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Fire command and leadership conversations for B Shifters and beyond (all shifts welcome)!
B Shifter
Triple Deckers and Command Considerations
Worcester Fire Department District Chief Gary Fleischer joins the B Shifter podcast to share his expertise on critical fire ground factors in century-old wood-frame buildings, particularly New England's iconic triple-deckers.
• Construction characteristics of triple-deckers, typically built between 1890-1920 as worker housing near factories
• Balloon frame construction creates continuous void spaces from basement to attic with no fire stops
• Original materials include true dimension 2x4s (full 2"x4") and often asphalt or asbestos siding
• Buildings typically built very close together (sometimes just 5 feet apart) creating exposure problems
• Vertical fire spread challenges requiring simultaneous tactics on multiple floors
• First-arriving company officers must "own the incident" with thorough size-up and clear assignments
• Importance of quick water application on exterior fires before they extend into concealed spaces
• Search priorities in densely populated residential structures
• Primary access challenges including blocked rear exits and cluttered stairwells
When you see these older structures in your community, remember they require specific tactical considerations due to their construction methods and arrangement. Train your officers to recognize critical fire ground factors that will drive your incident action plan.
This episode features Josh Blum, Chris Stewart, Gary Fleischer and John Vance.
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This episode was recorded on March 19, 2025.
welcome to the b shifter podcast. Today. You have uh john vance here in studio, I've got chris stewart and then uh from zoom, we've got josh bloom and gischer Gary. You know what? Let's start off with you real quick and just let everybody know who you are, because this is your first time on the B Shifter podcast. So we want to welcome you. You're one of our lead instructors, pivotal to the word getting spread out on the East Coast, but why don't you let everybody know who you are and give a little bit of an introduction?
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks, jv. So I appreciate you inviting me on here today. My name is Gary Fleischer. I'm a district chief with the Worcester Fire Department. I've been a firefighter here in Massachusetts for about 30 years. I've been in Worcester about 35 years. I've been in Worcester about 25 years and we started doing blue card here about four years ago three to four years ago and coordinated that. We're still doing the program, coordinated that program here and became a blue card instructor last September Nice.
Speaker 3:Yeah, february of 21, in the blizzard, in the middle of COVID, what a time to do it.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, we're really happy to have you here today, gary, and thank you. Thanks for sharing some information, and today we want to talk a little bit about critical fire ground factors that, specifically, you have a lot of experience with, particularly because of the age of the community that you serve. But we think it's a great conversation for all of us to be a part of, because we have a lot of these buildings in different parts of the United States. You could end up mutual aid at them. There are some different critical fire ground factors that we need to consider when we're particularly looking at some of these older type buildings, and we just don't get into it enough, but there are entire cities populated with these buildings.
Speaker 4:I think if we just kind of talk about I think Gary just describing kind of what these types of structures are, for them it seems to be like they're fairly common in his neck of the woods, both in his state and his region, right, and there's no shortage of fires in these right. So we need to be able to kind of talk about what's critical about them, how they're put together, what causes us heartache, what is critical information we need to have about them. And then let's talk about some of the tactics that they regularly deploy in these, because regardless of your incident command system, you've got to put into play tactics that match the critical factors the building and the fire and smoke conditions and maybe the life safety and maybe the arrangement, because these are built close together. So all of those things kind of go into coming up with a decent incident action plan.
Speaker 2:Thanks, chris. I think maybe the best thing I can do is just to kind of describe the housing stock that we have around here. So what we're kind of targeting in this podcast, I think, is these two and a half to maybe four story wood frame residential units wood frame residential units, and I think the key why this becomes so important to us is the construction of how they were constructed and what we find inside of them. So, particularly with us, we're known around here for our three-deckers, and in other parts of Massachusetts they may call them triple-deckers. They're all basically the same thing. So what it is is a three-story, basically an apartment, three apartments, and they all sit right on top of each other. So the third-floor kitchen is above the second-floor kitchen is above the first-floor kitchen, and so on. With all the other rooms. They have a very small footprint. They're generally on a very small parcel of land, so you've got a lot of people that can occupy a very small parcel of land.
Speaker 2:Now the key with the buildings are they're pretty old.
Speaker 2:I think the first ones we ever have heard of were around the 1870s, but primarily between 1890 and 1920, they built just the lion's share of these things and you find them in these old New England cities and towns that often had large mill buildings or factories and they were used for the staffing to live there for the factories.
Speaker 2:So of course, back, you know, in 1900, nobody had cars these are blue-collar workers they didn't have horses, they had to walk to get wherever they were going.
Speaker 2:So these three deckers were built very close together in the neighborhoods where the factories were. These three-deckers were built very close together in the neighborhoods where the factories were and the people were able to walk to work, and not only that, but their kids would walk to school, they would have neighborhood stores, the neighborhood barbershop, they would walk to those. And one of the phenomenons we see is that generally immigrants from certain countries all land kind of in the same neighborhood and they end up all kind of working at the same factory because they all speak the same language. So we have like, for instance, of vernon hill, where we have a lot of these three actors is, uh, a big section of it is is polish and they had a lot of Polish people there, and so the only time they would leave if they left the neighborhood to go somewhere, they'd have to take a trolley or a streetcar or, you know, take the railroad to go somewhere.
Speaker 1:Well, you could have fooled me, because you've already busted one myth. I always imagine those being large homes that were then chopped up into an apartment, but for the most part, they were always intended to be separate units within those triple deckers, is what you're saying.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. There's a couple different stories of how they were built. There are stories of the factory owners actually buying the land and building as many of them as possible and then selling them back to their own employees for their own employees to have a place to live and two income apartments where other employees of that factory could live, or potentially some level of their family, their family, their brother's family or their sister's family. And then we've also heard stories about people buying them on their own and then moving the whole family in on three different levels to pay their mortgage together. So there's a few different ways we've heard they all got built, but I believe the factory ones the most, because they're all concentrated on where there was a factory at one point in time.
Speaker 4:So most of them on. We've noticed like there'll be a consistent with the living units on each floor. Then you've got like an outside porch or outside patio, I guess, on each floor, right, and they tend to be towards the alley side, right, gary, if I remember this correctly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they all have similar floor plans, but for the most part there's usually a front staircase and often will either have a front living room that faces the street or they would have front porches that face the street and then they would have a back staircase that you can either find inside what they call a shed and when I say they I mean the people that grew up in them.
Speaker 2:They call it a shed so you would have rear stairs, kind of enclosed from the weather but not heated, and then like a storage room on their back porches, if you want to call them back porches. And then in other cases we have completely wide open porches that are just made of pressurized lumber, so the house would take up pretty much the width of the lot minus maybe five feet on each side, so we have an extreme exposure problems. They're generally close to the street and the only yard area they end up with is in the back, so they could use the back for the kids to play or, you know, to have a cookout or even have a garden, but that would be the only open space that they would have. There was no need for a driveway because nobody had cars most of them have basements and kind of the heating systems and stuff like that down there.
Speaker 2:We're in basement land Again. You know these buildings built. You know the most of them built between 1890 and 1920. The basements are called fieldstone foundations. So they're stone wall foundations. And they're called fieldstones because the farmers would go out and clear the trees and make farms and that land would be full of stones in their fields. So they would clear all the stones off and builders would take them, dig a big hole in the ground, stack the stones up and that would be the foundation for that construction, for that construction and typically balloon frame, or is there stops on every floor for if there was a basement fire?
Speaker 2:No, you know what they're balloon frame. So let's you know, if we look at it the way our company officers look at it right, they're going to do a strategic decision-making model every time they arrive on the scene and the first step in that is for them is always going to be sizing up the incident using their critical fire ground factors. I won't go into all of them, but I think there's a couple of really important ones. So first is, before we get to that construction, john, first is the occupancy. Almost 99.9% of the time these are apartments that people live in and oftentimes a lot of people live in. Generally they were built three bedrooms, one bath, but we've seen that cut up to five bedrooms, usually on one floor or not usually, but sometimes on one floor. Floor, or not usually, but sometimes on one floor. So definitely doing searches is going to be high on our priority list when we get those. And we do have some buildings that on the lower floor, whether it's the first floor or sometimes the basement. That's where they had these neighborhood businesses like I talked about earlier the local barbershop, the market they were in the basement of these. Or the first floor of these tenements, these three deckers, and you know what? Very often bars. They just made bars out of the basements of these things and they were very popular, you know, even at 7 o'clock in the morning when they guys got off the night shift from the wire factory and they would stream into somebody's basement bar, but that's. We still have some of those, some of those businesses are still around, but now everybody has cars so that the neighborhood markets and stuff aren't nearly as popular as they used to be. So that's pretty much the most of our occupancy.
Speaker 2:Critical fire ground factors, john, like you were asking, then construction becomes a huge one with these. So if you can picture the turn of the century, we had so much lumber available in New England that it was a very cheap way to build. And this is virgin, old growth lumber, really thick, sturdy pieces of wood. And they would build the shell of these buildings with two by fours Now that's nominal size. That is literally two inches by fours. Now that's nominal size. That is literally two inches by four inches. No kiln, dried, no planing or sanding. These are rough, cut big, two by fours and they're 30 feet long and they'll bring. I don't know how they did it, but they would build a wall 30 feet tall and they would stand it up on top of this field stone foundation, tie all those four walls together and that would give you the exoskeleton of that building.
Speaker 2:And then, instead of having, you know, platform construction like we have now, you build the first floor, you build the second floor on top of it. What they would do is they would literally hang the floors off of those outside studs. So, as you can see in this picture here, there's a ribbon board that they would miter into the 2x4s the ribbon board was a 1x4, and they would miter it into the inside of the 2x4s and then they would rest the joists right on top of those and nail them into the studs, and they would do this for every floor. So what that leaves you is this plenum space, this vacant space in that stud wall that would go from the basement all the way up to the eaves in the attic, and that's, you know, that is our balloon frame construction and that is one of the biggest issues we have with this, and I think you know, you guys know, from your parts of the country you probably have some form of balloon frame construction, correct?
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know a ton of the conversion of, you know, homes that regular one-story or single-family homes that were built in that same time frame but are now being converted to two or three or four apartments just because people aren't necessarily wanting to live in those homes. So tons of balloon frame and then other vertical shafts in there, right, because they're trying to get other types of HVAC systems and all that room into there. So it's that construction and void space and understanding what that really is. So you pull up on something that's original, with plaster and lath, still, that was 90 years old. We're going to have to handle it and deal with it and have a whole different set of critical factors than something that's that old but been gutted and now it's four separate apartments. So I think we're seeing that from well, where you are all the way to, as we talked about a little bit earlier, in California, san Francisco and some of those other places all around Seattle.
Speaker 4:Gary, with the way the floors then are set and kind of hung in there, how does the roof truss and the roof system then go on top of the walls? Is it basically sitting on those four exterior walls or how does it tie in?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's. Basically it sits on the top of those walls. It overhangs. Most of these buildings have usually a pretty good eave, and where we run into trouble is when the eaves are not made of solid wood. When the wood's been removed which is really common here in the Northeast to reduce ice buildup, what they'll do is they'll remove the eaves and they'll put in a vented soffit there and they'll cut a ridge vent along the top of the roof to allow the cold air to flow up underneath the roof so that none of the snow on these roofs melt and then refreeze into ice and cause ice dams. So that's obviously a perfect place for propagation of fire, especially with auto exposure on the exterior.
Speaker 2:If you have a fire on the second floor, a bedroom window, and it pops out that window and starts burning up the exterior, we know that we're going to end up in the attic in this place, like Josh said, we have all the things that he mentioned. You know the wet walls, the pipe chases, the chimneys, these, you know these were built. They had big, giant, behemoth coal furnaces in the basement, wrapped in asbestos, and it heated steam that heat the whole house. So there's a chimney that runs right up through the middle and before I was again on the fire department. I was an electrician's apprentice and doing a work in a three-decker is so easy because you can just drop the wire right down next to the chimney, go from the attic all the way to the basement. That's exactly where you know where our fire's going.
Speaker 2:There are some other issues too. I mentioned auto exposure, right. So what they used to side these houses with through the years. I don't really know the time frame, but we still have houses that are sided with asphalt siding. It's just like a roof material, but they put it on the side of a house and you can imagine how that burns and it's pretty ugly. So what do they do? They cover it with vinyl, which really doesn't do anything for us. So what do they do? They cover it with vinyl, which really doesn't do anything for us.
Speaker 2:Now there's one picture here that John can show you, where there's two of these buildings side by side, and the one closest to you with the brown stripe that's an asphalt-sided building. So you can imagine if we had an outside fire there, it's going to run right up that asphalt pretty quick right into the eaves. But the building that's just past it. It's kind of a brown color right. That building has asbestos siding, so it's the complete opposite. You couldn't light it on fire if you tried, um, and in any case, a lot of times it was interesting to find these two next to each other that somebody hadn't covered in vinyl siding. We see a lot of the vinyl siding hides what's actually underneath there, and I guess the only other thing maybe to point out is you kind of look through the pictures is these three and two, three and four story buildings as you move closer to the coast.
Speaker 2:So Boston and some of the suburbs, primarily these are flat roof buildings, which means they have a drain in the roof that goes down through those pipe chases all the way out into the sewer line. The drain roofs up. Now in central Massachusetts, where we are, we have a heavier snow load here. So most of our buildings are either a gable-end roof or a hip-shaped roof and we can kind of tell you know when we go to them, how much difficulty the attic's going to be, based on the type of roof that we have. If you can imagine, a gable-ended roof is pretty easy to get into and use for storage. A gable-ended roof is pretty easy to get into and use for storage. So it's going to have plank flooring which is very difficult to overhaul from the third floor. If we have a hip roof, those are very difficult to get into. You're bent over and crawling around. So there's generally not a lot of storage up there and very little flooring that you would have to worry about.
Speaker 2:So that's basically some of the oh and the arrangement. Right, you had mentioned that earlier, chris. That was the other issue. A lot of these are very, very close together. We have a picture here of three of them that are side by side. This was in Boston somewhere and you can see how tight they are together. Incidentally, that one in the middle of this picture, this came off a wheeler's website that sold for $1.35 million for one of these things, so I hope it has gold faucets. I'm not sure why you'd buy one for $1.35 million.
Speaker 4:So when you guys start responding on these like you do regularly, even the simplest fire you know, a kitchen fire, food on the stove, pot of meat, whatever that is, even that you can you're at a distinct disadvantage where you can easily get fire extension just from those types of things right, and so that being super diligent about checking for extension, even on something that you show up that actually may have nothing showing it, becomes a pretty significant thing for you guys. Am I guessing correctly?
Speaker 2:Yeah, any substantial fire. We have a lot of ceilings to pull and a lot of walls to open up, and it's not, of course it's an old building, so it's not just sticking your hook through some sheetrock. You know, it's mostly plaster and wood lath, which is a lot of work. In some cases we have the metal lath. We don't see it as much, thank God, because that stuff is really difficult. But yeah, I mean that's, you know, the critical fire ground, the critical fire ground factor of the fire really. And where is it originating from? You know, because if that fire is originally in the basement and it has reared its head in a third floor bedroom, it just goes to show you how important it is for us to do those 360s by our first arriving company officers. Look at conditions in the basement, because that could have started on any floor and popped out on any floor. Same thing with a lot of the fires we have in these buildings originate in either the front or the back porches and if you don't get there quick enough and put water on it, a front or a rear porch fire is going to the attic. There is no doubt about it. That is where it's going to end up If you don't get some water on that thing fast. To end up if you don't get some water on that thing fast. So as far as our tactics for these, we got to get quick water on them. As you do almost anything, we have to get water very quick on them.
Speaker 2:We've been fighting these fires for a long time, long before people talked about FRSI. You know, attacking from the outside, transitioning to go to the inside. We've had company officers for years. When I came on and was a new guy, they would tell you hey, pull 50 feet at two and a half off that one guy. You're going to knock this outside fire. You know, fire down from the exterior and the rest of the crew is going to take an inch and three quarter and advance it to the alpha side. When we're going to knock this outside fire down from the exterior, and the rest of the crew is going to take an inch and three-quarter and advance it to the alpha side. When we're ready to go, you just shut that off, drop it and you're the fourth guy on the line or the third guy on the line.
Speaker 4:To go back to something you said about 360s and size up. So, with these being as close as they are together, what's the normal operation for getting a 360 if you've got them this tightly? Do you have to depend on other folks other than the initial company to get the 360, or is there opportunities for them to do that?
Speaker 2:We still push the company officers to do 360s. Generally you're I mean they're not attached. There's always room between the two. It could be anywhere from five, maybe five feet on the smallest. It's maybe a little bit bigger. It's usually enough for both households to have a be able to walk down the side of the house to a little bit larger. A lot of people have put driveways in, probably in the 30s and 40s when cars became more affordable. So outside of maybe fences, there isn't too much usually to stop you from doing a 360. It certainly isn't big enough. If you run into a fence on one side, you're just going to have to go back around the alpha and down the other side and you should almost always be able to put eyes on Charlie because it's a staircase. It's regularly used, so it's usually very accessible.
Speaker 4:That makes sense. That makes it nice to have a better idea of what's actually going on before you're stepping foot in the building.
Speaker 1:What's the access like to the individual units? Is it outside, inside? How do you access each individual unit then?
Speaker 2:So generally the front stairs are finished stairs that are usually completely enclosed.
Speaker 2:They're not in a heated space but they're completely enclosed and they usually wrap a little bit up and then there'll be a apartment door at each landing and then the staircase continues up to the next floor.
Speaker 2:You know, as you look at pictures of these, you'll see the front corners of the buildings that you don't see any windows, or you see a very small rectangular window or a specially shaped window. That's where your staircases are in front. The back staircases are the ones that we really have difficulty with, because some of them can be inside that shed enclosure, some of them can be outside external porches made of pressurized lumber, but if you can imagine, when you don't feel like taking your trash out, that's where it's going to end up. And there are some apartments that are extremely difficult to access from the Charlie's side and, in fact, some cases where they never use them, so they may put the refrigerator in front of that door. Ultimately, those are probably the most challenging ones that we have, when we know what we got to do, we know where we got to go and we're getting there quickly, but we're hindered by something that's blocking our way that we don't expect.
Speaker 4:Based on conversations that you and I have had and then you've had with other folks here is, when you get fires in these, you and your department have had to really kind of resource and be able to deploy, based on being able to cover a lot of tactical positions you know in a quick amount of time, right, and so so talk a little bit about how you guys respond to these and what kind of what your priorities are with getting folks into the building and and because I vividly remember you saying when I, when I first asked you about it, he goes well, think about having fire in the in the basement, first, second and third floor in the attic and trying to get to them all simultaneously You're like, oh okay, yeah, I get the problem Right. So talk a little bit about that.
Speaker 2:It can.
Speaker 2:Yeah, again, it can be very difficult. Uh, if it's in a place that you know, if it's a fire that's started externally and when I say that I mean, like you know, the rear, the rear porches, which are more or less outside um, sometimes it's a little bit easier because you know that you could put a line on the outside, put some water on it, maybe prevented it from getting into the attic. But, uh, you know, as we know, it's balloon frame construction, so, just as easy as it can, it can come up from the basement and go into an apartment or go into the attic. It can just as easily come off the rear porches and go into the apartment as well. So we have to get primary all clears on those. Um, so what it basically means is, uh, doing your best size up, doing your best 360, trying to determine the lowest floor of fire, advancing a hand line to that and quickly having you know while you're advancing the hose line, you're doing primary search and fire control and hopefully you have another company with you, especially if you have smoky conditions, to do a more thorough search while you're trying to track down if you have a fire in that apartment or if you have extension, so hopefully we're going to have another. It usually ends up being a ladder company or our heavy rescue company. We try and do assignments to get a search crew on every floor and we try our best to make sure we have a hose line available to protect them, because over the years we know about our line of duty deaths but we've had so many near misses and guys jumping out of windows and we really need to make sure we get those lines up there and they're not preoccupied by something else.
Speaker 2:So where it's really important for us and where I like to try and influence our company officers is we want smart thinking company officers and the key is when they pull up in their first due. We want them to own that incident. We want them to do a quality initial radio report in the truck. And then, hey, once you open that door you don't know what's going to happen to you next. Is Mrs Smith going to come running up to you and tell you that her child's on the second floor? People are going to be pulling you in different directions. So you give that initial radio report so everybody's clear what you have going on before you step out and get distracted.
Speaker 2:Your company knows exactly what you guys are doing, what your IEP is doing, and then you've got to break free and get that 360 done after you get some critical information from witnesses. But of course they want to tell you what they had for breakfast before they tell you exactly what they see in that building. It's real difficult. It's the hardest job here is to be that number one IC and then, as they're doing their 360, we really want them to start giving assignments while they're going around the building before they get in the IDLH and they're talking with a face piece on.
Speaker 2:We know we have a lot of tasks, chris, you just said it. We're task saturated at that point, start giving out some of those tasks. So if you're IEP plus two plus three plus four, that's great. You know that if you didn't tag water supply you're going to need one. Get that right out before you're done in 360. If you've got a ladder company coming up right behind you, spot to your advantage, set up the truck and have your crew meet with my crew for primary search of floor two, whatever floor you're going to, and maybe even the next company coming in to take a line off our truck and advance it to the floor above us, primary search and fire control. So I mean, some of these are, hey, every fire is different, but a lot of those first few things you do are the same all the time.
Speaker 4:Yeah, you're referring to the slide that shows up regularly in day one. Our presentation right those standard conditions. So there's a typical standard thing that your officers are evaluating in these incidents early on and then they're starting to apply that standard action of getting companies in the right place. The fire can be in you know any given spot of the building, but it becomes that fairly standard process of getting them in place to manage all the places that you kind of expect it to go right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely. And again, the fires aren't always the same. So you know, if we wanted to base people's functions on their arrival order, it's just it's not going to work for us. Because you know, if you say your first two ladder company is going to go to the floor fire and do a primary search, and while that first Duke company advances in there they realize hey, this fire is actually on floor one, not on floor two, then you know they're moving up into a spot of you know where they're not going to be protected by a line. So they need to be told by the, you know, incident commander hey, we need you on this particular floor.
Speaker 2:And you know the other issue we see is typically here the second-due company is responsible for water supply and then your third-due company, almost always just by happenstance, is pulling the second line off the truck. So if you're not first-due's using TLOs, there's a real good chance that that water supply gets missed. Because you know, hey, who was number three, who was the third guy in Three engine company officers all raised their hand at the same time. I was there, I was there, I was there. So that's why we like to do orders using TLO and directing it to where the necessity is. Where's the first location and function we need to handle?
Speaker 3:Gary, you said something earlier, I think, in what you just mentioned there about making sure you're giving assignments in TLO and, being specific, that first new company officer owns it, right? So, uh, I was. I had some time earlier and I was perusing through this.
Speaker 3:It looks pretty new yeah 1946, uh series of books and specifically I was looking at this reading some things that I bought this when I was 18 years old, became a fireman, but it's the entire series of uh, firefighting tactics, engine company operations, all of that, um, and in the firefighting tactics piece it says the incident commander must organize and assign companies based off of what they see, the facts, the facts that they can identify and what they perceive.
Speaker 3:And it's like that was 1946 from Lloyd Layman, right, and it's like it circles right around. So there's nothing new that we're talking about here and it goes back to that thinking piece of what is the problem and what's keeping us from solving the problem, and that's where we need to use our resources. So I think that's really important for people to think about and consider, because a fire on the first floor, one of these three or four story buildings, is different than a fire on the third floor. And then considerations that it's always going to be vertical fire, spread right, just like any moose balloon frame If it's in the attic, it's in the basement, if it's in the basement it might be in the attic. So just having that understanding of what that all really means.
Speaker 2:You're going to have to time it out. I got to go on a run.
Speaker 1:All right, hey, gary, thanks, gary, thanks, man. Okay, be safe, all right we appreciate you, Gary.
Speaker 2:Thanks Be talking to you soon.
Speaker 1:All right, thank you. So, gary, there had to go on a run, but we continue on it. He gave us some great information, I think, about the kind of construction they have, and it's just not germane to them because that's all over the place we can run into it. I certainly see it with some of the older buildings in my community. You know not to speak for Gary, but, josh, do you know what their particular fire problem is? Is there a high likelihood in the Woosta community that you're going to get fires in these a lot?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean if you just look at their, if you look at their history and then you pay attention, like we do, to you know people who are customers of what fires are going to. Uh, they make a significant amount of fires in these buildings and I had the opportunity to spend quite a bit of time there and we're actually, chris and I, are going back there in june to do some, some other training with them and we're going to spend some time, uh, in the community and take a look at some of their buildings. But as you drive around, as Gary said, you know there was building after building after building of those and, as we know, just the that density alone leads to elevated fire threat. Right, that's Just with how many people are living there. And then you know Gary kind of alluded to it Maybe they're not taking the best care of things and they're throwing garbage, you know, here, there and everywhere, and it's not necessarily everybody.
Speaker 3:But if we look at some of their line of duty, death reports, their internal reports and their other reports that have been written, you know you can see that some of those places had been modified or cut up or weren't in the best condition. So it is a big fire threat for them. And you know one thing that they do for sure is they put a ton of resource there in a very short period of time. But when you start thinking about their community and you know four stories or three stories of wood frame that's 100 years old, with asbestos or not asbestos, but cellotex shingle on the outside of it five feet apart, you either get right on it or you're going to burn the block down. You either get right on it or you're going to burn the block down. So, and you know as you drive around up there, there's not a lot of residential blocks missing anywhere, because they understand their threat, they understand what they're up against and they have a deployment model to address it.
Speaker 4:Yeah, so they've got a. In talking to Gary and talking to the other folks there, they have a very strong culture of we have to get there and we have to get water on things early. Right, he talked to it about the back porch fires and slowing down the spread into the house and into the attic space, but then when that fire is on the interior of the space is getting lines in quickly, the life safety thing is critical for them. Absolutely right, these could be densely populated areas, but it has to have a good balance, and they're talking about having to have a good balance of we've got to get water on the fire simultaneous to us looking for the victims. That we don't have. We don't have the luxury of looking around for folks and then dealing with the fire. We've got to coordinate these actions either simultaneously or incredibly close to one another.
Speaker 4:And then, once they start to control the fire is in order to support those search operations and maybe even victim removal is they've got to have an effective plan for some ventilation, right? And how are they going to do that? And it doesn't appear that vertical ventilation very often, definitely on the lower floors, is an option for them, right? And so it's interesting. I am looking forward to hearing more about how they ventilate, the role of hydraulic ventilation has for them and because you know, when you've got buildings so close to one another you may or may not be able to hydraulically ventilate effectively and depending on the window arrangement. So they I know they have it. I'm super interested in hearing you know more about how they do that effectively.
Speaker 1:Well, we'll for sure get Gary back on because he's a good guest. We have labeled him a good guest.
Speaker 4:You know what I'm I'm bummed. He had to go Cause. I wanted to ask, now that he's actually been on the podcast because he's subjected his kids in the car listening to the blue card podcast so much what his kids are actually going listening to the Blue Card podcast, so much what his kids are actually going to think of him being on the podcast now.
Speaker 1:And I think his kids' names are Robbie and Joe, right, and they get sick of hearing my voice. So now you get to hear your dad's. Yeah, that's good, all right, before we go guys. Timeless Tactical Truth. Yeah, all right, let's do it before we go guys. Timeless tactical truth yeah, all right, let's do it. Timeless tactical truth from alan brunasini. And today we have the two of hearts and these are back in stock. We sold them all out, all of them were sold out, but now we have them back in stock at bshiftercom. Two of hearts. The ic is responsible for all command functions all of the time. Simply, command functions define the IC's job. So it's interesting, gary was talking about IC number one getting off the truck and having to instantly be in the mode where they're now responsible for all eight functions of command.
Speaker 4:The thought and consideration and maybe one of the larger pushbacks we get, instantly be in the mode where they're now responsible for all eight functions of command. The thought and consideration and maybe one of the larger pushbacks we get from you know departments and individuals is, you know we're asking too much of the initial arriving company officer. Well, I think the cost is too great not to put that responsibility on them and, like Gary said, from the very beginning, taking ownership of the incident, taking ownership of the evaluation size up and all the elements then that connect in a strategic decision-making process. So they're coming up with a decent plan from the very beginning, based on some important critical factors that they evaluated. Not just that, they made assumptions about to get people in the right place to come up with a plan and deploy companies fast so that they're getting water where it needs to go early. They're getting the searches done early where they need to.
Speaker 4:So we hear that argument or that that that you know pushback of it's too much. Well, I tell you what man. You listen to Worcester and you listen to a lot of other places. There are company officers showing up, as I see number one that are doing a hell of a job and they're hitting the bar and they're going over the bar. You know considerably because they, because it matters, they care and they've actually trained to be that good.
Speaker 3:I think when we get that pushback sometimes of the they can't do it, it's because the truth is they can't do it because they've never been exposed to a system to teach them how to do it. They glorified firefighters. Right, I'm just responsible for my company, I'm just going to do what I'm going to do. Well, when the expectation is that the organization says you're the first due company there and you're the first due company officer and that you're going to establish command and that you're going to be in command until relieved by that later arriving chief, and we trained them, laid out an expectation and we trained them to do that, then you know, we see that performance on the other side of it and we've heard audio from you know, worcester and hundreds of other fire departments now that are very successful, with company officers doing great size ups, developing great incident action plans, uh, being prepared to assign three and four and sometimes five companies themselves before a chief gets there for, for whatever reason, out of the district, delayed, you know, whatever it is, um, so that I think that that that's the piece, right, it's like it's too much, they can't do it. And if I like to go back to the, well, if somebody's not there making decisions, then what it goes back to the.
Speaker 3:You're freelancing. I mean, it's a, it's a freelance. Everybody's going to do whatever they want to do. So well.
Speaker 1:Hey, we'd like to thank Gary Fleischer for being with us. He had to leave for a run, but he gave us a lot of good information while he was with us and we'll get back with him very soon and continue this conversation, because I think there's a lot to be offered from different construction and then definitely his department, their transformation into an excellent blue card department, using these critical factors and really talking about them and I think you know from the way that Gary talks, you know that his company officers and his other chiefs know the building construction. They're smart company officers, so now they have that system to work within. Hey guys, thanks for being here today Josh Bloom, chris Stewart, thanks, jv, appreciate it, see ya. And Gary Fleischer, thanks for being here too. We'll talk to you next time on V-Shifter.