Question: I am a Firefighter in North Carolina. I have read as many manuals on firefighting as I can, and it seems like each has a different definition of: Direct, Indirect, and Combination fire attack. What is your definition?

Answer: Dear Brother: Well, you asked a question in “Brennan’s Q&A” so I will give you the opinion I have after years of the firefight as well as developing and delivering courses and seminars.

First, you are right. There appear to be lots of titles and definitions to what sounds like the same strategy. But remember, everyone in this business is always trying to reinvent the wheel. Firefighting is like the clothing industry — if you keep the garment long enough the trend will return to style. Just look at the idiotic controversy over nozzles and ventilation. We have a rebirth of smooth-bore nozzles after years of automatic, semi-automatic and whatever spring-loaded, pressure-activated, constant, variable, hollow, semi-hollow and the like that were options for poorly budgeted fire departments. Mechanical ventilation described fans that sucked products of combustion from the structure enclosure, to patterned, droplet-delivering nozzles directed through a window opening, to positive-pressure operations where we arrive and blow air into a building on fire to ventilate it.

The other axiom you should try to keep in mind to understand these definition differences is, “The fire service is really the world of the blind. There are a lot of us that have only one eye and want to be king!”

So now, to the question. What you are speaking of is strategy of the firefight in structural fire attack. Strategy is how we play the game, how the whole orchestra performs a piece.

To continue the thought: tactics are the individual operations that have to be in place to maintain the strategy. These tactics are so important that without enough of them — either because we don’t have enough people or because of the fire condition or structure extension — we are unable to attempt or accomp lish one or more. In that case the strategy (which you question) must be changed or we will not have planned for loss and certainly injuries to our firefighters.

So what are these Strategic Concepts, as I use them, in communicating, operating, teaching, and commanding?

1. Offensive Fire Attack (Direct Attack, according to your sources) — This is used most often by our aggressive American fire service and is the most result-oriented for our commitment to saving of lives and property. Tactics make the building enclosure behave, allow us to look throughout the structure for fire location and occupants, get the extinguishing/mitigation medium to the seat(s) of fire within the building and extinguish. This strategy also makes us successful faster and return to service quicker

2.Offensive/Defensive Fire Attack — Here is where the thinking on the fire ground is so important. According to all the reasons for choosing offensive strategy above, we have some variables. Exposures to the original fire location, both internal (horizontal floor space or vertically with additional occupancies on upper floors) and external (attached or semi-attached buildings or occupancies), become so threatened that we must defend them from fire extension at the same time we aggressively fight the original fire. So we are offensive in the fire building and defensive in the exposures at the same time.

3. Defensive/Offensive Fire Attack — Again your term “combination” gets foggy, as it is the only description of this second-of-four strategic concepts. Now, in this case, the exposures are involved in fire extension on arrival and the seat of fire in the original structure is intense enough to be ignored tactically for a short time. We momentarily use exterior operation tactics on the fire building itself, while we offensively protect and extinguish the immediate exposures from the interior. Examples of this strategy would be a fully involved commercial occupancy below two or three floors of dwelling spaces. We use a momentary outside attack of the store by engine monitor, tower ladder stream, or outside hand line while the major effort and tactics are employed above the fire to define the fire area by extinguishing extension.

Strategies #2 and #3 are the keys to success at the flimsy commercial construction of the strip store or taxpayer. (I guess you can see by now the term defensive is synonymous with exterior firefighting while the term offensive is synonymous with interior.)

4. Defensive Strategy (strictly outside attack) — All tactics are to mount an aggressive attack on the fire structure from the relative safety of outside the building. Here the fire within the structure is too intensely advanced to commit humans inside to fight fire, or we do not have enough personnel to perform the tactics necessary to sustain an interior or offensive attack and never will have them.

In your limited terms of direct and combination lie these effective and time-honored strategic concepts.

5. Indirect Fire Attack — In my opinion, “fergedabboutit!” This is a strategic concept tha t makes use of hydraulic physics and a specific interior structural layout. It makes use of the fact that water expands when heated to 1,700 times its cool mass as steam. That process absorbs heat and the pressure of expansion of water to steam forces the air or oxygen from the enclosure with the inert steam and smothers the fire. The building (mostly) must be enclosed. Second is that the artery to the fire compartment must be open to access by the steam. This phenomenon is accomplished by applying very limited quantities of water at extremely high pressure. The theory is that this process extinguishes the fire!

For our fire ground operations and for consistently meeting our mission statements with effectiveness safely, given our evaluation of risk and success, this tactic is nonsense in my view. This tactic writes off the ability of a human to survive within the structure that the steam fills. It is the equivalent of taking the humans that you just removed from the burning building and dropping them in a vat of continuously boiling water!

Now, there are a lot of interpretations and reinventions of the terminology that describes these four (hopefully not five) strategies that can be selected, changed, and reselected during the firefight. You can see that your limited description does not take into account the four discrete methods of fireground activity. But perhaps the parent of those terms didn’t understand the concept either or didn’ t experience enough fire activity!

We don’ t even want to mention the terms blitz and bomb attack. Hopefully those have exited this “job” along with CCL4.

Question: Hi! I am on a truck company in an East Coast beach municipality. We have recently put our snorkel-type truck in service with a two-man manning set (we used to have one firefighter assigned in the past). We have two firefighters assigned to the rescue and they join the snorkel people and operate as a truck. I have three years on the department and find myself the second senior firefighter in my shift. I cannot get the other firefighters assigned to realize that they must perform truck functions rather than just raise and lower the aerial device. The battalion would like to have them operate as a truck and perform those tactics necessary at structural fires. The battalion chief explained that to them with directions on how he would like them to operate. Yet it is still ignored on the fire ground. Am I missing something or is it just me?

Answer: Hmmmmm! Indeed you are missing something, my brother! A supervisor!

Gee, at three years on the job I thought that the battalion chief was God, until I met the deputy. Never mind the escalating rest of the department.

Let's talk some basics, because your department doesn't appear to have a firm foundation and the inmates are running the asylum.

Truck functions on the fire ground depend on “ finding” six people to do at least three things and then finding six more to perform the less important tactic, depending on that size-up and/or to assist those with heavy tactics to perform.

It is better to have the four firefighters on the truck from the start of the shift. Four is not really enough, but at least you can be assigned basic operations so that duplicate freelancing is reduced. One firefighter assigned to a truck company should ride on the engine or rescue. One firefighter cannot even operate a truck apparatus in reverse!

I have always said in the past, “He should take a bus! He is safer and will probably get off at the bus stop in the same ‘as close’ position as if he took the truck. Great cost saving too.”

Now with all that said, what does the “big chief” say? Where are the Standard Operating Procedures? Who is in charge?

I am sorry to sound so cynical, but if your letter is correct (edited “down” here in Fire Nuggets) you are in a troubled department. Study hard and make a difference.

In most departments in the United States, you need to operate the aerial device less than 10 percent of the responses in which you operate. But the truck functions must go on at every structural fire or you will need the aerial device to deliver defensive streams 100 percent of the time.

Someone should fire up the battalion chief or he’ll get fired!

Question: Could you list any random thoughts that you might have on the effectiveness of tower ladders that would help convince the department that I represent of the need to add a tower ladder to its fleet?

Answer: Sure! They are the greatest advance in firefighting since they put a motor on a pump! All negative criticism of tower ladders is greatly overwhelmed by its accolades &127 in my opinion, of course. Let's start at the beginning.

When I was in the truck as a grunt, we were chosen to receive one of the new tower ladders being issued to our "job." There were no guidelines, and the ones that we could "steal" from other departments seemed to profess that the responders should be "bucket happy." We could not afford to operate like that, so we had to "force" the tactics that would make the tower operate to it's efficiency and yet not have us (the truck) lose its value on the fire ground with the rapid access assignments of entry, vertical ventilation, rear access and search and search and locate that we were used to performing.

The short story is that we did it. Of course, we had plenty of fire activity in structures to make "lessons" and refine tactical considerations. The information that we received AND today's advertising show the municipal fire department again and again in defensive tactics. Departments think, "If we cannot develop a fully involved, four-story large area commercial fire every month or a defensive attached-dwelling complex, we don't need a tower ladder. The same negative assumptions tell smaller departments that if they don't have tall buildings (4-6 stories) they too don't need consider the tower. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Towers' value lies in their use for interior fire operations of a routine nature. Sure, it is the greatest equipment you can summon for outside defensive stuff, but how often does that occur in your district (woops!)? Height is not the value of tall tower ladders — reach is the value! Aerials have one objective at a time. If you climb for access, you must get in or get down and start again. With towers, you just "drive" to the next location. Aerials are faster for the single objective that they do have. But the tower puts the rested firefighter in the work zone quicker and with more equipment.

In my opinion, when properly placed, the tower is the key to reversing the terrible and tragic record of life loss we have in two- or three-story private-dwelling fires. (More on that later.) Let's say there are multiple life objectives on arrival:

• Aerial: It is a hard choice to pick one window or objective and decide who gets out first and then to go back for the next priority and the next.
• Tower: Drive around and get all of them.

Consider the following issues in light of the advantages of the tower ladder:

• Exterior overhauling — great work platform for anyone who ever had to remove siding and other constructs on the outside of a structure from an aerial (if the chief let you) or portable (if he didn't).
• Exterior Entry — should speak for itself.
• Exterior Ventilation — any opening can be made, including a breach.
• Vertical Ventilation — for flat rooftop floor fires, you can drop a vent team off with a hardware store of tools. For peak roofs, it provides a stable work platform to cut a hole in a flimsy roof covering that probably would never get cut.
• Moving equipment — lighting, hoselines, hydraulics, first aid and removal (stretchers) and any other things are raised to the location necessary and dropped off.
• Defensive operations — aggressive, non-collapse potential. The tower's effectiveness here in the hands of an aggressive crew is matchless. For exterior multi-story operations, begin at the lowest floor of fire and "dance" all over the façade of openings, extinguishing fire and opening ceilings and walls to other compartments. For single-story, commercial structures, drop to the sidewalk and operate a 750-gallon handline into the door openings. It removes ceilings of taxpayer construction (which should have been the objective in the first place).
• Maneuverability — with heavy caliber streams. Window to window, floor to floor, store occupancy to store occupancy: impossible for aerial devices with a fixed or portable ladder pipe. Firefighter operators in defensive aggressive operations are safe. They are useless on tips of aerials and in terrible danger from injuries that they never heard of. Towers operate in depressed areas, off piers, into excavations, and more.

Basically, the last 14 years of my career have been in tower ladders. From their inception, I was a firefighter then lieutenant, and lastly in command of one. In that time, I responded to more than 20,000 alarms — explosions, fully involved, hazardous materials, ships, private as well as multiple dwellings, commercial and whatever you can have in any district. The units that I was assigned to in that time responded to for times that number. The benefit goes to the guys that don't have to do that amount of work to access the lessons. Just ask. The tower is the greatest piece of structural firefighting equipment available today.

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