Wiping Face Pieces

摘要

Health and safety only get an official week in June, but this month typically becomes the de facto safety month in the fire service. Let's make this the month we usher in a yearly call to action on what's really ailing, injuring, and killing firefighters. Stand-downs notwithstanding, we tend to focus on the ‘easy’ stuff like the inherent danger of structure fires and the myriad ways to lose your life in one. This is because of the comfort level we find while searching for the faults routinely discovered in the external causes of firefighter injury and death. New policies, procedures, equipment, and practices typically emerge once we're done with the after-action review process and, unfortunately, after looking for the human error factor in the complex system we call the fire department. What's not easy to focus on is the problem right in front of our faces: how we're really managing the principle causes of firefighter injury and death-and not just at incident scenes. I'm talking about our entire day at work, since the rest of what we do during the day and how we treat our bodies are not mutually exclusive to how we treat the fireground.