This is a live recording of the last session at the 2023 Blue Card Hazard Zone Conference in Sharonville, Ohio. This episode summarizes some of the emerging topics discussed at this year's Hazard Zone Conference.
This episode features Josh Blum, Nick Brunacini, Dan Madrzykowski, Frank Leeb, Chris Stewart, Jeffery King, and John Vance.
Sign up for the B Shifter Buckslip, our free weekly newsletter here.
Shop B Shifter here.
You can register for the 2024 Hazard Zone Conference now! Register here!
Please subscribe and share. Thank you for listening!
Lastly, we express our gratitude to everyone who attended the 2024 Blue Card Hazard Zone Conference and you, our listeners, for tuning into the B-Shifter podcast. Enjoy!
This episode was recorded on October 6, 2023 in Sharonville, Ohio.
This is a live recording of the last session at the 2023 Blue Card Hazard Zone Conference in Sharonville, Ohio. This episode summarizes some of the emerging topics discussed at this year's Hazard Zone Conference.
This episode features Josh Blum, Nick Brunacini, Dan Madrzykowski, Frank Leeb, Chris Stewart, Jeffery King, and John Vance.
Sign up for the B Shifter Buckslip, our free weekly newsletter here.
Shop B Shifter here.
You can register for the 2024 Hazard Zone Conference now! Register here!
Please subscribe and share. Thank you for listening!
Lastly, we express our gratitude to everyone who attended the 2024 Blue Card Hazard Zone Conference and you, our listeners, for tuning into the B-Shifter podcast. Enjoy!
This episode was recorded on October 6, 2023 in Sharonville, Ohio.
Alright, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the B-Shifter podcast here. At the 2023 Hazard Zone conference, we might have a seventh panel member. Okay, john Vance here. We've got Nick Brunassini, jeffrey King, chris Stewart, dan Madrakowski, frank Leib and Josh Bloom and we're going to be taking some of your questions today. If you haven't got on the app yet, go ahead and get on the app and ask some questions. You know ways to date. Taylor Swift, maybe Nick's focus right now. So thanks everyone for being up on the panel. It's been a great conference here. We're looking forward to the conference next year and people are already signing up for that, so it's going to be a lot of fun. Alright, first question what emerging tech, equipment, techniques or innovation is the next game changer, both positive and negative? Water How's that changing our game?
Speaker 1:It's the ultimate winner. Vent and water works pretty effectively, especially when you put it in the right spot in the right way, isn't that funny?
Speaker 2:though, like these trends come and go, you know, and the things that we were doing five, ten years ago, and thinking of things like fog nails, like is that emerging? Is that going to continue to build?
Speaker 1:I think it's just another way to deliver water.
Speaker 2:There you go, alright.
Speaker 1:I think Dan said it best Flow water, flow water, flow water.
Speaker 3:Dan does say it best, so I'm going to say it for him, even though he's sitting next to me. The funny thing is with additives that you add to water, the closer you get to 100% water, the better it is. So no additives, right Water works best. But I'll give you a two that I think. So for training.
Speaker 3:I think virtual reality and how we've seen the accelerated pace of technology and that and where that is leading us, that we can recreate any event, any incident, our recent line of duty death with Timothy Klein we did a 360 imaging of the entire structure and at some point we'll be able to walk all of our firefighters through the structure and that is a game changer in how we will be training our firefighters. I also think our drone program. Seeing how much that has progressed and just in the last couple of years, I think at some point we'll be delivering water via drones to at least put a couple of gallons of water on at least a high-rise fire and just to make it where we could get up there and operate. Even if it just buys us the minutes it takes, because the vertical environment adds minutes to the response time to actually get to the fire floor, very different than a two-story private dwelling. So I think there'll be game changes and I don't speak about negatives.
Speaker 4:I think the use of drones I don't know how far away it is for suppression, but certainly for understanding the fire scene and using that then for training to help understand what happened at the fire scene. That gives you a very different perspective. We had an opportunity to work with FDNY where they provided us with video footage from the drone as well as thermal imaging footage from a drone, and so we could see how the heat and the smoke was moving through the space and then how it was they had an overpressure event extend out of one of the doors into the street and we were able to kind of track before that and after that and kind of explain that event. So I think, again, helping the understanding, I think you know, the best innovation we can do is more knowledge. I think if the firefighters have more knowledge so they can make better decisions on the fireground whether it's understanding how to use their equipment more effectively or understanding fire dynamics better all that will help to make them better firefighters and that's really where the investment needs to be.
Speaker 4:There were some studies by the Navy years ago and they were looking at, you know, different nozzles, different tools, different things, and what they really found when they picked up the best efficiency was when they ran those firefighters through the drills over and over and over again and as they went on the shipboard fires where they had to come, basically like into a basement fire, down and onto the fire decks, they could fight the fire on its own level. They found that after they'd repeated that four or five times the effectiveness of that crew and the amount of water they used the amount of water was less and the effectiveness of that crew, they were faster and faster. So please don't disregard or don't trade off training for technology blindly, because if you do adopt any new technology, if you don't train your firefighters thoroughly and how to use it, and if they don't understand it, you're not likely to get the benefit from it.
Speaker 5:I just got one piece on the technology thing and it's a follow up to what you said, Dan. So thermal imaging cameras, we have them and I don't know that we're doing the greatest job training people on what they can and cannot do. So exterior size up and interior size up. So what do you really see? And we spend a lot of time talking about that. So I think that it comes back to the training thing. But that technology piece and it is evolving a little bit more with thermal imaging cameras, like how it really works and what it really can do. So I think that's just another piece. We already have it, but the training on that technology.
Speaker 2:So next question has there been any consideration into the similarities and differences between attic and basement fires?
Speaker 4:So we have a study both for exterior and attic fires, where we started fires on the outside as well as on the inside of attics. Attics certainly are going to be a ventilation limited fire. Access to the fuel is one of the challenges and so similar to a basement, some basements have full access where you can go in a sliding glass door at grade level, take in a hose line, attack the fire in its own level. There are other basements that are limited to small windows or they might be entirely underground and the only access is through the interior stair. And if the interior stairs compromise, then we're looking at things like penetrating nozzles or fog nails or something to try to get some water introduced in there to make it tenable enough for a firefighter to finish the job, if the structural support it. Needless to say, these enclosed spaces might enable some type of overpressure event, back draft or smoke explosion. So we're currently looking at studies on those.
Speaker 4:Again for the attic, as we talked about a little bit earlier this week, what's burning in the attic?
Speaker 4:When you're seeing flame come out of a eave or out of a gable vent, it's likely that there's not enough oxygen in the attic to actually support combustion, so it's hot enough, the fuel is being generated, it's pyrolyzing, it's going from a solid to a flammable gas so that it can burn when it reaches the oxygen.
Speaker 4:So you've got to control that ventilation until you can get water in there to cool it. And we found that if you have eave access and this is part of the hose stream mechanic prop demonstration as well you could throw water up into the eave with a straight stream or a solid stream and it will go into the eave. What basically? Wash the roof decking on one side and then go down the other side and that's the fuel that's actually burning. When you try to make that attack from the gable end, the joists are basically destroying your water stream and cutting that water off and not letting it penetrate into the attic. So you can't really cool as much as you'd like and take that fuel out of consideration. Similar with hose streams and small windows for the basement.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm not going to argue with Dan geez. Alright, here's another question. Oh, the Jeff might be able to answer this one. Do we have any plans of introducing high rise operations as a CE or possibly a workshop?
Speaker 6:That is a question that we get far too often. I think what we have to make sure that our folks understand is that the system is about using the strategic decision making model and plugging in the critical fire ground factors. Having to go back and reapply the system to every situation just means they're not really understanding. We'll probably have some CEs. We'll talk about these things and communicate and share. But to create a high rise module for different organizations is going to change. You talk to one group. They'll say a high rise is a four story building. You take to another group it doesn't even count as a high rise till it gets to six. So we'll create some stuff to help support that. But I think to say a full on high rise module at this point may not be something that we would build, because there's enough with what we have to make sure they can handle it.
Speaker 2:Can we work on getting a system that will allow batch loading for SIM completion?
Speaker 6:That's a blue card. That's a great question. That's a great question and that's a Michael question that I think we can have those with him, that we can say that all 12 people successfully pass this and be able to do it a lot easier. That will speed up the back end stuff for some of our instructors and I think that would be a great value added. Customer service piece. Again, that command function number seven, where we review, evaluate and revise. Most of the changes come from the people out in the audience so we can make those changes if those are things that they need.
Speaker 2:Next question Any and I'm going to combine two questions here Recommendations for implementing blue card in a culturally resistant fire department, and how do you intelligently educate those who are opposed to blue card because NIMS exists?
Speaker 7:If the fire chief supports blue card, the fire department will do blue card. Nims was not designed for type four and five incidents. It wasn't. Blue card was accredited because there's not by ESAC, because there's not an existing standard for NIMS type four and five incident operations. That's why they did it. Nims existed then. Nims was when you look at 1500, 1561, 1026, all of that. Nims is for one, two, three. Nims doesn't have strategy, it doesn't have work cycles. It's got. It had no rapid intervention back in those days. So if the fire chief supports doing blue card, the fire department will do blue card. They're going.
Speaker 7:When you do blue card in your fire department, there are going to be a number of your officers that say this is bullshit and we're not doing it. Well, that's no different than saying we're not going to take blood pressures, we're not going to clean the stations. How do you deal with that Same way? You're going to do it or you don't work here anymore. That's put up or shut up. Who's in charge? I have seen too many times with fire chief. They're only friends or company officers that train. So they say we're doing blue card, company officers go present it. The chiefs stop it. Your company officers, your training officers. You're beneath us, we're not doing this. You can't tell us.
Speaker 7:Fire chief shows up. Here's a story. This happened, this really happened. Training officer doing a thing, blue card Chief said bullshit, captain, we're not doing it. Ha ha ha. Company training officer goes back fire chief asked him hey, how blue card go? He tells him what happened. He says oh really, those son of a bitch is did. Okay. He says you ain't a captain anymore, you are the assistant chief in charge of training. Here's your badge. How did it go after that, josh? Did they do what you told them next? Yeah, worked out just fine. Yeah, oh, we got rank and power. Okay, now they outrank you. Oh, we'll do it then. Oh, so you were a whole time yeah uh-huh.
Speaker 7:I don't I digress, but it's what it is. If the fire department decides to do blue card in, the fire chief says we're doing it, it's just that's what does it. It garrison said it during one of our presentations the fish stinks from the head down. I've been doing this long enough, for it was you would go places and start to present it. You could tell this is not gonna work here. It's just, there's too much dysfunction. It's hard to implement something when a fire department's at war with itself over whatever it is.
Speaker 3:So that's my answer. And although I hate following him, I'm gonna add to that because you're he's a tough act to follow. But it doesn't matter what you're implementing. If you're implementing blue card, if you're intimate, if you're implementing a New tactic how to reduce cancer in a fire service how to implement you will research. It doesn't. It doesn't matter if you have a cultural resistant department. It's training, it's education, it's an understanding of the why sound practices have sound reasoning and it's just that, continual education.
Speaker 3:Obviously for for Rapid or accelerated Adoption of new policies, you need to have department leadership on board, because you're a hundred cent right. You go to places and you see, you know you have bigger problems than implementing XYZ. Right, you got a fix, you got a fiction department and make sure of that. That you're, that you're open. A beginner's mindset is what I like to say. Right, so Approach everything we do, approach new technology, approach new procedures, approach it wouldn't a beginner's mindset and you'll learn. You'll be surprised at how much you could learn. And so said, instead of just saying this is bullshit, because when you just say bullshit, it means you don't understand the issues that we're talking about. So education, training and leadership from the top always helps. But it doesn't matter how you're changing, trying to change the culture. If I try and change something in the FDNY and I don't have good why behind it I'm not gonna get anywhere. So again, doesn't matter what we're implementing.
Speaker 6:I'd agree with that a hundred percent. I think one of the things we used to talk about in some of the fire dynamics boot camps is we go through the questions at the end of Everything. And Pete van Dorp stood up one at one of the last ones we had and they asked him the question Well, how do you implement stuff at a department that's resistant? And he said you want to implement stuff, find a new department and go be the fire chief. If you don't have support from the top down, it's gonna be very hard to move it from the middle. It can be done, but it probably doesn't have the lasting impact that you want if it's not supported from the very top.
Speaker 2:The best blue card classes I've ever seen for a department transitioning into blue card is when the fire chief shows up on the first day of the first training, gets up in front of everybody taking the training and say he says or she this is what we're doing, this is our direction, we're a hundred percent on board. Now train Gary. Did we miss anything? I mean, gary's been talking about this for the last two days. Okay, next question what's the best advice you've ever been given as a firefighter or fire officer?
Speaker 3:I'll lead off with this one. I have two pieces that I think it was given from my the very first captain. On the very first time I walked into the FDMI firehouse and Captain Jean McGowan told me to learn something fire-related from everybody you meet. I learned learn something from everybody you meet and sometimes you learn what not to do, and and and. The other was to read something fire-related every tour and for you know those, those two pieces of advice have have benefited, benefited me Greatly stay learnable long ago, somebody told me do what's right, no matter how bad it hurts later.
Speaker 1:So it's about the final outcome, not like how necessarily what it takes to get there, and I think I live by that every day, or I try to well I can say Probably one of the greatest pieces of advice I've gotten, and that I've had the most difficult time following, is don't do anything that feels good when you're angry, and so that is pretty incredible advice. It's also incredibly difficult to do, at least when you used to have red hair. So that that's our old boss would say that regularly.
Speaker 6:I will give mine to senior captain Eddie Bell with the Houston fire department. On one of my first days at station 31 as a rookie firefighter and he told me boy, I'm gonna tell you the truth, we're gonna over complicate this job and we're gonna make it look really difficult, but the truth is it's real simple because when we get to the fire ground, if you put the wet stuff on the red stuff, we go home. Kind of goes back to what you said and I'm sorry about the F bomb.
Speaker 7:Ego's eat brains. Yeah, control yourself. Only you can is kind of what that means.
Speaker 2:Nick's already lost a microphone.
Speaker 7:Hiding it. It's not the only I.
Speaker 2:I would say be nice, and we say it all the time at my place because, just like Chief Garrison says, with the fish rotting from the head down, if, if, as chief officers, we're being crummy to people and we're playing play back payback games and and have a Goofy internal politics, that is going to spill out onto the street and we're not gonna have a safe department. We're gonna have a department that doesn't back each other up. You know that's gonna be the focus instead of the customer being the focus. Moving on to the next question, and remember you can get on the app and ask questions. We're gonna take just a few more With the correlation to the project Mayday and blue card lecture slideshow and workshops. Is Blue card in touch with anyone or attempting to pick up the gap by Don Abbott's passing?
Speaker 8:No.
Speaker 7:In fact, a friend of mine the other day Went to a meeting with some technical people and what they were doing is getting ready to repost Don Abbott's project Mayday back online. So when he died, there was really nobody to take that over. There was a bunch of academics working on it, but it was just kind of went and there was no one to pick it up and carry it on. So Somebody, some enterprise in capitalist, once the website went down, they purchased the, the domain address in effort to sell it back and and I think it got reposted up. But there was, they were going back and forth we're gonna give it to you.
Speaker 7:Well, we're gonna do this, we, you guys take, and it's now we're, we're solution, we don't track. I mean, we, we do what we're gonna do and no, it was the answer. And I, from what I heard, dan, you guys weren't gonna do it either. It had to be a funded type of a thing and that didn't come Really well, that's what? What? They're full of shit then, because the people I talked to said we don't know that you, you Else told us no, basically.
Speaker 4:That's. I don't believe that to be true. That may not be but still it would, yeah, so afterwards, if there's a contact, please give it to me and we'll reach out.
Speaker 7:Yeah, I will, but that's gonna have to be a staff thing. That thing lives because Don Abbott took it on and he just wasn't gonna Let it not not succeed. So he took it to where it was and when he went away it faded. But I mean, that's kind of what happens when you hold on to something that tight and he kind of he, he was very proud and protective of that, for good reason. But there was really no mechanism to keep it. They had no legs to keep going once he was gone.
Speaker 4:I mean, that's a good example for all of us. What's your succession plan Right for your organization, for yourself, for your family? Important thing to think about. I.
Speaker 1:Think we need to be careful about who in the fire service does try and take ownership of it. And you know, depending on who runs it and who manages it will be dependent on the perspective that they take. And I certainly would like you well, or some academic, you know, pure research folks to do it, because they're they tend to be way less biased than the rest of us in the Fire service.
Speaker 7:You know the you would think the IFF would want to play a role in that somewhere. I mean because politically that information is the way you the same welfare of their folks.
Speaker 7:Yeah, and the body politic? No man, we're killing ourselves over this stuff we want. We need the city's help there. The communities help to stop it. So you would think that they would have labor would have a role in it, you would think, and the eye chiefs would be the other, because their management, so somewhere in there. But I don't know. You talk about succession plans. I don't know that those organizations have them. I think they just pass on and pass on and tell us that you just pass on it.
Speaker 4:I mean, another organization that supports the fire service, of course, is the National Fallen firefighters and they pick up many projects that are aimed to get ahead of it right. Certainly they support the widows and and children of Firefighters that have fallen, but also they're trying to limit the number of folks that are in that situation and trying to do proactive projects to do that. So I mean there's a, there's a family of fire service organizations that On good days, coordinate and cooperate and whatnot, and and I and there are many good days, I would say so you know, I think this is one of those projects that Needs to be brought to the group and if somebody you know figure out the people that currently hold it, how could they be helped to to continue on? Or, if they want to hand it off, how does it need to evolve and get some agreement so it can best serve the people out here?
Speaker 7:You know, and the other piece of that is, if you took just the data that currently exists there, you could Restructure that entire thing. Well, I mean, you're just gonna modernize it, but where it's easier to track that, easier to report it, easier to take that information and actually do something with it. So I mean there's a huge upside to some organization taking that over and managing it and, like you say, a much more proactive way.
Speaker 2:All right. Next question what is your best advice to create a fire department full of leaders and to get people to follow and or buy into training, even when they don't want to train?
Speaker 3:Mentor, mentor and mentor. Can you continue training from your newest firefighter on up Organizations take way too long to invest in there, in their people. Oftentimes it's not until they promote to lieutenant before we decide that we're gonna give them leadership training. If you have people that want to get training, give them training. They want to come to this conference, they want to come to other conferences. Support them. I hear people say if I give my people training, they're gonna be so good they're gonna leave my organization. Yeah, but if you don't, they're gonna stay.
Speaker 3:So it really starts with your entry-level firefighters and it's a career Long worth of learning. And look at some of the leadership in the fire service that they continually. They sit in classes. They're still learning. They continually have that that begin his mindset. I learned so much in the last two days. I'm grateful that I was able to do that, that I'm able to learn from Everybody and interactions that I've heard. So it's just invest in your people. They're your greatest resource. Your greatest resource is a thinking, well-trained, physically fit firefighter that understands the why and, when necessary, can operate in the gray areas of our procedures where it's not fully defined, and they could find the correct outcome. And that is to me. That is it. And if you continue doing that, nobody has a choice. They got to train. If I'm working and you're training, you're training right. Or, like Nick said earlier, find another department, right, but we're gonna train, it's not. It's not optional. I should not be optional.
Speaker 1:She part of your, your culture and your DNA and and you won't get there if you do not have an environment and a culture of trust inside your organization. If you cannot get them to trust the why and trust the reasonings behind what you're doing and Putting them in a position where you're demonstrating you truly care about them and the work that they do, then everything else is lip service. So that that, that culture as a leader and that culture as organizational change agents, is huge. If you lack trust and you can't buy it, you can't rent it, you can't be given. You've got to earn it. If you don't have it, it will make your job infinitely more difficult.
Speaker 6:That trust in a fire service is a really big issue and it's probably a little bit broader than the topic that we're sitting here having the conversation about. But I think there's an element that we need to have a conversation about. What the people is Is well, what are we talking about? This room, I think, would trust each other on the fire ground that if something happened, all of us would be willing to go in. I mean, we care about each other. That's why we're here. But is there trust in your fire department? Is there trust at your station level? Do you, do your firefighters trust you as officers enough to say I don't think this is working without fear of Retaliation or something else. If we don't have a trusting environment, we're not gonna have functionally safe systems, and there's got to be trust up and down the line, and I think it's a. It's a big topic that we probably need to approach at some point and have a conversation with if we want to do it justice.
Speaker 2:But trust is huge here is a blue card operations question. What is the best way to keep personnel involved to maintain Continuing education once they are certified as a blue card? I see that's a curriculum question.
Speaker 6:Jeff, that is a curriculum question. Look, the truth is it's a certification process. It is a certification that you're gonna hold and any Certification that you hold has to be validated over and over again to ensure that you're meeting the minimum requirements and you're functioning at A test ready level. Part of that recertification process is doing the continuing education. We've got an expansive library that we're making larger and larger. There are certification labs you got to put your folks through, but it doesn't have to be just the labs. I can pull audio footage and we can do grades on audio footage and give you Qualifications for your strip mall on the fire that you ran last night and check you off. So it's just a matter if you're gonna be in the program, then you need to be in the program and you need to follow what the program outlines for you. It's worked.
Speaker 6:This is not something that has happened overnight. This has been going on for decades. At this point We've got it fine tuned. It's just a matter of you holding your people accountable. Frank talked about it this morning. If you care about your people, if you love your people, hold them accountable. We don't we let them off the hook left and right and by proxy of doing that. We are normalizing some really bad behaviors and we're making them acceptable. Stop pretending we care and show that you care by holding folks accountable. That's how you get them through a recertification process.
Speaker 7:We developed this program hundred years ago Reorganize the fire department around it, built a training program, started sending people through. So before we did blue card we had an administratively based organization around the fire department. The Deputy chiefs who ran operation all worked a staff job. So one of the changes we made is that you can't have the bc's who work a 24-hour shift Be supervised by a bunch of deputy chiefs, especially ones with the bc's know more tactically than the deputies do, which is kind of the case going from operations to admin, switch the whole fire department over but went back to shift commanders as deputies. So all the battalion chiefs now report to the shift commanders. There's a it's like being a cardinal in the church to get a red ring. We start delivering the program. There were enough people going through that we couldn't do it quarterly so we had to do trimesters about 650 700 people every training session. So we would meet with everybody once or three times a year for four hours. We ended up operationally managing the Phoenix Fire Department for five years through training. So if there was something to wash or process or needed to be fixed, we did it. At the command training center, the example I like using we have ambulances staffed by firefighters.
Speaker 7:Fire Department runs the ambulance system in Phoenix. We were having accountability problems with AMBOs because they would all respond as quickly as they could to the. You'd have a working house fire. There'd be three engines, one ladder, two BCs and 27 ambulances. There were so many goddamn ambulances and battalion chiefs had a name for it. They called it alien abductions. All these AMBOs would be there, the doors would be open, passenger driver and there'd be a pair of tennis shoes on either side and no one present. They're all gone. They're all hiding inside the burning building. Shift commanders, telepoto, battalion chiefs, this is going to stop. We're going to kill somebody on an AMBO. We had fires where we went defensive and five minutes later you're watching AMBOs who operate inside and they're like goddamn it, get the ambulances out.
Speaker 7:So we put together. It took less than a week. We had every engine company that had an ambulance assigned to their station come to the CTC for the shift. It was a one-hour deal and we said this is the problem we're having. We're not going to have this anymore. So there's no more secret deals between the company officer and the AMBO. We're not taking ambulances off.
Speaker 7:Fire calls A young ambulance driver firefighters, the crew will be used. What you're going to do is you're going to say engine five is on the scene, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We're command and we've got ambulance five with us. So the responding chief knows you go from four to six and the ambulance is with you. It's pretty simple then. So that becomes the deal. It's all we want the deal. Within one month the problem was fixed. We fixed it through training and that's how it went, and nobody got executed or beat up. We just said this is the deal. We know what you're doing. You got to know send to fight it, as Pete would say.
Speaker 7:Terry, the best chief have broke all the rules that they're enforcing now and understand that and the way all that works. So we use the continuing education program every day in our fire department as part of the command training piece, and that's truly any issue in operations. We managed it through the command training center at that point and it got to the point where, like the personnel division wants to do the grooming standard and bring everybody up to date on that, the assistant chief ends up calling one of the shift commanders and says, hey, we need the first 30 minutes of command training. Why? Well, because we have a new tattoo standard we're going to discuss, and command training gets 85% attendance and EMS won't let us there because they get 100, because it's a certification that you have to have. So we're going to be there. So the shift commander told them no, you're not. The reason we have 85% attendance is because we don't talk about tattoos and haircuts. We could give a shit about that. Well, we have to do this. Well, yeah, build an administrative training center and do it. You ain't on my paper route, pal, go away.
Speaker 7:So you had to kind of protect your program too while you were doing it, which is and this was the reason everybody wanted to come into training, because it's where we held everyone accountable. We heard that over the last two days accountable, accountable, uh-uh. You come in and we're going to talk about incident action planning. So all it is is what's the best action to take at this particular fire? We all agree on it, 99% of us. Yeah, attack line through alpha X, y and Z support this way.
Speaker 7:So then the after action review piece is if somebody screws that up and you say, hey, we agreed on this, well, you know, no, I didn't do that. Well, what they did then is they broke a promise. That's a whole lot different. So it's on them at that point. So, no, no, no, no, we agreed it as a training and you're not doing it. So an old captain who won't wear their turnouts at the call? No, we talked about what a supervisor looks like for a task level crew. You got all your shit on and you're with your crew. Well, no, no, they say, stay out of their way. Uh-uh, see, you fix it through. Everything gets fixed through training. Then that becomes the lens. To do that, though, and to make it work, you got to train all the time. Well, that just becomes part of it.
Speaker 7:There's this big thing between fire departments, or schizophrenic Ops chief, training chief, who's in charge? Well, ops chief says we're doing this program. Training chief says no, you're not. We said no, what we're going to do is we're going to make them our aids. So you're going to do what Said we're going to make the safety officers the battalion chief's aids. That's what we're going to do, because that's going to work better, because now safety's inside the tent with us. They're not running around outside being managed by another division. They're supposed to support operations level safety, not medical services. So that became the thing. So operations started collecting all the stuff. But now this is something where you have a fire chief that says all of everything we do is going to be based on customer service and firefighter safety.
Speaker 7:Well, get rid of administration and push it in operations where it can all be managed this way. In fact, if he would have stayed fire chief a lot, much longer, I think that's what you would have seen is fewer staff chiefs. You would have seen fewer chiefs wearing gold and white and more wearing t-shirts and brush pants. They're part of the workforce then. So, and then that's how you get the organization down, the leadership down into the organization, as you never stop being part of the line at that point.
Speaker 7:No, this is, I'm not a chief, I'm just a strategic level officer.
Speaker 7:In this thing, you do your job, I do mine and it all works together. So we, we refine that in training. Well, no, frank said it. No, you don't get any training until you the training academy and then officer school, and then you're done. You look at officer one and two and three and four and five and six I don't know what they're up to now 15, 20 million.
Speaker 7:There's no hazard zone shit in it in the first eight modules. You're like well, that's where we get our lunch given to us, is there? Well, when operations takes over, what Frank described today is an after action review. With the escalator, it's like we have this problem that keeps coming up, and so we're going to make sure that we're capable of doing this. He, he just did the training himself, and then the his crews know what to do. We all come to agreement. Seeing your fire officers have a deep under should have a deep understanding of the hazards they face. So we all are operating off the same sheet of music. Then that's the only way you're going to get to Mary Travis Kelsey.
Speaker 2:One last question and then after that we're going to ask you a question, because we've got some prizes that Josh is going to hand out, so don't go anywhere. One last question for the panel, then we're going to ask you some questions. Has the old saying of keep your eyes open and your mouth shut changed over the last 10 years?
Speaker 3:Yes, and what's?
Speaker 2:changed with that.
Speaker 3:The police firefighter wants to know more of the why they've been brought up to be like that. So every generation is different. Every generation hates the generation before. Even the greatest generation that went to war had a generation that said they suck. We got to figure out the strengths and weaknesses of the current generation, just like other generations before us, and leverage them for our advantage as many, many advantages, especially as we get closer and closer to tech native firefighters, firefighters that have had technology since they were born. We're pretty close to that now. The iPhone came out in 2007 or eight, so you think about that. We're close to having firefighters that have always had an iPhone.
Speaker 3:So I think explaining the why is the same reason why servant leadership is more popular today and an accepted model. It's how you reach today's younger firefighters and new generations. So, yeah, it's, they want to know why, and they shouldn't know why. We have better firefighters when they know why. So I think that's important and just everything revolves around training. By the way, training is the heart and soul of an organization. Nothing happens without training. It doesn't matter what position you are. It doesn't matter you could be a firefighter that responds off duty. Your training is what supported what you were doing in some way, shape or form. If you have no training, you have no heart and you have no soul in your department. So that's why we must demand high quality, frequent training. Don't let anybody, don't let anybody deny you of your training.
Speaker 1:I think we get angry at the new generations because we did a shitty job of explaining things right. We assume that they know, and we assume or we expect that they would know something, and it comes back to like Terry's accountability model is if they don't perform well, the first thing we have to ask is did we have a clear expectation? The second thing we have to ask is did we do a good job or an effective job at training them? Oftentimes the answer is in one of those two. And who's in charge of that? Us, not the new generation, not the new firefighters. So the first thing I think we need to do is get a mirror and look at it when we're answering questions about the change in the new generations is all right. What are we doing to help them? What are we doing to fix them? What are we doing to train them to actually be good at their jobs?
Speaker 2:We really appreciate the guys who've been up here, not only teaching for the last couple of days, but participating in this. Frank Leib, thank you very much. Dan Madrakowski, of course, nick Brunassini and Jeffrey King we're going to keep Chris up here to help us with the microphone, but let's give these gentlemen a round of applause and thank them for being on the podcast. Thank you, and right now we're going to do one thing. So this is something that we asked earlier and we wanted to find out what's one thing that you learned. I'll go down in the crowd if you want to emcee that and I'll take whatever you're giving away.
Speaker 5:From the last two days. One thing that you learned big takeaway.
Speaker 9:To mind with this generation is the importance of imparting the why to our firefighters. I think it's integral, it's something that I can kind of identify with, but the younger folks definitely need to understand the why and that's how you get the buy in.
Speaker 5:I think so we heard, we heard, we heard why I don't know 500 times, and I think we've seen it now like a thousand times in the last two days. So that's a big part of it, and I think we all need to start with that. There's even a book, right, Jeff? Start with why. All right, we got one more.
Speaker 8:Last one. One of the things I learned, I guess, the after action report from Josh and Eric was we need to collaborate, we need to communicate, we need to commit, we need to be honest with ourselves. I think a lot of the times we actually lie to ourselves because we normally have the pat on the back and you did such a great job, communication after an incident and we don't talk about the stuff we need to improve. So I think until we get over that, I think we're going to start or continue running into the same problems and within our agencies and we won't be able to rise to the occasion for the public. Great Thank you.
Speaker 5:John.
Speaker 2:All right. Well, we're going to wrap things up. First of all, we'd like to thank everyone for hanging out. It's dangerously close to being five o'clock somewhere here and we appreciate you, late in the afternoon, hanging out with us and participating in this. We want to thank you for attending. We want to thank all the instructors, the staff and we look forward to seeing you at the 2024 Blue Card Hazard Zone Conference right back here in Sharonville. So keep listening to the B-Shifter podcast. You can find it right there by scanning that your code. Thank you very much for listening to B-Shifter.