I was just re-reading a story I saw on the Daily Dispatch, “3 Missouri Firefighters Recovering After ‘Flashover’.” Thankfully it sounds like they are doing well.

Firefighting is a dangerous job with lots of factors that are unpredictable and unforeseeable. Or are they? Whatever the investigation findings are from Kansas City there will be lessons learned and similarities drawn between that fire and many others. The trick is to take that information and internalize it. What can we do to spot those situations which lead to a disastrous outcome BEFORE they become a disaster?

The 18 “Watch Out” situations originally came from the wildland fire world. Through investigations they determined that 18 situations existed that shouted “watch out” here, you guys are heading into a bad situation.

There are several renditions of the “Structural Watch Out” situations. No matter which one you choose they serve as reminders BEFORE hand of those times when we could be putting ourselves in harms way. These must be trained on. There is no doubt we see these everyday both on incidents and in training. So bringing them into the post incident de-briefings or after action reviews (AAR) will start the process of solidifying them in the minds of our firefighters. As they become seated they will start to notice those situations as the beginning of something bad and then able to make better decisions on how to avoid the coming disaster.

Some years ago I was visiting a fire station that I had presented training to some years before. One guy said “hey Quinn we were watching the news last night about a fire and spotted a couple watch out situations they were faced with.” He told me the poster of the watch outs was hung up somewhere…