Firefighters are there to protect the public. To do this they have to take some risks and the amount of risk they are expected to take depends on the potential benefits of taking that risk- can life be saved or a huge incident be prevented.
If all goes well your approach will depend on the information available and the nature of the incident. It may be necessary to make a cautious approach to the heart of the incident to search and rescue and gain intelligence. Then withdraw first to an inner cordon from which operations are managed and establish an outer cordon from which the public will be excluded.
With the benefit of hindsight it appears that information gathering, communications and risk assessment were all open to question in this case, but hind sight is a wonderful thing.
Let us hope that firefighters are never prevented from taking a calculated risk to save a life. It would be easy to say for example to the emergency services "never set foot on the motorway unless it has been closed" but many lives would be lost as a result.
Fireworks, gas cylinders, chemicals- very often you dont know they are there till you are looking at them.
Approach and gathering of information are key to the next stages of Planning, organisation, control, management re-assessment and review.
Wise words. I am I agree with them as well as sharing Retty's concearns that things might have already gone too risk adverse. However it was known that this was a fire involving fireworks early - there can be no doubt of that - and yet it is clear that the fire fighters are very close.
When ever I consider fire risks and need to use an extreme example to illustrate a point, I talk about a timber constructed fire work storage factory.
I'm skill keen to hear if this is normal, or if most fire fighters would expect to have been working from further away.
Hi Chris
The very simplistic answer is that at an incident fire crews are described as being either in “offensive, transitional or defensive” mode.
It’s 'fire brigade speak' to describe what the crews are doing tactically to deal with a particular incident and only these three terms are ever used.
Generally unless the incident involves a threat to life and limb where crews need to enter a burning building for instance, the brigade will wherever possible fight a fire defensively (i.e stand outside the building on fire and squirt water at it from a safe distance). Conversely therefore an example of crews being in offensive mode would be where they need to enter a burning building to affect a rescue.
Transitional mode describes the period when crews are changing from offensive mode to defensive mode.
I’m being very simplistic here, but atleast you get the gist.
If crews were engaged at an incident where there was not a threat to life or limb, then you would expect the crews to be defensive mode; that is to say crews have established the relevant safety cordons, put in place all the necessary control measures to protect the public and their colleagues, and are squirting water at the blaze from a safe distance.
In reality however there are a multitude of variables that exist at any given incident which mean that tactical modes can change rapidly. I can give you a very simplistic round-about answer, but don’t forget unless you are physically at an incident watching the whole thing unfold, its very difficult for me, or anyone else who wasn’t present, to suggest what the crews should have been doing at any given point.
