Redmond Symposium

A few weeks ago I was honored to be sent to represent our IAFF Local at an international convention in New York City.  It is called the Redmond Symposium and it is one of the best conventions/symposiums I have been a part of.  The IAFF holds this symposium every other year and they present the latest and greatest ideas and practices in health, safety, and wellness.  As you know these are all passions of mine so this was right in my wheelhouse.

I arrived a day before everything got started to see the big city.  I did go to two fire houses spending approximately 2 minutes at each, just enough to show interest but not be that guy who says "Hey I'm ______ and I'm a Firefighter in ______ can I look at your firehouse?"  I got to see Ground Zero, the new Freedom Tower and numerous other sites in the city.  On Sunday morning, I registered and the most interesting week of my life began.  I ran into some folks I knew from DCFD or DCFEMS whatever they are today, and met countless folks at the opening ceremonies.  As the week went on, I continued to network and talk to people who had the same passions as mine when it comes to the IAFF and the Health and Safety of its members.

This symposium gave me countless ideas for posts on this blog, but I'll roll them out as I can remember them.  I attended a great presentation on the IAFF Fireground Safety and Survival Class that is currently in its rollout phase.  Battalion Chief Alkonis from LA made some great points in the presentation and presented some interesting information on why firefighters get in trouble.  However, out of this presentation two quotes stuck with me.  They both came from Laurence Gonzales in his book Deep Survival.  This book discusses the lives of extreme mountain climbers and how some make it and some die in their pursuit of making the summit.  To paraphrase his exact words "There will be things that you cannot control, for those you must have a plan".  The one that touched me more was "There are variables that you can control, therefore you must control them all of the time." 

During his presentation he also made the statement that when a firefighter uses a predetermined set of actions (SOP's/SOG's) to get himself out of trouble he aides in his/her own rescue more than they could by doing anything else.  If we know how our people will react to a MAYDAY we can rescue them more effectively.  As I stated above, the statement that got my attention more was that we need to control controllable variable at all times.  I began to think about this to figure out what this included.  Think about all of the variables we can and can't control at a fire......We can know our airpack, our SOG's, our apparatus, and numerous other items.  We need to understand all of these prior to even operating at a fire.  "Knowing" these doesn't mean learning them in recruit school 5 years ago, this means keeping all of the skills up at all times.  Too often we would rather watch HBO rather than look over our airpacks, too often we would rather run our landscaping business than go over an SOG for our department.

We must realize that we should live by the statement about controling variables every day.  We must control them every time we can.  Our job is dangerous enough by itself, we don't need to increase our danger by not preparing to deal with the dangers many of us look forward to facing each shift.  If we control the things we can control all of the time there is no doubt we will be a safer and more efficient fire service.

Thanks for reading everyone. And there will be more to come on the lessons learned from the Redmond Symposium.  If you would like to view any of the Redmond presentations, they are online at: http://www.iaff.org/Events/2011Redmond/newcoverage.asp

Stay Safe and Stay trained....