In the later stages of my career I was volunteer as a paramedic/fire-fighter on a combination paid/volunteer fire department. We also did first response medical. Personally towards the end of my active response work I enjoyed a good fire much more than a medical call, but 75%-80% of our runs were medical. We were dispatched to a report of a boat fire in the commercial boat docks of the local marina at about 1 AM.  I lived a little farther out so I was not on the first-in engine and our company was assigned to staging.  Staging at any scene is normally like getting all dressed up for a dance and never getting to go. No one likes staging.

The decision to go offensive or defensive in any fire situation is a risk/reward process. Based on circumstances, training and staffing you have to quickly decide what your reward is for risking the safety of personnel. Here is what the Incident Commander (IC) faced with the ICS priorities:

  • Life Safety – No one was on-board the vessel
  • Incident Stabilization – The one nice thing about boat fires is they eventually go out when the vessel burns to the waterline or sinks.
  • Property/Environmental Preservation – Property– letting the fire burn limits life safety but almost guarantees additional property loss.  Environment – Fuel tanks were intact but a sinking vessel can be a problem.
  • Return to Normalcy – This vessel represented the livelihood of the owner and crew. Without it there would be no quick return to normalcy.

In this case the IC wanted to limit the number of personnel down on the dock due to unsafe working conditions. Besides the IC, there was one team of two with a line for exposures and one team of two for attack. Staging was up in the parking lot. The boat was a 80′ wood fishing vessel with heavy timbers throughout the hull. Black smoke rolled out of the cabin. Of note is the IC had also been a commercial fisherman for about 25 years and was an SME on this type of vessel. I had done my own stint in commercial fishing in my younger days. Even today I can easily tell the difference between the pointy-end and the round-end of most boats.

The attack team had made entry into the cabin from the back deck and determined the smoke and heat was emanating from below deck, most likely the engine room. This is when the IC radio’d staging and asked for someone with “less profile”. Due to my build I have always been the tunnel rat, shoved in a window or crawled into the mashed up car kind of guy. The staging officer radio’d back “Jan is on his way”. I passed the fire-fighter with too much “profile” on the dock. All he said was “don’t say anything”. I have to admit that nickname stuck with the poor fellow.

The IC gave me a quick briefing and then had me take the nozzle of our attack line. A young skinny fellow fire-fighter followed me and down the stairs into the engine room. Basement fires are full of risk. This was like a basement fire but floating on water. Impossible to see anything due to the heavy black smoke from the decades of diesel and oil soaking into the wood. Invisible snares of bare copper wires hung down where the covering had melted off, tangling us and our air-packs at time. Wading in water from the initial attempts to knock down the fire we made our way forward until we finally found a glow. The plan was to knock down the fire, not flood the boat and sink it with us in it. Obviously since I’m writing this, the plan worked.

Lessons to Learn

First – Life safety is obviously priority number one in the ICS but without aggressive action to ensure property conservation in this case a return to normalcy would not have been possible.

Second – Staging doesn’t always suck.

I’d love to hear you thoughts or stories of non-traditional situations where a determination was made that the benefits outweighed the risks.