situational awareness

It’s Just a Vehicle Fire

I’d like to thank one of the loyal Situational Awareness Matters readers (whose name and department I am holding in confidence) for sending me a picture and a story about a van fire, no, a ‘routine van fire‘ his department had recently. On the arrival of the engine the officer reported a working fire and […]

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Mission Myopia: A situational awareness barrier

Every emergency scene operation should begin with determining the mission (sometimes called strategy) and setting task-level goals (sometimes called tactics). Strategy and tactics establish what is to be done and how it is to be done. For example, at a structure fire, arriving responders are trained to conduct search and rescue operations and to extinguish

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Tacit knowledge and situational awareness

While conducting research on how decisions are made during high consequence events I came across a term I’d never heard before – “tacit knowledge.” Once I learned what it was it quickly became evident that I possessed it… and I didn’t know it. In fact, every first responder who has developed expert-level knowledge and skills

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Station Alerting Noise Can Impact Situational Awareness

Noise can erode situational awareness in many ways. Loud noises, soft noises, lots of noise, odd noises, familiar noises, annoying noises… all noise can present challenges. In this article, I want to explore some of the challenges first responders face in a noisy environment and I’d like to share my personal example of how noise

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Seeing the bad things coming in time to change the outcome

The mission of Situational Awareness Matters! is “Helping responders see the bad things coming… in time to change the outcome.”  That is often easier said than done. In fact, the lessons that sharpen our situational awareness often comes after the fact. It is very easy to see the bad things that were coming when we

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