When the paramedics arrived for a “sick child” in Apartment 511 at 1:27 am, it started a chain of events that resulted in a mass evacuation of a five-story Type V apartment building with near lethal levels of carbon monoxide in the structure. The incident commander assigned Truck A to enter every apartment on the 5th floor, ventilate and remove any occupants. Truck B was assigned to do the same on the 4th floor. Both crews were on SCBA air. When Truck A reported that all 12 apartments were searched and ventilated on the 5th floor, Truck B still had 7 apartments to search on the 4th floor.
There are three metrics that impact the development of Unconscious Fireground Competence. Let’s take a look.
10,000 Hours to Superior Performance
In Outliers: The Story of Success (2008) Malcolm Gladwell referred to a study by Erricson, Roring, and Nandagopal that said greatness requires enormous time. Two examples
- Beatles gave 1,200 performances in Hamburg from 1960 – 1964
- Bill Gates’ gained access to a high school computer in 1968 at the age of 13 – spent 10,000 hours programming it
There has been some push-back to the 10,000 hours metric, including a statement by Professor Erricson in a 2012 BBC interview:
There is nothing magical about the 10,000 figure, as Ericsson said recently, because the best group of musicians had accumulated an average, not a total, of over 10,000 hours by the age of twenty.
In the world of classical music it seems that the winners of international competitions are those who have put in something like 25,000 hours of dedicated, solitary practice – that’s three hours of practice every day for more than 20 years.
Ericsson is also on record as emphasising that not just any old practice counts towards the 10,000 hour average. It has to be deliberate, dedicated time spent focusing on improvement (see graphic).
90 Days to Skill Degradation
When Scott Bourn, Ph.D., RN, FACHE was working at a national ambulance company he pointed out that they could document EMS caregiver clinical skill degradation if the skill had not been done in over 90 days. A 2018 study of performance for third-year medical students looked at 3 clinical skills: femoral line placements, endotracheal intubation, and pigtail thoracostomy, showed:
A total of 45 third-year medical students participated between June and November 2015. No significant difference was found in score distribution between baseline and 6 weeks; however, a significant decline was noted after 6 weeks for all three skills.
A 2011 Firefighter Nation article described Boeing research on skill degradation with Seattle firefighters in 1974.
Skills degrade much faster than expected. Without refreshing for 90 days, it took an average of 1.5 times longer for the study group to complete a task (150% longer than the original time). After six months, retraining was required in many settings.
I observed the same performance issue when we were exploring an accelerated career recruit school aimed at volunteers in our department who completed Firefighter II training through our Evening and Weekend program.
We took eight candidates and ran them through four hose-and-ladder evolutions that were used at the end of both the paid and volunteer recruit schools. The volunteers that graduated from the Evening and Weekend program within the past six months did well. Those that graduated more than a year ago were unable to pass the evolutions on the first attempt.
Six Minutes For Safety
Gordon Graham developed the 6 Minutes for Safety program to provide a beginning-of-shift review of High Risk/Low Frequency with No Discretionary Time activities while he was a state law enforcement agency supervisor. This process was adopted for federal wildland firefighting.
John Buckman III summarizes the importance of repetition to “overlearn” a skill:
The gunner will be able to repair his gun under the stress of battle and the basketball player will be able to sink a shot at the last second to win the championship game — both will make it look easy. And the firefighter will be able to throw the ladder, grab the victim and negotiate them to safety.
The human mind consists of layers of behavioral development. And it is repetition that causes the brain to convert behaviors into habits. Researchers believe personal development consists of 5 percent cognitive insight and 90 percent structured repetitive drills and exercises to establish new skills or enhance existing skills and behavior.
A new skill or behavior is fully assimilated when it can be demonstrated effortlessly, without resistance or reactive emotional stimulation.
Meanwhile, At The Apartment Evacuation
The Incident Commander had Truck A go to the 4th floor to help Truck B complete the search and ventilation. The “hot wash” with the command and company officers after the incident identified a difference in techniques between Truck A and Truck B.
Truck B was forcing every apartment door and the crew of three stayed together as a team. Truck A forced one apartment door and then crashed through the drywall between apartments. The crew split up with two smashing the drywall and the other one opening sliding balcony door, searching the apartment and unlocking the apartment door. They rotated assignments to keep the muscle power focused on quickly breaking through the drywall.
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Ericsson KA, Roring, RW and Nandagopal K. (2007) Giftedness and evidence for reproducibly superior performance: an account based on the expert performance framework. High Ability Studies. Vol. 18, No. 1, June, pp. 3–56.
Gladwell, M. (2008) Outliers: The Story of Success. New York: Little, Brown, and Company. ISBN 978-0316017923
Bradley, David (2012 November 14). “Why Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule is wrong: There’s no magic number for becoming a world-beater, says science writer David Bradley, just ask the psychologist whose research formed the basis of the popular idea.” BBC Future. Accessed March 16, 2019, from http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20121114-gladwells-10000-hour-rule-myth
Fisher J, Viscusi R, Ratesic A, et al. (2018) Clinical skills temporal degradation assessment in undergraduate medical education. J Adv Med Educ Prof, 2018 Jan; 6(1): 1–5.
(2011 September 02) Credentials vs. Competence. Firefighter Nation. Accessed March 16, 2019, https://www.firefighternation.com/articles/2011/09/credentials-vs-competence.html
Buckman III, John (2016 November 7) “Why firefighter training depends on repetition: Firefighters and instructors who think they can stop drilling on skills are dead wrong, and brain science explains why.” Fire Chief. Accessed March 16, 2019, from https://www.firechief.com/fire-chief/articles/why-firefighter-training-depends-on-repetition-ZWIwsYJuwqjekSWX/
Featured picture: Los Angeles City recruits, David McNew/Getty Images
Elements, identifiers and sequence of events may be altered in “war stories” to protect the innocent or work better as an example.