Fire Command, 3rd Edition

This episode features Nick Brunacini and is hosted by John Vance.

We trace the origin of the Fire Command textbook from Alan Brunacini and why standardizing incident command changes everything from water-on-the-fire decisions to firefighter safety. We walk through what’s new in Fire Command 3 and how Blue Card training turns hard lessons into a repeatable system that works under pressure:

• why freelancing and arrival-order deployment fail under stress 
• how Alan Brunacini’s early fireground experiences shaped Fire Command 
• the shift from slide programs and VHS to a teachable command textbook 
• how Fire Command fits alongside NIMS and FEMA for different incident types 
• what changed from the first edition to the second edition and why “deployment” matters 
• how Southwest Supermarkets influenced command safety and tactical supervision 
• why third edition puts deployment first and expands it to service delivery and aid agreements 
• how embedded safety and accountability replace late-stage fixes 
• what fire science changes about offensive strategy and exterior water application 
• how the Mayday chapter is designed to work without rebuilding the system mid-incident 
Come By The Booth At FDIC, Hoosier Corridor Booth Number 13011

Order the 3rd Edition of Fire Command here: https://bshifter.myshopify.com/products/new-fire-command-3rd-edition

This episode was recorded at the Alan V. Bruncini Command Training Center in Phoenix, AZ on April 15, 2026

For Waldorf University Blue Card credit and discounts: https://www.waldorf.edu/blue-card/

For free command and leadership support, check out bshifter.com

Sign up for the B Shifter Buckslip, our free weekly newsletter here: https://lp.constantcontactpages.com/su/fmgs92N/Buckslip

Shop B Shifter here: https://bshifter.myshopify.com

All of our links here: https://linktr.ee/BShifter

Please remember to share with a friend. Like and subscribe if you can. That helps us out!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:52

This is the B Shifter Podcast. John Vance, Nick Bernassini on this special episode. Welcome. Today we're going to be talking about Fire Command Training and specifically the Fire Command 3rd edition textbook that is uh available for purchase next week. So if you're listening to this uh the week of FDIC, it is for sale at the B Shifter store. So we're gonna talk about that today and really give you the evolution of uh Fire Command and where it started, where it's at, and uh why this is such an important text for our industry. How are you doing today?

SPEAKER_01 1:32

I'm doing very well, JV. How are you? Good, excellent outstanding.

SPEAKER_00 1:36

Yes, here we are. We're here at the AVB C T C We've got a really great group of new incident commander instructors. Beautiful, beautiful. They're learning the blue card system, and they're gonna bring it back to their respective departments. So everywhere from Texas, Oregon, Washington State, a continuation of what they're doing, basically.

SPEAKER_01 1:56

Yeah old timers. They're all doing it. Couple, a couple new departments, too. So it's oh that's good. Excellent. You know, when we've we've been doing this for a while, and when we first started doing blue card, we quickly started referring to it as black and blue card because you go off and have long discussions and I don't know that I call them arguments, but discussions. And it's it's crazy because like here more recently than not is like you get people from departments that they got hired, and that's all they've known. So it it's like it's old enough now that it's older than some of their careers, so there's not so much black and blue that goes on. Although sometimes, well, as you well know, you get out on the road and then you have a like a cult group of people that uh then that can be a little black and bluish, I suppose.

SPEAKER_00 2:53

Yeah, we we get it, we get a touch of that every once in a while. We get a stray jab. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:00

You're out here to do this money grab. We're not interested in this. Go away. Yeah, okay, yeah.

Why Command Systems Matter

SPEAKER_00 3:07

I I was I was watching a very smart guy, Scott Galloway, uh, the other day, and and he said that every 80 years we repeat the same mistakes. And like uh the after the Revolutionary War, no one wanted war again until the Civil War came up, but everyone forgot like how horrible war is. Yeah, you don't want to go through all that. Well, the that generation kind of dies off, so the next generation, let's fight, let's do that. And I'm I'm I feel like we're in that same spot right now in the fire service in a lot of ways, because there are a lot of hard-learned lessons over the last couple of decades, but those people have retired out of their jobs now, and you're hearing some of the newer firefighters, even some of the newer officers who want things like predetermined assignments and stuff, and but they don't know why we got to where we are right now, and they didn't live through the era of very poor command. Because a lot of us, the reason we instituted blue card or fire command is because we didn't have a system at all, or it was very dependent on whoever was on duty. So to be able to have a consistent command system that we can train on has improved our fire departments greatly, but people don't know the road rash that it it took for us to take to get there, you know.

SPEAKER_01 4:21

Well, and it it see the other part of it too, talking to that element of like incident command and structural firefighting operations, is that was that was our only service that we delivered for centuries basically in the country. We did the fire department did structural firefighting, and you're right, there is a a plethora of opinions of what that should look like, structural firefighting. And it's all over the page. And you're like, Well, who was telling me? Oh, Stuart would just got back from a a workshop they did, and he said, one of the guys, an ops chief, came over and he said, you know, I'd like to thank you guys. This is refreshing. That you're doing a decision-making class for structural firefighting, and like the number one decision is to put water on the fire. And they're like, Well, yeah, what else would you do? And he says, Oh, you'd be surprised. So there's a lot of people that come in and they and well, this has been part of fire service forever. Is the the the real experts don't put water on the fire. They do 800 things ahead of that because you know, we're pros and this is the way we do it. You're like, Well, no, I think the fire department should recognize that our we're called to put the fire out. That's why they called us. That's the only reason they called us, really, in many cases as far as fires go, is this fire's here and we don't want it here, so make it go away. So I I I think that's kind of sometimes we forget that, I guess. Yes. Well, yeah.

Brunacini’s Early Wake-Up Call

SPEAKER_00 5:57

We're we're here to learn a lesson today, and and uh the lesson really started well prior to 1985, but it got shared with the entire country in 1985 when uh Fire Command One came out.

SPEAKER_02 6:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:09

And that was the first book that Alan Brunicini wrote, textbook for Fire Command. It was something that you could, you know, ha have as a reference to teach this as a a skill and and and get knowledge on fire command. So how did that happen? Why did that happen? What what got this whole thing started?

From Freelancing To Incident Command

How Fire Command Became A Book

SPEAKER_01 6:27

My old man became a Phoenix firefighter in 1958. He was 21 years old. So he joins the fire department in the 50s, and I want to say his training academy was a week, two weeks long, something like that. It was very short, you know. These are hoses. We use these to put move water to put water on the fire, and these are ladders, we use those to go up. And then his class was, I think, the last recruit class that had to take a pompei ladder to the top of the drill tower. So they start at the ground floor, pompei their way up, I think three or four flights, whatever the tower was back in the day. And then they had to jump into the life net at the end, right? So they they they use the the gooseneck ladder to scale the side of the building, then they had to jump off the building into the net, and then they become a firefighter. So anyway, that was his training, and then he gets he becomes a firefighter, and he was always keen on an education. And then at the time, the city of Phoenix, which was very progressive for a city in the 50s, is they actually had a program where employees could petition the city to go to school and like to college, and they would send you. And so he went to the fire chief and he says, Hey, they have a fire protection program at Oklahoma State, and I want to get a bachelor's degree in that, and blah, blah, blah. So, very unusual. And the fire chief was somewhat enlightened, and he he he recognized, he says, Wow, this young guy wants to go do this. So he approved it. He said, Yes, go. So there was my dad spent about a year and a half going back and forth between Oklahoma State and then the Phoenix Fire Department. And then he earned a degree in I want to say his fire protection technology is what they called it back then. Basically, a fire protection engineer is what he became. He graduates, he comes back, and he's riding the tailboard of engine one. So that's where he he's a firefighter, but he's a fire protection engineer. Very odd thing in like 1960 to have that as a dual thing. So over the next 10 years, he works in the field is from firefighter to company officer, right? So his career spans this. He recognizes very early, and you see this in the Silverback program we're producing, where we have video of him talking about this early days as a firefighter and what that looked like. And he says he figured out pretty quickly that there was no management system in place to do a fire, period. And he's he said they were very spectacular. You know, it was sometimes you were scared. He says, you know, because things are blowing up and there's really no mechanism. It's just kind of task-level survival, is what they're learning. So he's collecting this set of questions of why do we do it like this? And then the other part of it is your personal safety really, it was almost a challenge to make it more dangerous for you as an employee to go in and do whatever it was. So, and I mean, SCBAs are kind of a brand new invention. They're really not wearing those very much. And it's it's and I don't think he ever wore an SCBA. As I think what happened is by the time he promoted, he promoted, became a company officer. During that era, company officers wore rebreather masks. So it was it was a mask that basically filtered the outside air, and then it would give you a little shot of oxygen on the inhale to kind of put make sure you had enough oxygen in your breath. But it just used the cartridge filter to filter out whatever you were breathing, which it was not very efficient or effective. It would be against the law. If if an employer gave an employee that to go do structural firefighting, they probably put him in jail about an hour later. It just wasn't a good idea. It didn't work. Well, I think his Waterloo came. He was a company officer. They go to a fire in a diner. Night, the diners close, the fire starts in the kitchen, boom, boom, they get there. Couple engine companies are inside doing an interior fire attack. BC gets there, and this is back in the area in the early 60s, where they have radios, but they're not talking a lot on them. They scream on them, but there's not orders, or it doesn't sound like today. And so the interior crews are doing their their deal. They're they're getting with it and they're pumping and humping. So they're engaged in fire attack. Well, the chief gets there, the chief sets up a defensive fire operation, and then when that's ready to go, if the fire isn't out on the inside, they just fire it up. So there's two, three companies inside doing an interior fire attack, and now ladders are putting water in from above. So that has the tendency to flip the whole thing, and now what was rising is sinking, and now these crews are overrun with heat and the products of combustion, like a volcano coming at them. So they're dragging ass. Well, like I say, the old man's got a cartridge filter mask he's breathing through. So as soon as that hits his cartridge filter, it's so he's pulling nothing. He goes down a few seconds later. Well, his senior firefighter is heading out and he runs into his unconscious captain and he drags his unconscious ass out of the building. They get out of the building, there's an ambo crew there, they get him breathing again, take them to the hospital. They finish up at the fire scene. The BC goes to the hospital, collects my dad, and brings him back to the scene so he can help his crew overhaul the fire. Oh yeah. So now he's overhauling this fire. So that's his early career. Well, the through the this era is he's taken a set of notes. And he's like, this ain't working. This is stupid. And you know, there's and you still hear it today. It's like, well, you you know, you you need to be able to take an ass whoop and you're gonna be a firefighter. And you know, there's some truth to that because we operate in places that are pretty shitty. They're hot, they're they're they're they're they're they're toxic, they're lethal. But still, there's certain places you don't operate. You don't put elevated master streams on top of people that are inside interior firefighting positions. You're you're so now what it is is that if the fire doesn't kill you, the fire department's going to. So there's really nothing to manage any of this. Well, and he's had a unique career because he starts, and that's all we do is fire attack. Well, he becomes he promotes to chief. So 58, 68. So the late 60s, early 70s, he becomes a battalion chief, right? Well, a few years after that, they start going on EMS calls. They make that a new service. Well, that was a whole different thing to become medical. See, before it was all it was close, man. We were the we were the Templar Knights. That was you didn't get in. The Illuminati ran it, and you just did what you were told. But now we have these outside influences coming in. Well, anyway, so we'll get back to the old man. So he's collecting all this experience through his young career, and he's like, this is not smart. Now, when he was a younger man, but in his teens, he worked in the construction industry. And he would go off during the summers during high school, and he would travel all over the western United States with a masonry crew, and they built schools, churches, and strip malls. So they built large buildings. Hundreds of workers at these kinds of things, big construction company out of New Mexico, but they built all over and there was big buildings. And so he learned at a very young age, occupationally, what task-level labor looked like and how the bosses managed that and just what that was. And he that was a different system than what was happening in the fire service. So he had some background in that. Then he went to school, he got his degrees and the rest of it. In fact, he was started teaching it at Phoenix College at a young age. In fact, I think the first thing he was an engineer and they put him to work there, which was very young to go to work at that time, but it's because he he was a homegrown thing. As they thought, okay, he's our recruit, our kid. We sent him to college, he's this, that, and the other thing, and we all understand where this is gonna go. So they just they said, okay, kid, you're gonna teach hydraulics now, because the captain who teaches it just retired. So that's how he got hooked up there. So now he's watching all this, he becomes a company officer and he's like, I'm gonna start changing some of this stuff, and we're gonna do things a little bit differently. So, and really there was a wide variety of skill levels amongst just the regular cast of characters that was on duty. So you had some companies that were very proficient at like being firefighters, uh establishing water supplies, advancing attack lines, all that. They uh they understood how all that worked, they were very good at it. You had other crews that weren't good. They sucked at it. You know, and they may have been trying or not trying, but for whatever reason, there but the problem was there was no standards for it. There's a really wasn't anything that you could hold somebody to and account for and say, because you were your training was a weak. You you used the Pompey ladder that they weren't using anymore. So I mean it none of it connected with actually the reality of what you were doing for a living. So he started to implement certain things and he started to look around outside the Phoenix Fire Department at what was going on everywhere. And he's like, no, we need to start fixing some of this stuff occupationally. And this deal that you can just take an ass whooping, and that's expected of you as a firefighter, is mistaken seriously, because we're gonna end up killing ourselves, is that's what's next in this, is we're gonna start producing line of duty desks. So he was pretty serious about correcting these things. Well, as a young company officer, that's what they did. They go out and drill and become very proficient at the task level things that they needed to do. Well, and they had a training manual, but it wasn't very specific. It was more broad. So most of this happened based on who the officer was. So he becomes a company officer, he's working downtown, he's got engine one, and this is the way we're gonna do things. And they kind of had a standard routine of what they did. So they're trying to improve and perfect that. Well, his next deal, he was a captain for a few years, then he becomes a battalion chief. Well, he gets a battalion now, so he can do this across an entire battalion. So now what's happened is he starts his everybody knew when he went to school, what what the hell was going on there. Once he comes back and they figure out, okay, he's one of us, he's a mouth-breathing firefighter, and now he's got a degree. So this is a new thing, but we're gonna go ahead and give him some space here just because he said when he he was he was a captain. There they go to a fire, and his engineer, this old guy, he's he he doesn't usually work with them, but so they're working together for a few shifts, and they're going to this thing, and they they get to this fire, and he said, We burn this thing down to the ground. He says, We lost the mineral rights. We burned this thing so badly. And they're driving back, and they're the engineer's going the wrong way. And he's like, Why are you going the wrong way? He says, So, why are you going to take us back to the station? He says, Station, hell, I'm taking us to Oklahoma. You getting your money back. He said, They stole that money from you, sir. He ain't no smarter than the rest of us. He says, He's kind of laughing. He says, The guy's right. Yeah, you know, this is it is what it is. But nonetheless, he becomes a battalion chief. So he starts implementing this in a battalion. Well, now you've got a battalion. And the other thing that's going on is he is starting to draw, to draw like-minded change agents in the thing that are done. They're like, no, this is stupid. And, you know, I like they grew up together. So they know the fire chief at this time, and they I don't trust that guy. And they're just very familiar with each other. And he says he shouldn't be here, and this boom, boom, boom. So now they're they're that the stage is set for change and evolution and advancement. So he starts doing this across a battalion. Well, now he has his spread his wings a little bit and he's starting to touch places outside. So he's starting to develop relationships with other fire service professionals. One of the things he hooked up with, one of the places, was the NFPA. And they the NFPA, since the early 1900s, has put out a quarterly publication. They called it the Fire Journal, they called it Fire Command. They've called it a couple different things. It's evolved over, but it is a continuous publication they have put out for over a hundred years. Well, he ended up hooking up with them, and now he is trying to design an incident command system for a large Metropolitan Fire Department as a battalion chief. So now he's probably got 20, 25, 30 stations, is how big Phoenix is then. And, you know, it's starting, it's growing, it's getting bigger and bigger, and they're hiring more and more people. And and they're starting to look at other service delivery, like EMS is starting to come up. And so now you're starting to see the evolution of the fire service there. So he starts writing these articles for NFPA Fire Command Magazine. And really what it is, is his experience and adventure and designing an incident command system for a big metro system, essentially. And so they start talking about staging and the different ways that you you can assign task-level companies to a work and fire. So they're going through the standardized evolutions. Well, freelancing is really kind of the mainstay system that the fire service used up to that point. And then they tried to refine that by doing like SOP-based deployment systems. See, now remember, all this happened before radio communications. So there's no way, you know, the radio communications back in the day was a speaking trumpet. So that's where you get the bugles for your rank, is this is how high I get to talk and how far. So well, with radios, you could truly take command now because everybody could communicate with each other verbally. So that kind of set the stage for incident command to take place. So you had to have these advancements first. So as this happens, they start implementing so freelancing, SOP-based deployment. So it's all arrival order. So if you're the first engine, you're going to establish a water supply to the alpha side and operate to your best efficiency. If you're second, do you go to the Charlie side, whatever it looks like. So everybody just designs it that way. Now, neither one of those things, you do an SOP-based deployment is not managing an incident. What you're doing is you're deploying companies based on the order they arrive to the scene. You're not managing anything because you're not sizing anything up. That's the problem with SOP based deployment. There's no size up in it. And it just kind of defaults to the offensive strategy. We're going to be going inside. Well, if you pull up to the dynamite factory and it's rocking and rolling, you're not going, I'm not going to lay a line and go operate inside that building because it's going to be like eight zip codes away here in a couple seconds. So uh uh Wrong o dong o. So an incident command system, they figure out you need an incident commander. That's what this is supposed to look like. Well, even when they're starting to make this, the chiefs don't know. Well, what the hell do you want me to do? So it becomes this deal that nobody really knows what that looks like. So that's what they were making sense of. So as my old man's career progressed, especially from company officer into battalion chief, that's really where the that started happening, at least for fire command. So he wrote this article, and this became a more ongoing thing. And then other people, like there was a huge thing going on in Southern California with the Urban Wildland Interface and Fire Scope and two-wide NIMS is going on, and then National Wildland Coordination Group, the NWCG, all that is happening back then. Everybody, well, that's incident command. And you're like, no, no, this is not incident command you're going to be doing on the East Coast. This is West Coast big fire area. We're burning down neighborhoods command. This is this is 30, 40 fire departments getting together to do a big thing. And then when those guys were done, Fire Scope, LA would all go back and they do LA homegrown tactics, which a lot of them said it's fire command. We do the same thing out of fire command, your old man talks about, but when we go to the big one, we use NIMS. That's the way perfect. That's the way that works. So those kind of became the two systems. You had California through the Department of Forestry and NWCG doing their thing in FEMA. That became type one, two, and three land. So the federal and state level incident responses became that. And then even today with NIMS, as they say, just use whatever works for your type four and five. So that's the other part of that. Well, so anyway, the old man's putting all this content together with the NFPA. Well, it begins, and it wasn't a book, it was like teaching aids. So, like these remember these caramate narrated programs? Like in a community college, you have a caramate projector, you put the slide tray, you put the tape in, you hit play on the tape, and then the tape would narrate the thing, and then there'd be a beep, and that would signal the slide selector to advance a slide. And then the next slide drops and the narration starts. That was like it was early PowerPoint, and you had the instructor just read the things. So that's what it was. That was fire command. And they talked about apparatus positioning, they talked about staging. There was a program for each one of those major like SOP-based things you had to do to be able to do incident command. See, if you don't have staging procedures, you can't do incident command, it just doesn't work. So if so we talked about if you use a freelancing system, you don't need staging procedures. If you do assignment by deployment, SOP arrival order, you don't need staging procedures because they just go do what's on the card or they just go do what they want. It's one of those two things. Well, none of them, they're not effective. They just aren't. It's not really a command system. It's we're gonna do this instead of doing command. And for the fire service, that's a lot of it. Is we'll do something as long as we don't have to really do incident command. Don't tell us what to do when we get to the scene. We just it's instinctual for me. I feel what I'm gonna do. And you think, nah, feeling it, and then I'll know when it's done, because I know it's not a very good way to operate. Very bad way to operate. Bankrupt and in prison is where that's gonna put you, or dead. But you're gonna be a loser in it because that's not built to win. I mean, it's just built not to have to do what you're supposed to do. So he produces the NF, he and the NFPA produced this this series. It's basically every chapter of what becomes Fire Command got its own slide carousel narrated thing. Then the next thing was they made a video, fire command in action. So, and then there were some flyers, there was a little bit of printed material, but there wasn't a book. And so the NFPA gets to the point, and they say, you know, this has to have a book to go with it. You know, that's really kind of what we're missing now. And so he's like, Yeah, well, we should write a book because we've got all these SOPs and all this other. I have a stack of stuff that we need to organize and collate into book for him, and that's going to be the first edition of Fire Command. So the first edition of Fire Command contained standard company functions, staging, fire behavior stuff. It beg it contained half a dozen different SOPs that you would need in order to do incident command. And then it contained the seven functions of command, which became the job list for the IC, essentially. And then the system that you had to build for that individual to be successful in managing that incident operation. So they produced that book, and that got printed probably like 1985 is when that came out, and that was brand new. And then there was a student workbook that came out with it at the same time, and then there was all this other auxiliary content and curriculum that was already produced ahead of that. So that kind of became the NFPA's incident command system, essentially, at the time. So in 1985, you had fire command came out, and then really what happened, the thing that like stitched this into the fabric of the American Fire Service is in the early 70s. See, he's he's a BC now, right? So he's a battalion chief. I don't think he's become the ops chief yet, but he's got some juice in the system, and people are starting to pay attention to him from other places, other states, the feds, so he he's his stature's kind of growing and what he's being a fire fire guy. So he ends up writing this book, and then well, before he wrote the book, in the early 70s, when they figured out what the what the table of contents was going to look like for the book. So they figure out these are the functions we're gonna use. Here's the other stuff you have to have. The the the uh auxiliary SOPs that go with the being in command. And then they presented that at FDIC in was it in Memphis? Where it was before it went to Indiana. So it was Nashville? Maybe Nashville, it could have been Nashville. Exactly. Stewart's got the brochure from that. Varner dropped it off here not long ago. And so he goes, him, Varner, and Kime, those three guys, and they go and do a two-day presentation at FDIC on basically fire command, the functions of command. And there was hundreds of people that watched that first deal. Many of them came up to him after the class, and they're trading cards. The guy says, I want you to come to my fire department and teach what I just sat through. So there's like-minded people in the fire service that have the same growing up stories as he does, and they're like, We gotta fix this. This this this old way freelancing and arrival order-based SOPs don't work. It's not efficient, it's not effective, it's it's no good. And in fact, a lot of people just over the course of my career said, No, you can't have like you expect a fire captain to make decisions like this, and you're like, Well, yeah, uh, no, they're too stupid. They can't do that. I mean, even trainers, guys that were like very active in training, would make stupid statements like you can't even explain what the first do engine operator does, all their duties. And you're like, You can't because you never did it, and you're just not a smart person. You're more of a cultural icon or idiot. I don't know. It's one of those two. I don't know which one it is, but it's one of them. And no, that you can, and that's the way you train people. Like a neurosurgeon operates inside your brain. That's even more confusing, and they just go to school to learn how to do it. I mean, that's the way the shit works. So, anyway, he builds this program, and then there's a grassroots of people because he presents it at a big national conference, and so and he did that, I want to say, for the next 20 years, probably. The same thing. He shows up and well, that was his first FDIC. He never missed one. He died in 2017, and I think he died in when was it, October? Yeah. Yeah. So he had been six months out of FDIC. Uh, I mean, he's probably at it on his calendar for the next one. So that's just what the guy did. So, anyway, that's where the first edition came from. He, in 1985, it was published. He had been the fire chief in Phoenix for seven years when that book came out. But I remember him writing it before I got hired as a firefighter. So I got hired in 80. So in the 70s, I remember a group of people sitting in his house uh yelling at each other over what what was going to be in the book. I wouldn't yell with the bunches. What he's gonna do, you guys keep trying to argue about this. He's gonna take you outside, give you a shuffle. What were the arguments? Do you remember? Or what just like what they were do we stage, do we do this? Just everything you can imagine building a command system. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:35

And kind of like what black and blue cards.

SPEAKER_01 32:37

Yeah, exactly. So that's kind of what it was. And there was a group of them that that kind of were producing it. And so there was a guy named Jim Evora who wanted to become a publisher, and he worked in Virginia somewhere, as I remember. And he was gonna be the guy who was the book guy. So he was gonna become Ifsta. And I mean, he was really he had figured this out, and my dad's book was gonna be the first one. And then the artist they were using was a guy named Don Sellers. And so it was those three guys were the book. And so that was they did a three-way cut, and that's the way they went with the first edition of Fire Command.

SPEAKER_00 33:09

So, how widely accepted was that? And and who started using it? You know, of course, it was being used here in the valley. I mean, it was the command system that was being used here, but uh but how how how did that spread? And how did the because I remember I off that first edition watching the videos, we had the VHS tapes on each function of command.

Fire Command Versus NIMS Clarified

SPEAKER_01 33:29

Well, the the there was one VHS tape that did the whole system, and that was that they we burned a uh apartment building in Phoenix. And you know, my dad was a narrator, and they had the little track they would set up with the dolly for the cameras, and Tiller the Clown was the guy up on the floor, you know, giving can reports, although we didn't call them that then. So I think it was just the NFPA selling it, it was the only game in town. So and then, like if you went to California, you were doing NIMS, but see, everybody said they're competing, and they never were a competition between those two systems. It's just that's I mean, that's just the way we context shit. We love to do that. One of them is for huge type one, two, and three incident operations. FEMA's system is is tremendous. There's not a better system for identifying who's in charge of something. That's kind of the way this whole country was designed. Is all the states make up the USA, right? It's all the states. So the feds kind of take care of states that are having issues, like problems, like tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, large wildland fires. See, the state isn't able to do that because they don't have the capacity of the whole country. They don't have the Coast Guard, they don't have the Army, they don't have the National Guard, none of that.

SPEAKER_00 34:51

Or the knowledge based on how to even operate it if they did.

SPEAKER_01 34:55

Because it's so rare for some of the FEMA teams, these type one FEMA teams that show up and manage these giant wildland fires. There's though that's a closed system. You don't get to show up. Engine one doesn't show up, but I'm gonna be the IC on the Rodeo Chettesky fire. You start it off, but how you start it off 15 minutes later, commands transferred to a chief in a car. Rodeo Chettusky, that guy's got that fire for three days until the feds get there and build a team and put it down and then take the whole thing over. It's the way it's supposed to work. Until somebody figures out a better way, we should stick with that. Nobody's figured out a better way to do FEMA, so don't get rid of it yet. You know, and I think that's what happened here over the last year and a half. Oh, we're gonna get rid of FEMA because we just don't like it. Well, you don't know the first thing about it. Well, they got rid of it, and then the next day they put it back in because you can't get rid of it. It does too much. It it's it responds to disasters. So, anyway, that's kind of the thing. That's and so that's where it grew from is the NFPA pushed that because the NFPA owned it. Now, when my dad wrote the book, he see the videos, the slideshows, the like the the the pamphlet style material that they had released, all that was owned by the NFPA. And they had made a fair amount of money on that. Big bucks. So when the book was written, they told my dad, they said, You're gonna be the author of the book. We're not. So the first time that's ever happened with the NFPA. I don't, I'm not aware of it ever happening since then. The NFPA does not put people's names on a book, they publish a book by the NFPA or a standard. Well, that was an Alan Brunicini book, and he kept it. And that's the way their lawyer set it up. So that guy was hugging a kiss. So that was the first edition of the book, and the first edition was it was revolutionary enough that it never really got up, it didn't need to be updated until he got around to doing it, basically, for the second edition. But the first edition was so I'm not gonna say revolutionary, but it was different enough than what we were doing that people just some people, well, I ain't ever gonna do this. I agree. I'm more of a NIMS ops guy. And you're like, no, you you you don't want to be accountable or do anything. So you think NIMS Ops is whatever you say it is, it isn't. That was really the genesis of the first book, and that was uh and I mean, even today, if it was still the first edition, there'd be people arguing not to do it.

SPEAKER_00 37:36

I mean, that's just what you got in the society. And I really think when I look at the way my departments used it back then, um, because I got in the fire service in 1990 and we were using it. It was in the library, but we use parts of it. Yeah, we would we would take pieces of it.

SPEAKER_01 37:50

You'd pick you pick and choose, and that's what you were able to do, and you still can for structural firefighting because there's nobody that does anything with it to that level that says, no, you have to do this, this, and this. So, like EMS, you didn't pick and choose out of the orange Brady book what you were gonna do. You're gonna do all of it because if you didn't, there was a group of people that were gonna come get you and it was gonna hurt. Well, see, we can't screw that up because that's the medical community. And then we got into hazmat, right? That was probably the next thing we did because we responded to hazmat calls, and those were so different than fires that if you did the same routine that we did on regular structure fires, you would die at a hazmat call. And that was happening. So there was a group of fire service people that went to the NFPA and they said, We we got to have a different routine for hazmat. We can't use the structural vacant approach that you just do what you want when you pull up, as we need like rules and regulations. The NFPA said, Yeah, we do, and so we're gonna do hazmat. Well, the first hazmat came out of IFSAC. That was the first hazmat certification. Because the people who went to the NFPA, the hazmat heads, the early OG ones, they said, okay, good. And they said, So they're talking to the NFPA, and they said, Yeah, we're gonna have a standard and we're gonna have this, and this is the way a consensus standard works. And the hazmat guy says, Well, we got some great news. It's all done. Here it is. And they said, Well, that's not the way consensus standards work. And they said, We gather the experts in that field, and they're these people were from different fire departments, and some of them were chemists that work for industry, and they said, That's us. And I said, Nah, well, we it's a deal that you you put it out ahead that we're gonna do this, and then people come in and that's what they're gonna do. They're just not gonna look at what you did, and they're like, No, we're we're not interested in that. We're not interested in five years. That's how long it takes you guys to do a standard. And I think the NFPA is the one that said you should go to IFSAC because they do non-NFPA compliant standards. And so if there's not an existing standard, IFSAC will make one. The Pro Board won't do that because we own them. The NFPA ran the Pro Board. That was an instrument of them, basically, back then. And what the Pro Board did is they just vetted your training to make sure it supported whatever was in the standard. So that's kind of what it was. So when you had like a third-party accredited training, that's who it came from, was the Pro Board or from IFSAC. Well, the first hazmat was IFSAC because there wasn't a standard for it in the NFPA. So five years later, the NFPA puts out a standard, so the IFSAC standard just defaults to that one now. Okay, there's a standard in place. All of this stuff beats it because it it's the same as what you guys did here five years later.

Second Edition Changes And Teaching Tools

SPEAKER_00 40:43

So that's kind of the way that's the way all that works. Let's fast forward to 2002. Then we get second edition. First edition is successful. I mean, it's it's in the library throughout, you know, you could go to fire every fire station and well, fire stations where they wanted to learn and you'd find you'd like to.

SPEAKER_01 40:58

Oh, well, they had a fire station library.

SPEAKER_00 41:00

Yeah, yeah. It'd be in there. And then 2002, we end up with the second edition. So why why do we what was in the second edition and how did that really vary from the original?

SPEAKER_01 41:11

Well, my own man wanted to do a second edition, basically. So the first edition was built uh around those SOPs where you had staging, yada, yada, yada. Well, refracting edition, he added a function of command deployment. He said that there was always something missing from the first edition, and he says we just couldn't figure out what it was. Well, it was actually deploying people on the fire ground. And see, that's where you get the SOP freelancing or assignment by the IC. Those are the three ways you can assign people to an incident. For structure fire, at least. So it's a we're we need deployment because that's more that's where the IC comes in. You actually have that boom, boom, boom. So okay, we'll put deployment in. And then there was nothing else in it. Is the first edition had all those SOPs for like company activities, standard engine ladder function, support work, search and rescue guidelines, all that kind of stuff. So he said, the second edition, we'll just take all we don't need that, and we'll do where it applies within each function, is that's where we'll include it. So, like, remember Jeff King and Why? Ask why. Yeah, Simon, the book. Yeah. The second edition was that that was my dad answering the question, why. So, I mean, the second edition had a lot more. This is the reason we do this and why we do it like this, and what it looks like. And so I think it it was more of a discussion of how it got here and the effect of that, somewhat. So that kind of became the second edition in the thing. And then the other part of that is we released a student workbook. We released a very robust instructor's guide that had presentations for each function of command, and then it had a set of simulated structure fires, like a four-slide set. Picture of a building with nothing showing, picture building with offensive fire conditions, marginal fire conditions, and defensive fire conditions. Those four slides you could teach a two and a half hour tactics class to whoever your audience was, just with those four slides, nothing else. And it was powerful. I'm the latter guy who knows the most about all of this. You could actually have an intelligent discussion with those folks.

SPEAKER_00 43:42

Well, and that was being used at junior college classes, too. Like our my junior college I went to was using that for yeah, that's what it was for.

Southwest Supermarkets And Blue Card

SPEAKER_01 43:49

That's we built it to teach that. I mean, that's kind of what we did. So, and then my brother had made a set of DVDs, the like nine DVD set, and then we had some for critical factors outside of that. So there's probably about I don't know, a dozen and a half DVDs that went with the second edition. You could buy there was the instructor guide, the student workbook. And so with that, and and at that point in my career, I was a battalion chief. So I actually helped write a good chunk of the second edition of the book. And it started out, my dad was doing it, and then he did I become a BC and I'm doing X, Y, and Z. And so he would start sending me shit. So we just would start going back and forth. So that developed the second edition, and then when that was done, the NFPA produced that also, all the other content we had with it, too, whole thing. And then after that came out. In 2002 was the publishing day. But Southwest supermarkets had happened right about the time Fire Command was being published. Right? So that that occurs. Well, then my old man drops right before Southwest supermarkets. So that's a five-year window. So you got five years, and then on the back end of that five years, you gotta leave. So the last five years of his career, he signs his drop papers a few days later, a month either way, before or after that. June. So yeah, two months. Drops, Tarver dies at Southwest supermarkets. We do a five-year recovery, and within about six months of the recovery, you know, you know what caused the thing. All the stories out, all the bullshit's done. Everybody knows the real story, what happened. And that this is it was we started offensive and we got into late stage offensive, and then we got into early stage defensive operations inside a commercial building. And those guys were were operating like they were inside a 1,500 square foot house, and they ended up it it turned to shit. That's what happened, man. It did a horrible thing. So but really the takeaway for me in that was tactical supervision, is you've got to be doing if you don't have a tactical level at some point when something goes wrong, it the strategic level is gonna go away. Because you're not the three minutes after the main day happened, IC lost complete control over the scene. It just there was nothing you could do. And until they put those tactical bosses in place, you weren't gonna get it back. That's what it took. So so anyway, the lessons learned from that got put into command safety. And command safety is really the safety effect of using an incident command system. So I think the thing happened in the fire service has been happening forever is like we don't want to do incident command or anything. We don't want to do anything that slows us down on the front end of this because our biggest window of opportunity is the very beginning of that incident for a structure fire to put it out, right? So we need to take effective action and that front end window that solves the problem. Well, incident command has a bad rap of this is a bureaucratic thing and it just stops any good forward progress. Well, no, what it does is it accelerates good forward progress and it stops stupid from happening. So you you can actually manage your response and you can put the fire out that much better. Yeah, I never understood it. Is we were vapid to attack the fire. So, like 30 seconds after you get on the scene and they set the break is we're going through the front door with a with 150 gallons a minute. I mean, you're you're you're getting it. So, and you have huge success off of that. Well, the problem is that when it doesn't work, you need to move back before it kills you. So again, my old man's early thing, if the fire don't kill you, the fire department will. Well, the thing is, is no, you're gonna go in and kill the fire, and I'm gonna manage it in a way that I'm not gonna let the fire kill you. So if you can't kill it, I'm gonna pull you out before it can get you. So, and it's not a half-assed attack we're doing. It's aggressive. Yeah. You're when I retired from my government job, my biggest concern is we are going too hard again. Is that we could manage that from the moment I could manage all of them. But when the roof falls on them, they're dead. I can't do anything about that. And you were having late-stage offensive success in buildings that you shouldn't have. You're like, no, that this building should be torn down within the next week or it's going to collapse. We shouldn't have been able to do this. So it's that kind of stuff you look at in an after-action review and say, this is we're feathering the edge again. We need to to make sure that we're operating in places that we can protect ourselves, basically. So, and the way you do that is you manage your response to that incident. So that's kind of what the second edition and where it came from and what it did. Well, after command safety was published, see, then in Phoenix, we went from an administrative incident organiz an administrative fire department organization to manage the day-to-day operations to an operational one, right? So we went from staff deputies managing in the operation division to to shift deputies.

SPEAKER_00 49:32

Who are in the field on 24-hour shift.

Standards Safety And Fire Service Politics

SPEAKER_01 49:34

Yeah. So you always had strategic you had two, well, you had two shift commanders all the time, and they were the ranking officers that were the senior advisors in the command post. So they took care of a pretty big response area. 550 square miles, about a million and a half people, 50 fire stations, about 600 on-duty firefighters in Phoenix. You had at least that many in the rest of the city that we did automatic aid with, the rest of the county, if you will. Maricopa County is about 10,000 square miles and about, I don't know, 5 million people. And it's got shit, 26, 27 fire departments that make it up. So you've the hundreds of, I mean, and it's all hooked through a dispatch center. So they all work together today. It's it's truly a county system. It has been for 50 years. Yeah. So, and that's where all this came from. I mean, that's you you had crazy Alan Brunicini kind of is the shepherd of that, yeah. Yeah, of the thing. And he kind of is responsible for the automatic aid. Is he's the guy that went to the other cities and said, hey, this is mutual aid stupid. We need to do automatic aid. So that was all part of it. Well, fire command's really kind of the book that he used to manage that in a very active way, pretty much. So that's what the second edition then, and we saw this, we thought, okay, we're gonna do this. And see, I grew up in a system where we full service. So we did EMS, hazmat, TRT, and then what we're calling social response today. So whatever the hell that is. EMS calls it really aren't EMS related. They're more social. So when you looked at those systems, especially like EMS, is everybody in the fire department that worked in the field had a medical certification. You were an EMT or a paramedic, one of the two. And you were one. And if you weren't one, you weren't working in the field. And it wasn't a deal. Oh, he lost his EMT last week. We need to get him out. They knew the minute you lost your EMT license or paramedic license, and you were done. Somebody from personnel came and got you and said, You ain't working in the field, pal. And usually people lost it because there was some reason. You know, they they were having some trouble in their life or whatever it was. So, but you didn't have anything. See, you had that for hazmat. If you were a tech, a hazmat tech, you were certified and you maintained your training throughout the year. And you had to have so many training hours every year to maintain your hazmat tech position. Same thing for uh technical rescue, ongoing training that went with that. So EMS, hazmat, and being a first responder, you had hazmat shit you had to do every year, and you had TRT shit you had to do for first responders, and then you had the OSHA stuff you had to do, the bloodborne pathogen stuff. And then you had your every three years we had to recertify as EMTs or paramedics, and what that looked like. So the only place we didn't do that was for structural firefighting. There was none of it. So once you graduated from the academy and got what was the equivalency of your firefighter one and two, is you were good to go for your whole career for structural firefighting. If you promoted to company officer, they may have put you through a up to a week-long academy to be a company officer. And there may have been a morning or an afternoon where you did some kind of a simulation for incident operations, but that wasn't 10% of your academy. It just wasn't. You had to put up all the ladders that an engine company carried, the three ground ladders, and then they would check you off on that. And then every year, probably about 5% of the companies would have some kind of difficulty or issue, and then they would just it would require a little extra training to get them through for whatever reason. So that was pretty much kind of to keep the task level on the same page, but there was nothing for command piece. So, you know, we had strategy and tactics and things like that. So out of Southwest supermarkets, we ended up developing the blue card program. Well, initially, when we taught it in the Phoenix Fire Department to the Phoenix firefighters, that was all in person. Shift commanders taught it using PowerPoint. That's what it was. And then we'd simulate. And everybody loved it. This is the greatest training ever. You know, why'd it take so long? It's like, well, it's just the next natural progression in this. So now we're here, so here we are. So that had a gigantic impact. Like the first year, year and a half, we did CTC command training. Now there was like 650, 700 students because we'd used all the officer in Phoenix, and then we opened it up to the other cities. So there were enough people that we couldn't do it over quarters. We had to do trimesters. So you had to have four-month training blocks. After a year to a year and a half, it standardized operations across the fire department in such a way, because we would we always did like after-action reviews, right? So you guys would come to Phoenix for conferences and we would show you after action reviews, and this is how the system worked, and it'd be a report card over the last year. We used it, and this is what the system did. So the ranking chiefs, the the fire chief, the ops chief, the training chief, all those guys are involved in these after-action reviews. So we're doing an after-action review one day. We've had this system for a year, two years, whatever it was. And the fire chiefs and ops chief, well, the group of them said, you know, this is odd for us because this is the first time in our careers where we've come in to one of these presentations for an incident review, and the people that were operating on the north side of the fire are telling the same story as the people who are operating on the south side of the fire. That's never happened before. And they're looking at us like you guys are like staging this. You're cheating somehow. There's like you're informing them or something's going. There's an earpiece. Yeah. Well, yeah, there is. It's called tactical supervision. That's what it is. We're putting BCs in places where we normally wouldn't put them. You just leave a company officer. Well, that's that's we talk about the third edition Vance. There's a lot of talking about tactical level. That that's that was the missing piece during my career. Is the tactical level was hit or miss in my system.

SPEAKER_00 56:57

Well, I wanted to say too, when you and you brought up the symposiums, but at the same time that that this was really impacting the the Maricopa County area, specifically Phoenix and around, it's also impacting everyone in the United States. Because you guys are writing about it. It's in every trade magazine, it's at every conference. There was an incident command symposium here. That's how Tim Schauble and I started coming out here and seeing what was going on because we wanted to replicate it. You hear about the success, but how can we simulate? How can how can we take this information and deliver it to our people? And that's really where we got into Blue Card after that. But you guys were impacting everybody. All eyes were on Phoenix.

SPEAKER_01 57:36

Well, and part of it was the the relationship my dad had with the NFA, because they're the there's only one of them. And they so really, first edition of Fire Command comes out in 85.

SPEAKER_00 57:46

What was it, 88 that 1500 came out? I think it was right after fire command. I think it was 85 as well. The first edition.

SPEAKER_01 57:56

It was it was closer to 88, I think. Anyway, but you're right. It was somewhere between 85 and 88. It's based off fire command. That was the energy of fire command pushed that. And in fact, that was after fire command, the NFPA said, uh, what do you want to do? I'm gonna do a safety standard for firefighters. And they're like, all right, this crazy bastard just wrote an incident command book that we're getting death threats on from certain people, certain quarters. Oh, we ain't gonna do incident command. You think, you know, you morons have been alive for a really long time. You just call yourself a little something different today, don't you? Uh-huh. Yeah, uh-huh, yeah. We know who you are. Anyway, once the NFPA pushed it out, that was I think that gave it the validation because they were the in charge of the fire. Well, at least making standards for the fire service, they were the only ones. But when they did 1500, that that put them down. The NFPA. They were not prepared for that. And they they said, This is this crazy man was able, and he got death threats for 1500. People actually wrote him letters and said, We're gonna kill you. You can't tell us how we're gonna take care of our firefighters. And he his standard line is he says, You spend more taking care of your apparatus, you don't spend any money taking care of your firefighters. Yeah, yeah, no, you're and in fact, if I'm being honest, I don't think he had a high regard for those people. And I think if they wanted to come talk to him personally, he would have been happy to engage them and have that conversation. Uh 100%. He would have, yeah. Tom Brennan. I'm gonna meet Alan Brunicini. Those guys were hugging each other with at the end. And I thought, it's a good thing you're hugging because he'd be choking your ass to death right now if you weren't. And they keep kicking the dog. I'm gonna bite you. Anyway, but that was it. Once that standard went, the NFPA said, You're gonna be the chairman now. And they made him the chairman of the NFPA then. They said shit, the guy can do anything. Everything he said he's gonna do, he did. Nobody, this hasn't happened before. So he was a unique character in the thing. And he was he never yelled and screamed at people. He would just talk his way into making enough sense that they, yeah, we have to do this. Well, became best friends with the IFF. There was a group of the IFF, just mostly that dealt with him. Uh Foley, a whole group of them. But but that that Al Whitehead was a partner in the 1500 thing, and he was running the local then. And he says, no, he says the next thing we're gonna do is staffing. So the first version of 1700 was a staffing standard, and that got derailed by the volunteers. And that was a political thing between the volunteers and the union. And they said, you're not gonna make those two, the two guys who are responsible for that, they said they're never gonna like each other. So that that's as long as those two are the principal, you're not gonna get a standard. So they took them out and they recast it, and now it's two standards and one's tactics, one's staffing. Yeah, I mean, so it is what it is, but it's all still there, and it all so and people know we're gonna go to three-person or two-person AMBO staffing. You think, no, the standard does not call for that. So, and really, when the authority having jurisdiction does that, they expose themselves to great liability. So if you have the resources where that hurts you, that change, and you can process that through a court, you will the last time that happened, they won over 30 million bucks in the thing over not doing incident command correctly at the scene. That's exactly where that money came from. Is we're gonna do it the way we said. And you no, you're not because you're not really doing it. I mean, you're not doing anything. What you're doing is you're making a it's it's it's it's like uniform cosplay. They're they're really not serious about it.

What’s New In Third Edition

SPEAKER_00 1:02:02

So let's get to to where we are today. Okay. The release of the new Fire Command third edition. How all these pieces and parts, the standards, second edition, blue card, what else is in there? What else, what else was in the pot to make the new stew? With the third edition?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:24

Yes. Well, the third edition is just the next itineration. And so the second edition came out in 2002, and then command safety came out in 2004. So it's been 22 years since we've done anything with it to update it. And really, like the first edition had seven functions of command, and they're still in the the third edition. The same. So now we've reorganized them a little bit and called them a little different here and here, but they're the same basic functions. And then deployment is the second edition function. It was the fourth function of command in the second edition. It is now the first function of command in the third edition, because we took deployment from just being assigning people at an incident to the entire system that you use to deliver service. So it incorporates the entire fire department and then all the aid agreements you have. So, see, that's the other thing going on. Is one of the things FEMA was looking at is interoperability and consolidating resources. And I think that's a good thing. Like, so I never understood. Like, I worked in a in an area and then the county, and we had, let's say, 30 fire departments. All 30 had the same exact positions. So they had a fire chief, they had assistant chiefs. There was a fire department, had one engine company. It had a fire chief, an ops chief, and a battalion chief. So it had three shifts of battalion chiefs and had one engine. And you're like, this doesn't make any sense. Why do you have all you need one engine to protect this community and everybody else around you? In fact, it makes it harder because now this department doesn't work with this department. And you're like, I don't under well, it's they're clubs, they're fraternal organizations. It's not a public safety thing. Well, no, we won't run with them. Well, what if if their station is the closest to part of your customer base, they're gonna be there, they're gonna get there quicker. They could save people. I mean, we're first when seconds count, right? That's what we advertise, but we don't want those relationships because it's somehow uncomfortable because we don't like their uniform patch or Jimmy did something a hundred years ago that pissed off Johnny or whatever it was. So it just doesn't make a lot of sense. In fact, that's public safety, period. I mean, it's like the old English model where you have villages that are separate from everybody else. I mean, it's so anyway. I don't even know what we're talking about, Vance.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:05

Third edition, and in the way that deployment really encapsulated the whole thing, the whole thing.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:11

Well, and you're seeing that like in clay, where the clay fire territory was in St. Joseph's County, and then St. Joseph's consolidated dispatch centers. And they said, no, we're only gonna do one dispatch center, so we're gonna shut down four of them. Yes. And it because it doesn't make any sense. We don't, it's gonna work better because we can we can move companies, we can make sure that the and eliminate the duplication of resources. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:36

They're all trying to do the same thing, but the coordination is actually less because of the time it takes to transfer calls and get information back.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:42

Yeah, it's the difference between mutual aid and automatic aid. The reason that we went this system works here in this county because the the Phoenix Dispatch Center. In fact, that's the glue that holds it together. Is there's been people that have come in over the last 50 years here, that they're gonna be the fire chief in some small western city that that's part of the county. And they get there and they're one of these ops dudes. It's no, I'm doing ops. I'm the ops guy. It's a bullshit thing they say. It's just, I'm not gonna do anything. It's whatever I say goes, is what it is. And I don't want to do this, and I don't want Phoenix dispatch. I'm not gonna be part of this consortium anymore. So, what that means is they got to build their own dispatch center. So this new smarter fire chief goes to the city and says, I don't want to be part of this, and this is what it's doing. And so he gives all the negatives and they don't pay any attention. They're like, okay, what do you want to do? Well, we need our own and blah, blah, blah. And he says this and this. Nothing about what it's gonna cost. They say, well, yeah. They don't approve it, don't deny it. They just kind of shrug and he goes to the next thing. He comes back a month or two later, and he's got a package of building a new dispatch center. Probably named after himself, you know. Give him a peace prize and build a dispatch center for him. And he goes to the city. And they're like, the authority having jurisdiction. What's this? And he says, Well, last month I told you we want to drop out of this consortia because they tell us what to do, and nobody can tell us what to do because nobody knows like I do. So I need my own dispatch center so we can dispatch 911 calls for our community. And then what we could do is grow that, and then they can belong to our dispatch center and we can charge for it and make money. Oh, okay. Well, what's this cost? Oh, that's uh$31 million. And they said, uh, we'd like you to meet Leo. He's the security guard, and he's gonna escort you back to your desk so you can get your personal items. He he's going to remove your email and your access to it, and you're fired. Thank you for your service. And that's exactly what happened. Wow. Is he was gone within a day or two. They were finished. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:56

So Well, it there's people who empire build or they want to empire build their own little banana republic. And we see that all over the country. Little banana republics that don't talk to each other. There's no consol.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:07

I don't want to consolidate at all. Yeah, you can't muddy my DNA here. This is my thing. So it is what it is.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:14

What what else is in Fire Command 3, then, the third edition? So we've got deployment up front. What what other changes are we going to have in the in the new book?

Safety Chapter And Embedded Accountability

SPEAKER_01 1:08:23

Well, the it starts with the the the evolution of the system. So basically the conversation you and I just had, a lot of it is that's this is how this is how the thing got written, why it got written, what it is, where it came from. And then it kind of talks about the the subsequent editions. And then the intro also goes into the differences in the third edition. The table of contents for the third edition is it starts with the evolution, then it goes through the eight functions of command. Deployments first, then you got assume confirm position, size up, communications, strategy, and incident action planning, organization, review and revision, and then continue, transfer, escalate, terminate. So we move transfer back, but it's and you could we could redo it and move it back to or it just doesn't, it it goes where it goes. Right? So then the next the nine the there are eight functions. The ninth chapter is a safety chapter you just reviewed, and that's the safety effect of using the system, and then the safety requirements that kind of occur with each of the three levels the strategic, tactical, and task, and kind of the the the safety system that they use just as a day-to-day thing. And really, kind of the but one of the key pieces of that safety chapter is we compare structural firefighting to skydiving and scuba diving as far as the risk is involved in it, and really the way you manage the safety. Because those other occupations, skydiving, scuba diving, there's not a safety officer. There's a jump master or a dive master. And so before you go out the plane, they have their thing. And then before you go underwater, they have their thing. But once you break the surface and you're into the new hazard, there ain't no safety officer standing there waiting to save your ass. It's if you can't save your ass, you're probably gonna die, basically, in those endeavors. So that's really kind of the safety piece of it. And I think that speaks to a couple things. The first is it's a that's why it's so exciting and it draws the kind of people into our occupation because you get to have a a thrill every now and then in a non-office setting, let's say it's outside it's good fun outside work. Good clean fun. Exactly. Uh-huh. And then the other piece is just when you operate within that system, is that is how you manage a lot of your safety in a very real way. And see, and it goes against the idea, like you still see safety officers. Is there the solution to firefighters being injured and killed on the fire ground? That's late stage, man. It's it's strategic, tactical, and task. And then we embed safety, the traditional safety officer on the tactical level. So they're reporting, the safety officer reports to the division tactical boss. That's who they're working for. We can open a channel in the command van, a safety channel on a safety section to do like higher-end accountability for like extended offensive operations where you got division bosses. And so the IC's not getting the work cycles for the divisions or attack positions like they were before because they're being managed by tactical bosses. So you can open up a safety channel, and then the safety officers can communicate back into the command post with like roll calls of where everybody is. So the old par system and roll calls, we don't do anymore because it's you're always you always have a par, basically, is the way the third edition looks at it, where maybe the first and second edition is it's something the IC had to make sure and verify. And it was a reminder for the task level bosses that hey, where's all my folks?

SPEAKER_00 1:12:16

Yeah. Or maybe every 10 minutes, though. I mean, it wasn't a continuous thing. It was like 10 minutes goes by and you lose Billy, you know.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:24

Yeah. But when you look at the third edition and the way the system is, is if in that 10 minutes, you're gonna get a can report somewhere, and you're gonna when you come in, you know you got a par. When you leave, you got a par. So that's really the key is when I'm leaving the hazard zone, I report my par. And that's I check them off that. So I know I got a par in this boom, boom, boom. So anyway. So it's kind of the value of the command system and just managing your safety moment to moment. The safest incidents I ever operated on as a firefighter is an officer. There were no safety officers. It was all managed by the bosses. We put the fire out, we there were hazards, you had energized fences that would have blown your arm off had you touched them, all kinds of things. But you just when you train your people to operate, that's that's kind of so that's what you train them to do, essentially.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:18

How much influenced did the the evolution of both science? Because I know, like in the uh early 2000s, I think it was 2000, you guys were burning buildings with NIST and Phoenix and with thermal couples and really looking at the science. Yeah, no one had done that before. And then FSRI through UL kept doing that. So, how much with all that new information through UL, FSRI, new NFPA standards, how much of that has influenced the the new book?

SPEAKER_01 1:13:48

A lot. See, like when you go back to the first two editions of Fire Command, you had offensive and defensive strategy. I was raised in a system where when you were in the offensive strategy, you did not do outside water application. And that was the deal. If you did that, you were a that was a coward's way to do things. We did not do that. And in fact, if you did that enough, they'd probably fire your ass. They say you can't be a window shooter. So we were taught to attack it with great vim and vigor. So if it was offensive, you were getting after it. And so, and these were things that you figured out pretty early, like you know if you're winning or not. Uh, I can tell you with in the first 10, 12 breaths, once we engage, okay, this is it's out or it's not gonna go out or whatever it is. Well, like you said, with all the tests that have been done subsequently, they have shown that exterior water application is far superior to what we were doing, right? Is you knock the energy out of it before you ever go in, you're going in standing up now, and you are moving straight to it. You're putting water and it's over that much faster. So, our approach, you could knock a fire down in 10 units basically of time. With today's tactics, we'd be doing that in five to seven. So it's it's the the effectiveness of your initial operation of uh removing the hazards, basically. We're the fire department. We should call uh when they call the fire department, we should show up and put the fire out. That's why they called us. They didn't call us to to to cut a hole in the roof. Now, sometimes we'll do all these things in effort to put the fire out. But it's gotta be a lot of people think it's the opposite. No, we do these other things so the fire goes out. No, we put water on it so the fire goes out. That's what puts the fire out. Nothing else does. Or it smothers itself and there's no oxygen. So it's one of those two things, or it runs out of fuel. Those are the three things. So there you go. The third edition, we say that if you're a strategic level person, you should have an expert understanding of task-level structural firefighting and its capabilities and limitations, basically.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:05

So this is truly a textbook, though. Yeah, it's a textbook. It's a textbook.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:09

It is a textbook, it is more on how than the last ones were. I mean, it it's we've it and the other thing this has is the first the second edition was done in the early 2000s, is we got 20 some odd more years of experience. So that that's a huge, like I said before, a huge piece of it is tactical level supervision. It's it just you assign a chief to run a sector division now, is what it is.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:36

And this is all stuff that's worked with 70,000 incident commanders and over 4,500 fire departments over the last 18 years since Blue Card started. So yeah, there's still people signing up for Blue Card.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:49

I mean, it's it's not going away, it's not going to. We're gonna keep doing what we're doing because it works, and it's just yeah, it's a small it's a much smarter way to manage your business, is because you're actually managing it now.

Mayday Management And The Living Glossary

SPEAKER_00 1:17:01

So is there anything else you want to talk about with the third edition that folks should know about before they hit the order button?

SPEAKER_01 1:17:09

There's also like we got the safety chapter in this chapter nine, and then it ends chapter well, but chapter ten is a Mayday chapter, so it's managing Maydays. So, and that's kind of that's where blue card's really kind of taken off and gone. Is we're a system where when you're blue card is designed in a way that if there's a Mayday in the middle of an incident operation, you don't have to change anything or add anything. You have done a set of things that have put you in a position where you can always manage a Mayday, is really the strength of the system. So and so we put that in the back and say this is the way Mayday looks. And then we do it whether it's the IC has all those task-level companies reporting to them. That's one algorithm we do. And then the other is when you have a tactical level boss running the attack position where there's a Mayday occurring and how that looks. And we even do a piece of like if you're uh the mobile IC and you're the only officer there, basically. I mean, as at least in the incident organization, and you got a May Day, you got it. I I don't know what else to do. You can't pass command, you can't get rid of being command. I guess if the Mayday kills you and you're the IC, then we're gonna have to do something. But really, just by taking command and sizing up and and and processing all that through a strategic decision-making model is that's going to eliminate 99% of the Maydays that would have happened and keep them from happening. So, I mean, it's the very the the system, you don't get a lot of maydays with the first engine getting there, doing blue card. They did like I've figured out where we need to go, where the hazards are, and what we're gonna do. So, and then the very last thing in the book is a glossary. So we put a in fact, I talked to Gerrit about that today, and she says, Yeah, we probably need to add some more to that. And I thought, well, yeah, it's a living glossary. So we're gonna have the gloss the glossary is gonna be done in the book here in another week or two. There, we're not gonna add anything to it because it's printed then. So what we're doing is we're taking that glossary and we're gonna put it on our website. And so the glossary will always be alive. So if there's more terms you want added, so the most recent glossary will be on our website. Yeah. Yeah, after I think six months, a year, we get, I don't know, half a dozen comments, add these terms, da-da-da-da-da. And then we'll do like we'll just notify them through the book slip. Hey, the new glossary is updated. Boom, boom, boom.

FDIC Deal Ordering Details And Close

SPEAKER_00 1:19:40

So we'll be at FDIC. If you're listening to this either the week of or week before of FDIC, we'll be there in the Hoosier Corridor, booth number one three zero one one. Come by, Nick's gonna be there. We're gonna have a special on the book,$25 off. You just get the promo code from us, and we're not gonna give it on the podcast because it's a limited time promo code only during FDIC. But this offer will be extended to everybody. You just don't have to be at FDIC to get the$25 off. So we'll we'll extend that to everyone during the week of FDIC. So that'll be out on our social media and our website. But uh, we invite you to come by the booth. I mean, you'll be there. We'll we'll have cards so you can order it and and and get on the list, and then in May it'll ship to you, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:20:28

Yeah. Yes. The book takes about they said two to three weeks print turnaround time. From the time the printing starts, the time it ends up with us. So we figured that by the end of May, we'll be sending them uh the first initial orders out of the thing. That's that's our plan at least.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:45

Well, we've got a lot of people asking about it already and folks who aren't gonna be at FDIC. So we just wanted to. Yeah, this isn't an FDIC only deal, they're just we're rolling it out at FDIC.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:54

But FDIC starts Wednesday. Yeah. So from Wednesday to Saturday. Yes. So next week, Wednesday to Saturday, if you go to b shifter.com and you get into the store and order the book, you'll get it for 25 bucks off. 25 bucks off. Yeah. So and the price of the book's 150 is what we put it at. Which is typical for a textbook. Oh, it's half of what a textbook costs. Yeah, yeah. No, so we do it's yeah. Yeah, you can I think we sell the first edition for 135 bucks on the website. Yeah. Yeah. So it's only 15 bucks more. Yeah. And it's brand new. So it's no, I think it it's good. It really, I think it supports the it's a good next edition after the second. I think it's it's got a lot of art in it. It uses some of the same art from the second, but it's got a ton of brand new, especially in the back of it. And and a lot of it is it it illustrates how this works and what it looks like through kind of the different phases of an incident operation. So it's it's a little it's a little more directions than the last couple have been, I guess.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:59

Get your learning on. That's great.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:01

So I mean, but but I mean, that's what you would expect from a bunch of B shifters that have been doing blue card now for the last 20 years or whatever the hell it's been. So yeah. But if you look at advance, like all the workshops we do today, all of it's based off the fire command book. Uh I mean, that's where all this came from.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:17

So and I think we continue to learn from you know, not just the Tarver incident, but there's a lot of other NIOSHAs. Oh, there's a ton of cards. There's other there's a lot of road rash that other people got that we don't want you to get. Yeah. And that's why we pass this information on to you. And I think the Fire Command 3 anchors all of that. That's the foundation.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:37

No, it really does. And I mean, it's true to the first edition, and I think it uh I think it kind of improves on that. That's what it's supposed to do. It's supposed to evolve and get a little bit better. And it does. I I I think it's I think it allows us to be more effective and even safer. So I think you get quicker results using the new tactics that we've been screwing around with here for the last like you said, 2000, but Dan Madrikowski's been doing this in the 90s. We were hanging out with him. So I mean, it's 30, 40 years of looking at this stuff. And it's a yeah. And then when you marry that to like the Shane Rays of the world and what's going on in big boxes, and then all that gets cooked back into the program. So it's it's best standard practices. And I don't know. I I think most of us want to go and do well at those types of events and not end up killing ourselves and and having a good outcome of the thing. Nobody wants to burn down a million and a half square foot warehouse. I mean, there's no reason we should. Unless somebody turns everything off and torches it, and that's gonna burn down. But I mean, shit, that's what we were. We had to run what was there when we got there. We we can't unburn that building. So that that's what happened before we got, we ain't taking responsibility for. Okay, let's do a timeless tactical truth before we go.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:06

Timeless tactical truth from Alan Brunacini. That book is available for 10 bucks at bshifter.com. And this week's is it's difficult and painful to attempt to manage something you are trying to save yourself from. Yeah. That's an appropriate one for uh we always have appropriate ones, but we're gonna help you manage it. I mean, we we want to give people the tools to to help them manage these incidents and and to keep their people safe.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:35

And that we're not running from it.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:37

Well, and it's a comprehensive system. So I mean it's got there's different layers and parts and elements that you have to implement during the course of an incident to be able to you utilize those things you put in place. And if you don't, then it's not it's not there. You can't do it. So if the IC doesn't assign people with a order that's a task location and objective, I mean, how can you control the position and function of somebody? So that's like you say, that's that's what the system's for. Is is and really when you use it and you get and that's I think why people keep coming back to it is I can do this job, I use fewer resources and we get it done quicker with with less exposure to our people. So I mean that's a kind of a hug and a kiss.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:26

Nick, thanks, man.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:27

JV combo. It's it's been yeah, it's another well.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:31

I appreciate the history, and as always, I learned I've learned sitting here, and and it's up. I always I always feel like I'm an Elliot Mince kind of person where I'm trying to archive this stuff and understand it all. But you know, he was uh John Lennon's biographer.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:45

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:48

I did not know that so but but then I always learned something else too. So it's I I I I love it. It's something that has impacted every organization I've been part of and continues to, and I think this uh third edition is going to propel that even further.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:04

Well, I think that's that's the joy of getting to be us, is we get to take the our crazy old man Big Toe, and his with the stuff he created and keep that current and uh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:17

The legacy lives on.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:18

Well, on his death, a lot of people said that he's responsible, like the architect of the modern service. That a lot of it came out of the first edition of that book, and then the standards that get done behind it. Minimum staffing is a piece of that. I mean, so there's a lot of things there. And I think it still serves us very well. Better than not using it, certainly. I think you can justify when you understand your work, you can explain it to people better and what you need and and why you need those things.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:49

So well, come by and see us at FDIC, everyone. Would love to see you there. If not, we'll connect you with you otherwise. And of course, we'll be here every week with the B Shifter Podcast. Thanks for listening.