Undaunted, they move into the burning building in a four-man team, laser-focused on finding a fellow firefighter who’s gone down and issued a call that chills a firefighter’s soul: “Mayday! Mayday!” His air is running out, and he’s in serious trouble.
With the mayday call, he gave them critical information about where he was — on the fire hose, which snakes through the burning building.
The first team follows the hose through downstairs, then upstairs, locating their colleague trapped beneath a collapsed ceiling. They make sure he’s OK and put him on supplemental air.
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But their own air is running
low, so they call for the next team to take over. That team makes more headway, but when their air runs low they call for the third team.
Between the three, four-man teams, they install a rope line for other firefighters to follow, chop out a wall to make the exit easier, cut through a maze of fallen wires and electrical cords, then lift a 500-pound ceiling off the firefighter. Next, they move the firefighter, who weighs about 215 pounds with his gear, downstairs and out of the building into fresh air.
They’re dripping with sweat, panting for air and spent from the intensity of the heat and smoke, but their colleague is alive. The downed firefighter shows no emotion, because he is, after all, a training dummy.
But everyone involved in this training knows just how real it can get, because three years ago, on July 28, they lost one of their own, Capt. Jeff Bowen, in an arson fire in the 445 Biltmore medical office building.
“We looked hard at that incident — we beat the national average, we got him out under the national average — so we were wondering, why? Why did it happen?” said Lt. Dustin Cooper, a 14-year Asheville Fire Department veteran and a close friend of Bowen’s. “So we studied it and then developed the RIT groups that we have now.”
For more than two decades, fire departments have had these Rapid Intervention Teams, but they usually consisted of two firefighters stationed outside a building, tasked with keeping tabs on those inside fighting the blaze.
Bowen, 37, died from smoke and fumes exposure while fighting the blaze. He left behind a wife, Stacy, and three children.
After Bowen’s death, 60 Asheville firefighters volunteered to look at 16 areas that could pose problems in a fire, studying the best practices from around the country. They came up with 155 areas for improvement, but then they zeroed in on six changes that are the most important and required the most innovative changes.
They range from adding a dozen more firefighters to those RITs to drastically reducing the threshold for what is considered “low air,” a benchmark that dictates when firefighters should leave a burning building.
So far, Asheville Fire Department Chief Scott Burnette has spoken to about 30 departments statewide and across the country about the changes, and many of those departments are instituting their own changes.
Those departments usually invite others to attend, so Burnette estimates he’s presented the changes to about 200 fire departments directly and shared information via telephone or electronically with about 500 total.
Firefighting is an inherently dangerous line of work. In 2013 in the United States, a total of 97 on-duty firefighter deaths occurred, according to the National Fire Protection Association.
That’s a significant increase over previous year, in large part because of two high-fatality fires that claimed 28 firefighters — the Yarnell Hill Fire in Arizona that killed 19 firefighters and the explosion at a fertilizer plant in Texas that killed nine.
Over the previous four years, the annual total ranged between 61 and 82 deaths, with an annual average over the past decade of 87 deaths, the association noted. One-third resulted from overexertion, stress and related medical issues.
From reactive to proactive
The most drastic change Asheville has instituted, and the one getting the most attention from dozens of other fire departments, Burnette said, is overhauling that RIT standard, commonly called “two in, two out.”
It dates to a federal OSHA standard from the 1990s that determined if two firefighters were inside a building, two should remain outside on standby to rescue them.
The problem is that’s a woefully inadequate number.
“We’ve done a lot of research, and what we’ve found out through that research is if you have two firefighters outside, they will only get themselves in trouble going in to rescue the firefighters inside,” Burnette said. “They will never give up until their air runs out.”
So far, Asheville has run 44 of its 48 fire companies through training like Monday’s at the Buncombe County Public Safety Training Center, which features several masonry buildings designed for fire training.
On Monday morning’s exercise, they burned 20 pallets, which filled the building with smoke and intense heat.
Besides the firefighters scuttling and chopping their way through the building, another team was stationed inside, taking readings off their air equipment, gauging the temperatures and timing everything.
The fire department has carefully collected data on the scenario of rescuing a downed firefighter, with obstacles in the way such as walls, a collapsed ceiling and wire entanglements.
Each fire company has 3-4 firefighters, and Asheville has 255 firefighters total.
“We’ve found it takes 15-16 firefighters to rescue one downed firefighter,” Burnette said. “That’s what really opened a lot of eyes in fire departments around the country.”
At the training center, firefighter Trey Young said it is a complete overhaul in thinking. While seemingly simple and straightforward, this tag-team approach to rescuing a struggling comrade represents a tectonic shift for the Asheville Fire Department. It’s a shift that other departments across the country are picking up on.
“Prior to the shift in thinking and strategy about rapid intervention, it was completely reactive,” Young said. “Now I would say we’re more proactive on rapid intervention than probably 90 percent of the country.”
Asheville has three battalions, in the west, east and downtown. Now it will have three specially trained RIT companies, one for each battalion.
Major changes in air management, structure ‘softening’
Before entering the building Monday, Young ran the firefighters through 12 “rules of engagement.” Number five was: “Air management, Air management, Air management.”
Firefighters carry air tanks that have about a 20-minute supply when a firefighter is under exertion, 30 minutes under a non-stressing scenario. At five minutes of air remaining, a vibrating alarm goes off, warning the firefighter that it’s time to get out.
In an uncomplicated fire in a smaller structure, this works well, but with complicating factors it can endanger a firefighter’s life. So the Asheville Fire Department overhauled the guidelines.
A full tank has about 4,500 psi of air. Now, when a firefighter gets down to 2,000 psi, he or she should start to exit. If the low-air alarm goes off, they must notify the incident commander by radio.
“If you’re not out of the structure in 60 seconds, they come and get you,” Burnette said. “It’s a simple change, but culturally it’s a pretty significant change.”
Burnette said another key is “softening the structure,” meaning the RIT members outside the structure do a 360-degree walk around the burning building, “looking for anything that would slow the egress of a firefighter out of that building” and removing them, including door or window locks and burglar bars.
On Monday, the three teams of firefighters, 12 in all, rescued the “mayday” firefighter in 35 minutes, 44 seconds, the fastest time they’ve seen since training started, by about four minutes. Typically it takes four teams to get the firefighter out.
Young stressed that in a less complicated scenario, firefighters would remove their downed colleague immediately, if possible.
Those decisions are up to the incident commander and a new position the department has created, that of a “command technician” to assist the incident commander at a fire scene. This assistant position also represents a significant change.
“Everything going on with that scene traditionally has been the responsibility of a single person,” Burnette said. “The risk of that is when you have a complicating factor or an emergency. A firefighter having a mayday is the worse case example of a complicating factor. That single incident commander becomes task-saturated in handling all those things at once.”
Burnette noted that none of these changes require hiring additional staff, rather they’re deploying staff differently.
‘No 911 for 911′
Another significant change the department has enacted involves more of a psychological hurdle. Firefighters are notoriously reluctant to call a “mayday,” Burnette said, citing one study that found they literally will do it with their dying breaths.
It’s an issue Burnette has thought deeply about, even more so in the wake of Bowen’s passing.
“”There’s an old saying in our profession that ‘there’s not a 911 for 911.’ It’s ingrained in our culture that we’re the last line of defense,” Burnette said.
So changing that thinking involves intense training. Firefighters are put under the stress of heat, smoke and complicating factors that can lead to entrapment.
“We train them the very first thing you do in this situation is call a mayday,” Burnette said.
It is a legacy that Capt. Jeff Bowen would be proud of, says his widow, Stacy Bowen.
“I guess the best thing to come out of any tragedy any time there’s a fatality in a situation in a workplace — and that’s essentially what firefighter fatalities are considered — that any time they can look at that situation and assess it and come out with improvements so as to never lose someone else’s life in the same manner, that’s going to be the ultimate goal,” Bowen said. “That’s where they need to go with that.”
She’s impressed that other departments are now picking up the changes Asheville has instituted.
Personally, Bowen said she’s doing alright, but she’s dealing with “a new normal” on a day-by-day basis.
“If I had my choice, it wouldn’t be my new normal, but you have to take it day by day,” she said.
The Asheville Fire Department has made six major changes since the death of Capt. Jeff Bowen in July 2011. Those are:
•
Proactive Rapid Intervention Teams:
The “two in, two out” standard in which two firefighters are stationed outside a burning building while two are inside no longer applies. Now, four teams of RIT firefighters, totaling 15 or 16 firefighters, work to rescue a downed firefighter. Those waiting outside also “soften the building,” meaning they remove barriers to a potential escape and place ladders at upstairs windows or exits. Enacted Feb. 1.
•
Incident management:
Fire scene incident commanders are now aided by a command technician, who among other duties tracks the location of every firefighter inside a burning building, monitors their air supply and listens to radio traffic as “a second set of ears.” Enacted fall 2012.
•
Air management:
Firefighters carry tanks that have about a 20-minute air supply when a firefighter is under exertion. A full tank has about 4,500 psi of air. Now, when a firefighter gets down to 2,000 psi, he or she should start to exit and not wait for the the alarm to go off when five minutes remain. At the five-minute alarm, firefighters must notify the incident commander. If they’re not out in 60 seconds, firefighters go in and get them. Enacted December 2011.
•
Mayday training:
Through training including simulated wall or ceiling collapses and entanglements in wires, firefighters are being taught to call a mayday much quicker. Enacted fall of 2011.
•
Staffing:
A smaller group of firefighters goes through training on any one exercise to better simulate the real event. Enacted January 2012.
•
Health and wellness changes:
A firefighter must engage in physical fitness for an hour each shift. Enacted in February. Later this year, the department will use peer fitness trainers.
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