You might know that I’m currently working on my dissertation on emergency response teams. I’m particularly interested to know how much emphasis is placed on structure vs. flexibility in training. Here’s a good quote from Participant #9, a firefighter in Central Texas:
No matter how organized it is, there’s always a little bit of chaos. But as long as you get the job done safely, and mitigate as much loss as you can, that’s fine. There’s no perfect scene and everyone has a little different ways of handling it. But one of the big deals, we talked about communication lingo, is saying, if you forget a particular code, or, you know, you don’t quite know how to sound quite as professional on the radio as your supposed to—because all of our radio traffic is reported, especially in a big scene, it’s gonna be—if any incidents come out of it, it’s gonna be replayed and everything else—bottom line, if you just tell people what you need, no mater how sophisticated the language is, that’s kind of been the new mantra in the department, because we have so many new people, kind of interchanging in and out of the department.
But the focus has been on: stop worrying about following every rule to the T, just use your common sense. You know, don’t waste time or energies trying to make sure you’re following every protocol. If you see an obvious fix to it, don’t let common sense go out the door.