Fighting fires

About 100 Louisiana firefighters spent three days at LSU Eunice learning skills from leadership to a fire fighting tactic that one of the state’s top trainers calls controversial.
Dave Casey, director of the LSU Carrol Herring Fire & Emergency Training Institute in Baton Rouge, said training was for first-line supervisors.
“We are trying to train the company officers,” he said Thursday, the final day of Louisiana Company Officer Leadership Conference.
The conference was sponsored by the Institute, Louisiana State University Eunice and the Professional Fire Fighters Association of Louisiana , he said.
On Thursday afternoon the firefighters watched a demonstration of a fire fighting tactic that Casey is widely used in the world of firefighters, but not in the United States and Canada.
“There are a lot of studies recently, Underwriter Laboratories and the National Institute of Science and Technology, regarding how we fight fires and a lot of what we still do is based on training 100 years old,” he said. “We got rid of the horses. We didn’t get rid of the tactics.”
Evidence Based Scientific Fire Attack runs against the grain of traditional fire fighting, he said.
“We’ve been ingrained that no matter what, we go inside and we knock the fire down,” he said. “We are always taught that if we attack the fire on the wrong side, we will push it to the other side and science is proving that not to be true,” Casey said.
Firefighters were learning Thursday that a fire can be tamed from outside a structure.
A couch in a fire-resistant room of a trailer was set on fire and then the 900-plus degree inferno was extinguished with a relatively small stream of water from a hose outside the trailer.
“We tried this the other day and the temperatures got up to about 950 degrees within
a couple of minutes up to the ceiling and when they attacked the fire through a window it just knocked it down with very short bursts of water,” Casey said. “It dropped the temperature almost 600 degrees with a couple of gallons of water.
“And the big difference is we are outside. We are in a safe environment. The building isn’t going to fall on us when we are outside. We are not going to fall through the floor and we are not enveloped by toxic gases.”
Another plus to the technique is if someone is inside, the temperature is lowered faster “than if we had taken the tie to force a door an dragged hoses and then get in.”
Lt. Christian Wiggins of the Franklin Fire Department said the training taught him “about how we conduct ourselves at a fire scene, how we take care of ourselves at a fire scene and how we manage our technical priorities.”
As for the new technique, Wiggins said, “This is new training to me. We are more old school type of way. I feel they are very knowledgeable in the new techniques.”
Casey said the trainees would return home with new leadership tools.
“I think they are going to go out there with a much better safety awareness and some tactics in that toolbox,” he said.
The firefighters were told there are dangers other than fire in their jobs.
Keith Tyson, of the Firefighter Cancer Support Network said firefighters have cancer rates more than twice the norm and the gases that build up in their gear and then released are suspected.
Tyson said 32 percent of about 2,000 firefighters in the Miami-Dade Fire and Rescue had been diagnosed with cancer.
“There are some issues going on,” he said.
Firefighter training at LSUE dates back at least 40 years, Steve Gervais, former program coordinator said. Gervais now is assistant director of the LSU Carrol Herring Fire & Emergency Training Institute.
“The fire service typically is not an industry that embraced higher education, but over the last 10 years it has really started to pick up. These guys are starting to realize a degree is necessary for their jobs espcially when they get into supervisory and officer roles as well as the executive levels,” he said.
LSUE averages about 35 people, mainly online, earning associate degrees in fire and emergency services, he said. LSUE is the only college offering the degree, he said.