• HIGH-RISE PERILS week. You get complacent. Nothing's going to happen. And this lime. these
you'll learn in your career is thal- whenever you let your guard down, you're
people were going crazy." Jacksonville Fire and Hescuc was able to save all of
going (0 gel smacked." So how do we keep from gelting
fhe Cathcdr:ll Towers' occupants; bUl,
"smacked" because of complacency?
Sands warns, "Complacency is what will
According to James t'o'iocklcr, a 26-year
kill you." Myou think Inew bUildings! are not going La burn," Kolar pOinL'i out. "And it's hard for you lO have that mindsct
veteran of the Houston (TX') fire Depart-
that, hey, this could happen. But I'm telling you that probably the biggest I..hillg
ment, it all begins with leadership by example. '" find that Iher'lI [my mem· bersl do whal I do. People do what the captain docs, I don't renlly explain myself. I just kind of do what I think is
necessary, and people follow me," l"tockler, assigned 10 the downtown high-rise district, was on the depart· ment's heavy rescue squad in 2001 when it responded (0 a fire at dlC Four Leaf Towers high-rise apartment building, j\.'locklcr's crew was scm upstairs to res· cue the captain of the first·in fire auack team, who had become disoricntcd, was running out of air, and c~llled ~l Maydny. Mockler recalls hearing the captain saying, "Whcrc's my backup engine?" and thcn, "We'rc having trouble," before declaring a Mayday. "EvcllIually, we found him," MockJer says. "Il was :1 big rugb)' scrum. SOllle guys wcre running out of air. One of the guys knocked me ovcr." Aflcr a desper:Ite struggle that nearly cost the lives of Mocklcr and his crew, they succeeded in reaching thc downed caplain :lI1d re· moving him from the fire noar. Despite their heroic efforts, the caplain did not survive, In Mockler's eyes, the crew will :lvoid compl:lCcncy so long as their leader doesn't show cornpl:lCency. "I think it's a leadership thing," hc says. He asl<s, "When responding 10 calls for alarms sounding in hotels and apartment build· ings, do company officers put on their gear? I think there arc a lot of guys who don't pUll.heir equipment on," he offered. Mockler stresscs that hc doesn't intcnd to be a victim of complacency: "I don't \~lnl to be on the fire noor and havc to comc running out because I wcnt up witham my gear or something," hc explains. Mockler uses the frequent false .. Iann responses he makes in high-rises as op-pOflunities to lr::lin his crews and teach Ihem about the building. "We use all l!lese automatic alarms we make," he says, ":15 :1 fire drill for us. We don't look to wrile up any tickets about excessive aJanns. II's like a training session for US." \~en responding to automatic alarms, he adds. "We go to the fire control ccnter; wc get the firefighters ke)', .md then we procc(.'(! .IS if we had :tn incident. And then 1 drill-you know, each guy gels to nm the elevator at different incidents." tn this W;I)', Mockler transforms a false 'I!.arm from an annoyance 10 a leaming op-portunily and transforms the "clectronic ghcHo" into a training ground,
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