COMMAND & CONTROL
Who Should Run This Fire? Neil Bibby
I have, for many years, had concerns with seeing the chief fire officer or one of his deputies, in full firefighting gear, on television news at the scene of a fire. I also know that if the most senior officers are in attendance, there will be three or four other senior people in attendance as well. Let us think about this and I generalise because there are many variations on this theme. However, they all come to the same point – do we not trust our field officers to do their job?
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his is not the waffling of a grumpy old chief (some may differ) but reflections while sitting back in retirement and, may be, realising I was part of the problem too. My fundamental question is: why do we have so much brass at a fire? First let us look at the excellent training now undertaken by all first line officers. In advanced countries of the world (notice I did not say “in the western world” this is because many Asian fire services are more advanced than those in the western world) most junior officers, after five years in the field, go through significant training and examinations to show that they can handle a fire of at least third alarm (small factory, six to eight appliances and crews); more to the point there could be six officers of that calibre at the scene.
ASIA PACIFIC FIRE
The equipment in this modern era provides fire officers with a greater knock-down capacity than could have been imagined in the past; a fire appliance has two or even three times the capacity of three decades ago while also utilising fewer personnel. This means most medium size fires are under control or contained very quickly. In a large number of cases the senior officer response has not changed from the 1970s when equipment was more basic and required larger numbers of firefighters to bring them under control. After the first wave of appliances had arrived and set up, other fire appliances arriving were just people transports to the fire. Normal practice is for a battalion chief/district officer (DO) to drive through the streets “code one” and arrive just as the flames are dying down, 79