
Firefighter Math - miobrien
http://www.firefightermath.org
======
taxicabjesus
After I 'retired' from taxi-driving, the volunteer fire department for my
grandfather's (deceased) rural cabin sent a bunch of us to the Arizona State
Fire School [0]. This organization provides training for small fire
departments that don't have the resources to run their own training. Topics
covered include basic firefighting, how to drive a firetruck, fire
investigation (arson?), etc.

[0] [https://www.facebook.com/Arizona-State-Fire-School-
Arizona-S...](https://www.facebook.com/Arizona-State-Fire-School-Arizona-
State-Fire-Training-Committee-150904741607047/)

My firefighter superpower is 'vehicle extrication'. When people wreck their
cars, firefighters' job is to stabilize the car and extract the people inside
as quickly as possible. I don't know why the president of our volunteer fire
department decided 3 of us needed to learn about Vehicle Extrication - we
don't have a lot of traffic on the county road, nor much in the way of
equipment to extricate people from their rolled cars...

At the state fire school's opening ceremony I realized the difference between
firefighters and police officers: if the fire department is dispatched in
response to your call, _they will try to help you._ If the police are
dispatched in response to your call, part of their job is deciding whether
there is an excuse to arrest you.

One of my passengers was mistakenly arrested. Those police officers put her in
a bad situation, and it was my honor to help extricate her from the area
around the county jail. She wasn't planning to get arrested that night,
probably didn't have any of her friends' phone numbers committed to memory
[1], and was hoping her friend would have money to pay me when we got to his
house.

The diary about my insights about firefighting vs policing is "Ordinary
Rendition: The Public Servants' Quagmire" \-
[http://www.taxiwars.org/2017/10/ordinary-rendition-public-
se...](http://www.taxiwars.org/2017/10/ordinary-rendition-public-
servants.html)

This section is about my experience at fire school:

> _The Public Servants ' Quagmire_

> [...] Police officers have a bit of a predicament: their official motto is
> to "protect and serve", but the politicians have given them no flexibility
> to fulfill their role.

> After I retired from taxi driving, I spent a couple days at fire school.
> During the opening ceremony I realized the difference between firefighters
> and police officers/sheriff's deputies.

> If the fire department is dispatched, they will do whatever they can to try
> to help you. Fire trucks are outfitted with all sorts of equipment that
> might be needed to save someone's day. These include not just fire hoses and
> other firefighting equipment, but also tools to cut up cars to extract
> people when the doors won't open, etc. Equipment on this Mesa special
> operations firetruck was once used to lift the light-rail train off of a
> drunk who'd passed out on the tracks: [Photo: Mesa Fire Department's Rapid
> Response/Special Operations Firetruck]

> No judgement calls are made by firefighters when responding to the incident
> at hand. In a future post I intend to tell of the time that I had to call on
> the city's firefighters to save the day. After the firefighters had
> disappeared into the night, the also-dispatched police officers decided they
> didn't need to make the situation worse, and also disappeared into the
> night.

> Discretion is the police officer's most important skill. But police are
> frequently pressured (performance evaluations, etc) to take actions that
> really just needlessly wreck people's lives.

> Another passenger told of the time she was being unruly, and how her family
> called the police for help dealing with her. After a while those police
> officers decided they didn't have any way to help, so "we're going to have
> to take you downtown." Her adult daughter protested, "THIS IS NOT WHY WE
> CALLED YOU", but the police officers were like, "whatevers". Arresting
> people is their job, even if that person really only needs a time-out from
> their situation.

[1] My earlier post about the importance of memorizing some phone numbers,
_Who Are Your Lifelines?:_ [http://www.TaxiWars.org/who-are-your-
lifelines/](http://www.TaxiWars.org/who-are-your-lifelines/)

(minor edits)

~~~
junkscience2017
It would seem that assisting at auto accident scenes now constitute 95% of
actual calls firefighters make (i.e. discounting false-alarm calls)...which
makes me wonder why there isn't an effort to situate fire stations right on
major highways.

Where I live in California there has been only one house fire in our town in
years, but the fire department is on the highway responding to an accident at
least once a week.

~~~
johansch
Ah.. I guess that explains why they moved my city's fire station from the city
center to something closer to the nearby major highway. (Europe/Sweden
though.)

~~~
dx034
It could also be that they wanted to expand the area they can reach within a
certain timeframe.

------
stmw
This is very cool! There should be an SRE version: "the mx4-large instance is
filling memory at 5 megabytes-per-gallon, when will Datadog retrigger
PagerDuty?"

------
zarkov99
this is one of the coolest things I have ever read.

------
hulkisdumb
almost mistook this for another iteration of street-fighting maths. Bravo
though!

------
johansch
[http://www.firefightermath.org/index.php?option=com_content&...](http://www.firefightermath.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=29&Itemid=43)

"A 100-foot length of 1-inch diameter hose is charged with water. How many
gallons of water are in that length of hose?"

Ugh.

~~~
knz
The section on unit conversions
([http://www.firefightermath.org/index.php?option=com_content&...](http://www.firefightermath.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=23&Itemid=125))
just makes me wonder why fire fighters don't use metric...

"How many pints are in a 5-gallon pail? How many cups are in a 5-gallon pail?"

~~~
brooksgarrett
Speaking from experience, it's primarily due to 'tradition.' All of your
combi-nozzles and rate control valves are rated and marked in GPM (Gallons per
minute) and hose is purchased and stored as 50' sections. NFPA specifications
for the hose required on a first due engine are in feet.

A department can't decide to use metric alone. The entire industry first would
need to support at the minimum both standards.

~~~
johansch
It's probably possible, somehow, to quantify how many americans perish every
year because of this.

~~~
maxerickson
I bet it is close to 0.

In recent years, the total number of fire deaths is 3000 to 4000 per year:

[https://www.usfa.fema.gov/data/statistics/fire_death_rates.h...](https://www.usfa.fema.gov/data/statistics/fire_death_rates.html)

Many of those deaths will have happened regardless of the response.

In some sense, across 300 million people, even 3000 is close enough to zero
(there's more than 2.5 million total deaths each year in the US). That doesn't
mean that improving fire response isn't important, but it might not be a very
good place to look for incremental improvements in mortality.

~~~
brooksgarrett
I agree. I've never been on a fireground and had someone yell, "We lost the
house because you didn't divide by 12!" Fireground math is a very rough
science. Every engine in our district has pre calculated charts for every
cross lay and discharge so you aren't doing the math on scene. Additionally,
once you deploy line you have a radio and can ask the engineer to increase or
decrease pressure with no math required.

A much bigger issue is the lack of recruitment and volunteerism in the
American fire service. People simultaneously don't want to increase property
taxes to fund career departments and they also don't want to volunteer.
Communities can't have it both ways. Lack of staffing is a far greater risk
than whether I'm dividing by 10 or 12.

