Scar Tissue: Recognizing and Overcoming the Challenges of Poor Firefighter Training

Whether you’ve been in the fire service for 20 years or 20 days, you likely developed a training “scar” or two. They generally occur in the acquisition of new skills and are reinforced through repetition without correction. The challenge isn’t so much in developing them; it’s in correcting them. You must analyze your training program and your department to see which ones you still are operating under.

Where it all starts

Some of the most common examples of training scars come early in firefighter training.

How many times did you practice putting your PPE and SCBA in perfect little piles lined out in your designated engine companies? Although it might look nice, I never once laid out my gear like that on the bay floor so that I could get into my full ensemble in 60 seconds or fewer when the tones dropped.

Scars such as this start on Day 1 and can metastasize throughout a career if left uncorrected.

A few of my other personal favorites:

• “Hold my boot” search: Nothing contradicts “We’re here to save you” like holding onto each other as we try to move rapidly through a building does. We are past the point at which this should be a part of our curriculum. It slows us down and takes time away from our victims who aren’t in PPE and SCBA.
• Crawling when we can see: Just like oriented search, this is something that’s taught in training that we never do in an actual incident—except we do, because it’s what we were taught. Even after you know better, you default to this training tactic.
• Not spraying water until we see the seat of the fire: This is a dangerous tactic that shouldn’t be used in training any more. Cooling the smoke and getting to the seat of the fire as quickly and efficiently as possible is what engine companies do.
• Dragging victims out the way that we came in: Just like a VES entry, we must get victims out via the closest exit. Each breath might be their last, so why would we continue to put them in danger? If we find them in a bedroom, isolate and get them out via the window. Don’t drag them back down the hall to the front door.
• Calling any fire “fully involved”: There is an automatic letdown when the first-arriving units say this. We lower our guard and our expectations. What might look like significant fire from the Alpha side of the structure might be searchable from any of the other sides. If we instead call it a “working fire,” regardless of our ability to make entry, we stay mentally engaged and ready to do work.
• Not training in gear: When we choose not to put on PPE and get acclimated to working in a heat-stress environment, we set ourselves up for failure when we must gear up and engage. Our bodies aren’t accustomed to base-level heat let alone interior operations during a working incident.
• Not setting time standards to complete tasks: Once good foundational skills are mastered and personnel complete them consistently without failure, you should know how long that it takes to accomplish core tasks. How long does it take to hook a hydrant? How long does it take to deploy a crosslay and get it charged and ready to make entry? If we don’t set a bar, we take seconds and even minutes away from the victims who don’t have time to spare.
• Not immediately providing patient care upon removal of a victim: We aren’t simply completing a victim drag; we are completing a victim rescue, and that includes patient care until EMS takes over.
• Utilizing personnel numbers during assessment centers that wouldn’t be available during actual daily operations: For example, having a four-person pumper/truck when you only run three as part of your regular staffing.

Price of building poor scars

Stamford, CT, Fire Marshal Chris Brennan, who has written on the topic of training scars, believes that it takes as many as 200 repetitions to build in automaticity. (In academic circles, automaticity is the term that’s used to describe the development of training scars. It occurs after extensive deliberate practice.) Unfortunately, it also might take 3,000–5,000 repetitions to replace that automaticity scar with a new one. The initial repetitions might not even reach the 200 mark, but years of repeating the same deficient skill will burn that skill into your memory as the only thing that you know.

In “On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and in Peace,” Lt. Col. Dave Grossman and Loren Christensen address the idea of autopilot actions. This is something to which first responders are by no means immune. The authors relate that we can train to a level of unconscious thought, but those actions might be detrimental depending on the circumstances. “Whatever is drilled in during training comes out the other end in combat, no more, no less,” the authors write.

If the training doesn’t line up with the situation at the time of application, negative ramifications could apply. Grossman and Christensen view those training scars as “bad muscle memory,” further stating that these scars in the midbrain are counterproductive to survival. In other words, you don’t rise to the occasion; you sink to the level of your training, Grossman and Christensen write.

The scars don’t come only on the training ground. They also come from repeated incident responses. When we repeatedly go to the same addresses for false alarms, we let our guard down. We might not gear up all of the way. We might not lay in a line. We might not be prepared for the real incident.

Early in my career, I experienced a poor response scar, and it taught me a great lesson. We responded to a commercial paint facility in our first due. We had been running regular nuisance alarms there quite frequently, and we all assumed that this was another false alarm. As we arrived, there was nothing showing from the exterior, but the audible alarms were sounding, just as they did during every other run to the location.

We grabbed our packs and tools but didn’t mask up. While walking through the building to confirm our suspicions of another false alarm, we casually opened a door into another section of the building and were greeted by heavy smoke and steam. We were able to mask up and upgrade the alarm, but we had let our guard down. We failed in the most basic principles: expect fire, expect victims. In this case, there were no victims, but if there were, we would have failed to do our job. The scar of repeated false alarms set us up for what could have been a catastrophic failure.

What do you do?

I like to relate training in the fire service to the four stages of competence for new skill acquisition that was developed by Noel Burch in the 1970s.

The first stage is unconscious incompetence. You don’t know that you don’t know. You are happy in your ignorance.

The second stage—and where our training programs generally start—is conscious incompetence. You recognize your lack of knowledge or skills in a subject. You start your training here, but you are in the infancy of learning the skills.

In stage three, you reach conscious competence. You learned the skills and understand why you need them, but you must think about them.

The final stage, which we should train toward, is unconscious competence. You can complete the skill with minimal thought about how to accomplish it.

In their article, “Practice for Knowledge Acquisition (Not Drill and Kill)” (2010, American Psychological Association), Mary Brabeck, et al, relay that deliberate practice is necessary to improve performance. The authors further emphasize the need for downtime between repetitions, for chemical processing to transfer the information to long-term memory.

“When there is too much information in our working memory, it will fail, and the chemical processes that transfer information to our long-term memories will also fail,” the authors write. “Long-term learning is enhanced by a distribution process in which information is repeated, allowing time, with time in between practice sessions, rather than crammed practice.”

Crawl, walk, run

The crawl, walk, run theory of skill development has become a recurring theme in recent years. When it’s tied with the military mindset of “Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast,” we can better understand how to develop skills without scars.

To really develop our skills, we must master the basics first: crawl. We can’t throw in a bunch of fancy challenges until we have significant reps.

Once we have the basics down, we can add small injects to up the challenge, utilizing the same skills but with a twist: walk.

Finally, we build on those skills and injects with more complex tasks, still using the foundational skills: run.

One of the more common barriers to allowing this slow progression can be the instructors. It isn’t that any of them have bad intentions. They want to teach and develop new firefighters, but unfortunately, the instructors get bored teaching the same skills or want to show students a cool and different way. This leads these instructors to modify the training before the basics are mastered. The students don’t get their base reps and, instead, are taught new whiz-bang ways. This is why it’s so important to have dedicated lesson plans for the classroom and the drill ground. You don’t vary from the script.

Set up for failure

Our goal as firefighters and leaders who train personnel should be to get students to the point of “running with unconscious competence.” A term that was coined by Micah Horton and Jesse Horton of training company Hortons & Hunt is cognitive capital. When firefighters struggle with the basics, their anxiety rises, their heart rate rises, their breathing rate increases, and they waste cognitive capital, which costs time after breaching the doorway. Firefighters’ mental and physical efforts must be on the inside of the structure searching for victims and fire.

We all have seen the negative effects of our training scars and how they not only can slow down our fireground operations but, worse, potentially cost people their life. As Ben Shultz says, “Time is our enemy, speed is our weapon.”

When we build scars that sacrifice speed through poor skill development into our training programs, we set up ourselves and our citizens for failure. Learn what scars your personnel might have and build a program to address those shortcomings. Look at what your department is teaching and work to update those skills. Take the time on the front end to teach fireground expectations and you will develop amazing firefighters.