The Minimum Standard of Firefighting

 

Firefighting is a unique profession.One doesn’t just stumble into being a firefighter or wake up one day and decide to join the local fire department. It takes hours upon hours of training, intensive study, and rigorous testing.

The question is, how does one measure a firefighter’s success?

A Look at The Metrics

Ultimately, a firefighter has two goals: put out fires, and save lives.

That’s the job, and if a firefighter manages to accomplish both goals every time they respond to a call, they’ve done their job.

However, this is also the minimum standard.

By nature, most professions allow for dozens of hours of practice in a week and thousands of hours of practice in a year. The more time you spend doing your job, the more you improve and the better you get.

Firefighting is different, though. A firefighter may be on call for hours, ready to head out at a moment’s notice, but there might not be a fire to deal with during that time.

Compared to the thousands of hours of on-the-job experience other professionals get in a year, firefighters only get a small amount.

In the absence of valuable, continuous work experience, skills must be developed through consistent training.

How Do Firefighters Improve?

What it boils down to is that firefighters, by necessity, have to be driven by integrity.

When they get to work on a fireground, firefighters must act as their own critics and reviewers. They must know what to do, and they must know enough to understand when something doesn’t work.

The general public is unlikely to understand the technicalities or nuances of putting out a fire.For them, either the fire is out, or it isn’t.

This is why fire departments must hold themselves accountable. It’s not enough to simply extinguish a fire or save lives. These tasks must be performed efficiently and properly.

Integrity, which is nothing more than doing the right thing when nobody is watching, is how firefighters improve. Even when nobody else understands what they do or how they do it, they have to keep putting in the work.

The Way Forward

The need for improvement should be at the center of every activity a fire department undertakesand every policy it implements.

Training exercises, efficiency measures, and tools and equipment should all be focused on always putting the best foot forward.

This is how moving beyond the bare minimum and succeeding becomes possible.

 

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