This week, five young men and one young woman in my department completed their preliminary training and were certified as firefighters by the State of Ohio. They are justly proud of their accomplishment and eager to put their skills to good use. They may still be probationary firefighters, but I watched them start to be accepted and assimilated into their company’s operations under the direction of a seasoned lieutenant. This got me to reflect on how much they had left to learn, how much they had to learn from first-hand experience, and how much I had learned from those who took the time to teach me.
I had two uncles and a brother who preceded me in the fire service and my dad was an accomplished fire protection engineer. Growing up around them, I heard the good, the bad and the ugly of everything from fire codes and building construction to the lack of leadership in the fire department. (Does any of this sound familiar today?) My Uncle Frank, a respected truck company officer, decided that he saw something worthwhile in me and even as a teenager would spend time discussing what it took to be a good firefighter. He taught me the responsibility to pass on my experience to younger firefighters so they wouldn’t make the same mistakes and learn as he liked to say the “hard way.”
Throughout my career, other firefighters took the time to help me learn from their experience. I remember an officer on a routine run involving home heating oil telling me to always look for the “white ghost,” a vapor cloud indicating incomplete combustion from an oil-burning furnace that sometimes resulted in an explosion. It was several years later as a lieutenant that I experienced the “ghost” and knew it was time for my crew to vacate the basement, await ventilation and avoid a potentially disastrous explosion. Not too long ago, a similar situation caught a fire crew unaware and literally blew the house off its foundation while they were inside, seriously injuring several of them.
Often I wondered if we ever will get to the point when we can download our experiences and upload them into a young firefighter, much like we move a memory stick from one computer to another. Until then, it’s up to us to find a way to do more than train our new firefighters, a way to teach them from our experiences. How are you mentoring your new firefighters? Is there more to it than just training?
August 6th, 2007 @ 3:39 pm
Bob, once again you’ve hit the nail on the head. Firefighters have a responsibility to one another to share tacit knowledge and to help one another de-code its implicit lessons for the benefit of all. We cannot afford underestimate the value of vicarious experience in helping young (and Old) firefighters gain experiences before they experience novel situations first-hand.
Our ability to employ such experiences in real situations makes no particular or even useful distinction between the way we acquired that information or experience, and neither should we. That means it’s incumbent upon us all to make sure the experiences we share are fully discussed and their implications explored in a safe, non-judgemental way.
Put another pot of coffee on and pull up a chair in the station mess. This ain’t no bull-session, it’s a training opportunity!