For fifty years our creed has remained the same,
Fight fire aggressively, having provided for safety first.
You should recognize this as the tenth fire order.
In this module we are going to look at the history
of the Standard Fire Orders.
Dr. Jennifer Ziegler is a professor of communications
at Valparaiso University in Indiana.
She recently wrote a paper titled The Genealogy
of the Ten Standard Orders.
A summary is provided in your student workbook.
Listen closely as Doctor Ziegler describes her research
into our most fundamental principle.
I originally got interested in doing this kind of project
when in the mid 90s I had recently read Norman Maclean's
book on the Mann Gulch Fire it's called, Young Men and Fire.
And I was living in Colorado at the time and about
that time the South Canyon fire happened
and that was a fatal fire that killed 14 firefighters
near Glenwood Springs and I had read the accident
investigation report for that fire and I noticed
in the report there was something called the Standard
Fire Orders that were being sighted as a cause
of the tragedy and I thought to myself, huh, I don't,
I wonder what that list is and I don't remember hearing
about that when I read about Mann Gulch
so I became really curious from an organizational
communication point of view to me that suggested
that if it's ok to make to make an argument that...
people died because they broke the rules then
that must be a very strong culture
and that list must be very important in that culture
and everybody must know .what it means
and I become really curious about ...how do you manage
to create a list comes that comes
to exert that much control.
So I began digging a little bit into just learning
about the fire orders as a list in general and I actually found
that they were at about that time the subject of a lot
of controversy which kind of surprised me,
In the 1950s the list called the fire orders was create
in response to public pressure from a fire called the
Inaja Fire in California.
The then Chief of the Forest commissioned a task force
to study and it actually has a very long title you know they
went back and they looked at 20 years of tragedy fires to try
and figure out what those fires might have had in common
And in particular they focused on the five worst fires
that killed ten or more people at once and they found
that those five fires had about 11 things in common.
The task force actually called them Sins of Omission,
that firefighters who otherwise knew what to do simply forgot
in a critical emergency.
So, in a sense that is compatible
with the previous storytelling mode of praise and blame
by calling those firefighters sinners the task force was kind
of blaming them for faulty actions.
So the task force wanted to develop a tool
that could help firefighters to remember or to,
not forget what they knew... in a time of an emergency.
But they had a little bit of a problem,
they couldn't really put their finger
on what the heroes were doing right.
For example, the task force in addition to looking
at the tragedy fires, they also looked
at successful near miss situations.
So fires that really could have become critical
but somebody saved the day.
The task force decided that those fires were successful
because some cool head, they literally called them,
some cool head sized up a change in local fire behavior in time
to get them into safety.
You can tell from that explanation,
you really didn't know how that worked, it was sort of,
you know a personal virtue, seemingly unconscious.
And so the task force had a sense
of what the sinners did wrong.
In fact they had a whole list of 11 things
and they had an outcome that they knew that the heroes
or the cool heads did right.
They kept the fire small, they kept people safe.
So what they did was they took the list of sins of omission
and kind of flipped them around and said,
well these 11 things must have been what the heroes were
doing right.
The task force came up with one list, which where they spelled
out mnemonic Fire Scald but Chief McCardle actually he kind
of monkied with that list a little bit.
He deleted one thing, he combined a couple of them,
and he added one important fire order at the bottom.
And this is a very well known fire order,
fight fire aggressively but provide for safety first.
And if you think about it, that fire order captures
the two simultaneous virtues that those cool heads were
somehow able to do correctly.
Fight fire aggressively keeps the fire small.
Provide for safety first keeps people safe.
And so that's why I say it's a kind of personal task book
because if you can come to internalize all
of the other nine items, you can literally become the 10th
fire order.
You can literally become one of the cool heads
who automatically knows how to do both at once.
And really in a sense doesn't even need the list anymore.
By the 1980s the Fire Orders had migrated from an individual list
to an organizational one.
And specifically they became a kind
of an employee / employer contract.
Where the Fire Orders were understood as duties
that firefighters had to follow.
And they were specifically reorganized in 1987
to make them easier to memorize.
And they were revised to spell the mnemonic: FIRE ORDERS.
And during that time in that kind of second era
of the Fire Orders, the Fire Orders shifted from a list
of personal virtues that an individual firefighter came
to embody, to a set of duties that the firefighter owed
to the fire organization.
So in a sense, that second list was a kind
of employee / employer contract.
And you started to see particular fires being
evaluated using the Fire Orders.
So for example, it became possible in the late 1980s,
early 90s to actually violate the Fire Orders, to break them.
That language was not necessarily used in the 50s
when they were originally created.
In 1990 the investigation into the fatal Dude fire
in Arizona was one of the first accident investigations
to actually use the fire orders as a checklist to try to figure
out what went wrong on the fire.
And from what I've seen, that kind of set the standard
for how investigations were done throughout the 1990s.
Investigation teams would write the story of the fire
and then kind of filter it through the Fire Orders
and find instances where this or that Fire Order was not followed
on an assignment at some given time.
Perhaps even in a way that led to the tragedy
that they are there to investigate.
That's when they became kind of controversial.
And there were opinions on both sides that, you know,
one group thought they're hard and fast,
they're called orders for a reason.
Another group thought well no they're really just guidelines
for you to use in your work and exercise individual judgment.
So it's interesting that in 2002, there was kind
of a proposal to, let's reclaim the original intent
of the Fire Orders as a systematic tool,
I hesitate to say checklist but, a systematic set
of steps you would that you take on take
on the fire to ensure safety.
So, we have in a sense, remembered the original intent
of the Fire Orders in a way that resonates
with contemporary discourses of risk management.
And if you look at the way that last Fire Order
has been changed from, Fight fire aggressively but
provide for safety first.
To, Fight fire aggressively having provided
for safety first.
There is a sense that the first nine Fire Orders are intended
to kind of create safety and by the time you get
to the tenth Fire Order you've kind
of earned an organizational permission
to fight the fire aggressively.
So if you think about, now we have the same list
in the very same order as we did in 1957
but in 1957 the Fire Orders were a group tool
that could help exert control over the individual.
But now we talk about the Fire Orders as a tool
that an individual can use to question the potentially
irrational decision of the group.
Now that you've been given more of a background
on the Standard Firefighting Orders,
let's go to the Student Workbook and complete the exercise.
A link to the article written by Dr. Zeigler has been included
in the Student Workbook.