B Shifter
Fire command and leadership conversations for B Shifters and beyond (all shifts welcome)!
B Shifter
Support Officers
This episode features Nick Brunacini, Chris Stewart and John Vance.
We want your helmet (for the AVB CTC)! Check this out to find out more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qg5_ZwoCZo0
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This episode was recorded at the AVB CTC in Phoenix, AZ on September 12, 2024, although this was supposed to be an "evergreen" episode!
How can the presence of support officers transform the efficiency and safety of fire response operations? Join us as we make a compelling case for the critical 24/7 role these officers play. From maintaining accountability and offering crucial information to enhancing overall incident management, discover why support officers are indispensable on the fire ground. We'll unpack their multifaceted responsibilities that allow incident commanders to focus on strategic and tactical decisions, ultimately leading to well-coordinated and effective emergency responses.
welcome to the b shifter podcast. John vance, nick brunasini, chris stewart here today. Thank you so much for joining us. Fellas, how are you doing? Rather sweaty yeah it's still hot, yeah well, or it could be cold.
Speaker 2:We don't know, this is an evergreen episode.
Speaker 1:Damn it, chris we're not.
Speaker 2:We're not here all year round. I just went through the rules of the podcast and the first rule was I go.
Speaker 1:This is a podcast that could air at any time. We're going to keep it in here now because now it's entertaining.
Speaker 3:Just being honest, yeah, but I don't think seasonal breaks that evergreen piece, because it's still seasonal and we haven't gotten to where the whole thing's just on fire all the time. Yet that's true.
Speaker 1:So, Vance, we're still, we'll be okay and we are coming at you from Phoenix, which it is warm most of the time here.
Speaker 3:Yeah, intermittently yeah.
Speaker 1:Aside from that, how's everything going? Very good.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, good, good Nice.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Very generically.
Speaker 2:That's nice. It's been a great day. Yeah or not?
Speaker 1:Yeah, depending on what time of day it is. Yeah, we can be recording this anytime. Well, you know it is. And in Evergreen.
Speaker 2:I'm glad our country has escaped the polarization that we've been suffering for so long, and now it's it's like there's promise on the horizon. And universal health care. Yes, exactly, things are all together.
Speaker 3:It's not driven by profits.
Speaker 1:No, grocery prices are down.
Speaker 3:The patient becomes the centerpiece of the health care. That'll never work. What are we? A bunch of stinky Europeans.
Speaker 1:I'm really glad people quit eating animals in the neighborhood Exactly. That's really what's turned out really nice.
Speaker 3:You know, I think we're going to start giving blood pressure checks here at the AVBCTC. That would be nice. And then we'll just come in and we'll have an envelope and we'll say, ma'am, your blood pressure is this. Here you go. It'll be like a fortune you can give them, but you didn't use a sphygmometer. No, we have that truly started on the raging queen. Whatever you want, we're gonna make. We're like pedro, we will make your dreams come true there's a lot.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of upside to giving blood pressures for your community. I mean, I think it's a really nice oh yeah, uh-huh yeah thing to offer, but if we could do a little fortune telling with it too, I think it's even better.
Speaker 3:Well, I'm going to say in the leadership department, that would be defined as added value service. I fully agree. Yeah, it really is.
Speaker 1:Hey the topic today is support officers. Topic today is support officers and we wanted to talk about the attributes of a support officer. When do you bring a support officer into a command post? You know a lot of most departments, I think, out. There aren't running with two in a battalion, like you guys grew up with and had during most of your careers. So how do you get that person into the command post if you're not deployed with them? So, starting off with when do you need a support officer?
Speaker 2:Every day, all day, yeah.
Speaker 3:The system we came from. Yeah, we had them 24-7. And why? Because it was the way we managed the strategic and tactical levels of the incident organization.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it evolves in other things. Right, they become the support officer in so much that happens in managing a battalion. But when you get to the actual incident, they do a fantastic job of supporting that. Imagine that it's in their name, right. Fantastic job of supporting that. Imagine that it's in their name, right, Of supporting the incident commander, the sector boss, with the key elements that are everything other than managing the hazard zone strategic decision-making, functions of command, portion of it, the accountability, the work rest cycles, everything that keeps a firefighter safe, typically and organized and accounted for. That's what the support officer becomes man. They wear so many hats they're a bouncer, they're a counselor, they're all these other things on the fire ground. That helps us keep things straight and keep things working so that the division boss or the IC can actually pay attention to things they're supposed to pay attention to, not the other things that distract it.
Speaker 1:I think, like we do here at the CTC, we'll start off without a support officer for the first several sims that we do, and then, once we put the support officer in with the IC, it's a noticeable difference. What should that support officer be doing for the IC? As they're in the command post, what's part of their duties?
Speaker 2:First and foremost, accountability, right. So when you arrive and you're getting ready to do that transfer of command, they should be a second set of ears. Typically they're driving the, the, the chief officers, you know, keeping things straight, and then once they arrive you typically pass that all the writing duties off to the, to the support officer, so that the IC can manage what's going on outside the windshield and manage the radio part of that, and then they become the information collection point, if you will, for that. So they are accountability first, I think. Second is a second set of ears, right.
Speaker 2:I can't tell you how many times I've looked over and said what did they just say? You know, like trying to clarify, make sure that I heard it, whether I did or I didn't understand it. They kind of help support that, and then they're in a great position to help to prompt the IC when we actually need to communicate. Hey, we really need to check on this, we need a CAN report from this person, or as no, no, no, just let it go. We're good, we got everybody, we don't need to disrupt the silence right now. So they play a critical role in making that function way better.
Speaker 1:So who, ideally, is a support officer within the organization? What rank is that? What kind of career trajectory do they have? Who do we put in that role?
Speaker 3:Where I began my career, they called them a chiefsade that's what they were, and they were firefighters and they would drive the chief.
Speaker 2:They were kind of senior firefighters. Yeah, they were older, exactly.
Speaker 3:So it's like trying to get a utility truck as an engineer is you're going to have to have some seniority to work there, and so they were. They were senior firefighters when they started and then they drove the chief was. The key is they drove the chief as part of the initial dispatch, so that allowed the chief to monitor the radio and then to initiate the tactical worksheet and figure out. So when they got to the scene it was they were ready to instantly transfer command. There wasn't a whole lot and really you just did a brief rundown, kind of like you're doing blue card today. That hasn't changed very much.
Speaker 3:So, as Chris said, the whole the advantage you get from having two-person battalion chief response vehicles is the accountability is there all the time for incident operations and tracking people in IDLH and then, as our system continued to evolve and be refined and advanced, is pretty soon they identified. They said the chief's aid is actually operating at an officer level and we need to make them and it needs to be a company officer. And that was kind of a little bump because all the old chiefs' aides were pissed. It's like I'm going to lose my spot and these were senior folks. So we transitioned through that and I think there was a way they said, like we did with everything else, if you take the captain's test and get promoted, because they figured out pretty far in advance when they were going to transition from firefighters and engineers driving the chief to a company officer. So that was kind of the first upgrade in the position.
Speaker 2:That was like even before Southwest Supermarket. Oh yeah, that was like it. It's in the 90s, right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, and even we did it. One more time is when we went back to shift commanders. After 2002 is kind of when we went back to. That is so now you had two shift commanders, you had a north and a south. Well, the organizational changes we were making is, in the command post we would staff a safety section, right. So that wasn't in NIMS as you did finance administration and all the other stuff. So you know, that was a little bit of a rub, but still, for structural firefighting that was what you use as a safety section and that's kind of what you see today. So because Alan Brunicini was running the Phoenix Fire Department, we were kind of ahead of all this of everybody else and really he was building a system and then that became the model later on for a lot of the standards you see in the NFPA, because you could do it in a big metro fire department. So, and that's kind of what the system was designed for and why we got kind of spoiled with having that aid position with the chief. So when we went back to shift commanders, they upgraded the chief's aid or whatever you want to call it position with the shift commanders to battalion chief. So you had two response chiefs in the vehicle. So when you set up the command post, we set up the command van, I see support officer come over. Well, if I wanted to, I could ramp up the safety section then and logistics as soon as the command van went up so we could go from one channel to three channels, one for the hazard zone and then the other two support for that. And it just became the way we operated organizationally. So that was.
Speaker 3:Another advancement in our department is we had a fire chief who didn't. He gave precedence to operations over everything else. It's all got to support customer service and service delivery. So he made the dog and then the tail, the dog wagged the tail, basically, and then that helped to eliminate it throughout my career. Like you would get the rubs between the training division and operations. Well, because Alan Brunicini was a fire chief, it's like no, y'all work for me and operations and then training have to be together. So when we went back to shift commanders, we took over essentially all operational training went through the shift commander's office, which was good. So it camped and it solidified all that. So the evolution of that program.
Speaker 3:So the evolution of that program right before we went to upgrading the shift commanders' partners as chiefs? Is we probably about 2002 this happened. Is we upgraded the chief's aid position Before? We called them field incident technicians, techs, because they were chiefs' aides up until the 80s. And then AIDS happened, and that's really what happened. They said no, we don't want our position to be affiliated with AIDS virus. And so they changed the field of incident technician for that very reason. No other reason than that we're not petty. No, not at all. Yeah, we, I'm scared, but anyway, so that happens.
Speaker 3:Well, in the early 2000s we said I mentioned, like, the competition between operations and training. Well, even worse, the number one competitor was safety. So the safety division is like a band of hornets that just nuisance everybody in a lot of places. That's the normal relationship you see, especially in bigger fire departments. Between those two divisions Said nope.
Speaker 3:So we took over the safety division and the caveat was you had to have a plan. It couldn't be retribution against you know old back and forth between the two. So we said no, what we're going to do is we're going to integrate it right into the operations division. We're going to make it a real thing. It's no more strangers showing up with an overtime slip. They're filling up so they can be the safety officer. It's going to actually support operational safety. So we made the chiefs aides safety officers and in about five minutes of like concern, why are we doing that? Then everybody kind of sat back and thought you know, this makes the most sense Because when you look at the way we operate is the advantage Chris and I had in our system standard incident First company gets there, establishes command, becomes IC number one. We're responding First. Nbc is three to four minutes away typically and they know you get there and the attack. You're still halfway through the first work cycle. So I mean there may be just engage in the fire now as you pull up as a chief and so you can kind of see the effect of that initial action and what it's had. And so that's when you start making decisions about okay, this is how I need to review this and refine this plan Now.
Speaker 3:A lot of times you get there and it's just conversion and you're like, well, I'm going to give it a minute or two, and now it's on scene and then we're going to leave command for right now and then in a minute all this conversion's gone and now it's just back-end work. The fire's over, so I'm not going to transfer command. So you kind of got that front end of it. Now, when there's situations where you're pulling up, sometimes you pull up, you're not even there, they're not done with the initial radio report. It's like no man. I got to get there quicker and take this. This thing is rocket and rolling. So I have had instances where you get there very early and, let's say, you can't get a very good view of what's going on, for whatever reason. Well, a lot of times I would just have my partner sit. That was the other thing. Let me cloud this. But like, whoever got to the vehicle first was going to be the aid, you were going to be the driver right, and that's the way it worked.
Speaker 3:So during the day, that would usually be my partner would get there first. At night, if it was after midnight, I would always get there first because I was usually up and they were asleep. So then I'm driving and my partner is going to be the IC. I'm going to be a support officer. Well, it didn't matter, it was. You know, we worked together long enough that you couldn't. If we would have washed our voice, you wouldn't have known who was in command. In fact, there was jokes they would make. One of us is drinking a glass of water while the other one's talking.
Speaker 3:Anyway, the option you had is, if you didn't have tactical clarity about what kind of where the conditions were and I can't make sense of what buildings on fire, and if it's all three levels or just the roof or the basement, I would send my partner forward or I would go forward, depending on who was the IC. And then you're given intel back to the. So there's a place where, like in a smaller system, if you don't have an aid, that person is going to be the division boss. They're not going to be your support officer because it's the ic right now in the front end of us. I don't need a support officer. I need to know what the hell's going on at the incident scene. And so and I was an experienced IC, you know, because I had been doing it a while, especially as I got into my career Well, now I'm more confident as an incident commander, so I don't really need the partner at that point, whereas like a younger incident commander may oh my God, I've never done it like this before and they're going to need you as much as just it's like a rock that they can, okay, and you can kind of give them direction. And they're going to need you as much as just as like a rock that they can, ok, and you can kind of give them direction. And then I love doing that because you'll get somebody and like, after four or five fires as you'll try to help them on the fifth, and they'll say shut up. You're like, ok, they get it enough that they don't need coaching anymore. Let's say so, which is a good thing. So anyway, that's kind of the use that you have. That's the ultimate decision you have to make is what do I need? Do I need help commanding the thing, or do I need somebody forward that could give me tactical supervision right now, and that includes recon coming back to me in the form of reports. And you know, this is what we and a lot of times I have been set in that position as the forward division person, and it was because it was confused. Right, you've already got a command team set up.
Speaker 3:I'm the third or fourth arrive in BC and they're still trying to make sense of what's going on. So there's, I've been sent to the like the Charlie side typically then and say you go to Charlie and you let us know what we need. Well, once you get in Charlie and you get set up, it's like oh no, I'm going to tell you exactly what I need. I'm going to run the incident from Charlie basically through you as the strategic ICs, and I'm going to give you my request. So I'm going to run the tactics back here because I know the best, because it makes sense here. Because I know the best, because it makes sense, I can see it and I've processed it where it's going to take me another two chapters to inform you of what I know. Because I can see it. It's in my face and I know I need an engine company up here. I need one underneath you and I need one to the, let's say, the Delta side, because that's where it's running.
Speaker 3:Well, pretty soon in the command post, you can hear the IC saying okay, I know what's going on now and what you're doing Because we all work together, we're the same rank, we train together and so we know we're speaking the same language. So when you start to tell people like tactical recon information is you can hear the Tumblr starting to click on the strategic level, is you can hear the tumbler starting to click on the strategic level. So there's a combination of strategically, the first thing I need to figure out is the IC is where do I need tactical support anywhere right now? And that's where I'm going to start sending the next person and if it's critical enough and they're not going to be there for a minute, I will send my partner. If that becomes the deal. Now in most cases I'm getting there and that's not the case, we're going to stay together and, as Chris said earlier, my partner's going to track on the worksheet and keep that up and I am going to operate the radio and manage the incident action plan in real time, and we're going to do that together as a command team. So it's just two of us basically.
Speaker 3:So what that system does, especially in a big metro place where you're like we'll get to the scene of something and like four minutes after the call was dispatched and it's clearly a defensive fire, a fire in a pallet yard, you're thinking no man if, and now you're writing buildings off, that building's going away and that building's going away and it's going to happen soon. So you'll put that's where. I want tactical bosses on the ground and I'm like, no, I've got to stop it here and we've got to clear this one first and make sure no one's in it, because it's in 10 minutes the roof's going to collapse on that one and it's not on fire yet. It's just. You know, that's kind of the. It will be. Yeah, that's the situation you're dealing with. So it gives you flexibility.
Speaker 3:We built a deployment system where you had all the strategic and tactical bosses staffed to manage the task level resources we had on the ground. So what we did over a period of time during my career I was probably 25 years into it and we put up a third shift commander. So we had three command vans right and we had essentially about 12 response chiefs, total, two or three shift commanders and those were coming in and out. It was getting. It was right.
Speaker 3:Before my dad retired he could have, if he wanted, a thousand person army.
Speaker 3:They would have gave it to him for the last, however long, of his career and anyway. So what you could end up doing is you could run. Well at that time you could run three greater alarms at the same time in Phoenix, arizona, and we could do it all with our own resources. Now we had 20 other cities that bled in that helped with that, and then we bled out and helped them. So it was a very robust system where we all spoke the same language. In our case, the command system became the common language between the 21 departments that worked together, so you were all talking the same thing and so any kind of disagreements we ever had you had to process it operationally, which gave you clarity and a solution that everybody could live with in the thing. So I mean that became our currency, is just doing the work, and that I mean we're doing the leadership stuff, the Silverback leadership program. In fact we just not to disrupt the green, but we're well underway with that. So this could be any time over the last five years.
Speaker 2:Let's say we're at chapter 25. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3:Oh, you just wait babies. So I think I've talked long enough about that, vance. But that's kind of the history of our system and the way we kept it up. So it started with firefighters, ended with safety officers. So we embedded safety in the command system that way. And then, as Chris said, we would use if I sent a sign to BC to take over a division, I got the division boss and the safety boss with them. So it's big, metro, full-time, busy fire department. That's the deployment model that you have. That's the big, robust end and we understand there's other places. You got one person in that strategic presence and then when another couple chiefs show up, now you got some options. I can start to build a command team, I can start to do tactical supervision. So I got the ability to keep the incident action plan up to date in a way that I can control position and function strategically.
Speaker 2:So I don't again. Having not had to make those decisions in my career, I'm at a little bit of a disadvantage. However, I've been learning a lot from the folks that are in our classes and the kind of what they're talking about, what they're teaching us right, and so I think what Nick said was really important. I think if you are in a system where you are single chiefs, you don't necessarily have a support officer. You're looking for opportunities.
Speaker 2:When and how should I create a support officer? A support officer? You need to look at that question of is it better for the incident right now, whether I put somebody in to be my support officer to support me running the incident, or is it going to be more appropriate that I put maybe that second chief forward in a division position or a sector position? That is going to then give me the ability to better organize and manage a group of companies that are working there that maybe I can't see very well, or maybe I have multiple tactical positions that I have to manage right now. So that's an important question and I think those individual departments and those individual chiefs have to come up with whatever their trigger points are and whatever they think the right thing is to do, but that really is your choice and it really becomes a binary thing.
Speaker 3:I think at that point Chris, and I think to speak to that, what you just said is there's benefit that you get sending let's say that it's something where you want a tactical boss I need that ahead of a support officer. Well, when I send that tactical boss forward, that has an effect of balancing my span of control strategically. So that assists me as the IC also, because now I've put a tactical supervisor between me and the crews operating in the most hazardous place right now and I've also increased their safety because I've got eyes on the conditions that they're operating in. So that's another thing to keep in mind. If firefighters say, if you're getting there and you've just transferred command, and I said man, no, that's the fire's advanced and we're making progress, but I need I would go boom division. And then because now, if anything happens is I got somebody there that can do entry control, see, and that becomes a huge thing.
Speaker 3:And I mean we're talking about the whole deal is, tactically, entry control is the number one item that you bring as a officer operating in the warm zone. That's the reason we don't give that to working company officers. They don't operate in a warm zone and they cannot provide entry control for anyone other than their own crew Period. If the captain of engine one is the IC and that individual tells the captain of ladder one to do this is ladder one will do whatever they feel like doing. In most cases when a battalion chief does it now it becomes part of the rank structure and if we use rank, we use rank to do day-to-day admin stuff that you would never have. Captains grading captains Well, when you're operating in a place that can kill you, that's a pretty good reason that you should put your boss there to make sure you don't die. So I mean, this is all, but this is the job of the IC to figure out where do I need my bosses parked in this thing. So if we want to, channel.
Speaker 2:You know, bruno, right now, with you, better be doing everything right when something goes wrong. One of the questions we're finding in these classes to ask is all right, what position a support officer or a division boss puts me in a better position if we hear we've got a victim in priority traffic, or which one's going to be better for us for mayday? Mayday, mayday, really, because that's the idea. So what can I do right now to put us in the best position to be doing everything right when something stupid happens?
Speaker 3:The thing I would add is because it's always going to almost always default to the division is, if I need a support officer right now, I better have a division boss up there and make sure that that's going on. But at some point I can't keep putting divisions. I got to have support in the command post, especially if I've got past, let's say, a first alarm assigned. I'm past four engines, two ladders, and the thing I need somebody in the command post with me and see in our system is because we did it so long and trained and just I mean Alan Berners-Lee was our fire chief.
Speaker 3:Again is a lot of times when that BC pulled up they could be the IC, the support officer or the senior advisor. In a lot of cases At least three-quarters of the battalion chiefs when I retired from the Phoenix Fire Department could have and they did, they replaced you. If you were off duty, we would move a BC up to become this senior advisor. You just get an older BC that's comfortable and you know that their egos balanced. They make the perfect, yeah, especially if they're cynical and sarcastic and yeah, the witty Calm.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:They understand why we're there. One of the best things my dad ever said is he said the longer I'm here, the more I learn, the less regard I have for property. I mean that's yeah. Nobody ever got fired over the property thing. I mean they collapsed the library and caused tens of millions of dollars of damage. Everybody kept their job. You kill somebody at the scene of something. I mean that's a whole. I'm not saying we should fire you for it, but you know what I'm talking about. It's a different level of scrutiny.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean when you're dead, it's over. You can't get another car and get it fixed. You're done, I'm dead, I broke the owner, so we're. Yeah, that's not a place we want to be. We want to avoid that at all costs. Occupationally, that's a big bad thing to do.
Speaker 1:So I think you look at these positions support officer, division bosses, safety sections, everything and you start to fill that in by what you can deploy right now. So and I'm speaking to the departments that maybe have one battalion chief on duty or you're just moving to that I know I was in a situation where we identified through Blue Card that we need a chief officer on duty 24-7, but it was going to take us a few years to get there. So we developed a program where the front office chiefs were duty officers. They were on call. The city, I don't think, did much for us for doing that, but everyone stepped up and did it. There were five of us that did that and you had five 24-hour periods of time monthly that you were responsible for, with the idea of the city is going to fund these other positions at some point and then we won't have to do that any longer. And that helped out tremendously and other cities were doing the same thing and it wouldn't be unusual for us, on a first alarm, to get seven chiefs then in pretty short order in comparison to the largest county in the United States where they have some response times of 25 minutes for a battalion chief, we were getting a battalion chief there or a chief level officer there in 10 minutes or so.
Speaker 1:So you know we had strategic supervision. So the point of me saying this is there begin with the end in mind. Think about how you want your fire department to look, especially operationally on the scene, start to build the infrastructure for that and make some plans to get those other positions staffed as time goes along. We were just at a department not too long ago where they added a second battalion chief per shift using blue card, using the blue card model, saying we want strategic supervision, not only as a BC on the scene, but that BC needs help and we want to be able to support them internally. So there's ways around it. A lot of times we get people build a wall right away because they're like well, we don't have a chief on duty, well, there's a way for you to get there right now and then make plans to get there down the road. Does that make sense?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. And I do want to say though and it even happened in the most recent trainer that we taught together is you get to day three and day four of the train the trainer and things are escalating. You're doing bid box, you're doing multi-unit, and then you get into Maydays and the light bulb comes on for the students. They're like, oh, this is way better being the IC when I have a support officer managing a good portion of this because we bring it up in class. How effective are you at speaking, listening and writing all at the same time? There isn't a human being alive that's good at that right. So it is the best practice and the goal needs to be, I think, for departments to try and get there.
Speaker 3:I think to your point, especially when there's a lot of activity going on. So when you're the IC and you're like, actually you're going to be talking on the radio for a minute back and forth as you ignore the worksheet and it goes away and you'll get other things going and then you get that and before you can make notes, somebody else calls you and then you. Before long. I've gotten in as a senior advisor into the car with the first arriving chief and depending on who it was is sometimes this person didn't have a tactical worksheet, they had a pen and they started writing on their arm. I'm not bullshitting you man.
Speaker 1:They get a medical glove out and they start writing on that. We know who they are.
Speaker 3:It really. There came a point where I thought it's going to be easier if I just take the radio from you right now and you need. What I want you to do is start filling this sheet out. So transcribe all your tattoo onto that paper and we're going to go ahead and fix, and then you know. And so you're like Jesus Christ, we need to figure out how we're going to staff the city when somebody's off.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but well, to that point is it used to be that the system you described for providing a battalion chief? That's the system my department used to provide a senior advisor, and so before, when we had district commanders, you didn't have an on-duty deputy. They had to staff it with a staff deputy who ran a district, and so what they would do is they would have a support officer. Yeah, they had no support. Well, they didn't need one because they're a senior advisor. So what they do is they spend the night, right, so they have a Murphy bed in their office. It's their turn to pull the duty. Well, now you get an incident where you get the command van I, now Battalion 1 shows up with the command van. They call you over. So now you're rocking and rolling and you've got two qualified command officers that are taking care of their business. And now you get this staff deputy showing up and God knows what they're going to want. And so you think, and you would ask, like the ops chief, why did we do this? Well, they're the senior advisor. They give you the deputy chief support. You're like, well, no, what they do is they come in and they screw the whole thing up and start asking you a bunch of the good ones just go in and they sit down and they go to sleep in the chair and you just keep running the thing Because an IC and a support officer can do most of the stuff. And then the staff of the command van knew what to do that the senior advisor would normally trigger them to.
Speaker 3:When we first started doing this, the very first command van that we had was like a 1977, 78 Mack Gerkenslager. That was a squad, yeah, a converted squad. It was a converted squad because they put and they gave it it was the first ALS ladders, as they gave them squads and you thought you put two paramedics. It didn't work, man, it was the wrong staffing, yeah, so they took them out of service and they had this thing sitting there. Well, alan Brussini, he was just getting ready to, he was writing fire command. He's like we need a command post and so that's, they converted this old squad. We need a command post. And so they converted this old squad and one of the things they were turning it into a command RV so they put a toilet in it. Right, they put the well on B-shift you had, yeah, blue Dew was the shift commander and then his, the guy who drove the command van, so you'd get to a fire he'd set the command van up and then he'd take a dump in the bathroom.
Speaker 3:Oh man, and so you would send cheese. Hey man, that keeps people out of the command van oh, and it drove the IC out. And so like within the first few months of the command van, as they put a big sign, they said you cannot get where you command.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:And they screwed the door shut. You cannot get in again and use the bathroom. So that was the lesson we learned and in fact what we're doing today is.
Speaker 3:I think the Sprinter van concept is really about all you need is a response vehicle. If I was still where I had retired from, we would not be using SUVs or pickups. I would go to the Sprinter van five-person command van and we're done with big CVs, don't need them. And so everybody that pulls up IC number two, you never have to pull them over to the command van as a senior advisor. I get there and I just get in their vehicle. You got us logistics and safety. So we would use 99% of the times we set a command van up. Five people. That was it. Ic support officer, senior advisor, logistics, safety Took care of 99% of all the incidents we ever went to. Anything bigger than that. A big command van would show up and you would use it for God knows what I mean. You just got a big office. Essentially is what it was, but most of the tactical running, the strategy for a tactical operation I've never seen needed anything bigger than that.
Speaker 1:Was it you who coined the sentence? I guess it says CV not RV. We're not putting a bathroom in it. Was that from you? It could have been.
Speaker 3:I mean, it was just something somebody told me. But yeah, I grew up being told that.
Speaker 2:None of the ones after that had.
Speaker 1:Schaubel at Clay was building a command van and one of the chiefs were like, are we going to put a bathroom in there? And he said it's a CV, not an RV. There's not going to be a bathroom because your stories were enough to like nah, we don't want people in there doing that. Well and then what happens is they know you have a bathroom.
Speaker 3:Well, the mayor shows up and hey gotta. Yeah. Well, sorry, mayor, are we yeah?
Speaker 1:I, I had these crew packs from canadian national railroad. I had an uncle that worked there and and they they were like plastic bags with medical gloves, some wipes, toilet paper, and you could go into a private area and do your business. That like they give them to the crew of the train. So so I'd be on an and I had them in my chief's vehicle, so somebody needed to to use the there you go, go find yourself a private spot yeah you're not doing it around here though, yeah yeah, go, make it to go back all right, you guys have anything else on support officers?
Speaker 1:you?
Speaker 2:know. The one thing I wanted to bring up is you before asked about, like, who should be the support officer? So, so we have seen in our careers, you know, really highly effective ones. There was a period of time where it was, you know, anybody was the support officer, any company officer, right? This is after we had moved to the company officer model and we had some folks that were company officers, that were wanted to be fits, you know, support officers. They just, and they were good at it, they did a good job and so we like keep them there.
Speaker 2:And then there was a movement of well, we just want the people doing this position to be folks who are taking the battalion chief's test. So there's got to be some kind of mixture there of I don't ever. If somebody wants to do the position, they're competent and they help you out a lot, then we should be using them in those positions. It's not just a promotional tool. It's okay to have professional support officers.
Speaker 2:And then the other side of it is you'll see chief officers that just want to get their friends or their buddies or whoever they're comfortable being stupid, around to be support officers, and that doesn't work either. Right, your support officer actually has to have a clue. They actually have to be serious about the work and the job and when it's time to do whatever it is that you got to do, that they can actually accomplish it and make the IC better or make the support officer better, or actually make a hard decision and keep the mongrels organized when you're trying to manage a division that has a bunch of companies and they're trying to push their way into the hazard zone. So you need somebody that again to use a Bruno thing you need a blend of a French poodle and a bulldog that can actually manage all of the right stuff in the right way A French poodle and a bulldog that can actually manage all of the right stuff in the right way.
Speaker 3:When we went to the safety officer, we said, no, you're going to be the safety officer Because the safety division wasn't working anymore, not for operations at least. Whatever they were doing was their own thing. So embedding them directly into the operations division. That kind of became the edict. Is you, in order to become a battalion chief, you first have to be a safety officer and then work in this capacity, and then you, you and anyone that's here has to be. Uh, the deal was they have to take chief's test. So there were a couple guys who fell into the category that you're talking about. They said, nick, I don't want to be a chief. I said well, it didn't say you had to be a chief, just said you have to take the chief's test. That's it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, let's take the chief's test yeah, speak Chinese in there.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and that's what they did is they said and they figured out I'm going to take the chief's test and I'm going to do bad. I'm going to pass it, and they did. And you think you don't have to study for it. You just show everyone knows what you're doing. You're meeting the rule? No, that's, that's all we're asking. And you're going to be excellent safety officers. I mean, they were very good at what they did, like you said. See, the problem is keeping them there permanently. Like that is, the BC's are too transitory. Typically. We really didn't have battalions that stayed anywhere longer than five years permanently, like that is, the BCs are too transitory. Typically, we really didn't have battalions that stayed anywhere longer than five years. Maybe, If you stayed somewhere five years as a BC, that was ancient man, you were there forever.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you had really good blackmail material you did.
Speaker 3:Or you fit into that place well, and that was the other thing. It's because if you had talents or skills beforehand is you never got to stay in the field. They'd suck you into admin so fast and as we aged as a department and you started to say, no, why do you keep sending all the cream in here? No one's going to take this chief's test. When I took the chief's test I think there were eight of us that took it and I mean it got down to like six. I mean you were in single digits. Nobody wanted the job.
Speaker 3:When we started converting and doing the other stuff and making it where you could stay in a spot a while and you get good at what you're doing, and then you started to see more stuff coming from admin back out to the field. They said no, the training division and safety, they're just going to do it within operations division now. So training still existed because you had to do EMS and TRT and hazmat and paramedic stuff and all that. So they had more than enough to keep them busy. We just took the operations over again and the same thing with safety. But we took the whole safety division. Because what do you think? What's most of the safety division do it's to keep firefighters safe operating and see structure fires or IDLH events.
Speaker 3:So it just worked out very well. It caused better morale and, like, pacified the workforce, because it was all about the work, as you had to be able to do the work. The workforce, because it was all about the work. You had to be able to do the work, and if somebody couldn't do the work and you were a boss, you were expected to do something about it. When I retired it was like no, you don't get to be incompetent anymore. Those days are over. We're all going to do what we're supposed to do.
Speaker 2:So you had single digits in your battalion chief's test. My first battalion chief's test, my first battalion chief's test, 60 people took it, yeah, so it was very different and obviously it had changed in a big way because there were no more desirable there were no more district commanders everything's needed.
Speaker 3:The old man was pushing everything back out to ops, in fact, the last probably three years of his career. If he had meetings, he would have them three days in a row. So there was no more of this bullshit that you have to come on your day off anymore. You got your life back more. It became a much better way to run a fire department and you didn't need it. I don't think you needed as many resources as you, it was more. You were much more capable as a group that way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, unfortunately, my first test was six months after I retired. Yeah, I didn't time it very well. Yeah, unfortunately, my first test was six months after I retired. Yeah, I didn't time it very well.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but we're all drawn together on it's it's now, we're yeah. We don't have a boss, we have like a union president type of a situation. I don't know, it's just, everybody does what they're supposed to do. So it's it's yeah.
Speaker 1:You end up where you're supposed to go.
Speaker 3:Yeah, Life is pretty goddamn good.
Speaker 1:All right, you guys ready for a Timeless Tactical Truth?
Speaker 2:It's what I've been waiting for. All right 2026, man, here we go, first one of 2026.
Speaker 1:Well, whenever it is Timeless, Tactical Truth from Alan Brunicini. This is the Ten of Spades here from our card deck. You can get these cards. There's a lot of goo.
Speaker 3:Get them online. Do never chase the goo, though You're going to go set.
Speaker 1:Use tactical priority benchmarks as the action planning roadmap. Use tactical priority benchmarks as the action planning roadmap. Use tactical priority benchmarks as the action planning roadmap.
Speaker 3:Yeah, vance, you just did a sentence that introduces another hour-long podcast. Yeah, we went from search and rescue, fire control, property conservation to fire control in name of life safety and property conservation. We're the fire department. That's the way we do it, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so there's a few things that line those tactical priorities up right. You've got to have an effective size up. You've got to have an effective understanding of what the critical factors are. You've got to know where you are in your risk management plan. You've had to have identified your strategy, but when it comes to building your incident action plan, you are basing it around those three tactical priorities in the most effective, efficient manner, utilizing your resources to the best of your ability and keeping the firefighters safe right so that they can actually accomplish what it is they came there to do. So, yeah, it's amazing how beautifully that lines up.
Speaker 3:Yeah, public safety provider should show up and provide public safety. So that's what that does.
Speaker 2:And that's our job. Those tactile providers are our job. Every single time the lights come on, yeah, every single time. That's the only reason we exist.
Speaker 3:Exactly and the quicker that we can turn that high-risk incident into a low-risk incident. That is how we're going to protect and save. That's the approach we take.
Speaker 1:All right, gentlemen, thanks so much for being here today. It was always a good conversation to have you both here. I look forward to the next time that we're all able to get together. Excellent, whenever that is Whenever that is, we don't know when it is Any year, any month, whenever.
Speaker 3:The next evergreen podcast.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening to B-Shifter.