Please comment if you understand what I am saying or if you believe that the passage in red describes your experience.

“Manually applied water sprays have two extinction effects that can be identified and observed visually through experiments:

• -  They generate a decrease in the rate of pyrolysis mainly induced by a decrease in radiation from flames and hot gases back, i.e. they reduce the externally applied heat flux.
• -  They penetrate through the flames, hit the burning surface and cause a decrease in the rate of pyrolysis, induced by a cooling of the surface, i.e. they increase the rate of heat loss from the surface.Practical consequences of this are that it is very hard to reach a high degree of evaporation (and consequently suppression) when applying water on surfaces, especially when using manually applied water sprays. The purpose of the jet or the spray is, amongst others, in addition to the strictly practical reasons to increase the surface of the extinguishing media. According to Svensson et.al. (1999) (paper I), extinguishing mechanisms, how water is applied to fires, and how the jet or the spray affects the fire can be summarized as:

• -  The momentum in the spray is transferred to a stream of air, which increases turbulence and stirring. This will usually increase the rate of heat release in the initial stage.
• 
  
• -  The effect of the spray on the gases generates a decrease in the rate of heat release and radiation from the flames.
• -  The jet or the spray penetrates through the flames, hits the burning surface and causes a decrease in the rate of pyrolysis.All of these effects can be observed during real firefighting, although they are very hard to physically model. In addition, adding human aspects of fighting fires, variations in application rates, water spray cone angles and drop diameters (depending on e.g. settings and wear of the nozzle), the situation becomes very complex. “

What the dissertation does not speak to is how long this “initial stage” lasts. What I don’t understand is how the HRR is increased because of the increased turbulence. HELP??? From the experiments I have seen the introduction of water streams has led to an almost immediate decrease in temperature and HRR because of surface cooling.

Nearly every fire service magazine, website, or blog of any significance has talked for years about the dual dangers of modern construction and modern fuel packages.  You can read anywhere how the presence of plastics has increased the potential for fires to burn much hotter and to develop much faster. This fact combined with the inherent susceptibility of lightweight construction to quick failure, leaves  firefighters in a bad situation.

I am sure that we can all agree with that.

Further, sufficient science exists to show that most civilians who die in a fire do not die from thermal insult but rather from asphyxiation secondary to smoke inhalation-the greater part of which is carbon monoxide exposure.

I am sure that we can all agree with that.

Now I can’t swear to it but I suspect that most fires burn for at least a short period of time before being discovered. During the vast majority of its life a fire in the modern environment the fire is ventilation limited, meaning that there is insufficient oxygen to cleanly burn all the fuel present. This means that there are significant amounts of carbon monoxide present for most of the life of the fire.

I am sure that we can all agree with that.

It takes time to process a 911 call. It takes time to dispatch a 911 call. It takes time for firefighters to get dressed and start driving. It takes time to drive, to initiate a water supply, to stretch hand lines, and to mask up. While this clock is ticking the occupants of the structure are being exposed to heat, oxygen deprivation, and most tragically, carbon monoxide.

I am sure that we can all agree with that.

The primary mechanism of risk for the civilian then is the exposure to carbon monoxide that is being created by a fire burning uncontrolled and under-ventilated. As long as the fire burns it consumes oxygen, creates heat, and creates carbon monoxide.

It also true that the second we begin to apply water to a fire the rate of its burning is reduced, the amount of heat it can generate is reduced, and the amount of carbon monoxide it is able to make is reduced. The primary risk that requires reduction for the person trapped inside a burning house is the risk of being asphyxiated. The second we begin to apply water the risk is reduced.

Residential fire sprinklers save lives. They save lives by spraying water down from the ceiling onto burning surfaces. We can all agree to this too. They do not charge in the front door down the throat of new flow paths and into the door of the burning room. They do not smash windows or cut holes in roofs, they don’t spread fire by their fine spray. They still save lives.

Life Safety, Incident Stabilization, Property Conservation, in that order, just like I remembered.

Assuming there are no jumps in my logic and assuming that my primary objective is to account for life safety and assuming that the primary risk to the trapped occupant is the fire and assuming that the second I begin to apply water that risk is reduced, I should want to apply that water as quickly as possible.

Arguably I have reduced the inherently chaotic and complicated nature of firefighting to some very basic terms. I have removed the “fog” of confusion. I have assumed that every fire station was located based on some valid mathematical formula. I have assumed that all units were in quarters, that there was no delay at the fire station, none of the fire engines went the wrong way, there was no trouble stretching the line, and that the crews took the right line to the seat of the fire quickly. That was a lot of assuming. We can all agree that things are never that perfect.

But I think that for most people who have followed along thus far this is where the agreeing turns innocent faces red and the disagreeing begins. Most firefighters know that the best way, the fastest way, to save a life in a fire is to put water on the fire as quickly as possible. They know this. They know that everything gets better after the fire is darkened down. They know searches can move more quickly and can be more efficient after the fire is darkened down.

But they still believe, most of them, that in most cases, almost all cases that the best place, the right place to apply the water is from the inside out. Even though it takes time to get a line stretched, time to force entry, time to do a circle check, time to mask up, time to move through the structure, it all takes time.  The one commodity that a person trapped by carbon monoxide in a burning house does not have in abundance is time.

The modern firefighter can believe everything I said so far. He/she really wants to do the right thing. They want to save lives. But they also believe that all this talk of exterior streams as the de facto mode of initial operation is a sign of the demise of the modern fire service. They believe that deploying a hand line to an exterior position as a matter of policy makes one a sissy, a coward, a heretic, a modern day Joan of Arc, and an anti-hero all at once.

They will say that I got it all wrong, that the science they refer to in lectures during probie training is right, is good science. The science that says fires need fuel, oxygen, and heat, and when one of these ingredients is missing the fire goes away. That science is valid. However, somehow the science that says it does not matter where the water comes from, that science is tragically flawed.

The second we begin to apply water to a fire the rate of its burning is reduced, the amount of heat it can generate is reduced, and the amount of carbon monoxide it is able to make is reduced.

The second we begin to apply water to a fire things get better for the trapped people and things get better for the firefighters. The risk of dying a horrible death goes down dramatically for both parties. The risk of experiencing a positive outcome goes up for both parties.

I am confused how about how it should matter where the water comes from.

In a recent discussion about fire ground effectiveness I asked my peers if it was possible to follow all the rules and still come up with the wrong answer. After the briefest of pauses they answered, “Of course.” My follow up argument was that if the strict following of rules cannot promise success the rule following metric cannot be the sole measurement of individual effectiveness.

Rule following as the primary methodology for fire ground success exists for two basic reasons: it is easy, and it is clean. Either you laid a supply line into the fire or you did not. Either you went to the front door or you went to the rear. Simple and clean.

But what happens when you are faced with a moment-I will choose one that enjoys rampant discussion on the blogs these days. Let’s say you find yourself in front of an obviously vacant structure in the neighborhood of urban blight. There is fire coming from three windows in the front of this two-story house and smoke showing from everywhere else. Just to make things easier, the house is modern lightweight construction and was occupied by the world’s premier pack-rat before going into foreclosure and being abandoned.  You know all this, you know the place is vacant, you know the departmental rules about vacant structures. But then you also think that you saw someone in the window when you arrived. You are not sure but you think so.

Balance.

So you decide to be a rule follower because that is what is easiest. You cannot confirm that someone is trapped in that house. You think you saw something but you were moving, you are breathing heavily, it could have been a shadow. Follow the rules and  don’t climb in that window to search.

Balance

So you decide to keep your mind focused on the stated fire ground priorities of life safety, incident stabilization and property conservation. You order you nozzleman to darken down the fire on the first floor through the windows while you and your other firefighter climb a ladder to the window, sound the floor, close the interior door, and search for the shadow. You broke the rules.

Standard operating procedures were designed, as the name implies, for standard situations. It is not everyday you find people in the windows of vacant structures. Some days the rules don’t apply.

This is not to mean that the rules can be disregarded willy-nilly. Most of the situations that we face on a daily basis are standard, the rules do apply, and we are remiss if we don’t follow them. If we make a habit of not following the rules the organizational system, the framework for action, begins to disintegrate into chaos.  So, we follow the rules, every single time, unless they don’t apply. I can teach any idiot to follow the rules but the really smart officer knows when it’s the right time to break one.

Balance

After the fire is out and the smoke has cleared and the team is full of sports drinks and snacks from the canteen unit we will be asked to account for our actions. Some Chief, some peer, some subordinate will look at what we did and question why we did it that way, or question why we did not follow the rules. Unfortunately that cannot be avoided. Hindsight is a wonderfully clear lens through which to view the world despite its inaccuracies.

Balance

I can’t tell you what to do every time unless we are canning peaches on factory assembly line. I can tell you however, that most times, under standard temperatures and pressures, this is how the world behaves and this is how I expect you to react to it.

There has been a great deal of chatter, some intelligent, most not, about the relative merits of the safety culture vs. the aggressive at all costs culture. I tend to resist such simple and reductionist thought processes. What I would like to see is some balance. There is a time to rush headlong into the proverbial battle and a time to squirt water from the street. There is a time to risk everything that ever mattered to you, just make sure it counts when you do.

Balance

Sometimes the people who work for me ask about scenarios, “what if.” It is hard to answer those questions but I try. I try to refer the person back to himself or herself and back to the basic premise of why we exist as firefighters. We exist to save stuff, be it people or their belongings, from fire. It cannot be any simpler than that. And because we exist to save stuff we have to know a few things: what stuff is and what it means to save it.

It is quite likely that I will come to you, that you that works for me, one day and ask you, “what did you save.” By way of an answer I would like to hear that you saved something, something meaningful. If it turns out God forbid, that the trade-off for what you saved is you I would hope that in hindsight I could make that meaningful without stretching the truth one bit.

In the end though it is all about balance. We move through organizational and cultural phases. First smooth nozzles and bigger fans, then fog nozzles and no fans. Everyday something changes and soon enough, if we can survive long enough, I am convinced that we will find ourselves right back where we started. But only if we can survive that long.

Dear Bill Carey,

One last thing…I find it interesting that you, Bill, would latch on to the word unethical as would Dave LeBlanc. What makes it interesting is that the definition of unethical is slightly more nuanced than simple immorality or disreputable behavior, right? But you and your supporters quickly got the sense that I was somehow vilifying you for your ideas, even though I never came out and called you a villain.

My point with regards to the basic premise of your work is that while you don’t ever come out and say it is okay to search without thinking and while you DO say that one must take every situation as this sort of novel experience requiring a unique analysis, the main action of the counterfactuals you supply  is the vilification of the converse of your approach e.g., the tacit assumption that a vacant is vacant.

The truth I think is that for the vast majority of fires this is never an issue; it is either obvious that you need to search or it is obvious that you should not. If we are to have a rational disagreement on this matter you will have to allow me at least that much: there are some fires where it is obvious that we must search the structures and others where it is obvious that we should not.

It is important to set the range of possibilities; to create some boundaries for us to work inside of. So, our real question is how to behave when we face a small minority of our fires, e.g, occupant status is unclear, fire conditions are difficult, AND there is no hoseline immediately available. If the lone occupant of a structure meets you outside and tells you he was home alone, should you search without a line? That one is easy, of course not. If you have a small fire in bathroom vent fan and the smoke is confined to the attic space and occupant status is unclear should you, close the bathroom door and search the sleeping areas without a charged hoseline? Of course you should. If you have a hose and are putting cooling streams on burning surfaces should you search behind the line, ALWAYS. So we only have something to talk about if there is unclear occupant status, difficult fire conditions, AND no handline available.

The first problem as I see it is that fires burn hot, they consume oxygen, and they produce carbon monoxide; simple inescapable facts. The second problem is that people exposed to high enough amounts of heat, low enough levels of oxygen and/or high enough levels of carbon monoxide die; also simple inescapable fact.

I think that I can find popular agreement to the notion that it is wrong to trade a life for a life that is already lost. We should not ask firefighters to die in an attempt to recover a body from a burning building. Interestingly I think agreement begins to break down quickly after this point. While we can all agree that we should not trade the living for the dead, this is where people begin to argue what it means to be dead. This is where they say that I have no right to decide when someone it dead inside a burning house. This is where we bump up against the boundaries of the rational.

I need to digress for a moment, please bear with me. I find it interesting that firefighters will risk their lives in a burning house to save someone, because “you never know…” but tend not to apply that same logic to the 80-year working code in the nursing home. I agree that a patient who has been pulseless and not breathing for 20 minutes is not likely to have another birthday. But I never had anyone argue with me about “calling a code” prematurely like they do about me pulling them out of a house fire before they were done searching. Really, what’s the difference? Death does not come in degrees, is dead sometimes not dead?

So, now I am standing in front of a boarded up house on a vacant overgrown lot. I am faced with a significant fire (again, if it was not a significant fire we would not have anything to talk about) and an unknown occupant status. In my mind there are three basic ways to approach this situation. The Cowboy way, “Search until your gear catches on fire.” The Carey (I picked a name for ease of conversation) way, which I characterize as, make no assumptions about occupant status, analyze/size-up and then search as conditions allow. Or the Bailey (I picked a name for ease of conversation) way, which I characterize as assuming that it is impossible for people to survive some situations but it is possible to make rational judgments about what those situations look like. The difference between our approaches I think is subtle. Both approaches assume that people are rational actors e.g, that the search team does not have a death wish. Both approaches are bounded by rationality in general, e.g., there are situations that are not survivable for people or firemen.

The Carey approach leans heavily on the ability of on-scene analysis to overcome an ethos of aggressive searching. In other words you are asking firefighter to stop and think in the split second about whether the search is rational thing to do. However, the split second decision tends to draw on something other than rationality. Rational thought requires time. Search or not search decisions come without the benefit of time. The Bailey approach says that if you are faced with a situation for which you have to stop and analyze you have completed your analysis. If a rational actor is given pause it is unlikely that a person trapped in the house would be alive. If that person is alive it is because that they are in a compartment isolated from the fire. If they are alive it is because they are in a safe place. Put the fire out fast and then go look.

At the end of the day there is always going to be this one time where a 90-year man walks out of a fully involved house wearing a speedo and flip-flops but I am not risking my life on the off chance he’ll need my help to open the door.

Pauline Kael said once,

“At the movies, we are gradually being conditioned to accept violence as a sensual pleasure. The directors used to say they were showing us its real face and how ugly it was in order to sensitize us to its horrors. You don’t have to be very keen to see that they are now in fact de-sensitizing us. They are saying that everyone is brutal, and the heroes must be as brutal as the villains or they turn into fools. There seems to be an assumption that if you’re offended by movie brutality, you are somehow playing into the hands of the people who want censorship. But this would deny those of us who don’t believe in censorship the use of the only counterbalance: the freedom of the press to say that there’s anything conceivably damaging in these films—the freedom to analyze their implications. If we don’t use this critical freedom, we are implicitly saying that no brutality is too much for us—that only squares and people who believe in censorship are concerned with brutality.”

I said once after that,

” At fires we are gradually being conditioned to accept risk as a sensual pleasure. The “firemen” used to say they were showing us the real face of risk and how ugly it was in order to sensitive us to its horrors. You don’t have to be very keen to see that they are now in fact de-sensitizing us. They  say that the public is weak and needy and the heroes-us- must be brave and take chances and sometimes die in order to save them. There seems to be this assumption that if you’re offended by aggressive interior attacks, you are somehow abandoning your contract with society, replacing it with cowardice. But this would deny those of us who don’t believe in the foolhardy and the excessive the use of the only counterbalance: thought-the freedom to analyze their implications. If we don’t use this critical freedom, we are implicitly saying that no danger is too much, no carcass is beyond trading our lives for, no shell of a house is too little to die for, that only squares and people who believe in analysis are concerned with brutality.”

I wonder why no one reads this stuff…

(Mountain climber and rescue party member Ed Viesturs, quoted in Rose, 1998: 8)

To be clear this is not a complete work, it’s a little fragement of thought I hope to eventually expand on.

This discussion is partly based on an article written by Dr. D. Kayes, a professor at the George Washington University. He writes about a tragic expedition to the top of Mount Everest that was wrought with trouble and led to multiple deaths.  You should read that article first. Then consider the following:

In my opinion the problem with the fire service application of narratives as a tool for organizational learning is multi-faceted and I suspect this holds true for other organizations. My suspicion is that the problems with application are due to the narrative applications I list below but also with the fact that while human actors are accountable to rule sets, they are more accountable to their peer groups and the prevailing cultural norms that they are operating under. Despite being accountable to peers people still get rattled, they get scared, they make mistakes, and they do silly stuff, especially when under extreme time pressures. It is precisely, I argue, this accountability to the peer group that is the main causative factor in the narrative taxonomy below. People have to make it right in their heads, cover up the silly, cover up the fear, and ensure their continued participation in the peer group. How they do that with their respective narratives is what I explore below.

I tend to characterize the application of narratives in the following ways:

(mind you this non-academic taxonomy is really rough around the edges) 

1. Narrative disassociation- A fancy way to say, ” I believe that it happened to him, but I don’t believe that it can happen to me.”

2. Narrative isolation- A fancy way to say, “I know my story and the story of the people around me, but I don’t know the story of the guy in Boise, ID.”

3. Narrative drift/shift- A fancy way to say, “I know my story and it is true the way I tell it, even if the facts of that telling change over time.”

4. Narrative substitution- A fancy way to say, “I know that what I did was wrong/ineffective/illegal, so I have to tell it in a way that does not make me look bad or that minimizes my culpability.”

5. Narrative refusal- A not so fancy way to say., “I heard your story but stories are for sissies, chumps and relativists. There is an answer and it lies in the adherence to blind orthodoxies, such that when my outcome are less than ideal I have no personal culpability but instead refer to the orthodoxy. “

As I move forward in thinking about such things my rough taxonomy starts to make sense. It makes the connection between the Thackaberry article and what I see in the real life of after-action reports and the national firefighter near miss reporting system. The stories are out there, perhaps disjointed and without structure, but out there, and still there are these huge cultural barriers to risk avoidance.

What is interesting is that in the fire service the “safety culture” is under attack. The detractors argue that we have gone too far, that there is such a thing as “acceptable life loss” when your job is to rescue babies from burning buildings. The detractors use words like, “risk aversion” or worse yet “cowardice” to describe the efforts of those pushing for safer firefighting strategies and tactics.

So the second part of this discussion of narratives is two-fold, right? First you have to consider the language used and manipulated to describe the desired outcomes from two main angles: the metaphorical- firefighting as an extension of military action, we “fight” fires, we engage in “aggressive attacks”, we do “blitz attacks,” we are organized into battalions, and divisions and we call our large caliber streams “deck guns” or “water cannons.” The second part of the language use problem is that we only describe our profession, “saving people from burning buildings,” in terms of something “saving people from burning buildings,” that the vast majority of firefighters never do in the course of a career.  But that act has emerged as a key structural component of the dominant narrative.

Then you have to consider how the culture (what a nebulous term) tends to react to the narrative. I think here the problems are deeper than firemen, mountain climbers, etc…and begin to run into embedded cultural ties to the narrative (especially those where oral histories is a primary connection to the past). I would like to argue that the firemen I speak of and the mountain climbers you studied were all Westerners steeped in what I call the “scientific method” mindset that believes that rationality is the magic elixir. I wonder what the Sherpa take on the story was. (It is interesting that their narratives were not included in the movie or the article).  Would a team of climbers from a matriarchical culture have behaved the same way or better yet would they have even climbed the mountain. What if they were firefighters.

So to work through this notion of trust and the impact it has on ad-hoc teams when a crisis comes (and by crisis I mean a mayday type situation).  To make this work I am going to ask you to imagine a small fire department-much like your own- one where there are “weak players” and “strong players.” People who we all accept as “firemen” and people who we think are afraid, scared to go in, too worried about safety to get the job done, or simply inept. Imagine both types because they are both critical components of trust.

In my imagined trust is a core component of what makes the teamwork. You have to trust the guy leading you into the burning building. Sometimes that trust is built on what I call “strong connections” which is to say, connections that are forged under real life circumstances. You trust the other guy because you have faced danger with him and emerged ok. But that notion does not work with ad hoc teams, right?

You put a new rookie into a fire station and he trusts the Captain, but that cannot be a strong connection because he just met the Captain that morning. He trusts the Captain but with a “weak connection” a connection based on a formalized position in the hierarchy. He really does not trust the Captain. His faith really is in the organization’s ability to put the right people in the right position. This weak connection and those like it is what I think is likely the primary causality in organizational collapse.

We don’t trust each other to do the right things and somebody has to do the right thing so we end up doing multiple versions of the “right thing” which collectively are dangerous and wrong.

But let’s think about this a little bit more. Imagine a recent experience of collapse at a fire. We had “leaders” in place. But we still had this crisis moment. There is this Captain who everyone says “sucks” We know we need to trust him but we can’t. The people we look up don’t. Our bosses criticize, often informally with rolled eyes and smirks. But we can’t do this thing, fight this fire, rescue this person, not with him because he does not fit into the dominant cowboy/hero paradigm. (Not that I think that people ever understand that they are operating in this paradigm-once you understand the paradigm it necessarily follows that you abandon it). It turns out though that this time he is right and if only they had heeded his advice there would have been no problem.

But there was a problem. People were lost, people almost died, it was close. We got away with one…this time.

So we are this ad-hoc team plopped down into the middle of a crisis, a house on fire, we may know a lot about fires and the chemical and physical processes that govern fire behavior but what we don’t know is how this one particular fire works in this particular time and space. We are in the middle of uncertainty.  We have a weak connection with the leadership. We have this official authority who must be followed because that’s the structure of the organization/the framework/the exoskeleton/

Then the crisis comes…

We are at a fire and we are oscillating regularly around the base level of expectation and actual performance. Then someone falls through the floor, a MAYDAY is called and we have to adapt to a crisis within a crisis, the oscillations become chaotic. The organization collapses.

It collapses because the new guy had a weak connection with his/her leader and the other players had weak connections too; there never was an essential trust. There were no strong connections.

The organization collapses because it was based on this faulty notion of leadership, right? There of basic expectation and of ethical and functional parameters that was breached. We expect that the people are going to follow the rules and the leaders. But that doesn’t happen at this fire, and the organization collapses. It does this often.

There were narratives related at that session whose only resemblance to the truth were the characters involved. The characters were right but the motivations, the primal urges that provided the framework for thought and action in the heat of the moment, they were not right.

“I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.” Tim O’Brien said that and I experienced that. I am not sure what kind of truth I heard but I am sure that I heard some narrative shifts, slowly evolving truths, the kind of truths that developed increasingly finer detail the further away from the moment they got.

I was not at this fire and no matter how hard I try I can’t get to that particular confluence of events and time and people. I cannot recreate the dramatic oscillations in the response system that night. I cannot re-understand or re-explain why the hair was standing up on the back of my neck while I listened to the far-off battle, the voices of firemen under stress on the radio echoing across the silence of my sleeping quarters.

That moment is mostly gone. It is not completely gone because a story can never be completely gone. I am certain that the people who were oscillating and those others who were oscillating around them never noticed.  The story lives forever as it dies the death of a thousand tiny fractures.

Once upon a time I went to a therapy session posing as a critique of a fire and what I wish I could have heard what not what I heard. I wanted so badly to tell them that the end only justifies the means in the more vulgar cultures.

I wanted to say that the removal of a body that was most certainly already dead in no way justifies freelancing, insubordination, and a general failure to “get it.” I watched and listened as the individual narratives unfolded, weaving a tapestry of “hero virtue”, a virtue virtuous only in terms of the outcome, a virtue marred ever so slightly by the muted, always qualified near admissions of fault.

I was not at this fire that they were talking about, but I was and after the therapy I am convinced that I will be there again. I know this because if this one fire was an anomaly things would be different; but it was the same. There was the usual rushing about, the cursory adherence to some unwritten rules of “firemanship,” the search for totems in the form of smoke stained accessories, the manipulation of language, “a quick search” as a smoke screen, pun intended. Oh, yes it was the same as it always is and was and shall be.

Joan Didion said of places, “A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.” I think the same is true of the narratives like the ones I heard tonight. Those “firemen” claimed their spaces hard, fought back with raised hair and bared teeth; they writhed, twisted and wrestled. It was painful to watch because it is always painful to watch self-deception. They claimed their space and I watched silently but this time without complicity.

If there is to be that change in culture that the fire service writers are clamoring for it would require that people begin to subordinate their personal agendas to the needs of the team even if they don’t think much of the team or team members. But how can that happen in our subculture while the parent culture continues to celebrate the “cowboy ethos?”

If we had at that fire first supported one small team (the first engine) until the priority changed to the other team (the team rescuing) we would have had a similar outcome. The body would still have been 50,000 PPM of carbon monoxide worth of dead but it would not have been a mindless scrum.

At some point, we must learn to work together towards common goals even if it requires us to not be the hero that day or if it requires us to support someone who we think sucks or whatever. I am not holding my breath.

Tonight I went to a therapy session about I fire I was not involved with in any way. I had to leave a little early because I was starting to laugh out loud in this room full of my peers, subordinates, and bosses. Why was I laughing? Well as Vonnegut says, “Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.” I am sure he is right.

Sometimes experience is useful.

An experienced carpenter is certainly preferable to an inexperienced one. An experienced plumber is certainly better than a DIY neophyte. Even though in both of those occupations you can have eureka moments wondering how that board ever got out of the mill without becoming sawdust or wondering how that “thing” made its way into the shower drain. But most days are predictable days and even when there is a  toy stuck in the shower drain it is not really an emergency and the thing gets fixed eventually and all is well. Experience matters in these situations because sometimes it is easier to get a new board than it is to make the bad one work. It takes an experienced carpenter to know the difference.

Experienced train engineers are quite useful too. Experience means that we start slowing down at mile marker five for “dead man’s curve” at mile marker 10. The new guy doesn’t know.

An experienced firefighter is a little bit different. Not taller, smarter, or better, just different. An experienced firefighter knows that each section of the track can be a “dead man’s curve.” Each fire is inherently different. Every drain has a toy in it because every box truck parked in front of a transit station could be holding the next big bomb that changes everything; that alters the world.

Perhaps that is the difference with the firefighter experience, the chance that it might change everything.

Carpenters build a lifetime of experience making minor adjustments that add up to new structures. Each house is new for sure but the wood goes into it essentially the same way. A plumber does not have to re-write the book on plumbing for each service call. The firefighter has to wonder if the next call to reset the alarm becomes the conflagration of a lifetime.

Perhaps that is the difference with the experience. For the firefighter everyday presents the potential to alter worlds.  Every working fire represents a shift in the world of the person who experiences it. In the worst case imaginable the fire takes a life along with the property and for those left behind their earth tilts on a slightly different axis than for everyone else.

A crooked wall is inconvenient, a clogged drain is inconvenient, the burnt shell of a house, a dead body; they alter worlds. That experience is different.

Decision making under such weight takes on levels of significance that can be overwhelming, can lead to frozen brains, poor judgments, and more agony than most people can bear.  That makes the experience different. Not taller, smarter, or better, just different.

I have been recently accused, by more than one person, of riding on the bandwagon that is systematically destroying the fire department. My argument, I think, is simple: When so much is at stake under circumstances that are so difficult for level headed decision making, why wouldn’t you make some time for thinking the problem through and use it.

The FDNY of September 10, 2001 will never exist again. The pre-Katrina New Orleans is a function of memory and imagination. The life of Mrs. Smith whose son died on the fourth floor of a tenement is different now. And the life of Mrs. Jones, whose husband died a heroic death searching the floor above a fire is different too. The next fire is a chimera.

When your profession, be it  soldier, nurse, or firefighter, policeman, diplomat, or stunt driver, has the potential to alter worlds it only makes sense that you would study, review, reflect, pause when necessary, and/or do anything possible to prevent the world altering events from happening in the first place.

I am by all accounts, the accounts of otherwise rational men, men who buckle their children in car seats, wear their seatbelts, wash their lettuce before eating it, and avoid bottles labeled poison, but wish to run headlong into “aggressive” fire attacks on the off chance that someone might be inside the vacant house, ruining the fire department that they love. The ruinous behavior I profess is called reflection.

Experience can be a wonderful thing if it is meaningful, that is if by getting it you reach a terminal state of adequate and actionable knowledge.  Experience is a wonderful thing for a perfectly spherical earth spinning in a frictionless Newtonian universe. However, the second you add friction, or what Karl Weick called “cosmologies,” things change, and they change because you now are in a realm where it is possible to alter worlds. That has to be a different experience.