Beyond the Flames – Line-of-Death Guidelines Make Dealing with Disaster More Structured

With major firefighter loss-of-life incidents such as the West, Tex. fertilizer plant explosion in April, as well as the more recent Yarnell, Arizona wildfire last month, the death of firefighters performing their duties has made national headlines
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While there are many difficult situations that fire departments have to deal with during their daily operations, none is more challenging than the death or severe injury to one of your own. Shock, confusion, extreme sadness, and often anger are all reasonable responses to such an unexpected incident.
But how would your department handle such a death? The “It won’t happen to us, we’re all volunteers” train of thought is long outdated in the fire service, as volunteers account for on average more than half of the line-of-duty deaths in the United States each year.
Constructing a set of Line-of-Duty Death/ Catastrophic Injury Standard Operating Guidelines, accessible to all your members, makes dealing with a departmental disaster a bit more structured in a time where chaos will reign.
If your department does not currently have a set of such guidelines, the National Fallen Firefighter’s Foundation and the United State Fire Administration both offer a substantial amount of material and resources to assist in constructing such standards.
While each set of standards will be constructed differently to better service the needs of your department, some items should be considered standard and included universally in any set of standards. These include actions that should be taken immediately at the scene of a death of severe injury.
Any emotionally unstable firefighters, as well as firefighters who were directly involved in the trapping, rescue, or removal of firefighters should be removed and replaced at the scene immediately. When removing the firefighter from the fire grounds, collect, bag, tag, and secure all of the firefighter’s turnout gear and SCBA, and turn the equipment over to the incident’s investigative team.
Never transmit the name or line number of any deceased or injured firefighter over radio frequencies, and contact your dispatch via landline to report the line of duty death and advise them that you will need a copy of the audio transmission for the call.
All guidelines should also include contact information for the National Fallen Firefighter Foundation’s Local Assistant State Team (LAST) as well as the NJ division of LAST. Both agencies will respond to the incident scene or firehouse within six hours of initial contact, and will be able to provide department assistance with documentation, funeral arrangements, counseling services, fire service family support consoling, and a variety of other functions.
The remaining guidelines are at the discretion of the department creating the guidelines, but some general suggestions are available. Designating a nearby department to be placed on automatic mutual aid response to all calls within your department’s jurisdiction until further notice is often a good contingency plan to have in order to ensure your department’s personnel are emotionally stable before returning to emergency response.
Creating a list of important contact information, such as state, county, and local officials and agencies that may need to be notified or be utilized in the event of a death or injury can also be of great assistance during a death or severe injury. The last thing you want to be worrying about at this time is how to get ahold of a person or agency you desperately need.
Finally, departments should consider the creation of an emergency contact form for all firefighters that should include personal information such as emergency contacts, any preference of firefighters to make the notification to families, preference with funeral arrangements, and any other pertinent information to be completed, signed, and sealed by the firefighter.
The documents should then be placed in a secure location know to the leadership of the department and opened only due to the death or critical injury of a firefighter, or at the firefighter’s request in order to make changes to the paperwork.
It is the hope of all in the fire service that departments never need to utilize these guidelines. But if the unfortunate event does occur, your department will have one less thing to worry about, as they’ll at least have a starting point along the long road to recovery. Stay safe.
Knoll, 21, of Eldora, can be contacted by email at beyondtheflamescmc@gmail.com. He is a student at Rowan University.