Firefighter Accountability: When Things Go Really Wrong
The most critical issue facing a fire ground incident commander is personnel accountability at the scene; according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, lack of firefighter accountability is one of the top causes of firefighter deaths! The scene can quickly turn chaotic when a catastrophe happens such as roof or structural collapse, flashover, entrapment, or firefighters become lost. As conditions worsen, panic may set in; no matter how well trained the individual may be it is difficult to remain calm in untenable atmospheres, exposed to high heat conditions. This scenario has occurred in many well documented cases over the years, when firefighters have been confronted with near certain death, a physiological flight response takes over pushing years of training from their conscious thought. Many wise fire service instructors have commented on this flight response by saying “panic only helps if you’re pointed in the right direction when it occurs.” A good accounting of personnel operating on the scene allows for rapid intervention and rescue of distressed firefighters.
The use of an accountability system is mandated by the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) 1500: Standard on Fire Department Occupational Safety and Health Program. While most fire departments have an accountability system that complies with national standards, they struggle in adequate implementation. Career department duty rosters can change daily based on vacation, sick leave, swaps, or overtime staffing and must be constantly updated to reflect who is actually on the truck! Volunteer and combination departments have an even harder task of determining who is on an emergency scene due to numerous volunteers being dispatched from throughout the community, some responding directly to the scene. Acceptance of accountability systems, like other changes in the fire service, has met with an attitude of indifference from firefighters and their leadership who places too much emphasis on tradition and a culture that is slow to embrace change.
Fire scene accountability is the responsibility of the incident commander, who through a manual or computerized system must be able to identify the firefighters on an incident scene by either their name or identification number, their unit or company that they are working with, the assignment given to that crew, and their location on the fireground. The Company Officer, once assigned to a crew and given a task, is responsible for maintaining unit integrity; these tasks may seem quite manageable on the ordinary single alarm response associated with many incidents. These responses involve fewer than fifteen people for short durations; however, multi-alarm incidents requiring many resources from a single department or its mutual aid partners can complicate scene accountability and rapidly become unmanageable. For example, on September 11th the FDNY still maintained its duty rosters on carbon paper held by the company officer who reported to the incident command staff upon arrival. Hundreds of firefighters were on scene when the towers collapsed and those chiefs and company officers responsible for accountability were killed along with their firefighters; no one outside of those who died in the command post had a true account of who was actually on scene.
A recent partnership between the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory’s Space Systems Development Department, Manning RF, and FDNY shows great promise in using active radio frequency identifier (RFID) tags to account for all fire department members operating on an incident scene. Firefighters are equipped with an RFID tag which is worn in a pocket on the inside of their coat; the tag sends out a signal every five seconds specific to that firefighter. A receiver in the fire apparatus senses the signal and builds a database of those members present. The roster of those on scene can be viewed by the on-scene incident commander and can be transmitted to a dispatch or command center. This ability for off-site viewing of on scene personnel is beneficial to dispatchers as well as command staff tracking resources, but the most valuable component is the knowledge of who is on the scene should catastrophe occur such as the one involving the ammonium nitrate facility explosion in West, Texas. In this explosion, all firefighters were killed and the apparatus was destroyed making an on-scene accountability system unusable. Additionally, the accountability data can be archived at the dispatch center, maintaining a complete list of members who may have participated in an incident in which it is later discovered that they may have been exposed to hazardous substances or for investigatory purposes.
The RFID system is fire service friendly, meaning it is cheap, reliable technology that is easy to use. It uses “off the shelf” hardware to reduce cost, but relies of sophisticated software to track firefighters similar to how the retail and warehousing industry tracks inventory and shipments. The tags carried by firefighters are approximately twenty dollars each and the truck mounted reader cost about eleven hundred dollars per unit. The system does an excellent job of building an on-scene personnel roster which is the first and a major component of accountability; unfortunately, at this time, the task of tracking assignments and firefighter location is still up to the incident commander. Tracking exact locations of personnel within buildings, especially multi-story or multi-unit buildings is problematic. Similar issues plague the tracking of cell phones used to make 911 calls from high rise structures, but as technology evolves perhaps soon a method will be available and affordable to pinpoint the exact location of firefighters in distress!
Knowing who is on scene, the assignment and location that they are operating in is critical to rapid intervention when things go really wrong on a fire scene.