Joint Command Post at a Shipboard Fire Incident
So you want to be in charge? First Responders, like their military brothers and sisters, are a special breed. They have decided to serve their communities and their country, despite the risks involved. Commanding such fantastic people is an honor and a privilege, but with that awesome responsibility comes accountability. You are responsible for those placed under your supervision, and you are accountable for the decisions that you make. The ability to make quick, critical decisions at any incident, while under extreme time pressure, is developed over time through your collective experiences and knowledge. A study commissioned by the U.S Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences found that in more than 80% of the cases, fireground commanders used their experience to directly identify the situation based on their stored knowledge of previous incidents, rather than the expected conventional time-consuming selection of one option from a set of two or more alternative courses of action. Their knowledge, perceptual cues, and goals dictated their actions at that moment. Most of the decisions these officers made were made in less than a minute; many were made in under 30 seconds.
As experienced officers and supervisors retire in larger numbers, many departments have and will continue to face the challenge of fielding a younger leadership force that lacks the experience used to build the mental database of prototypical responses to deal effectively with the situations they will face. Where and when will they gain the experiences to quickly base their size-up and risk assessments? How will they learn to develop effective incident action plans based on the circumstances? When will they practice maintaining situational awareness? If people learn best through active learning, i.e., by doing, then you have some measure of control through the decisions that you make while learning. We can gain experiential or experienced-based knowledge through our responses to realistic incidents, making decisions under time pressures, and experiencing the consequences of those decisions without burning down structures, risking lives, or consuming resources. Simulations can be a key experimental learning tool to augment traditional training methods to help build the future Incident Commanders our communities need.
Simulations allow participants to explore various options or courses of action in a synthetic environment and learn from the mistakes they make without concern for adverse costs to their organization or others. Utilizing platforms like ERSims to create scenarios that involve low-frequency, high-risk incidents, allows incident commanders, company officers and supervisors to practice decision making over many iterations. Realistic training, under stressful conditions, mixed in with the “fog of war” in a sandbox environment, can be repeated as many times as desired. Instructors can run a simulation scenario involving an active shooter event, then move on to an incident like a shipboard fire, or HazMat event allowing participants to experience these events at greater frequencies than they actually occur in real life.