Positives and Negatives learned...

Well, our RIT has been running fairly smooth since it was started up. Our call volume has increased, and manpower has been fairly ok. My question to all persons involved with RIT! Any Positives or Negatives encountered while running RIT? <--------- (Besides Manpower - This is a problem as all of us know). I have had firefighters from mutual aid area's tell me that they feel much more comfortable knowing that we are there, and ready. The training I recieved in the RIT was excellent. The overall course design was excellent, and keyed on radio procedures, Rapid S&R, Enlarged Openings, Incident Command Structure, Accountibility, Team Leader Accountability (PAR). These are things that most courses do not offer. Some of these you may have touched on in basic classes, but you really go into it in the RIT, and Ive learned alot from this. And the dispatch centers have started activated the RIT 1st alarm as requested.

Now, some Negatives.... Manpower, which is a given, And oh yea, you ready......the RIT wanting to enter the fire and do interior work. <----------- Jim, you said this would happen. And being toned out for the average chimney fire, only to get cancelled pretty much everycall. Other than this, I think everything has been going well. Any idea's, new procedures, ups, downs, anything that will benifit us, post it and lets see what has been going on.

And just one more thing that I have noticed since starting up our RIT team. We have been doing a hell of a lot of interior firefighting after the backup RIT arrives. I would have to say that 50 percent of the time, the IC tells us to start fire suppresion.<-------- This IS after the RIT from another department arrives, which when a structure fire is dispatched, we automatically start 2 departments for RIT.

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John Williams
NRFF1/EMT
Clairton Fire Dept

scen25 congratulations on receivng training... i personally believe that is the single most important factor to implementing a rit protocol.. our dept. initiates a rit team on all working fires, then the ic has authority to disregard. few incidents come to mind that utilized the rit. the main factor i have observed is the moth to light syndrome on the fire scene. this is where i beleive training needs to focus. we have in commitee now a suggested plan for rit.. it also deals with radio procedure, command structure and training. right now rit is not supposed to be use for suppression but we all know what happens. do you send extra rit companies for multiple alarm fires? my opinion is first a need to understand or define a parameter of rit. intervention does not necessarily mean extrication. but, could be viable support of a victim pending the arrival of heavy rescue or appropriate special teams. the onslaught of those not assigned to rit can cause more problems ie. accountability, impeding the rit and causing more structural instability..

We are presently in the process of implementing a RIC protocol. Due to limited turnout for working fire calls, we will be using mutual aid companies as RIC teams and likewise we will function as RIC for those departments. As many positive aspects of using our neighboring departments as there may be... I foresee a problem. Not all of the equipment between the surrounding departments is the same. In instances where rapid SCBA switchover is neccessary our face mounted regulators will not coincide with the masks of multiple surrounding departments. Since RIC teams will be responsible for having their own equipment on their rigs we've kicked around the idea of donating one or two entire SCBAs to our assigned mutual aid RIC team. This still presents a problem when multiple firefighters from different departments are assigned to the same sector, and they all become the victims of a collapse or some of them are unaccounted for. My problem is I haven't been able to come up with any reasonable solution to this problem. Perhaps there is no cut and dry answer to this problem. Hopefully our training and creative problem solving will take over and get the job done without negative results.

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Scott Bock
Lieutenant/Paramedic
Munson Fire Department
Munson, Ohio