A great deal has been written about the elements the firefighter or company officer should consider when sizing up a scene. Scene size-up is the cornerstone for the onset of fire department operations at an incident. This article addresses these components from the perspective of helping the reader to set the stage for the best possible achievable incident outcome. The above mentioned elementary steps must be done rapidly, and there is little room for error. Moreover, all this must be done within the first five minutes. These initial decisions are always based on a wide variety of factors, but they are based on the company officer’s ability to effectively size up the incident, to apply a decision-making method that processes the information obtained in the size-up in strategic and tactical directives, and to efficiently communicate the size-up and initial action plan (IAP) to incoming companies and chief officers.
#FIRE OFFICER INITIAL SIZEUP SERIES#
The reason for this is that the initial arriving company officer’s decision making sets the tone for the initial phases of the response and sets in motion a series of actions (or inactions) that impact the mitigation efforts undertaken by the officer’s crew later-arriving companies and, ultimately, the command or chief officer(s) responding to the alarm. It is often the case that the first five minutes of a working fire or other significant, multicompany response incident can dictate how the next several hours may unfold.