One of my best friends (who happens to be my "B" Shift counterpart) came back from his NFPA Committee meeting (mine was in Baltimore and his was in St. Louis. I'm thinking we need to start doing these in Hawaii). He was telling me that during his travels, he happened to be having a discussion with an airline pilot. I guess the conversation came to the subject of safety and near-miss procedures.
According to this pilot, Chief H said, when there is a landing that isn't perfect, there is a culture of not pointing fingers that encourages the flight crew to report the event, discuss the factors, and to come up with methods to improve their performance. Sounds a lot like a near-miss policy to me, but the difference is that apparently, there is absolutely no resistance to reporting these issues because there is no threat of repercussion.
Now we have the Secret List and the Firefighter Near Miss Reporting System, and in our organization at least, we discuss standard operating guidelines in post-event critiques, but I don't know that those concepts even go as far as what Chief H was suggesting they do in this airline program. To me, it sounds a lot like common sense: instead of focusing on the situation that has already occurred, focus on the events we can fix or those we can grow to recognize and solve, and move forward.
But there is no way this kind of concept can evolve on many of these blogs. Hell, if anything is seen, like a glove missing or God forbid, someone isn't wearing their SCBA, it becomes a litany of what a dumbass the individuals are and how is it that these people are even still fighting fire.
Now while our department is very strict about the use of safety equipment and insuring best practices are followed, it is hardly a slamfest out there. If we see you don't have something, we suggest (pretty strongly) for you to go get it and wear it. This happens pretty rarely because we have squared away people who have been doing this stuff fairly often (with the exception of some of the rookies, of course). But really, we do make mistakes and there's a lot of times we laugh about it because once pointed out, everyone is pretty good about doing the right thing.
I'd hate, however, for someone to take a photograph of us when we rolled up on a scene, however, and someone just so happened to have missed putting a glove on. In the case of a recent fire we had, there was significantly enough fire on the outside to cause the arriving officer to order a transitional attack. His company deployed two lines to the exterior to knock down the rapidly extending fire, which they did without donning masks.
The next due engine stretched an attack line to the front door and using proper PPE, made the knock on the inside. Confined to the two rooms we found burning when we got there, nobody hurt. Nobody was coughing or hacking and honestly, the most difficult part of the evolution was dealing with the mosquitoes. But just on the chance there was a picture taken of those first few seconds, we'd have heard cries of "sissy" and "outdoor firefighter" from half the crowd and angry accustations of unsafe activity and amateurism from the other half.
Instead of showing the world you are the resident expert on firefighting (which I suspect half of the trolls would run crying at the sight of a real fire), why not use what you see on the blogs and posts to learn something from it and instead of sharing your incredible insight with us all, perhaps make some intelligent observations that could help others remember not to make those mistakes. I doubt any of the haters are reading this, so I doubt it will have much impact, but perhaps, maybe it will.
