Why Rapid Intervention Often Fails

I don't believe that rapid intervention is an antidote for anything. I believe rapid intervention is a purely reactionary mechanism used during mayday situations. It's a lot like trying to put your seatbelt on a millisecond before you launch through the windshield of your car. Mayday situations are a symptom of a deeper problem, and rapid intervention will not fix it.

It's foolish to believe that RICs can save us from all fireground hazards. Three different things can cause traumatic death to firefighters at structure fires:

1. The fire burns us up;
2. The building falls down and crushes us; or
3. We get lost, run out of air and die of CO poisoning.

If problems number one and two occur, it's generally too late for RICs to do anything about them. A structure fire can go from tenable to flashover in a matter of seconds. When the fire is literally on top of us, we have less than a minute before our protective gear fails. Consider the time required to get those RIC attack lines operating in the proper positions. We face an impossible question: do we send RICs into a fire area where they have little chance of survival? The safest, most effective thing to do is to move everyone to safe positions and blast the fire with master streams.

We don't want to be anywhere near a structural collapse. If a building collapses on top of us, our chances for survival are very slim. Heavy, technical-rescue operations involve lots of specialized resources and take a long time to execute. The best way to deal with these situations is to avoid them altogether. We must remain in safe, outside positions when the building falls down.

Only One Chance

This brings us to the one event where rapid intervention has a marginal chance of success---finding and rescuing firefighters lost on the inside of a building filled with toxic smoke.

Most 30-minute SCBAs provide the user around 20 minutes of air when they engage in physical work. Firefighters in trouble usually have a 10-minute life span if they don't get out of the hazrd area. for a successful rescue operation, the RICs must be in positions that offer quick, unimpeded access to the trapped firefightes. Somehow the IC and RICs must pinpoint the exact location of the firefighters. If it takes them 10-15 minutes to find them, the lost firefighters will most likely have run out of air, and the RIC will also be dangerously low on their air supply. Getting lost inside a building is a task- level mistake, and it's almost impossible for incident command to solve task-level problems.

One of the fundamental problems with rapid intervention is the time and place it typically occurs. If firefighters are trapped, the RICs must rescue the trapped firefighters without becoming trapped themselves. If firefighters are lost, the rescuers must search the smoke-filled structure before running out of air or becoming lost.

Lessons Learned

1. Increase the initial response for structure fires.
2. Control access/egress into the hazard zone.
3. Assign multiple RICs to various locations.

Conclusion

Rescuing one of our own is a very labor-intensive operation that must occur within minutes. Compounding the problem, these operations must typically occur during the most hazardous incident time, when conditions have taken a drastic turn for the worse. Physically removing (hand carrying) one firefighter from the interior of a burning building (75 feet or more) requires 12 firefighters---three four-person RICs---and will take approximately 20 minutes. There is nothing rapid about it.