incident awareness

Situational Awareness Matters

Another False Alarm: A Tale of Complacency

Complacency is a big deal for first responders because it impacts your situational awareness on multiple levels. I would like to give every responder the benefit of the doubt that if or when they have found him or herself being complacent that it wasn’t happening on purpose. In other words, I hope every responder desires […]

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Situational Awareness Matters

Multiple Awarenesses

The mission of this website and my personal passion for situational awareness is to help first responders see the bad things coming in time to change the outcome. Consistent with that mission, I try to help responders understand how various aspects of the job – from training, to human factors, to command competence and everything in

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Complacency – a barrier to situational awareness

We develop and maintain situational awareness by being perceptive about what is happening around us. To be perceptive, we must pay attention to what is going on in our environment. We can employ all of our senses to help us pay attention – seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting and smelling. However, if we let our guard

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Situational Awareness Matters

Radio Discipline

A frequent contributing factor in firefighter casualty incidents is too much radio traffic. This can have a significant impact on first responder situational awareness because it becomes near impossible to take in, process, comprehend and remember the volumes of information being transmitted over the radio when communication is not disciplined. This article explores some of

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