Chief Concerns

The myth of water conservation & the lack of a tactical chief

Author’s note: In the spirit of Dragnet, the following is true, but names have been left out to protect the innocent.

• Engine 101 is a 2,000-gallon/1,500-gpm pumper/tanker
• Engine 102 is a 500-gallon/1,500-gpm engine
• Engine 103 is a 2,000-gallon/1,500-gpm pumper/tanker

• Chief 3 is a figurehead who possesses no tactical experience and continues to be elected to his position because no one else wants to be chief.
• The troops of Chief 3’s department are a great bunch of folks that succeed in doing a great job in spite of their chief.
• E102 and 103 are from different mutual-aid departments.

The call:
Engine 101 is on the scene with a fully involved one-story log home. Engine 101 will be making a defensive attack with two 1 ¾" lines. Chief  3 has command. Next-in company has water supply.

Engine 102 is on the scene. The E102 company officer confers with C-3. “Chief, 103 is right behind us and we’re gonna let them take water since they’re a pumper/tanker.” Chief says, “Sounds good.”

The E102 company officer recommends to the C-3 that they get a short blast from 101’s deck gun to knock the fire down. Two of 101’s crew standing by take action to make this happen. They miss what happens next.

C-3 immediately explodes at the E102 officer: “We don’t have enough g@#$*^n water for that bulls*&t, these 1 ¾" lines can handle it!” then storms off around the truck.

With the noise of the pump, 101’s crew did not hear the exchange and put the deck gun in service. Thirty seconds and about 500 gallons of water later, the fire is knocked down just as C-3 shows up.

“See, I told you the 1 ¾" lines were enough.”

“Yeah chief, you told us. By the way, we just shut the deck gun down. E101 still has over half a tank of water left.”

I can only do so much justice to this event. There are so many things wrong on so many levels with this type of chief. It goes without saying that zero tactical experience equals bad decisions on the fireground. If things had continued along the path they were going, this would have been a prime example of something my friend Chief Larry Davis has said: “The fire would have gone out faster if the fire department had never shown up.” In fact, the firefighters of E101 started to make a deck gun attack on arrival, but were show down by C-3. (To be fair, this chief does overload the assignments. A recent car fire got five apparatus from the chief: the fire SUV, a brush truck, an engine, a rehab unit and an ambulance.)

Is it a problem when a person with no experience is selected for the position of chief? Not always. So long as the individual doesn’t have an ego problem and possesses the attitude of “By God, I’m the chief and I’m in charge.” So long as the chief lets a firefighter run the fireground and sticks to strictly administrative tasks, it can work.

But on the fire in question, later-arriving companies from both C-3’s department and mutual-aid departments came to E102’s company officer for direction. E102 concurred or made suggestions for their tactical plan, and sent them to C-3 so that they could tell him what they were going to do, giving C-3, the incident commander, the final say.

And to be sure, not every firefighter with experience is qualified to run a fireground, much less be chief.

Scott Cook is chief of the Granbury (Texas) Volunteer Fire Department and a contributing editor for FireRescue.