Risky Business: Consent Safety and Fire Fighting Culture. Essay

In 2009, The National Fire Protection Agency released its 46-page presentation on potential performance measures relating to the core functions of the fire service. This document is available online www.nfpa.org. The document acknowledges there are vast differences across the country and no two fire departments are alike. However, specific value set’s lie within every department that can be held to measurable standards for statistical data input, referencing, and documentation. Maintaining higher standards does come at a price. The fire service, in general, is a costly profession to operate. Unlike the police departments and ambulance companies where vehicle and equipment cost is less

Around thirty labor laws were enforced in reaction to the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. A major law was enacted where employees should not have to risk their lives or health in the work place. Other laws included that all high risk building had to have automatic sprinkler systems installed and that all exits had to be unlocked and swing to the outside. It is pivotal that safety measures are taken serious and enforced in a workplace. Deadly fires are bound to happen when the owners of a company neglect the safety of their workers and that is what caused this

This paper will look at NFPA 472 and what it does to protect the FireFighter. NFPA 472 is a very interesting standard as it is the standard of competence of responders to hazardous materials/weapons of mass destruction incidents. The purpose of this standard is to specify the minimum effectiveness for those who respond to hazardous materials and WMD incidents and necessary for a risk based response to the incidents. Hazmat situations can be a very tricky situation with all the recently introduced acids and gasoline of the current era. NFPA 472 keeps the FireFighter safe and effective on duty.

To better understand the background of the contrasting views, we must look at how the fire service has developed around

NIOSH found the following (2009) Ensure that fire fighters receive essential training consistent with national consensus standards on structural firefighting before being allowed to operate at a fire incident, develop, implement, and enforce written standard operating procedures (SOPs) for fireground operations, ensure that fire fighters are trained to follow the two-in/two-out rule and maintain crew integrity at all times, ensure that adequate numbers of apparatus and fire fighters are on scene before initiating an offensive fire attack in a

Nowadays, it is almost impossible to find a building that does not have exit signs or fire extinguishers in America. Whether in a university or at the work place, exit signs and fire safety instructions can easily be found by anybody. Fire drills are regularly practiced to ensure the least amount of casualty will occur if something goes wrong. However, a hundred years ago safety issues were barely taken into considerations and safety regulations were most of the time inexistent, as illustrates the terrible fire that happened a hundred years ago at the Triangle

This commission helped usher in much needed changes on the labor side, which after a few years developed into the New York State Department of Labor (aflcio.org, 2017). The fire also helped fire departments not only in New York City, but all over the Nation at that time, make changes to how they operate. The National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), which was founded in eighteen ninety-six, declared at its annual meeting right after the fire, to all departments nation-wide, how important fire-drills were to life safety (Teague & Farr, 2009). A few years later the NFPA formed the Committee on Safety to Life to help with fire codes, regulations and departments. Several years after its development, they adopted revised specifications to fire escapes, and worked on specific regulations to exits to buildings and the Building Exit Codes (Teague & Farr, 2009). All of their work helped bring items like fire drills, egress from buildings, sprinklers, fire escapes, and other building code changes. Fire Departments all over the Nation were also helped and their eagerness to improve and update their equipment to meet the needs of a changing, and more industrialized and upward-bound Nation took full effect. Improved safety nets, ladders and equipment to reach taller buildings, more water access points and better personal safety equipment were all a result of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire and the efforts of the

While dangerous work like firefighting often requires decisive and quick action against one of nature’s most destructive elements, do the inherent risks of firefighting justify risky decision-making by officials? In this dangerous and often daring line of work, when is the line between protecting the public and protecting public employees crossed – and who is responsible when that line is crossed?

On March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire broke out. Proper workers’ rights and fire prevention installations were not in place or were not followed. There were no sprinkler systems and the doors were locked to keep the garment workers inside. From sparks to embers, the fire lasted a short fifteen minutes but it changed fire safety from then on. (Triangle Shirtwaist

The fire service has long-standing traditions dating back to the 18th Century, whether it is the color red on fire apparatus or the shape of their helmets. Some traditions are important in the American fire service while others traditions are dangerous or unneeded practices but still, exist for a variety of reasons. One of the biggest challenges to making changes requires the changing of the culture within the fire service.

This tragic fire demonstrated how the fire inspections and precautions were noticeably lacking safety for these workers even though “a little more than five months before the tragedy Firemen Edward F. O’Conner made a routine inspection and said the Asch Building was ‘good’ and the building was ‘fireproof’”(28). The fire finally died down with over one hundred dead bodies piled along the streets. Sunday morning “thousands of people began to form into a slowly moving parade around the city blocks”(89). The people were walking in honor of these workers and would go around trying to identify the bodies and confiscate any items the bodies my have possessed for reminiscences. On the other hand, the departments felt immediate quilt for not stepping in to fix the Asch building before, because the departments knew of the horrible safety and health precautions the Asch building had but nobody emphasized the problems. “But who was to blame?” (113). Chief Croker was quick to blame

For years if not decades, firefighters have responded to a reported structure fire that turned out to be a fully involved single room. This fire scenario requires a core set of fire tactics and skills to control and extinguished the fire, but is it this simple? Perhaps twenty years it may have been, but new dangers are lurking in every scenario and may have detrimental outcomes for unsuspecting and unaware firefighters and victims. The National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) agency along with the Underwriters Laboratory (UL) have been conducting research to understand fire behavior and fire dynamics. This research is providing firefighters with new information about how and why

One could say the Fire Service possess one unique quality about how it operates daily and that is the culture and the community that lies within every department. Culture is defined as defined by Miriam-Webster “the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations (Definition of Culture, 2017, para. 5).” The many diverse aspects of each department in still’s a variety of cultural differences separating one department from the next. At the heart of all departments, fire service culture is the men and women who work and train hard to serve their communities as prescribed by the Fire Chief. The Fire Chief, however,

The Emergency Services organizations in the United States are complex and challenging group’s that are a required necessity of all communities, based on law. The fire service part of the emergency services have been around over two hundred years and has been the backbone of many emergency service agencies on how the culture is built and how everyday actions are completed within the emergency services, there has been cultural ambivalence within the Emergency Service on how to deal with employees, with the current laws and regulations. Many of the employment issues within the emergency services have been due to the increase in members of the emergency services pushing back on the old cultural practices of the agencies or governments who govern the emergency service agencies. It is evident that in some incidents that the politics and old traditional cultures have made issues of diversity, leadership issues and equal rights issues. There is growing professional literary evidence that acknowledges the legal issues surrounding emergency service agencies (Rielage, 2008).

According the agency of the Department of Homeland Security states that motor vehicles crashes are the leading cause of death for an on-line duty fireman. Other significant causes of death are: caught/trapped (10%), fall (5%), collapse (3%), and other (7%). Intentions of firefighters are to make the community safe as possible, but we the people need to think twice before we do anything else when dealing with fire. The other things that it 's a national problem for firefighters is not wearing their seat belts when driving out to an emergency. They are so focused on saving our lives when first it 's supposed to be the opposite, their safety is first, but firemen put their lives at risk.