Safety and Health Considerations in Fire Incident Response
The issue of safety during emergency response by the fire fighters has been discussed and severally emphasized. In as much as the responders are out to save lives and property, they too need to be safe so that they do not add to the count of the victims, if any be, as well as avoid injuries in the process of saving others. There are manuals that have been developed in various states and even counties all with the aim of streamlining response to emergencies and reducing the number of deaths of both the victims and the responders. Hundreds of fire fighters die in the line of duty each year with most of the death being from the exposure to rapid fire, getting trapped by objects and collapsed buildings. It can be said that there are sufficient safety regulations and guidelines concerning the operations procedures at the scene of fire. The challenge comes in implementing these guidelines to the effective end.
In the case study provided, there are a number of errors that facilitated the fatality and the near fatality of the fire fighters that were involved. The glaring mistake that can be seen from the investigations was that the 25-year-old volunteer ignored the checking of the SCBA when it was handed to him to know how much...
It is from determining the quantity that the volunteers could have been able to tell the distance they could cover in the building and the time they had in their hands before they were required to vacate the building. The SCBA seems to have run out on the volunteer who then suffocated to his death.
The other issue that stands out is the glaring mistake of ignoring to have personal alert safety system (PASS) device on the captain and at the same time not sure whether his compatriots had one on himself. This is one critical safety tool especially for one going into fire and the fire fighters need to verify that each of them has one on himself. There is a possibility that with the PASS device on the captain, the response and the results could have been different as these would direct the rescue team to find them faster. Apart from lacking this basic safety tool, the 25-year-old volunteer did not have any communication device with him but relied on the one captain had. It is hard to know whether he could have come back to his senses and was unable to call for help hence his final death.
The 25-year-old volunteer who claimed to have the knowledge of the plan of the house apparently did not have the requisite knowledge of the…
