Three Miami-Dade firefighters recently resigned their positions following a training event that went tragically wrong. While the June 21 incident is still under investigation, these facts are known: The vacant building had been used for more than a month prior to the incident for fire department drills. None of those prior drills involved an actual fire and, according to the mayor of the town where the building is located, the building owner did not give permission for a controlled burn. Instead, prior training had been limited to search-and-rescue simulations, including the use of canine search teams.
According to WSVN in Miami, firefighters in the building were in the middle of their training exercise when someone added too much fuel to what should have been a small tar pot fire meant for “demonstration.” The resulting fire involved three alarms, the injury of several responders, and the death of one person who had been in the building.
The man who died inside the burning building was not a firefighter, nor was he a member of Miami-Dade Fire in any capacity. He was the son of one of the firefighters who was at the training event that day.
Boulder tragedy prompts NFPA 1403
Reading the details of this incident spun me back almost 43 years to my worst day on the Boulder (Colorado) Fire Department: Jan. 26, 1982. A training event took place in an abandoned storage building that had been used as a chicken coop. Department members modified the building for the purpose of search-and-rescue training under smoke conditions. The training was talked about strictly as search and rescue; no one ever mentioned the word “fire,” even though tires and other materials were burning inside the structure to generate smoke. When the third crew that day went through the training evolution, a flashover occurred, igniting low-density fiberboard tiles in the building. Two firefighters died, and a third was critically injured.
The subsequent investigations revealed several key points: The person acting as training officer that day was not trained or experienced in that position. There was no hydrant hooked up nor additional response crew outside the building. The firefighters inside the building had only a booster line as a water supply.
This tragic fire took the lives of a 10-year department veteran and a rookie firefighter who had been on the job only a couple of months. In the aftermath of this event, several department members resigned or were demoted. This incident led directly to the development of NFPA 1403, which provides minimum requirements for conducting live-fire trainings to ensure that they are conducted in safe facilities and a safe manner for participants.
NFPA 1403 was first published in 1986. But between the Boulder and Miami incidents, too many deaths and injuries have occurred secondary to training incidents where live fire was a factor.
How training goes sideways
How can this continue to happen when clear standards exist for conducting live-fire training? One answer is tragically simple: No one acknowledged the incidents as fire training. It was a smoke drill. It was search and rescue. And even though fires were burning, they were for “demonstration.” Therefore, the standard did not apply.
But fire is fire. It doesn’t care what you call it. All firefighters know this in a visceral way. They have seen things go from routine to insane in a moment on fire calls, on accident scenes, or on medical response. That’s the essence of the job – to be prepared for the unexpected and never take anything for granted.
Yet sometimes these good instincts are lost or set aside, and it happens all too often during training events, which really should be the safest and most controlled thing that firefighters do. But people get bored. They get complacent. They’re showing off, or they’re in a hurry and just trying to get through whatever it is they are doing. They rationalize and they justify, believing that because nothing bad has ever happened as a result of their actions, that nothing ever will.
Before NFPA 1403, there was no standard for running a safe training fire. For almost 40 years, a standard has been in place that has been considered and revised to meet the changing demands of live-fire training. But standards only work if people recognize the need for them and apply them every single time fire is present, in any form, during training.
Final thoughts
If you find yourself using the words “only” and “just” when describing a training event (“It’s only for practice” or “we’re just generating smoke for a drill”), you’d better think again. When fire exists in any context, it behaves as fire does – sometimes predictably and sometimes not – and you must always take that seriously. In Boulder, we hoped our tragedy would at least serve to prevent such incidents in the future. It is heartbreaking and infuriating to see these avoidable losses still happening.
