Could the Nozzle position be more dangerous than 20 or 30 years ago? Why does it seem more firefighters are getting burned and killed with a nozzle in their hands? Did you have an Instructor tell you, no water on smoke?
Please Share your Nozzle Position Close Call and/or Death.
Don’t Hesitate to share links. Looking for Big Input and Shared Experiences.. Look under Close Calls on Home Page for more Pics and Video of another Close Call here in Northwest Florida.The Nozzle Firefighter was burned while making entry through front door of small house. He was burned from Vent Point Ignition.. Video under Close Calls on Home Page..
Mask starting to fail. Short period of flame contact made it impossible to see through lens.
Firefighter burned and transported. Close call of Firefighter assigned to nozzle.
How long will your gear protect you? Have you inspected your gear lately? What kind of hood do you wear? What is the rating on your gear? Do you wear your ear flaps pulled down?
ECFR Firefighter Suffers Facial Burns-Lessons Learned click here
Our Next Generation of LODDs from Live Fire Training
Kevin Story Captain
Who are they: They are all around you and they are graduating from academy’s every day.
What are they: They are our next generation and the future of the fire service. If you are a Company Officer, they are riding behind you. If you are a Chief, they are the Troops you had coffee with this morning.
Why are they going to be LODDs: Because what live fire training is today, is ill preparing them for what they will face once they are riding on the apparatus.
But we have NFPA 1403: Which is part of the problem, as it has watered down fire training (pun intended) to something unrealistic, to the real world of rapidly growing fire conditions we now face.
There was a definitive need for NFPA 1403: that was plainly seen by some of the training events which left you saying that favorite three letter acronym that also works for, Well Trained Firefighters. Training evolutions that were not thought out all the way through no doubt. They were not planned with intent to do bodily harm but had tragic results. But these same departments go to real world fires without killing their Troops.
There is often a more lax command and accountability at a live burn event because, “It’s just a training burn”. As if the fire and smoke are training fire cooler or smoke training toxic level. That apathetic attitude will most definitely get someone hurt or worse. So to combat this we have tamed our burns down but our fires in the streets are doing the complete opposite. Basically like training and equipping the Troops to fight in the desert and shipping them to the North Pole to fight and hoping for a good outcome.
Today our fire attack is more enhanced than ever before. We have more technical and laboratory information produced than ever before. With all this what we are teaching sometimes does not match our enhancements and the information we have gained. Now it has been awhile since I was on the military training grounds but, even back then we were not taught, go till you feel bullets hitting you and then start shooting. Still we have firefighters that think you need to feel your ears burn so you do not get to deep. But this is a myth because every time you burn your ears and they heal up they lose feeling. So the next time you will be deeper yet, because you are deadening them every time you burn them.
The “Don’t shoot till you see the whites of their eyes” has long since went away. But we teach exactly that by saying do not open the nozzle till you see fire. The smoke we are passing through to get to that glow is a bullet just waiting for the right conditions to cap the primer. The intensity which it lights will also light fuel behind us there by causing more problems. Better gear and thermal imaging now enables us to literally fly to the seat of the fire compared to the days of inching forward blindly by brail and feeling that heat at a slower pace. As Newton said “To every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction”. So here is ours, you fly to the seat of the fire and the reaction is it burns your gear off or melts your mask. This is probably not what we are hoping to accomplish.
But we routinely drag our underlings in right up to the fire and open up. This works great in a concrete room, with pallets or hay, but not in room full of hydrocarbon based products with a means for the fire to travel. I have not been to too many residential fires where I found a stack of pallets or hay burning in the middle of the living room or bedroom, excluding acquired structures.
What I have found is overly stuffed BTU producing rooms that produce extreme fire conditions when the conditions are right. There is a ton of articles with huge amounts of BTU production rates and Heat Rise Rates. All this data is extremely informative and relevant but it boils down to these few things. Attack with as much water as you can be effective with and you have trained with. If you do not train with 2 ½ inch line you are probably not going to have great results pulling 2 ½ on a large volume of fire. Eventually your experience/training might catch up but you will lose a few buildings before you get there and maybe a firefighter or two. I remember reading a report chastising the use of 2 ½ at a residential fire. The reason stated you couldn’t move 2 ½ and be effective. Really, whoever wrote this has not seen some of the firefighters that I have seen move a 2 ½. But I have seen those that cannot advance a 1 ½ either.
When our armed forces are faced with a target a little bigger than they want to deal with up close with a small force, they prep the target from a distance. We can do exactly that, it is called reach of stream! The problem evolving from how we are training in burn building is, flowing water while advancing the line is becoming a lost art form instead of a basic skill.
Awhile back some of my Mentors where blamed for why bad events where taking place. So I went back and looked at videos of those “horrible guys”. I did not see them going in without water or wading in till they just could not stand it anymore and jerking the bail open and hoping the fire went out. These guys worked in busy houses their whole career and never retired until they went to the house the last time. They fought fire aggressively and they were the solution not the problem. They all went home too, because many are all enjoying retirement. Their mentored firefighters are not killing people off at an alarming rate now either. There is too much “Let’s run in and get some of that” mentality instead of “Let’s push aggressively and get all of it”.
Engine companies have to be changing the conditions to better, not just sitting inside and letting conditions simply get worse around them. From the Incident Commanders position, if crews are in the building and conditions are worsening, the I.C. has no choice but to pull the crews out. Put yourself in the I.C boots, they have 2-3 lines capable of 200 G.P.M. each inside a burning structure and conditions are getting worse, you have to wonder. If an Incident Commander or Division officer that can actually see the fire calls me for a progress report at a single family structure, I take that as a clue we are not moving or being effective. The progress of an attacking hose line should be visible from the outside in most structures.
So where is the problem? Better gear, Thermal Imagers, radios in every firefighters coat and people are still getting in trouble and the fires are not going out. The problem is one of the smaller pieces of equipment on the fire ground, the nozzle handle. It is not being opened and the line is not being advanced while flowing. Reach of the stream is not being used. We teach sounding the floor with tools during search. Why not teach structural stability with the stream? A 1 ¾ hand line producing 200 G.P.M. is a 1666 pound a minute hammer. Use the stream and look for kill you structure damage when the stream hits. Think past the moment of the fire going out. When things are heated they expand, when cooled the contract. A heavily involved room has a lot of expanding going on that when you apply a sufficient G.P.M. fire stream you should be causing an immediate switch to things cooling and now contracting in an instant. This is not breaking news to you, I am sure, but when we have trained our Firefighters to always be right up and personal with the burning material in the burn building. So in the streets they get in the room before causing the reversal.
The fire is producing more BTUs than ever before so bigger flow hand lines are being carried by almost every department so what gives. All that flow is worthless if Firefighters do not react according to the situation they face. But how can you expect a firefighter to operate accordingly during an extreme fire event if they have never seen a extreme fire event or applied water during an extreme event. Now given the faster temperature rise of our hotter fires you certainly cannot expect a good outcome if they are scared to death because they have never felt significant heat beyond their own body heat in gear.
Does every live fire training need to be flashover hot, absolutely not. Do we need to put trainees into flashover chambers to operate no, that would get really expensive in gear and S.C.B.A. But a firefighter’s first encounter with Walmart heat should not be at a Walmart fire. It should be in a controlled environment. A Walmart fire is not referring to a fire in a Walmart store. This is a fire that makes you question why you did not go to work at Walmart instead of the hot, black nasty one; I think we may die environment you are currently in. Firefighters need to be trained in this environment enough to know that they can survive. How bad would the U.S. Navy Seals performance be if they trained at the neighborhood heated pool? Long durations are not needed either. A little goes a long ways because when you encounter that heat you basically have 3 options. Flow water, ventilate if not already done, get out, or combination of the three. Trainees need that seasoned Instructor to say, “Okay when it feels like this, here are your options and if you do not exercise one of these, it will get much worse.” Will trainees get their needed experience at the Academy, no but they should be well trained enough that the Company Officer does not have to tackle them or kneel on them to maintain crew integrity.
Let No Man Say his training let him down. This is a very often repeated statement which is on many Fire Academy walls and in training material. So why when live fire instructors can routinely be heard to tell students, “This is not like the real thing” are we allowing their training to let them down? We often jump on the newest thing, because it is new it has got to be better. Did we try it under those real conditions or close to real? Probably not or that whole left for life and driving all that heat down on us and pity on anyone near but not under the might fog might not have been such a great savior. Attacking the gas is not the root of the problem
No one is going to the fires they used, not exactly breaking news. So where is the experience going to come, realistic training not make believe almost like a fire training.
Many will scream where the safety is if we burn hot. Where is the ability to keep the trainee safe from crawling into the fire and just burning their untrained selves up?
- Staffed back up lines in place where they will make a difference. Staffed by Firefighters who will say uncle and open them to make a difference.
- Facilities constructed to produce the desired result of producing a fire to flow water onto with barriers to keep the student out.
- Burn rooms that have light debris that actually fly’s around producing some of the effect a 200 GPM stream makes happen. Remember the first time you hit sheetrock ceiling with water and it fell. That wasn’t seen in training was it? Probably got your attention though. Eventually you got used to it would have been nice if it was not such a big surprise. Or the fact that when we drive those streams against a solid wall it comes back on you. You can no longer see just from your own water. But you will not learn that in a two or three second blast from a nozzle.
Checking in on this one.
Is the nozzle position more dangerous than 20 or 30 years ago. Especially if you operate like we did 20 to 30 years ago.
Looking for major input and shared experiences. Please share and post Pics, videos, and reports.. Working on class titled “Death On The Nozzle” How to avoid death while assigned to the nozzle position. The answer is not just stand outside and/or always flow water on smoke. The Nozzle Position should train just as much as some do on how to force the door they will never face. I believe in Advanced Forcible Entry Training. But, not at the cost of under trained Nozzle Firefighters. We must MAKE ENGINE TRAINING a PRIORITY and do ADVANCED NOZZLE TRAINING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
TIE “Training Is Everything”
Are you On-Duty? What is On-Duty? Future post will answer that question.
Couple years ago took dave dobsons class art of reading smoke, introduced me to some amazing concepts when it comes to interior attack and nozzle use, he has some excellent info that goes far beyond just reading smoke, I suggest anyone who truly cares about their skills or the people they are making entry with look into this class, this article is right on par with some of those ideas more people need to be understand what that nozzle can do and must do before carrying it into a house, I don’t believe enough new firefighters are being taught the true knowledge behind the basics of fire attack, I wasn’t
Thank-you for this comment. I’ve fought for years to have our department stop buying $8-10k breeching simulators. All we run are residential (wood & aluminum) doors… that are usually unlocked. However they won’t fund (bullet) heaters, smoke machines or wood for props to make bailout simulators, heat rooms, etc. At least they buy us giant rehab tents that have never been out of the box. SMDH
Have you tried training with the bullet heaters? Was curious how that worked for producing a simulated heated room.
Thanks to Captain Kevin Story from Houston FD for sharing his article. Great Stuff!
Great article Captain Story!
Good article. On the Mark with it!
Kevin, nice job bruddah … You talked about a lot of the stuff I have deep feelings on. Realistic tacticle training is essential to develop proper responses to problems as they develop. Because fires are never the same,MIT is imperative that training taken not just real world feel, but many different dimensions need to be simulated.
For example, if you want to run through an evolution frostart to end the evolution must be broken into skill stations that allow you the opportunity to develop the necessary psychomotor skills to accomplish the task correctly. After all these drills are accomplished successfully the next step is to develop the responses while putting them all together.
Sounds easy doesn’t it? It’s not, because the objective is not to just put the fire out, it is to develop appropriate mental/physical responses while learning to keep your emotions (adrenalin, cortisol, norepinephrine, and your heart rate as well as breathing) under control …. THE ONLY WAY TO DO THIS IS: consistent repetitive realistic training under real world conditions (within the law of course).
Back to the previous paragraph, putting it all together means you may be doing the drill half speed at first. Several key instructors to coach your people along the way. Slowly increase the degree of difficulty (size of fire) each time. This insures the necessary development of all the psychomotor skills you will need to smoothly, and effectively work a intense fire without panic and anxiety being your driving force. Of course what I just explained is an over simplification of the process … rule of thumb, if you dont have the right instructors, you got a cluster fuck. This goes for anything in life, if you lack the proper delivery system, you might have the best plan in the world, but you will never succeede at getting it off the ground.
The crux of this teaching begins, and ends with educated instructors that understand what is trying to be accomplished, how to accomplish it, and why we are trying to a accomplish this. Training within the fire service is changing, it is becoming much more sophisticated. As we are making leaps in the areas of ventilation, and fire progression, the same leaps in, asare occurring in preparing our firefighters from the inside out.
Kevin as usual, home fuckin run brother, strong work … to everyone else, remember … we rise and fall together.
We as live fire instructors are always going to be bound by standards as to what we can and cannot do during a live fire training scenario. Just like anything else, the foolish and irresponsible actions of few often result in the knee jerk reactions that cause the quality and realness of training for others to go down significantly. Are there things that have been done over the years during training that never should have been allowed? Absolutely. Are there safer ways of recreating some of these same scenarios that would still provide a realistic training experience without compromising student and instructor safety? I personally think so. The key is going to be finding the balance between the two.
One of the major areas of concern I see with other firefighters in my area is a major lack of understanding on how some of their equipment is supposed to work, the nozzle being one of the most ignored single items. Your average firefighter only wants to know how to open and close it, not how it is built or is designed to operate. We have guys who can’t tell you if they have automatic, selectable or fixed nozzles on their machines. This is a problem. Ask any cop what brand, model and caliber of sidearm he carries and I bet you a paycheck he will be able to answer correctly AND then show you have to take it apart and clean it. He knows this because his sidearm is his weapon, his main line of defense. Our nozzle is no different. The sooner that we as a fire service start making this a priority the better.
We still have chief officers who believe in conserving water. A fire that requires 200 GPM to extinguish will require that 200 GPM regardless of if you have 500 gallons on the engine or if you are sitting on a plug. How you use the available water is up to you. Like already mentioned, fires today are burning hotter than days before. As situations change so should our tactics. The 2 ½” line in many areas (including mine) is still looked upon as a defensive weapon. Captain Story hit the nail on the head with his comment about training with the big line. Prepare for the worst and it will make you better ready to handle the routine simply by default.
Great article. Looking forward to more discussion.
I want to try and find cutaway nozzles. A picture doesn’t work to show people how they work. Any ideas of how to do this without the innards of the nozzle falling out?
Absolutely incredible information. Be sure that this story and article will be passed up through the ranks. Thanks again to all
Best article I have read in a long time. Great points on the real world experience needed to teach and train our Firefighters how to operate in a burning building. As a new LT its tough to look around at FF ‘S in my dept with 2-3 yrs on who have never made an interior attack, and the last time they actually where inside was at academy. I constantly think about how to manage a scene with crews with limited or no experience. Thanks for this article, it will be passed up,over and down throughout my dept.
Black Fire was unspoken of for a majority of my carreer, No one in minimum standards or in my Dept had mentioned it.So I take an out of state class and got to experience it first hand,Never forget it made entry crawled down that dark Smokey hallway looking for the seat of it all couldn’t see it but damn sure felt it and heard it called for ventilation a little late and penciled the celing blissterd ears and a slightly burned seal,but a room or two away from the working..
The gear that we are wearing
today is a lot better, with that being said I think we are getting a false since of security and we are getting in to deep and before you know it its to late.
Big load of crap…book boys like to tell how smart they are.show me the proof.
had the line 30 years ago.had the line yesterday,same exp.no two the same.
first.you can flow 300 gpm in a 1-3/4 try that with a 2-1/2
second that mask mask cover on it witch fails early.not a sine of to much heat,not coverd up!!!
I’m sorry, I thought you were a firefighter. Sorry for bothering youand wasting your time.
Thanks and Have a Great Day!
Curt Isakson (850) 393-0581
“Water On The Fire”
that nozzel was dropped and left.
robbiedill on youtube.see for your self
There are two sides to this story. No pun intended. We have the training fires of an academy and we have real world fires. The changes to NFPA 1403 especially regarding regarding burn materials is what accounts for the wood and hay syndrome. Balance and standardization is what the standard is geared toward. The burn package while variable is not drastically different and does not supply the increased HRR of modern furniture. I always thought that some set amount of modern also be used in the package to better replicate conditions in a house fire. However even with those restrictions and for good reason ( past fatal training burns) we can still give our students good fires.
The lack of continious fire training for the rank and file is troubling. We have a fire service that often is seen by its leaders as medically based with some occasional fires. While that may be statically true it sets us up for poor training and real world proformance. We need officers in engines that understand fire attack, how to organize for it, how to stretch and how to advance once inside. We need to make sure firefighters on he nozzle stay there and open up when they should, before they reach the tipping point. When the officer understands their role and that of their firefighters then we will have less LODD on the nozzle.
Uno de los mas notables video-games de su clase,
aunque los graficos le muestra falta de alfuna cosa
Un juego que divierte empezando desde el primerisimo moomento mas que deja
ansias de muchisimo mas
Very valid points.. Great article!! When I help with flashover training I ask the attendees “did you feel that heat?” Tell them to remember what it felt like. Know you stream going in, it’s your sword in battle!!
I call bullshit on several levels:
1. As a fire instructor yes 1403 is good in some aspects for uniformity. But the safety aspect (at least the organization I worked for) is above board in command, control and accountability .
2. It is a double edged sword the fires we push to the absolute maximum level of 1403 to try and recreate realistic conditions are weak at best.
3. When there are instructors that have no desire or experience beyond the text book or you tube video they watched, that is the bullshit they will be teaching their students. Or worse yet the assbags that only teach for the paycheck and not about providing adequate quality regulation .
Yes fires have changed by getting more intense, sadly over regulation and over educated safety SAMs are exaggerating the problem.
https://youtu.be/_L24WehA-Mc
Let me start this by saying thank you this is a great article I think that every young rookie in even 10 year veteran on small departments . All should read this article I think we have gotten away from the old basics with our high-tech tools and high-tech jargon take it from a 30-year vet read this article and pay attention to it read it more than once