The Engine Company
How much thought have you put into the design, equipment & operations of your Engine Company? The engine company is the backbone of the American fire service.
While many things may be different from one Engine Company to the next like the brand of apparatus or the types of hose lines carried and whether you are on the East coast or the West coast our mission remains the same.
We need to get water on the fire quickly and efficiently. There are many factors that will determine how successful the engine company will be at making that happen:
1. How are the hose lines packed on the engine? Flat pack? Minuteman load? Triple stack? And does everyone on your crew know how to advance the load(s) you are using?
2. What different size attack lines and lengths do you have at our disposal? If you have one standard pre-connected hose length what options do you have when you need to stretch farther?
3. Do you have smooth bore nozzles or combination fog nozzles and if you have a mix of them on which load does each type reside? Have you tested your flows to ensure they are sufficient and your pump operators are knowledgeable of the correct pressures? If you have breakaway nozzles do you know how to use them in limited visibility?
4. Are there riding assignments for each member of the crew? Are you putting these assignments into practice on even the run of the mill fire alarm responses?
5. And most importantly, have you TRAINED sufficiently so that all of the factors above are second nature? That is, that the
knowledge of all the key Engine Company concerns above and how you approach each situation becomes habit.
Your first due area should determine how your engine is setup not what will get you the most trophy’s at your next parade. The majority of my local area is made up of single family dwellings with setbacks that can range from 10 feet to 100 feet and some flag lots that are even further off the street.
Our building fire SOG states that the first due Engine Company will secure a water supply and position short of the fire building or pull past it.
When you combine a 100ft setback, the distance the engine is past the fire building and any obstacles, a 200ft line may quickly become insufficient. This is the why at my company we have a 300ft pre-connects that complement our 200ft pre-connects.
If we misjudged the stretch and have to add to one of our 200ft lines we can easily do this using one of our high rise racks. We utilize 75psi break away Elkhart Brass Chief Nozzles on all of our pre-connected 1.75” hose lines.
This breakaway nozzle enables you to extend the line without having to shut it down at the pump panel. We had switched to these nozzles after multiple flow tests on our hand lines and old nozzles which uncovered some false perceptions about what pump discharge pressures were required to obtain our target gpm.
With these new fixed 75psi Elkhart nozzles we were able to lower our required pump discharge pressure on our 1.75” hand lines including our longer pre-connects while achieving our target flow of 150gpm.
Our hose lines are packed in a minute man fashion. Using this type of load the hose flakes off your shoulder from top to bottom as opposed to a flat load which would flake off your shoulder from bottom to top. If you have ever experienced both of these two types of hose loads you will understand how unnatural that flaking from bottom to top of the flat load feels as you deploy the line. It’s also more difficult to maintain the integrity of the load as the flat load flakes off your shoulder and in my experience many guys simply dump the entire load off of their shoulder and have a pile of spaghetti to deal with. The minuteman load is extremely easy to deploy and feels much more natural.
Our engine company riding assignments are as follows:
Driver
Officer
Nozzle
Hydrant
Backup
Extra #1
Extra #2
Most of the time we have a crew of five on our engine but there are times when we have seven. If operating as a seven firefighter engine company the two “extra” positions can act as an exterior truck company team (ground ladders, roof) or stretch a 2nd line if the OIC chooses. We had an apartment fire during 2014 and the two firefighters in the extra positions went ahead of the hose line and rescued a woman from the fire apartment.
Training in my opinion is the biggest factor that enables our engine company to operate quickly and efficiently. We train on pulling lines often so that all of our firefighters can become proficient. We can’t expect our firefighters to stretch a hose line quickly on a fire scene if it’s only the 1st or 2nd time they have pulled a line that year.
I’ve heard of departments that don’t even pull hose lines off of their trucks when they are practicing live burn scenarios at their tower. Instead they roll out spare hose from racks they keep down at their burn building, connect the hose to their engines and then charge the lines in place before they begin their training.
How are they preparing their firefighters to perform in a real deal scenario? They are being trained to get off the engine and pull spare hose off of a rack! This specific fire department is doing their members a huge disservice and it’s only a matter of time before that will catch up with them.
I used my fire company for the examples in this article but the key point is that we have a reason for everything we do and what equipment we have. We flow tested our lines to verify our target flow and
pump discharge pressures. We had outside training companies come in to show us how other departments operate outside of our area. Our SOG’s were evaluated and updated to reflect how we operate and riding assignments were formalized. These changes did not happen overnight and they were not met with open arms from everyone. It wasn’t easy but as a company we were persistent and trained often.