Acting Captain Lessons Learned

I was Acting Captain all three shifts of last tour. Captaining is something that I'm called upon to do periodically. It's something that is definitely outside my comfort zone, but it's something that I'm required to do, so I will figure out a way to do it to the best of my ability. The main part about Acting as Captain that makes it seem overwhelming is there seems to be an incredible amount of information to learn, absorb and be able to quickly use to form a plan of action. As with other things though, that might initially seem overwhelming, the best way I've found to tackle them is just to get a foothold somewhere, break it down into bite size chunks and start methodically accomplishing it bit by bit.

This was the first time I've been called upon to act as Captain for three shifts in a row. While it was a bit daunting, it proved to be preferable to be randomly being called upon for a few hours here and there. Having more consecutive time in the seat gave me the opportunity to implement the lessons I was learning quicker, and thereby reinforce the learning process.

One responsibility of Acting Captain is navigating to the call. This is especially important because getting to the call can often set the tone for the whole call. To help learn the area I have been hopping up and figuring out the route anytime one of the rigs in the station gets a call, as well as driving the neighborhood when getting off work. Other things that have helped as well are learning to use all of my resources. I am a big fan of the printed maps that we have in the rigs. I like to be able to see the big picture of where we are going. We have GPS devices in the rigs, but they can be a bit temperamental and only show one turn at a time. When using the maps I also have to be aware that sometimes water stains or scratched areas on the map might obscure an address or street, some of the lettering is ridiculously tiny, all of the lettering seems tinier and blurry when driving en route to the call, especially at night, and once a little bit of adrenalin and tunnel vision kick in, it makes it all that much harder to navigate. The key here is to use all of my resources. Grab a run card from the file that shows the route from the station to the call's street. Find the location on the big wall map in the station before leaving. Show the engineers the route before heading out. Use members of the crew that are familiar with the area if there is any doubt to the exact location of the call. This last one is important for me to remember, because while I am ultimately charged with determining the route, it's still okay for me to ask for input from the crew.

Another lesson learned dealt with nutrition. My ipod was on shuffle the day before when an audio track from Dr. Mark Hyman's UltraMind book began to play. This track mentioned the importance of magnesium. He stated that the body uses magnesium to help it cope with stress. When the body is stressed, it depletes its stores of magnesium and they need to be replenished. Captaining is shall we say, a bit stressful for me. The first shift I increased my intake of magnesium and noticed feeling more relaxed and resilient. I'll have to research and play around with this further.

Call wise, there was a ton of learning that took place. We responded to 3 different type fires in 3 shifts. The first shift was the previously mentioned wildland fire. Lessons learned here mainly dealt with need to remain hands off, keep me head on a swivel, direct, and keep up constant communication with my crew. With my background in wildland, I'm very eager to jump in and help work. That's great as a firefighter, but can be a little counterproductive as a Captain. Communication, as always on the fireground as key. When we arrived on scene initially, several different members of the command staff were trying all give me different assignments on different radio frequencies, all at the same time. Here communicating to each of them my current assignment and the requests from the other officers on scene, and being patient while they figured it out among themselves seemed to be the best plan of action. At another point Division Alpha requested I walk the perimeter with him to get another set of eyeballs on the fire and our containment efforts. Next time in this situation, I will communicate better with my crew to make sure the know my assignment as well. Another item that will help with communication is my helmet. Captains' structure helmets have red reflectors on them, and the wildland helmets are completely red, while yellow denotes all ranks below Captain. I grabbed one of the other Captain's structure helmets at the beginning of the shift, but didn't grab his wildland helmet as well. This would have made it easier for the Chief's and overhead to pick me out on the hillside. Additionally, one other minor lesson learned was as I was hopping out of the rig making sure that I had both radios, they were tuned to the correct channels, and communicating with overhead, that I initially forgot to grab my gloves from structure gear and transfer them over to my wildland gear. This is a simple fix; I'll just have to get another set of gloves to keep with my wildland gear.

The second fire was a car fire in the parking lot of a mall. This is something that we had pre-planned and practiced just a few weeks ago. As we pulled up, the car was completely obscured by the thick dark smoke. One of the engines that responded with us and was first on scene, runs with a smaller wildland engine called a patrol. The patrol pulled into the garage in an attempt to quickly extinguish the fire. The lesson learned here was that the smoke was so thick that it actually caused the patrol's engine to stall from lack of oxygen. We extinguished the fire by laying a pre-connected hose from the other engine, and then extending off of it with one of our hose packs to reach the vehicle. If the fire had been on one of the upper levels, we would have had to extend a hoseline off of the tip of the truck's aerial ladder.

This reminded me of another call where I was higher classing a month or so prior. We got a rescue response call early in the morning for a vehicle rollover. We arrived to find an older model toyota pick up truck on it's side, with the engine running and a small fire sparking from the catalytic converter. The driver had fled the scene long before we got there. My quick thinking engineer grabbed a CO2 fire extinguisher and sprayed it into the undercarriage. The CO2 displaced the oxygen around the engine and effectively shut it off. Here was an instance where we were able to use the same principle to our advantage.

The third fire on the last shift also had quite a few valuable lessons. The beginning of this post discussed lessons learned navigating to the call, which in large part came from this call. In addition to this, once on scene after the fire as knocked down, the homeowner came barreling into the apartment complex, through the cones we laid down to block off the road, driving over our 5" hose and almost running over a few firefighters. Again, I've got to stay completely aware of my surroundings even with the simplest of tasks and when everything appears to be calm.