#fireground safety

[scriptfirefighter]

Sorry if this has been answered: how is it handled when you show up to a scene where there are also human victims to worry about? Does an ambulance always follow a firetruck or something? And/or how much EMT training and supplies do you have yourselves?

Hi there, @scix-in-the-back-row

It all depends on the type of emergency, and to a large degree on the reporting person.

For example, if we were dispatched to a vehicle collision where the reporting person (RP) indicated the presence of injury to dispatch, they would roll EMS immediately. However, we are often the first on scene with car wrecks and we may have to indicate a need for EMS if the RP did not. 

For a fire, if the RP tells dispatch that there are victims trapped, EMS would be on fire stand-by at the scene until we cleared them. But once again, if the RP does not, we might have to call them out.

As far as our medical training, many of us are certified at one of the three or four levels of emergency medical training depending on your local/state protocols (Medical First Responder, EMT-Basic, EMT-Intermediate/Advanced, and Paramedic). Many of the people on my department are certified as EMT-Basics, while my captain and couple of others are paramedics. 

Also, any professional departments are staffed with/require fully trained and certified Firefighter/EMT’s or Firefighter/Paramedics while others maintain their own ambulance branch with its’ own chain of command (think FDNY/Chicago fire).

That being said, because my department is only certified to run as a first responder agency, we can only provide the first responder level of care. Meaning we are able to do our best to stabilize the patient and assist with the administration of their own, prescribed medication while we wait for the ambulance. 

If you want a more in-depth description of the various duties and capabilities of the various levels of training and certification, please feel free to visit ScriptMedic (a real-life paramedic and everything).

As always, thanks for asking and I hope this helps!

~529

[scriptfirefighter]

Hi! My MC is a firefighter and I was wondering if he'd wear dogtags or ID tags of some sort. Obviously he's not military, but do firefighters wear an equivalent in case they... IDK, get burned to an unrecognisable crisp, or need a blood transfusion (ie displaying blood-type) or anything?

Howdy Anon,

We don’t wear dog tags, however we do typically have several types of identification built into out PPE (Personal Protective Equipment. The first is on our helmets. On our helmets is typically a helmet number, which functions as an ID number, or our name. Additionally, on the back out our turnout coats (the coats we wear into fires) can be a name plate toward the bottom on the back of the coat. 

In order to keep track of which personnel are inside or outside of the structure in question, the incident commander or the safety officer will collect an accountability tag (velcro tag with name that attached to IC board) from everyone that enters a structure. This helps the IC to, at a glance, be able to tell who is or is not inside and who has or has not been accounted for. In the case of my own department, it’s as simple as removing a tag (we have more than one) from the underside of our helmet brim and giving it to the IC. 

Many departments also give their firefighters plastic ID cards, similar to a driver’s license. However, I haven’t heard of any department’s ID card including information about blood type. They can, such as in the case of my own department, include information on what privileges firefighters might hold such as the right to run ‘blue lights’ in a personal vehicle.

As always, thanks for asking and I hope this helps!

~529

[scriptfirefighter]

How are firefighters prepared and act upon a biological emergency like a disease?

Howdy @askthescp-4050-instances,

Firefighters are prepared for biological emergencies to a limited degree, in that we are trained to essentially quarantine and ‘kick it upstairs’ so to speak. We (i.e. those trained in HazMat) seal the area, and those inside of it until more appropriate personnel, summoned from their response centers, labs, and so on (more than likely FEMA, Homeland Security, and the CDC), can respond and dictate the best course of action. 

The scale of the response, of course, depends on the scale of the emergency. If the incident is contained to one person, it might well take until they’ve been taken to the hospital for quarantine protocols to be enacted rather than if the incident has a broader scope and scale.

Well, as always thanks for asking and I hope this helps!

~529

[scriptfirefighter]

Hello! This is a little too long for the ask box, so here i am. I am writing and constructing a post-apocalyptic world. The surface is not safe, so everybody is living underground. There are eight major towns, and the most important one is based in Paris necropolis (catacomb? undercity thing? English is not my forte…) They let some tunnels be and modified others to have more space.

The thing is, i have absolutely no idea of how they would react to a fire. I mean, there IS a firefighter team, but how would they react to a fight here? Knowing it’s all underground and enclosed ? And would the fire comport itself differently? Thanks in advance!

Hello There,  Ayahne!

First, thanks for your question.

Second, to be honest with you, I’m not entirely certain what that response would look like. I’m just too unfamiliar with Paris and how the fire service there operates. I would imagine that they have protocols in place to deal with an emergency in the catacombs.

Sidenote: You would need to place something in the catacombs to burn because human bone is INCREDIBLY hard to burn. Like thousands of degrees to “burn” human bone. and even when bone is burned, a substance called hydroxyapatite is left behind. @forenscripts would be a good person to consult on that front. 

On to something I can confidently answer, fire behaves VERY differently in an enclosed space. As it occurrs to me, because of the nature of the catacombs being underground it seems the easiest way to battle a blaze there would be to seal them and let it smother out. Firefighters in a subterranean area fighing fire is a recipe for disaster, especially if it was to get out of hand.

And one final point, for you and anyone else who might be reading this. I will never be upset, vexed, or even annoyed by someone not having a super firm grasp on English. I’m here to help you, and if that means that I have to run a thing or two through a translator then that is exactly what I’ll do. 

Again, thanks for asking and I hope this helps.

~529

[scriptfirefighter]

The scenario: my mc runs into a burning building. He goes up to the second floor, trying to stay low to avoid smoke. He enters an apartment and rescues a little girl which takes about 10 minutes. He helps her escape, not leaving the building because reasons, but rather running back up the stairs, pausing at each floor to check for people. Because of one of his super powers, he takes maybe 30 seconds to check floors 3 and 4. On floor five, he finds a person trapped under rubble from a collapse. His super powers help him lift the rubble and help the trapped dude one other guy who has already passed out but wasn’t pinned. He takes them out of the building and then he collapses right in front of the door. At that moment, the firefighters run into the building to do their thing. In the end it ends up being about 20 minutes in the fire. So I have multiple questions:

For a normal human, how survivable is the scenario I presented (Yes, I broke it, I bought it. I just want to know what insurance policy I could have gotten per se) 

How do fires act in a building e.g. do they go for the room’s contents first, then the structure?

The city is essentially modern day NYC. How long would it actually take for the fire department to arrive one they had been called?

What would the firemen do when they see the characters collapsed outside of the building? I’m assuming that they wouldn’t just leave them there, but paramedics are also there so…

Is there anything specific i should research to increase my understanding of the dangers my character will face with the fire?

Heavy duty questions. Heavy duty answers. Here we go.

1: Point blank, it’s not survivable. Period. Inhalation of smoke, let alone the myriad substances off-gassed by burning substances, would knock even a large human over in seconds.

2. The way a fire behaves depends on a number of factors: ventilation, materials, structure type, time, and others. Assuming that is was in a residential high rise in a city like New York, the building would probably be constructed of concrete or stone and lined with dry wall or, in an older building, plaster on lath. These types of structures tend to burn from the inside, leaving a shell of the building (assuming it burns completely) if they don’t collapse from heat-stress. If it’s a poorly ventilated fire, then you have to begin thinking about things like backdraft (Seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnUA04wyHg4). Flashover is also a concern, in instance like this fire would actually shoot across the ceiling of the structure and ignite the entire room (Seen here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtMmymOxdjc).

3. Using NYC as a model, response times for structure fire are on average 5 minutes with response times for medical calls at 8 minutes 11 seconds.

4: The firefighters would immediately transport your mc to waiting paramedics (likely also firefighters and employed by the FD) where medical care would be rendered.

5. The best advice I can give is watch all the helmet cam footage you can from sites like youtube. It’s a fantastic resource and will give you a much better idea of how fires behave and the dangers posed by them.

~529

[scriptfirefighter]

If the actual source of a fire was a person (think supervillain with superpowers), and they were still inside the burning building, how would firefighters deal with it? Would they try to go in regardless if there were people trapped there?

The decision to fight a building from the interior is often based on a number of factors: environmental (what’s the temperature like, how is the wind behaving, etc.), manpower available, building construction, and building materials as well as the structural integrity of the building itself. 

When a building is occupied, some of those considerations carry less weight as our primary mission is to protect life, then property. Ultimately on arrival a team would probably be sent in to conduct a primary search, and if a victim was located attempt rescue, and such operations would continue until command staff (usually known as the incident commander or IC) made the call that it was unreasonably unsafe to do so. 

At that point fire suppression operations would often become defensive in nature, in an attempt to a) stop or control the spread of fire and b) to protect surrounding structures.

~529