Did you know that when the fire department shows up to put a fire out, they don’t just shoot the fire with water? Firefighters need to be quick to make potentially life altering decisions and be excellent communicators, decision makers and quick with evaluation skills.
Learn more about your local fire department, North Bench Fire District, at their town hall meeting on Monday, September 15 at 64484 Highway 2, East 3-Mile at 6:30 p.m.
According to Firefighter Nation, “Structure triage is the process of inspecting and classifying structures according to their defensibility or non-defensibility, based on fire behavior, location, construction and adjacent fuels.
The decision to engage in structure defense operations should always be based on the determination that the structure is, in fact, defensible and that any risks to firefighters can be safely mitigated. Therefore, structure triage decisions must be based on current and forecasted fire behavior. Any change in fire behavior can quickly change the defensibility status of a structure.
When making a decision to defend a structure, firefighters must continually assess the fire environment as well as the physical features of the structure and its surroundings and make a reasonable forecast of what will happen when fire impacts the location. Firefighters have been injured or killed during structure defense operations in which firefighters underestimated fire behavior.”