical role of EMS
72:25 - High-rise fire case study: Twin Parks
74:10 - Battery and EV charging hazards
75:06 - Post-incident review and investigation readiness
78:24 - Hose lines, crew safety, tactical positioning
80:49 - Scene size-up: sides of the building
82:11 - Scene command from the scene or balcony
83:08 - Dealing with media and public perception
84:02 - Post-incident investigation and accountability
86:08 - Documentation and legal considerations
90:42 - Debriefs and continuous improvement
94:01 - Preparing for future large-scale incidents
95:28 - Leadership and fostering a proactive safety culture
95:46 - Closing thoughts and Q&A

Resources Mentioned:
The Emergency Mind: Dan Dworkis MD PHD
Sources of Power: Gary Klein
Thinking, Fast and Slow: Daniel Kahneman
Mastering Fireground Command: Brian Brush and Anthony Kastros
Fire Engineering (May 2024)
Leadership Strategy and Tactics: Jocko Willink
Fire Rescue Survey

Contact:
opstalk.wfd@gmail.com  

Eric Linnenburger
linkedin.com/in/eric-linnenburger
elinnenb@westminsterco.gov

Transcript

SPEAKER_14 0:05

Welcome to Ops Talk. I'm your host, Eric Linenberger. This is a bonus episode. It's different from our usual format. What you're about to watch is a class I recently delivered to an officer development program in the region. The class is built around a devastating apartment fire my crew arrived first into when I was a captain. You'll see actual incident footage, extreme fire conditions with window rescues and radio communications as it happened. This isn't a formal after-action review, but includes honest lessons learned, combined with data and practical recommendations to help you prepare for large-scale events. We break down VEIS, radio communication, resource positioning, and how solid preparation is what separates chaos from control. Whether you're a firefighter working to sharpen your skills, a company officer leading crews, or anyone trying to get better at operating under pressure, this one's for you. Before we get started, if you're finding value in this content, please like, subscribe, comment, and share the show with others. It really does help get it to the people that can use it. So let's get into it. Welcome to Ops Talk, Westminster Fire Department's operational training podcast, where we share ideas and knowledge through honest conversations, highlighting the people who do the work. I'm Eric Linenberger, Deputy Chief of Operations. While built as a resource for our members, we invite the Greater Fire Service and the community to be part of the conversation. What we share reflects our current approach under present conditions. Always follow your department's procedures and guidelines. I'm Derek Linenberger, Westminster Fire Deputy Chief of Operations, and I'm going to talk to you about this. A lot of it centered around this call we had, kind of one call in the background, but take it a step further and we're going to talk more about how we can actually prepare for these big events. Because these big events are different than your than your day-to-day. This class is really all about how we, well, first of all, can we prepare for these big events? And you know, what are some of those things we can do, especially this breaking it down at the company level, really? I mean, a lot of the things we're going to talk about here are big picture uh command level things, but really the focus of this class is for that first two company officer. I'm going to talk a lot about this call that we went on, this apartment fire. I know it was a few few years ago, but I still think it's pretty relevant. Honestly, it's one of these calls that there's so many lessons to come out of it, but we we didn't have the opportunity to really share those lessons, especially early on. So that's something that I'm trying to do right now is get out and share as many of these lessons as I can now. So this will just kind of paint the picture of the call. You'll see some news footage from that night.

SPEAKER_00 3:12

But first, Michael Abeda is live at the scene with the latest. Michael.

SPEAKER_12 3:18

Yeah, by all accounts, this hot fire was hot and fast moving, sending residents scrambling to escape. Just after 2 a.m. Sunday, the Westbury apartments in Westminster caught fire.

SPEAKER_16 3:30

The smoke was kind of creeping through the parking lot here. I saw flames initially in the bottom corridor.

SPEAKER_12 3:36

An apartment building with 69 units burned.

SPEAKER_16 3:39

It spread extremely quick.

SPEAKER_12 3:41

I was scared. It looked like hellfire. Residents scrambled to get out, some even jumping from second and third story windows to escape. Neighbors from adjacent buildings rushed to help.

SPEAKER_16 3:51

There was young men running through here, left and right, trying to get people out of here. Engine 63, Battalion Chief 61, apartment fire.

SPEAKER_12 3:59

Firefighters arrived on scene to rescue people and get the fire under control. Ten people were taken to the hospital and two died. One at the hospital and a second was found inside. The rest managed to escape. Firefighters spent Sunday searching the building and looking for a cause. Bryce Carpenter and Jacob Hughes say the Westbury apartments community will help those who lost their homes as much as they can.

SPEAKER_01 4:26

We will always be there for each other.

SPEAKER_12 4:33

Now police and firefighters are still on scene looking for that cause and searching for one person who is yet to be accounted for. In Westminster, Michael Aveta, covering Colorado first.

SPEAKER_14 4:46

All right. So my plan today is to share those experiences of being that first arriving officer. I was uh first arriving captain on our truck six at the time and uh talk about some of the challenges of being first due in a large expanding event. You've got a lot of pressure on you. Uh it's tips how you can prepare before, during, and for the after the event. I don't think we talk enough about what happens after these big events. And then just encourage that healthy respect and awareness for what might be around the corner, but there's nothing to fear here. It's what we do. And we can train for it and prepare for it. A couple of disclaimers just because I run this fire doesn't make me an expert. Just because I'm a deputy chief does not make me an expert. We don't do enough of this stuff for any of us to call ourselves experts. And that's not what I'm here to talk about. So I'm not going to tell you how we did it was the right way. Um, I'm just going to share what we did and I'm going to talk about some lessons learned with it. I just want you to know that uh this is really just an opportunity to create dialogue and share some experience. As uh Alan Brunicini once said, the most of the time on the fire ground, the first five minutes are worth the next five hours. I think all of us in this room have probably been on enough incidents that have seen things start off bad and continue to go bad. And then that incident commander spends all their time cleaning up the mess from it. So what we do in those first couple minutes are incredibly important. And especially as that first arriving company officer, uh, you've got a lot of responsibility. But it's not that hard. We can do a few things right and really set ourselves up for success. So you guys all know this, but just uh for the sake of the presentation, uh we're, you know, we're full service. This is how we are operating at the time, full service, six station suburban department. Uh, we're running with five engines, two trucks that are quints, five medic units, a BC and a SAM, our minimal staffing, three on an engine and truck, and two firefighters on medic units. Most of our medics these days are running with a single medic, typically, because we're we're short staffed and we were at this time as well. At the time of this incident, uh, we did have mutual aid with all the neighbors and all of you represented in this room, but we now have a 37-station regional CAD-to-cad system that is an absolute game changer. And I think would have been a game changer for this event. There's no doubt about it. It doesn't, it doesn't make it automatic, but you look at what happened the other day at uh 84th and Huron. How many resources do we get on that scene? Well, I mean, within like, I think there were like 50 some fire resources on that scene. I'd say the majority of them were there within 15 minutes. That's massive. That doesn't happen everywhere across the country, especially in uh, you know, when we're relying on mutual aid and automatic aid. So really, really cool. And really is the why behind this whole CAD to CAD thing that we're doing now. So the event itself, uh, two o'clock in the morning. It was a warm July night. This was a very, very familiar building to us. This complex, very nocturnal, very, very familiar place. We go on a lot of calls there. Uh this happens to be the biggest one in the in the complex. So it's a three-story, 69-unit garden apartment building. I'll show you a picture here in a minute, but it's got like a, I call like an H shape or an I shape, like a capital I. So it's got the long center run, and then you've got two end caps. There's apartments on the ends, and then there's apartments all the way down the middle. So it's the biggest one. It's also the one with an elevator. It's the only one in the place with an elevator. So, what's that tell you?

SPEAKER_06 8:29

All the 88s on there.

SPEAKER_14 8:31

Any mobility challenged people are living in this uh this particular building. So we were just there, literally the shift before, and we were on one of our frequent uh customers. And of course, she lives on the third floor, doesn't walk, doesn't ambulate, but she likes to smoke like a chimney. And so she smokes in she smokes in bed, and we're there for a medical call, but you see all the cigarette burns in her bed, and we're just like, oh my gosh, we are gonna be back on this. Right when this call came in, we all looked at each other and said, we know where we're going. Didn't turn out to be the case, but we knew this building well. So super familiar building. Dispatch tells us we've got multiple callers saying it's a large fire and there's people jumping. We're two o'clock in the morning. We're just getting out of bed. All of our resources are available. I mean, it's like a three-minute response time to get there. No cars on the road. And when they're saying that there are already people jumping out of windows, like something, something doesn't make sense here. So we were on truck six, we had medic six with us. We had a three-minute response just right up the road. Our first alarm was uh three engines, a truck, two medics, a battalion chief, and our safety officer. We eventually, I'm guessing, had the equivalent of about four alarms, including resources from well outside our region. Uh, we had West Metro there, we had Denver there, uh, South part of Arvada there. And like I mentioned before, this was before CAD to CAD. So a whole different world we were planning in. And I said I think we had the equivalent of four alarms because you'll see in some of these videos, we we didn't even have our alarms set up right. We thought we had all set up our multiple alarms, our additional alarms and within our communication systems. That was kind of one of the first things we started really working on. Because this was not, we weren't weren't far out of CAD to CAD here. So we were already working as a North Area. So we were working on all these things. We thought we had a first alarm, a second alarm, you know, built out to eternity. Um, you'll see the battalion chief call for a second alarm when he gets there, and dispatch comes back and gives him like two units. And so we obviously didn't have things in line. So I just was doing that by counting units. We had them coming from all over the place. So this video is from the perspective of the SAM officer following in the battalion chief. So you'll hear a little bit of the radio traffic. Um, I'll see if I can turn it up just a little bit on this. Uh, you're gonna hear me expose myself for the first time. Uh here's the other thing I'm gonna talk about. We weren't blue card yet. We were um we were all kind of going through the online training at this point. So you can say what you want about blue card. We can argue whether blue card is the best thing in the world or the most terrible thing that's killing the fire service. But what I will say now is blue card gives us a common communication system, and we are completely different because of it. So you'll hear my my arrival report, which I think part of the deal is my jaw's like on the ground and I can't figure out, you know, what to say. But basically what we say when we pull up, and it takes us forever to even maneuver around uh this this apartment complex in the parking lot because the cars are so jam-packed in there, and the people, the people are just they they flock to the truck and they're running up next to our rig. And I'm actually worried that someone is gonna get sucked up under the wheels. And so we are literally creeping in. I start giving my arrival report as we turn the corner. I'm thinking I'm gonna be to the building within 15 seconds, and it's taken us a long time. So there's some pauses in there, but basically I think it kind of starts to cut off. But I say we've got uh defensive fire conditions, we've got fire above the, you know, above the roof line, and we've got people jumping. Basically, just so we're gonna be performing ladder rescues, and and then we parked. So you'll see as the battalion chief the SAM officer, and then you can see truck six out in the distance pull up. It was so chaotic that I don't think he got it.

SPEAKER_13 14:28

That's the egress right there.

SPEAKER_14 14:30

That's the the stairwell that the the end of the building and the long part of the building here. You know, the time to to maneuver around this this building. But yeah, right there, that is that's the stairwell that serves this entire half of the building. So if people didn't get out initially, they were not getting out of that place. So we knew we had an issue. We had people, so when we turned the corner, you could tell it was just smoke-filled there coming out of these windows. But we had people you could already see hanging out of windows, and you could see police officers were plucking people out of the garden level. Well, I don't know how many people they saved, but they they rescued quite a few there as well. So we went ahead and came around the corner. It was actually the crowd. I'm gonna talk a lot about um trusting, I was kind of trusting your gut, but knowing that the cues will be there when you get on these scenes. Not always, but you got to read take a minute to read the cues. And the cues were telling us that we needed to make the corner because this was probably gonna be a defensive fire eventually. So I wanted to get our our one of our, you know, few truck resources in place in the right spot. But I also wanted to set us up so that we could get other units in. And I knew that there were gonna be people um hanging out of those windows because that's where the people were taking us to. That's where the um people that were running next to the truck were were were taking us to these windows over here that you can't see because they're covered up by trees. So, first arrival, there were five of us, uh, heavy fire and smoke conditions on three sides and above the roof, including the only egress, like I said. People hanging from second and third floor windows on two sides. Now, this is the part that I think became overwhelming really, really fast. Typically, you have a fire, you any big fire we've been on, where you have a rescue situation. Usually the rescue situation might be in one area and the fire is in another area. So you're making a determination if you're gonna, are you gonna are you gonna hold the fire off to protect the people or you're gonna remove the people from the fire? In this situation, we pulled up as a first do and we had people hanging out of windows on both sides of the fire. And both were equally exposed. And so it's it was we had some decisions to make pretty early as far as how we were gonna engage. It was next level chaos. I'm gonna show you a video later that just shows how chaotic it is. I mean, all of our fire scenes are chaotic, but this, when you have people trapped, it takes it to a whole new level. And things just didn't add up. I just knew that this wasn't right. You just feel like something's not right because we're three minutes from this place. We know people are up all hours of the night here, so it's gonna get called in. It's gonna get reported pretty, pretty darn early in the event. So I knew that this wasn't right, the the amount of fire that we had and the amount of people trapped so quickly. So this is just uh a drone view of next morning of the building. So you can see over here, this is this is that exit egress that was on fire right there. Serves all these people and those people on that on that end cap. So this we pull up here into this parking lot. This is the back, like bedroom side of these apartments. Front doors are on the on the courtyard side. So we don't even get a good view of the courtyard when we pull in. So everybody's moved to the back of their units, which I can see why now. And I'm gonna show you um the amount of fire we had on that other side and didn't even realize it. So you've got, yeah, you've got people hanging out both sides of the fire there, and then hanging out here. You can see that we had is middle of July, so um, all of our trees are overgrown. You know, you've got this courtyard that that creates a long stretch and and blind spots as well. And so I think this is kind of one of those first lessons is like, you know, we got to get off of that sterile drill ground sometimes, and we need to go throw ladders in those places where the trees actually are, and the, you know, uh, and and you're gonna see in a minute, like the work that was done, the ladder work that was done, it wasn't pretty. It wasn't like the textbook kind of stuff you would expect a, you know, a new new recruit doing a JPR on, but it it got the job done and it's real life. So we park, we park right in here. Um, we're gonna engage in the fire there. My and that was my first real tactical decision was okay, I've got people hanging out of windows, I've got this massive fire, and I've got a three-person truck company. So, what do I do with my firefighter? Do I start putting them on rescues or do we put them on a line and start, you know, making maybe buying us some time on this fire? Then I had my medic unit pull up as well. Medic unit parks back here in the back of the parking lot. They did a good job kind of parking out of the way. BC and Sam park back here on this corner. And that matters because we're going to talk about naming the building here in a minute, and it got a little bit confusing. So the BC and Sam Park, the medic unit parks, they come up to the rig and they're like, hey, we've got people hanging out of windows over here on the end. Can we take a ladder and go start making some rescues? And so I'm like, okay, what do I do with my firefighter? And then do I allow my medic company to go work unsupervised in this hostile environment? Luckily, I had I had an acting officer that was the paramedic that day on the medic unit. And I had a probationary firefighter, but he was a dang good probationary firefighter. And I trusted the work that they were going to do. Wasn't ideal. I thought about it later, and I'm like, man, if something would have happened and Nayash would have come back and re and and and reviewed this thing, it probably wouldn't have looked very good that we just sent our, you know, unprotected medic crew over there with ladders. Turned out to be the right thing to do. And I do it uh every single day over again. So I end up putting my firefighter on a two and a half to sit on a two and a half to try to just buy us some time to protect the rescues that are going to take place. I knew we had engine four, the next coming engine was already pulling up on scene. Um, so what we end up doing by the time he gets his line out, uh the first ladder comes off the rig. I think I'm it's me and the engineer pulling the ladder off. And then by that time the next engine shows up. They place the ladder, but we were still so shorthanded that I'm still technically in command and I go up the ladder and make the first two rescues. So that's, I mean, again, not an ideal thing to do. I would never, I'm gonna talk about the importance of detaching from the scene and keeping yourself at a distance. I did not do that at that point, but it's what had to, it's what had to happen, right? You're gonna do the work that needs to be done. So, first two rescues where it was uh a guy who was holding his baby out the window. He's right here, like right next to the fire, and he's ready to throw the kid. And I'm like, I'm running up and I'm like. No man, don't we we've got time here. Cause I knew we had time. We had a little we had a little protection um from that stairwell. And so I tell him not to throw the kid. Um I we buy just enough time, we placed a ladder. I knew he was close to, and so I just shot up the ladder, grabbed the kid, come back down. And then he was able to just kind of self-rescue, I think, off on the ladder itself that was already set. And then we had another rescue um just like two windows down uh second floor. It was an elderly lady that I had to assist down. And then after that, we started getting enough resources in, and then I was able to take that step back that I needed to. But that's how how chaotic it was. So we're doing all this work over here, and the the work, the stuff you're gonna see in the videos, or the work that the medic crew was doing on that short side of the video, on the short side of the building. So you can see that going on there. Um, you don't see any of this on video, but just imagine the same thing's going on on this side. So this was our problem. Uh, that's that stairwell I was talking about. And this is actually after we had already gotten a little bit of water on it to darken it down just a little bit. But you can see it's floor to ceiling fire, and it's all the way through the breezeway. And then this is what became the delta side later. So the the courtyard side that I was showing you, we had fire running that entire uh I guess I would call it like the walkway. Um, it's where the front doors exit out to, you know, like kind of kind of motel style on mainly the third floor, but we had fire on the second floor as well. And so they weren't getting out. Those people were not getting out. So this video is chaos. Uh, I should probably hand out Dramamine before I show this. It's gonna be from the perspective of the uh helmet cam of the SAM officer, and um you're gonna see him go around to that other side and kind of supervise the operation that's going on with the medic crew over here. And this is where I say it's just different when people are trapped. You just feel a different level of intensity, and uh it's total, total chaos.

SPEAKER_08 28:17

It's done.

SPEAKER_14 28:18

Whatever happened up there, that was it's coming around the corner. I think this is when we first really realized the amount of fire we had on this courtyard side. It was so protected by the building and the trees that you couldn't even you couldn't even tell that we had that much fire going there. You get the gist of the uh the chaos that's going on. Um we only had uh initially was just our medic crew over there with the ladder, and then eventually we had another engine that came and helped them, but that's really all we had on that side. And then luckily that SAM officer, again, not something we recommend. We don't want the SAM officer in our system to take on that kind of uh division or supervisory role if we can avoid it, but there's gonna be times where we just need some supervision in some places, and so you got to be ready for for just about anything. And I'm forever grateful that that our Sam Odie did set up over there and and provide, you know, some eyes for those guys. And then I he was able to take that information from the ground where those people were like, hey, there's there's someone up in that window. If you saw that last window they moved their ladder to, that was a targeted VEIS right there, where they said, hey, no, there's someone in there. They didn't make it out. I think someone even said they saw them at the window at one point and then they fell back in. Otherwise, I don't know if we would have at that point had the resources to prioritize jumping into that window. So it was good to have those eyes on and to pay attention to what's going on. So the early actions, uh, the one, the two and a half inch hand lines to protect the rescues. Initially it was just the one, two and a half. Uh, we ended up with, I'm guessing, 20 to 30 really fairly high-risk VEIS entries into windows on both sides. Um, there were eight uh known upper level ground ladder rescues, uh, multiple garden level rescues, like I was talking about, where the you know, police maybe just had to hop down into the garden level and help someone out. And uh we had 19 known injuries, and most of those were transported. So we had an MCI as well. And then a a couple of fatalities. And then we evacuated all the uninvolved units, utilized PD, and then what resources we had to make sure we we cleared the units. So eventually we uh we ended up with four divisions. Uh we had defensive operations with uh six, I counted at one point, six aerial master streams and then a bunch of hand lines. And then we cut out had a cutoff point established, and you'll see that picture again of the drone footage. You can tell exactly where we finally had the the time, and we got strategic and got ahead of it and cut it off. I have to share this. This was Chief Spellman's uh uh run uh command sheet. This was another thing that we didn't have at the time was we didn't have command tablet command, another game changer. I think this tablet command would have been an absolute game changer along with CAD to CAD in this call. But I I gotta give him credit because I don't know how he kept track of all that. You guys heard the radio track traffic and the chaos of that. We're gonna talk a little bit about that and really being thoughtful about how we prioritize our radio traffic, but that's a lot of units to take care of. I mean, I'm up here eventually in the Bravo uh division as a supervisor. And so that's the other thing to think about. It's not ideal to put a company officer into a division role, but in this case, it's it's what we had to do. I'm a company officer, just made all these rescues, our crews are gassed, and I've got 10 units working for me in a division. I mean, I'm already I'm outside of my span of control, and that's in a in a in a division. Think about what he was dealing with managing all of this in his car with pen and paper.

SPEAKER_15 32:03

And Chief also uh Chief Spellman, uh since we weren't set up in a similar system, did he have uh another battalion chief in his command post with him or was he doing this?

SPEAKER_14 32:14

Good question. Good question. So the initial response was still a single battalion. Eventually he did get help. So he ended up with uh a deputy chief of operations was in there with him, and I think he ended up with a battalion chief uh as well. I think what we ended up doing is since the deputy chief showed up, he became his aide, and then we sent all the additional battalion chiefs out to be divisions at that point. And so, yeah, another great point, we would get that automatically. We would be building out that command team automatically with the system that we have right now. But I just have to share that. He gave me that when he retired as like his parting gift to me, and so I've always kept it. I think I have it right here. Um but yeah, it's just it's wild. And he's color-coded it, and I don't know, I don't know. I don't know how he did that. I was never good at pen and paper. I'm definitely more of a tablet command person. So, how do you prefer prepare for these things? And can you? And and I'd say it's not you're not gonna go out and you're not gonna recreate this incident, you're not gonna recreate the um the brush fire incident the other day. You're gonna take pieces and parts of it, but you're gonna prepare like you do every single day. You're gonna build your crew competency, and that's what this comes down to, and that's why we're here today talking about that uh initial company officer, and especially what it takes in these expanding incidents. You're gonna control those controllable factors. We're gonna talk about some of those controllable factors later. Uh, the skills are really the same, there's just more of them that are needed, and that's what I found on this call. There was nothing really that unusual about any one part of this incident. It was just way more of them at the same time than we're used to. And you're gonna make these skills in a calm, competent mindset just second nature because people feed off of that. So, first book rec, even if if my presentation sucked, the one thing you're gonna get from me is you're gonna get some book recommendations because I think you know everybody should be doing some reading. What's the old saying that not all not all readers are leaders, but all leaders should be readers. This book here, and it's one that not a lot of people know about, uh called The Emergency Mind. Uh, this was an emergency room doctor that that wrote this all about how we how we can work to train our brains to operate well under pressure. I think that there's a lot of decision-making books and and resources out there, but not very many of them appeal to the line of work that we do. So this is a good one. So he has this term Sengfreud. Anybody know what Sengfreud means? Anybody speak French?

SPEAKER_06 34:46

Maybe a little bit.

SPEAKER_14 34:47

Of course you do, Andy. What's gonna put you on the spot then? I mean, what's Freud?

SPEAKER_15 34:51

Flo means cold. Cold? Good cold blooded.

SPEAKER_14 34:54

Nice. Gosh, I I used to bring like a a prize along for someone if they got it. I don't I haven't do that anymore. I'm sorry. But good job, Andy. So yeah, saying is blood and f and Freud or Froid or however you pronounce it is I say Freud, um, is cold. So I mean that's what we're hoping for here, right? We're not gonna have all the answers, but we're going to try to remain cool and calm, collected under pressure, and perform at high levels. And um that's what that's what we're aiming for. And that's how we do, that's how and why we become prepared. That's you know, and people people they really do uh they react to that. And you guys have all seen that that company officer that gets on scene and it's like, holy crap, you think the the sky is falling, and then it's just like a you know, small, simple incident. You need to keep your cool on these incidents. People are really gonna, you know, they're gonna react to that. So there are many predictable challenges, like I talked about, things that could be prepared for. Those trees are always overgrown this time of year. We should always know that laddering this building is gonna be a challenge. So we should practice that. We this courtyard has been there since the beginning of time, since the beginning of this apartment complex. We need to get out, get off that drill ground, and and and extend our hose lines. Uh, we need to to work on our apparatus placement and know that this parking lot is always gonna be jam-packed. You see how how tight it is, even with a lot of the cars being gone. But that night it was full because it was uh it was nighttime and people were there. Um so a lot of these things can be can be planned for. So with that, we'll take a quick break and then uh part two gets into recommendations for how we can prepare, we can learn from the incident and prepare our crews for this kind of stuff. Jump into part two. Um so part two just kind of take some of those lessons learned and we start to talk about how we can apply them to you know to our preparation for the for the call, how we can apply them to preparing for when we are actually on that call, and then how we can prepare to operate after the call. So of course it starts with training, um, but but again, it's not I really don't think it's the big stuff. And back in the day we used to run these massive, you know, training evolutions with, you know, airplanes crashing into high rises and stuff. And I'm not saying that's not gonna happen, but you can't really prepare for that. What you can do is master all the basics and you can put all those small things together on the big thing. And so that's what it came down to. I mean, I think about some of the stuff that you can do within your own stations independently as well. And take being a company officer out of that and think about you as a firefighter and the responder that you need to be and the competence level you need to have. Are you pulling your weight? When it comes to ladders, VEIS, quick water mask-ups, I mean, that's one of those things. That's an individual skill. We can save so much time. That's it's one of the one of those um one of those things that we can control. You know, we can save so much time on that mascot. How are you getting out there and practicing with your crew, getting that ladder out there? Are you coordinated? Who's throwing the ladder, who's who's masking up, you know, so that right when that ladder hits that window, that that firefighter that was masking up should be, should be shooting up that thing. Seconds matter in in this scenario. And so I think those are some of those things you can practice and practice them well and get really, really good at them. You know, we were doing VE. Well, at the time it was called VES. We added the I. We were doing it like for every training evolution for like two years straight. And I was like, man, are we just not being creative here or what? And I think part of it was that maybe it was just that skill that we were able to keep doing over and over again, and it was fun and it was, you know, impactful. And you could do it with a small crew, but we were training a lot on it. So I'll tell you when we got to this fire, it wasn't, I wasn't nervous about doing the VEIS. It was so second nature to us. The hardest part about it was making the decision to do it. And that should be the hardest part about this. You should free yourself up the bandwidth to make the decision. If we're worried about how we're gonna do these things, we're not gonna be able to make a good decision on it. And we're gonna talk a little bit about decision making as we go here. Communications. And I'm not talking about just getting on, you know, sitting in a sterile room with a with a scenario up on the board, which those things are important. But are you getting out in your rigs? Are you going out to these apartment complexes with your crews? Are you practicing arrival reports when you're in the rig? Are you getting dressed first, getting in the rig, driving there, putting it in park, trying not to get tangled up in your Dave Clark headset? Because I can't be the only one that's had, I've been this close to pulling out a pocket knife before and just cutting that thing. But that's due to that's just lack of training on my part. That we don't think of those things, but that's still training. That's individual things that you need to be tight on. And so are you doing that? Are you practicing, you know, what order you're gonna get dressed on? Are you practicing getting dressed in the rig with your seatbelt on while you're while you're going down the road? Are you practicing making sure that your radio is in the in the right spot? Are you put your radio in the same spot every time so that you can access it? You know, everybody's got a different way to do it. I prefer the strap and I prefer it under my coat to protect it with the mic coming out. You don't have to do it that way, but you have to make sure you know why you do it the way that you do, and that it's accessible and you can do it blind. I talked about just going beyond that sterile drill ground. Ladders are a lot harder to or a lot easier to throw when you've got all that space and that runway, right? You saw in that first video there was nothing pretty about the way that those ladders were going up, but they probably went up just as fast. It just there didn't, they didn't get any style points for it. Um, so how how are we doing that? Are we stretching, are we taking the time to stretch around cars and and that sort of thing to practice? We don't have a wide open drill ground every time we have a fire. And are we going, are we getting proficient beyond our pre-connects? Like, are we are we extending our lines? More and more we're having to do that. And so are we practicing with that? Where it's second nature. Um, okay, your your next book recommendation. Anybody know Thinking Fast and Slow? Daniel Kahneman. Daniel Kahneman talks a lot more about uh there's a lot of bias, like individual bias type of stuff that comes into his work that is just in the background all the time when we're making decisions. He talks about uh um the system one versus system two thinking. So system one is like that intuitive, man, a gut instinct comes to you right now, type of stuff. We operate a lot in system one. System two is when you have to take a little bit longer. It's gonna be like, you know, we get to that strategic part of the fire where we're we're trying to, you know, pros and cons. We're trying to determine how we're gonna cut this fire off. He talks a lot about like, say, the, you know, this the stock market and stuff like that, where people are are weighing, you know, pros and cons and different um predictions. I think our goal is to get as much into system one thinking as we possibly can. But you can't do that if you're having to to to think about these things, especially when it comes to the tasks on the fire ground. So that's why I say that the fire ground is the time to call the play, it's not time to teach it. So if you think about like uh, you know, any sports team, they're not, they're not other than maybe a basketball inbounds play, nobody's drawing up these plays. And even if they are drawing it up, they've done it before. And so we we shouldn't be any different from that. So um he says that as you become skilled at a task, it's demand for energy diminishes. And so that makes sense intuitively, right? But but there, when we talk about bandwidth and we talk about what capacity we do have, there is only so much energy. It takes a lot of energy to make these decisions. And so everything we can do to make these things second nature, I think, sets us up for success on the fire ground. We need to be studying more than just our textbooks. There's a lot of information out there that can help us, especially when we are running. You know, we were lamenting just now about running three-person engine companies. You know, that's a of course we'd all want it, we all want to have four-person engine companies, but the reality is we're gonna have to work with what we have right now. We need to understand that we can still do a lot of good, but we probably need to be very focused in the training that we're doing, right? Don't just go out and blindly do training, focus between the margins first, and then you can take on that extra stuff. So there are some great tools out there. There's a firefighter rescue survey. If you're not familiar with the firefighter rescue survey, you absolutely should be. This is this is real rescues that are happening every single day around us. And so I do recommend too, if you guys make rescues out in the field or or or your crews do, report to the firefighter rescue survey so that we they can continue to get accurate data. I apologize, my slides are still the first 3,000. Um rescues that they released just uh like what a two years ago, I think. They've got the 5,000 rescues now. And so I need to update my slides. They basically say the same thing, though. This is all real data. And it makes sense, right? The quicker that we get in and do a search, and the quicker we get them out, the better chance of survival they're gonna have. I mean, that makes pretty good sense, right? But it really does show that those little things that we can do make a difference. So our crews being ready to go, getting out the door uh quickly in the station, getting dressed, getting out the door, doing a quick mask up to cut as much time as we possibly can. Like I was talking to sports teams, you know, sports teams, they're they're looking at fractions of seconds, and we probably should be as well. So we, if you can get people out within the first four or six minutes of an incident, you got a really, really good chance of survival. Really good. But we have to we have to be prepared for it. The other thing, the arrival order, the crew that rescued the victims, almost 90% of the time, victims are being rescued either by the first driving company or the second arriving company. So be ready. Always expect it. And that was very, very true in this incident. So another thing, were victim reports accurate? So, first of all, are we taking the time to listen to those people reporting? And there's some crazy ones. You heard the chaos on this call. You can't listen to everyone. I mean, we do have to tunnel in just a little bit, but are you taking the time to listen to what those first RPs are telling you when you get there? It's not gospel because there's still 20% of the time when the victim reports were not accurate. But 80%'s still pretty darn good. So understand that you're still gonna make that search. You're not gonna blindly trust these people, but will it help you target that search? If they say, hey, my my kid is in that room and they're in that bedroom, second floor, right there on the left, what room are you going for first? You're gonna you're gonna increase your odds. You're gonna go for that room first. So take that information. Was the victim found in the initial room of entry for VES? 84% of the time they were. And so I also believe that VEIS is a very, very safe tactic that, if done right, can be very, very productive and is not as scary as it seems. I think there's some people that think that just because you're diving in onto a window without a hose line, that it's it's dangerous. I think it's targeted. And so you're safe. You're going and you're shutting that door, you're isolating a room. You've only got a couple steps and you can get out onto that ladder. And so that's what a lot of our crews ended up having to do was was bail. But I think that it is a great tactic. We can target our searches. And I think that that's a lot of what we need to probably do in our region, especially early on in these incidents. And by all no means am I saying you shouldn't search the whole structure. You should, but but this is how you get started sometimes. So we don't have enough people to make a difference. I think years ago, there was a lot of uh data that came out about firefighter maydays and how many people it takes to rescue a downed firefighter with all their gear on their incapacitude. That's all true, but I think we got it confused a little bit and mixed up with civilian rescue. And it's not the case. Per their data, um you know, the the majority of these rescues are being done with one person, usually, usually like a hasty drag or or grabbing them and you know, just pulling them out of the structure or two. Um, but the high obviously the fewer number of rescuers needed, the higher chance of survival, which also makes a lot of sense because there's probably a good chance that they're able to help you out a little bit and that you're getting to them quickly. But if you think that you can't make a difference, the point of this slide is if you think you can't make a difference with your small crew, then then you're wrong. Um, we need to go beyond those firehouse or fire ground skills. You know, that firehouse kitchen table is uh is something I hope we never lose. You know, I it's the best place to get great information and and also terrible information at the same time, but it's so much fun. You have people's attention at that point. So, as a company officer, are you looking to utilize that table for something good? Are you bringing an LODD report, an AAR to the table to discuss in a very informal way with your crew? Those are those things that a good company officer does. You do that, and when you're doing that, you're building leader's intent at the same time. You know, everybody talks about this leader's intent and you know how you just start to operate as one without even having to say very many words. And it's true, it happens out there with good crews, but it doesn't happen blindly. Like this is intentional. The good company officers make it happen. Know your response area. I mean, I know, at least in our department right now, we've got people moving all over the place. And we've got people on working different shifts because of the amount of overtime that's going around. So we've lost a little bit of that, you know, knowing our districts. Know your district. And then when you do go and you're working in another area, learn those areas. We have great opportunities on medical calls, on smoke investigations, on just the run-of-the-mill stuff to just focus for a minute on what could happen in that um in that building and do a little pre-planning. Learn to read those buildings. I think that that was a benefit to us on our fire. I think we knew that building so well. And I'm not going to take credit for it. I'm not saying that that was because I was such a good company officer and took my crew there every day and trained there. No, it was just because we were there a lot. We were there a lot on medical calls. But I think just that, just going on those everyday calls and paying attention when you're there, looking at egress, looking at how these apartments are set up, could be the difference, you know, between uh someone's life, uh a civilian, or even your crew member. Uh relationships. And this is the part where I get a little bit soft, and but I can't not talk about the importance of these relationships. And there's something to be said about knowing your people, knowing their strengths, their weaknesses. I mean, I look at this crew right here, and this was one of my highest functioning crews, and they couldn't be more different. Those of you that know these guys know that they're all very, very, very different people with different skill sets. But dang, they operated well. I didn't worry about them on the fire ground. And so it's it's knowing those people, um, knowing them inside and out, knowing them off the fire ground, uh, knowing, you know, when they when they need something. And just remembering, and I talk about the influence that a company officer has a lot. And I don't think you really realize it until you leave that role. But the company officer has more direct influence in an organization than any other position. I'm the deputy chief. I can I could write a policy tomorrow and put it out if I wanted to, but nobody cares. Like, yeah, that's that's that's big picture strategic influence, and I'm not, you know, underscoring that. But the company officer has the ability to make or break people's attitudes. They have the ability to make it a good day or a bad day. You can take a like this is our station one crew. Station one can be the greatest place to work, and it can be the most miserable place to work, all based on what your crew is. So just think about that as you as you promote up. And I'm sure you guys have all experienced that with company officers. I remember back years ago, I still remember the good ones that I had. And I still remember the not so good ones I had. I couldn't tell you anything that was going on in the department at the time. I couldn't tell you who the fire chief was at the time or who my battalion chief was at the time, but I could tell you who my officer was. That's all that mattered. That was the influence. So just never take that lightly. Um, and I think that sometimes our company officers get, you know, maybe they get disenfranchised or they want to make this big splash and they want to solve all the problems in the world. I tell you, they're trying to fix the wrong things. Company officer influences a crew and it is huge. It it makes it makes or breaks attitudes. When we talk about mental health issues in the fire service, it's not to take away from from the calls we're running and the difficult stuff we do every single day, and it seems to be even more frequently than ever before. But I'd like to look at our local, you know, uh crew level leadership and look how much impact that those company officers actually have in that environment. So I'm gonna get off my soapbox now, but it's a really important thing to me. So as you move into these company officer roles, never ever underestimate the influence that you have and don't waste it. Encourage that interactive culture, bring people to the table, do the things that you need to do so that you're interacting and getting to know each other. And train outside your company and department. That's something that, you know, when this fire happened, we we were training, starting to train a little bit as a North area, but not like we do now. So remember, I don't know, those of you that have been around a little bit, but it wasn't even comfortable running calls with each other back then. Like I remember uh with us and on the highway, we started taking baby steps. And so we we started working with Thornton, where we always provided a mutual aid engine, depending on what side of the highway it was, as a blocking engine. And we did that intentionally to start to work together and to start to kind of keep our resources intact. It was so weird at first. It's like, what do you mean? I need to change radio channels? Like, we didn't change radio channels back then. You realize we have about 500 channels on our radios that we don't use ever. And that's one of those things when I go back to the training stuff and communications, like, know your radios as well. But anyway, that used to be so uncomfortable. And then now it's just like we're all just crossing paths and running each other's calls, and that's not even a thing anymore. And so the next step, I think, is to not just rely on those big um battalion level or uh regional trainings. Go across boundaries and get to know one another, you know, get to know your sister station um across boundaries and and train together. And sometimes it's not even, you know, necessarily laying a bunch of hose. It's more just getting out there and and looking at each other's rigs and talking about uh equipment and how you're gonna approach scenes and just getting to know each other. And it comes down to relationships. Earlier, I was talking about uh this call and how it wasn't perfect and how because we didn't have CAD to CAD, there were uh there were crews in the region that were just self-dispatching to it. I would never, ever recommend it, but I was so thankful that a couple of those North Metro crews did show up. It just happened to be the probably the two people I knew the best at North Metro, because like I said, we weren't working together that often, but I went way back with these guys, like before our our, you know, our work at our respective departments here. And I saw those guys come over the horizon and I was like, oh, thank God. Um, but I didn't feel that level of comfort with everybody that was on that scene. So I felt comfortable knowing that I could trust those two as company officers to manage their crews as we're doing these high-risk VEISs. I think we start to, we start to build, build more of that in naturally now, but we didn't have it at the time. So so cross boundaries, train together, get to know each other, get so it's a little uncomfortable at first, but it's worth it. This is one of those controllable things. It's a it's a non-negotiable, right? You're a company officer, um, make sure you're setting a good example. Don't be a liability. These scenes are big and they only come around every once in a while. I'm sure people experienced it the other day on the uh the Thornton call, the work that the amount of work that was needing to be done out there. I've had a couple other calls like this where you know it's like I don't even blink and all of a sudden I ran or I breathe through six SEBA bottles. And I know that it's not ideal and we have you know rehab policies in place and stuff, but when these events happen, you got to work. Don't be a liability on these scenes. That's another role of the company officer to make sure that you're you're setting a good example. Understand the game that you're in. I hear people complain a lot because we're not doing this or we're we're not doing that, or you know, like FDNY was doing this, and you know, LA County goes to the roof on every, you know, every call. And we're not those departments. Understand the system that we work within. Before you can start expanding and starting to make it bigger than what it is, you gotta understand the system that you work in first. Same thing with policies. I'll tell my crews all day long that I got your back. If you have reason to break a policy or to deviate from policy, by all means, we'll talk about it later. And I'm probably gonna back you 100%. But if you didn't know that we had a policy in the first place, that's a problem. And and we see that all the time. You wouldn't believe how many people come even to my office, and they'll be like, hey, you know, we should really have a policy on this thing. I'm like, well, we actually do. Did you even look at the policy book first? I mean, it may be a little outdated, but there's something in there. So so know the system that you're in, understand your policies. This is your job as a leader, this is your job as a company officer. I mean, it's all of our jobs collectively, even as firefighters and medics as well and engineers. But really, when you become an officer, you you got to know this stuff. So know your system, know your capabilities. I was talking about radio communications. Understand how to get from one group to the next to the next. Understand how to change, change channels when it when you go beyond that little ABC toggle. And it's like, oh shit, how do I, how do I move the radio? Understand what's there. You know, there's a lot there. So know the system you're in, understand expanding ICS. I told you guys that it wasn't ideal, but as a as a as a truck captain, I was assigned a division and I had 10 resources working for me that day. I didn't have the benefit of sitting in a car with a tablet or even a pen and paper, but it's what we had to do. And so understand your role within expanding ICS. You could be on a medic unit and you could still be showing up first on these scenes. How are you gonna set things up right? Um, not expecting you to engage. I'm not, you know, you don't have the tools to engage necessarily, but how are you gonna set that thing up right? You could be a medic that's assigned a medical branch. On our call, I'm gonna talk about medical here in a bit. On our call, it was a basically a brand new paramedic that got assigned medical branch. We had 19 injuries. It was an MCI. So are you ready to take that on within that expanding ICS system? Are you ready as that first arriving officer to level two stagnant to be the staging officer? Do you know what that means? You know, so so think about these expanding IC ICS events and how you're gonna act. Whether you're in the promoted role or the acting role, that could easily be your assignment, right? And then it's it is a serious job. We don't like to take ourselves too serious, but we need to remember that it that it is a serious job. So now we've done the preparation stuff. It's game time. So I talked about breathing and and reading the cues. This is then the next book recommendation. Anybody ever heard of recognition prime decision making? So this book has been around for a while. It's kind of a classic, but it's still so applicable today. This was like the first real like scientist, doctor, smart person to actually study fire ground incident commanders. His all of his work is pretty much geared around fire ground incident commanders. So he studies these guys. And this was like back in the day, like in the 80s and 90s, especially when I mean they were they had a major fire problem back then. And so he's trying to figure out how these guys can make these split-second decisions, thinking three, four, five steps ahead and and running all these, you know, what we thought used to take time and and pen and paper and a computer and chat GPT to um to make these kinds of smart decisions. And he was like, man, these guys are not only making these decisions, but they're very successful in doing it. And so there's some really good research that he's done. But he talks about um experienced decision makers adapting to time pressure well and folk because they're able to focus on the most relevant cues and they ignore everything else around them. So again, that comes with experience, but he's he talks about, you know, it doesn't have to just be out on the fire ground like you've run, oh, I've run a hundred fires now, so so I know how to run every fire. It's taking your training, it's taking your experience on each each incident and and putting it all together and making these good decisions. That's what helps you read the cues. If you don't have that background, if you haven't done the work ahead of time, you're not going to see the cues when you're confronted with them. We did some things on that scene that I'm very proud of. We did some things I'd love to have back. Uh, but I think that a couple things happened just naturally that day. And I think about it now. I thought about it after the event, and I'm like, holy crap, I can't believe that just happened. You know, it's things like we're out there jumping into windows, and I have this young, I don't know, she's I don't know how old she is, uh, 10, 11 years old. And she's walking up to me with her grandma and she's holding her arms out because her skin is sloughing off of her. She's burned. And she's okay. But any other incident, I we all would have dropped everything we had at that moment, put all of our efforts into that very critical pediatric patient. But the fact that we had all these other things going on, my brain, I think, I think in hindsight, just told me that no, she's outside, she's safe right now. You have other things to work on. So it's not that I'm gonna ignore her, but I guided them to the medical area and I kept on task. But afterwards, I felt like total crap about it. I was like, did that really happen? Did that poor girl come up? And I hope she's okay. You know, I just felt like, you know, a terrible person. But then when I put it all in perspective with the the the magnitude of this event, it was absolutely the right thing to do. She was out of the hazard area. We needed to focus, we still had people that were trapped in the hazard area. And so I think that that's when you when you when you get yourself to this level, whether it be through training, experience, building those relationships, you start to be able to read these cues a little bit more. And I'm not saying it's a perfect science by any means, but again, really, really uh recommend this book. And I think these three books here, The Emergency Mind, Sources of Power, and Thinking Fast and Slow, are if you're into like decision making and studying decision making, are really great trio because they're not the same. Sources of power, Gary Klein and Daniel Kahneman would go back and forth for years. They disagreed with each other on most of the things when it came to decision making. But what they agreed upon was that when it's a semi-controlled environment, and I know a fire doesn't seem controlled to us, but but we it's predictable what's going to happen. And so, so even Daniel Kahneman would agree with Gary Klein that that intuitive decision making, if you have the right experience behind it, um, matters. And so again, just three nerdy books there that are non-fire service, but um I think apply. I can't do a presentation without bringing a little jocko into the mix, right? Leadership strategy and tactics, and I've heard him talk about it before, but he's talking about the importance of detachment. So he he talks about a training operation that they were on where they were out uh like clearing oil platforms out in the ocean. And they're all like staring down this the scope of their weapons, and then they just got to this point where they they were needed to turn a corner, but nobody would make the call because everybody was just seeing the world through the through the scope of their weapon. And then at some point, he says he pulls his weapon, he he like high ports his weapon and then looks out, and it's like the whole world opens up to him. And he's like, Well, duh, we just need to, you know, cover left, move right, or or whatever the command was. And it seems so simple, but it was it was just illustrating the fact that sometimes we need to physically and mentally detach when we're on these scenes. Now, you don't want to detach some I've seen some people detach too much and then they're not engaged anymore. But just think about that when you're in that supervisory role, this happens on the fire ground, but it's also when it comes to the administrative stuff, taking a second to take a step back. Um, I'm in the I'm in the executive fire officer program at the National Fire Academy right now, and we talk about the importance of getting on the balcony. So if you you you um envision yourself like you're down on the dance floor where all the chaos and stuff is, but then the minute you walk up, walk up the stairs to that balcony area and look down on all the chaos of the dance floor, it's you get a totally different perspective. So I think it's the same thing when you're on the fire ground. These this detachment takes a split second sometimes, but I wasn't able to do that initially when I was task saturated. But as soon as you can get yourself untask saturated, I know that's not a word, um, you should. So I think in detachment both on the um fire ground, but then detachment on the personnel side when you're dealing with the 95% of your job, which happens off the fire ground. Very, very important. And then normalizing that chaos. I talked about just staying calm, cool, just assume that these things are going to happen. I talked about the, you know, the little girl and her grandmother that approached me. I mean, those things were happening left to right. Had uh another person behind me yelling the whole time, yelling at me. They're they're in the parking. Lot, there's a fence between this parking lot and then the uh the parking lot to the next apartment complex over. There's two apartment complexes like back to back. And they're just yelling at me, hey, like I think there's a dead person in that building. And I'm thinking to myself, yeah, I'm thinking there might be, you know, 20 or 30. And I am like, I'm I don't know if you guys have ever experienced, you know, being on a scene, telling yourself, man, I'm gonna get demoted tomorrow if I'm lucky. I'm gonna get fired if I'm not lucky, like just thinking about the how big this incident could have been. Well, I kept pushing them off, pushing them off. And then eventually I did go talk to these people and they showed me a video that they had, and I'm like, oh my gosh, I can see now why they were so concerned. It was a terrible, terrible, and I probably never should have watched it. But again, I didn't have time to deal with them. Like that, we we we had our hands full with what we were doing. And so just you got to make make it normal and not let that chaos rub off on you so that you're rubbing off an influence in other people. So then when we get there, some things we can do. And I'm gonna talk about some real simple lessons here that we learned. And and I'll tell you, probably my biggest teaching lesson that I show from the the rooftops now is naming the building and where you're positioned, what your location is. There's some confusion throughout this call where I assume I'm operating in the beginning on the alpha site. I pull up to this building, I go to where I think the majority of the rescues are. It's the long part of the building. Um, I'm the first unit there. I'm making this assumption that I'm alpha site. Well, the battalion chief shows up shortly after me, and you could see how fast he was there. I didn't realize he was there that fast after me. He says that he's on the alpha side. At first, I thought, okay, well, we're both on the alpha side. Well, he parked on the corner, if you remember how that building looked. He, in his mind, the alpha side was the parking lot on the short side of the building. In my mind, the alpha side is the long side of the building. We had this confusion for an hour and a half into this incident, to where it was, it didn't, again, I don't think it changed the outcome of this thing at all. This building was still going to get scraped. I mean, it was to that level. We made, I'm very proud of our crews. I feel 100% we made every possible rescue that could have been made that night. I mean, it was pretty remarkable. But again, this is more than a style points thing. This this thing um caused some confusion on the scene. And I take full responsibility for that. Had I pulled up and said, Truck six is on scene, give my arrival report, and I'm not talking about like this isn't the time to give your long dissertation of a blue card report, but there are some important things that have to get out. And number one, where are you positioned, especially when it's not a run-of-the-mill bread and butter single family dwelling? Where are you positioned and what do you call on that side of the building? So important. And I failed to do that that night. So it created some confusion. I take full responsibility for that. So give that good arrival report. Like I said, it doesn't have to be a dissertation. What are those things that are important? You know, we are we offensive? Are we defensive? Where are we engaging? What's our problem? We're making ladder rescues. Bam. You shouldn't have to say much more than that. Uh, and then and then you'll pass command when the time comes. Verbalize those initial actions. Another thing, do we have a water supply? We put a lot of water on that thing pretty quick. I made some assumptions that we were close to a hydrant. Here again, you got cars parked every everywhere. You got fences, you got dumpsters, you got bushes, you got all the things. That was a lot of work for my engineer to find that water supply. Get ground ladders going, flake out our hose, get the pump engaged, and then find a water supply. So um we just make sure we're we're verbalizing those initial actions. Order those additional resources. Another thing that today, if I ran this call, and I know we've got you know standardized uh alarms built out, I don't know how it works in all of your agencies, but I know in Westy at least, like if you know what you're going to, the minute I had reports of big fire people jumping, I should have, I should have struck a second alarm. Like get it going, get it going early, even as a company officer. Um, and I didn't do that. However, I mean, we were like blocks away. We were very, very close to this scene. So the the IC, uh the battalion chief did it pretty quick in the incident. And then you saw what we ended up getting and had to dig out from that one as well. So order those additional resources, give them a staging location so that they don't pile up on your scene. So get that, get that off your plate, have that. That's like a package then for that incident commander, but don't half-ass it. Like make sure that when you do order that second alarm, you're really thinking about it. We don't just willy-nilly order second alarms. That's a lot of resources to have committed to that call. And then that's a lot of resources that we're also taking out of the region. So I will stand behind you every single day if you feel justified to order that second alarm, but just make sure that you have good reason for it. And give them that staging location to keep them from piling up on that scene. Don't forget about EMS. This is another one of the big points of this presentation that I can't talk about enough. I didn't realize until after the event that this was an MCI. So we had those 19 patients, the majority of them transported. We had medic units, and that was before we had this regional auto aid set up, but we had medics transporting patients to the hospital, doing hot returns back, back and forth, back and forth. Uh we had a lot going on. We ended up assigning a medical branch. I told you that it was a brand new paramedic that got assigned as the medical branch. Are you ready for that? So don't forget about EMS. So the next case study is this Twin Peaks fire in in New York. I don't know if any of you have read about this. Um, this is another book recommendation. When it comes to incident fire ground, incident uh command type of books. This is my favorite. Uh, it's new, it's fresh. It's uh Brian Brush, uh, who came from West Metro originally, but he's big on the fire engineering scene. And then Anthony Castros, who's been doing a lot of great stuff for many, many years, uh, co-wrote this book. And then there are a bunch of um additional case studies written by uh different leaders across the country that have experienced real events. And so Frank Lieb is the one from FDNY that shares his experience with this fire, the Twin Parks fire. Wasn't the biggest fire. Uh, it was a pretty standard uh high-rise fire for them. It really wasn't a fire problem as much as it was a smoke problem. Fairly recent, though, just a few years ago. Um they didn't know what they were rolling on. They thought it was just basically a two-room, uh two-room structure fire, uh high-rise fire. It ended up being like uh batteries, uh scooter batteries and that sort of thing that had overheated and started on fire. It wasn't about the fire, it was about the MS call. 60 fire victims removed. Who's ready for 60? He he talks about like they're FDNY. They've got all the resources in the world. 60, 60 fire victims was way more than they had capacity for. 30 of them were in cardiac arrest. Could you imagine? And it's totally sad, but it's pretty amazing that only 17 of them were fatalities. That means they saved a lot of people in that scene. But could you imagine if something like that happened in our region? And it could. We have mid-rises, high rises. We have, especially with um, you know, with the EV and the battery charging that we're we're still trying to figure out. Uh, and and we've been on fires inside our mid-rises with uh with batteries. We had one at St. Anthony Hospital not long ago where it was just a small scooter that someone had taken into the locker room. And luckily, the owner of that scooter had the wherewithal when it started to smoke and and and you know it was starting to expand and do all kinds of crazy stuff. He carried it at least out to the stairwell and got it out of there. That could have been a nightmare just from one scooter battery. I I highly recommend that book, but I also recommend reading about that call specifically, especially from the EMS standpoint. Don't forget about EMS in these fires. Our event, like I said, it was an afterthought. I won't say it, it wasn't an afterthought that night, but for me, I was so tied up I didn't realize what an EMS event we had going on. So make sure that we're ready for that. Make sure that we're calling those resources early, especially those transport resources. Get them coming. They're easy to stage, but make sure that we're giving them a good place to stage. Again, you could really jam up your and your ingress and your egress if you don't. So think about that. So when it comes to these big calls, um, I was always pretty nervous, especially as a new company officer. And I attended a, it was like an expanding incident um class. I think it was like an NFA outreach kind of class. We're getting to the point where we're we got these gigantic events where they they've even bringing out like uh matchbox cars, and we had we, you know, we're we're we're we're running major like palisades fire type events. And then he finally just stops us at one point because we're ordering like helicopters and stuff. He's like, You guys, you guys have helicopters in your area? And I'm like, No. He's like, How are you actually gonna respond on this? So we got rid of all the all the stuff, you know, all the matchbox cars. And we said, How are you gonna deal with it? I'm like, well, how are we supposed to deal with this event when you're giving us this ginormous event and we have this many resources? He said, make it simple. Break it down to every fire has three components. You're gonna probably have a uh, you know, a couple of these in at the same time, but you got to determine as a first driving company officer, which one are you gonna impact first? You can't do it all. You can't. And we found out we couldn't do it all on the scene. Is it a people problem, a fire problem, or a smoke problem? Are you gonna are you gonna go after the people right away? Maybe it's only two people that you need to do a ladder rescue, and then you can reset, and then you can do firefighting. In this case, we knew that we had to put do a little fire control in order to protect the rescue to buy us sometime. So we had, you know, we had all three of these issues on this fire, but people was definitely our number one concern. So just remember that when you're when you're pulling up and it seems overwhelming, you just have to engage. You just have to go to work and and you just make that determination. Is it people, is it fire, or is it the smoke that you're gonna impact the most? All right, so another video, some of the same footage that we've already seen, but kind of from a different perspective. If I remember right on this one, we do see the safety officer get out of the car. You're gonna see some helmet cam, but then you're going to see um the dash cam as well. So I want you to do, you're gonna see this video is gonna go on for a little while, and then at some point you're gonna see a split screen where you're gonna see the dash cam, and then you're gonna see the helmet cam, what's going on actually on the other side of the building. And then tell me, do you think the incident commander is running the same fire that the people on the back side of this building are running? And so, again, just the importance of good communication and how important company officer communication is on the fire ground. Also, just look at how effective a well placed two and a half inch hose line can be too much.

SPEAKER_11 1:20:52

The people on the back and the people on the front.

SPEAKER_14 1:20:59

This was tough. This was a tough one to to put into words, you know. When we had we struggled just to name the size of the building, you've got the courtyard that is, you know, um is difficult. You can you can't act, it's difficult to access, you can't see it. So I talked a little bit about you know, th listening to that radio traffic and and you heard this video the first time I played it kind of standalone. Um and I was kind of I don't know, criticizing the amount of radio traffic in in the beginning. Because if you think about that's the thing you got to think about, like what radio traffic are you giving? You don't need to give any good news reporting on these big instances. You do need to you need to make some decisions as a company officer. We need to be thoughtful about the communication because you heard it in the beginning. Could you imagine being that IC sitting in that car and hearing all this chaos coming at you? I mean, it's just it's impossible to focus. But when you go around the back side of that building and you see the whole building is on fire and everybody's front doors are blocked, that's priority traffic. But you just think about what you're gonna say before you get on the radio. So that IC needs that picture. And I don't care what people say about whether the IC should be in a in the commanding from the car, in the, you know, the old argument about, you know, East Coast versus West Coast, it doesn't matter on this incident because even if the IC was out of the vehicle, they'd be in front of that building. They're not gonna be you, this building was too big to see the whole thing at all times, right? Another reason to get this building sectioned off, to get divisions in place, to get groups in place. That's why we do it. It's span of control, but it's also to get eyes on these different parts of the building. So with that, I just wanted an opportunity to leave this slide up here just for a little while. Uh we're gonna move into the aftermath of this thing, okay? It's something that I think we forget on on calls like this. You would think we just did all the cool stuff that we're trained to do, right? I mean, we I personally made more rescues in one night than I've made my whole career combined. We did more things that night than we could ever imagine. It was cool. Like we still talk about this call, and it was quite a few years ago. You would think it would be like the greatest day in sports history when the Chicago Cubs won the World Series. You would assume, but it was not necessarily uh that way. It gets a little bit messy, right? As firefighters, uh uh, you know, the people are a little judgy. Uh, there's some Monday morning quarterbacks, if you could imagine that. Um, and it's also coming in from the outside. Usually we deal with that just internally, like small fires. It's like, oh, I wonder why they did it that way or this way. But now think about it when this becomes a national on the national stage and you've got the ATF involved and you've got CBI involved, and you've got all these federal agencies. It doesn't feel great. So, investigation. Things really do get real when the investigation goes beyond your jurisdiction. So, think about this. As a company officer, you will become, you'll be interviewed and you'll be a witness in this incident. You also have your documentation gone over with a fine tooth comb. So that's why we harp on everybody for the importance of documentation, even on the day-to-day stuff. Documentation is so important. And we're talking documentation after the fire scene, but we're also talking about documentation, the pre-fire stuff, pre-fire plans, um, inspections, all those job responsibilities are important because they scoured everything. They went back years and years and years on our documents. Luckily, they weren't pointing fingers at us necessarily, but it doesn't feel good. It's morning time. Like I said, this call came in at 2 a.m. It's about seven o'clock in the morning. We're gassed. We finally have this thing under control and we're getting ready to get um swapped over. And I'm like, wow, that was amazing. We're all just like jaws on the ground, like this is the craziest call ever. ATF doesn't care how crazy your call was. You know, they're just, they just they've got a job to do and they've got interviews to do. And so it was like from the beginning, they were interviewing everyone. This footage that I've got here, it didn't resurface for tele a couple of years ago. That was all on that was our SAM officer. It was his uh helmet cam and his dash cam. He made the mistake of putting that all on his personal laptop. It was well-intentioned. He wasn't trying to take it or do anything with it. We just didn't have the capacity to put it on our work computers. He kept getting denied because his files were too big. So he put it on his personal laptop. ATF found out that we had footage. ATF took the footage. ATF didn't just ask for a file transfer. ATF took the entire computer along with cell phones and everything else. So think about that. Think about that just in your day-to-day. Um, be smart about the pictures that you're taking, be smart about any social media. Just be mindful of that. Be mindful that you you could have something on your device that allows it to be taken from you. So think about your searches too. Um but uh anyway, those personal devices will be confiscated. Documentation, I can't say it enough. Stuff is so important. And so we make sure that we're documenting those calls well. Um, it's why it's an important part of your job. Um, and subpoenas will be possible for years to come. So it was mostly on the civil side, but I was getting subpoenas. This year this instance is quite a few years old. I was getting subpoenas up to four or five years after the incident was over. I never did have to testify I made it to like the day of multiple times, but it was all civil cases. So it doesn't feel good, is is the bottom line on this. But you do your job, you do it right, you do it on, you know, the the way that you've been trained, and um, don't cut any corners, and you're gonna be just fine. And then nobody was out to get us. I don't want to come across like that. It's just you you feel exposed. So these events are messy. You know, you got to take care of your people. And this is where that company officer influence comes in. Take care of your people, be aware of those armchair quarterbacks. It's gonna happen. We're a judgy group. Some of it's for good reason. We want to do a good job, right? But come on, every every incident we have, um, there are gonna be some armchair quarterbacks. And this was a big one, especially since we weren't allowed to talk about it. I hated that we weren't allowed to talk about it. We didn't have anything to hide in this. Nothing to hide. I was I was gonna share all the screw ups that I had, and we could learn from the from the good things. But we couldn't. We were we were told not to talk about it because this you think about this was a murder investigation. So it was a big deal. The media. So one of my medics, he was, he was the probationary firefighter, and he was he was the one I think you saw going in and out and in and out of those windows. He had one like really, really close call where he heard a big crash, I guess, at one point and got a little bit disoriented in one of those apartments. I think it may have been that last VES that they did. He was to the point where he he almost called him A Day himself because he just he thought he thought there was a floor collapse. Comes to come to find out it was just something outside. But he he doesn't think anything of it. We clear the scene. He thinks that this job is the coolest thing ever, you know, like he's gonna do this every single, every single day. And uh he goes on a trip the next morning. He leaves with his wife to go on like a road trip. Well, he's exhausted. So he sleeps like the first half of the first day, you know, when they're they're in the car or something and he's asleep. And so then by the time he wakes up, it's like they're full on road trip, you know, they're just doing their thing. She has no idea. She knows, she knows he ran a call the night before, but she has no idea the type of call she just ran he just ran. Well, then they're watching the news, and on the news, they're talking about this call. And I tried to find this footage, I couldn't find it. But he tells me about it and he said, I was sitting there watching, and they there was somebody that was questioning. I think it could have been a family member. Um, I'm not 100% sure. Maybe a bystander, maybe one of the people that were just standing outside, just probably made a side comment. I don't think it was intentional, nobody was pointing fingers, but it was like, gosh, it seemed like it took him a long time to get in there. And he felt this instant guilt. He felt terrible. Well, his wife didn't even know he had just gone, gone through this whole thing. And so to find out, have the media, you know, inform your family of this traumatic event that you just um that you just went through is pretty crazy. So it just, it just gets different when the when the media gets involved. But again, they weren't pointing fingers at us. Um our actions were were all justified. And it was really a lot of the, they're gonna point fingers somewhere. And so they they focused on the uh the building owners. But anytime you can bring closure and learn through AARs, uh we couldn't at that time, however, there are things we could have done. I'm confident about that. I think that we couldn't have done a, we probably couldn't have done a public-facing AAR, but I think we could have brought the people in the room that were part of the call in a closed door um session and we could have talked about the call. I think it would have helped a lot of us, but we didn't. They they were we kept being like just a little bit longer and we'll get we'll we'll do this a little bit longer. And then it drug out so long that it wasn't even worth it anymore. So I think we could have, uh, but it was a very sensitive thing. And so this was a this was a big, big deal. And so they didn't want to compromise any investigative components. And I get that. It was a big law enforcement action on this. So so I get it. And that's why I'm, you know, I'm not even gonna too go go deep into that side of things here, only talking about the things that we did and the things that we saw. And the things that have really become public already. You saw all these videos that, you know, news footage and stuff too. So yeah, I wish we would have. We could have done something though. This is just another video to kind of tell that story about, you know, they're gonna look for somebody, they're gonna look somewhere to point some fingers.

SPEAKER_09 1:31:24

Here first on Denver 7. There are no questions tonight about whether more could have been done to prevent the deadly fire from spreading at the Westminster apartment complex.

SPEAKER_03 1:31:32

Two people were killed, dozens left without a place to live after flames ripped through that building in July. Denver Seven's Liz Gillardi is live where this all happened. And Liz attorneys are saying that building wasn't up to code.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:44

Shannon and uh Teresa, these are serious safety allegations. You know, this fire spread so quickly that residents were forced to jump from the second and third stories of this building. And experts now reviewing this fire say it points to some real serious safety concerns.

SPEAKER_04 1:32:03

Yeah, they did nothing wrong. They were in their home. They should have had some basic protections, and something went horribly wrong.

SPEAKER_02 1:32:11

The fire at this Westminster apartment building killed two people and sent 14 to the hospital.

SPEAKER_15 1:32:17

People were having to jump out of the windows just to even get out of harm's way.

SPEAKER_02 1:32:22

A fire that spread so quickly, the whole building was engulfed before people could escape.

SPEAKER_04 1:32:28

We're at the point where there's red flags, and the fire seems to have spread more quickly than it should have if things had been built correctly.

SPEAKER_02 1:32:36

Mari Perzak, an attorney, is looking at potential safety issues, along with an engineer. Nearly a month after the fire, residents are still displaced. The flames reached more than half of the 69 units in the building, and how it spread could be key.

SPEAKER_10 1:32:52

Spreading out. So once it's into the attic space, it wanted to move out sideways instead of being stopped.

SPEAKER_02 1:32:57

A forensic engineer explains firewalls are supposed to contain the fire, at least briefly, so people are able to get out.

SPEAKER_10 1:33:05

Should survive for approximately one hour. That allows people to get out, it allows the fire to be contained. What we saw in the videos and as the helicopters flying over, and the cell phones is a very quick spread.

SPEAKER_02 1:33:18

It's enough to raise serious questions about how this apartment was built and if it was up to code.

SPEAKER_04 1:33:24

But no, we are not at the point yet where we can say this is exactly what was wrong. That needs to be further investigated.

SPEAKER_02 1:33:33

And it was determined that this fire was intentionally set, but the experts we talked to say, you know, that shouldn't matter because the proper protections should have been in place. And we've also had a chance to touch base with some of the residents who lived here. Many of them are still struggling, wondering what to do, and they haven't been able to get back inside or retrieve any of their belongings that are still inside that apartment building. Reporting live in Westminster, Liz Gilbardi, Denver Sun.

SPEAKER_14 1:34:01

Yeah, so they're gonna they're looking for places to point fingers. I mean, it's natural, right? A lot of people just lost their homes here. It's very, very tragic. People lost their lives as well. It it it stays messy and it's for for quite a while on these. And so, like I said, as long as you're doing your job right ahead of time, as long as you're you're you're training your crews, you're you know, you're you're acting appropriately on the scene, but then you're documenting and you're doing the after incident things correctly, you have nothing to worry about. There's nothing to worry about. There you're gonna be fine, but it just doesn't always feel good. So it's not if but when. Uh I really do believe that if you prepare with intention, and I'm talking about preparing on the basics, knowing your crew, understanding your influence as a company officer. Uh it'll allow you then to stay calm, read those cues that are around you every day, and and go to work and act on game day. And these events are messy, but I mean, in the end, we're here to do those hard things. It's what we're trained for, and it's why we got into this job in the first place. I appreciate everybody sitting in this room, taking the the next step for leadership. Leadership is it's it's exposing sometimes, and and it's not always easy, but we need good people to step up into these positions. We need people willing to take on that challenge and be uncomfortable and take care of our next generation. So um just appreciate your your your time today, your attention. Here's just here are all the books that I I referenced. This this presentation basically, I threw it together after uh an article in fire engineering that I wrote in 2024, and it was a it was geared around the same thing, just didn't have all the videos. And so that that article was the thing that motivated me to put this presentation together. With that, any questions, comments? What's it gonna take to get a five star review and get invited back next year? All right.

SPEAKER_15 1:36:08

Thank you very much.