SAMatters Radio

On January 3, 2014, the St. Charles Fire Department responded to a single-family residential dwelling fire on Nancy Drive.  This podcast chronicles events (told by Captain Chip Ashford and Battalion Chief Dan Casey) as they unfolded. The thermal assault enduring by these firefighters resulted in injuries that included second and third-degree burns and a shoulder injury from bailing out a window. O...

  On January 3, 2014, the St. Charles Fire Department responded to a single-family residential dwelling fire on Nancy Drive.  This podcast chronicles events (told by Captain Chip Ashford and Battalion Chief Dan Casey) as they unfolded. The thermal assault enduring by these firefighters resulted in injuries that included second and third-degree burns and a shoulder injury from bailing out a window....

On January 3, 2014, the St. Charles Fire Department responded to a single-family residential dwelling fire on Nancy Drive.  This podcast chronicles events (told by Captain Chip Ashford and Battalion Chief Dan Casey) as they unfolded. The thermal assault enduring by these firefighters resulted in injuries that included second and third-degree burns and a shoulder injury from bailing out a window.  ...

On May 31, 2017, I delivered a presentation to the Colorado Springs Fire Department in Situational Awareness. During the program we engaged in a conversation about how they do their training. I was so impressed that I asked them to do an interview with me.  This is part 2 of a two-part interview with: Jason Buckingham, Lieutenant, Station 8; Jesse Weddle, Firefighter, Station 8; and, Brian Lynch,...

On May 31, 2017, I delivered a presentation to the Colorado Springs Fire Department in Situational Awareness. During the program we engaged in a conversation about how they do their training. I was so impressed that I asked them to do an interview with me.  This is part 1 of a two-part interview with: Jason Buckingham, Lieutenant, Station 8; Jesse Weddle, Firefighter, Station 8; and, Brian Lynch,...

Accountability is a critically important component to the safety of employees when they are operating in hazardous environments. From the perspective of situational awareness, accountability plays several roles. The obvious role is personnel accountability facilitates the rapid deployment of teams if something goes wrong. The person in-charge knows the team sizes and where the teams are operating...

The potential issue from uncoordinated, independent action is it may be unrealistic to think multiple individuals, or multiple teams can begin work on a problem, at varied times, and make the same assessment of the situation/conditions and know, automatically, what other team members are doing and what goals they are trying to accomplish. This can cause problems with team and big-picture situation...

When it comes to developing and maintaining situational awareness, tunnel vision is a big deal. Situational awareness is developed by having a broad perception of the environment in which you are operating. As your focus narrows, you start to miss things. Those "missed things" are like lost puzzle pieces, leaving holes in your understanding of what is happening. Thus, situational awareness can be...

Your highest level of situational awareness is formed when you are able to make accurate predictions about future events. We call this projection and it simply means you are able to predict, or project, the future. This is accomplished through mental models you develop that are founded in your training and experience. But for supervisors, it requires more than training and experience to make accur...

In this episode, we discuss how to use your imagination to anticipate outcomes – an important component of developing strong situational awareness.   Our sponsor: Midwest Fire MidwestFire.com   Intro music Safety Dance (1982) Men Without Hats GMC - Virgin Records Licensed by BMI Music   Situational Awareness Matters! website www. SAMatters.com   Firefighter Near Miss Reporting System http://www.fi...

In this episode, I am taking on a topic often discussed in my leadership programs more often than in my situational awareness programs – motivation. I'm not going to get in to depth on the topic of motivation as it takes me a solid four hours in a classroom session to demystify the topic and reveal the secret sauce for how people are motivated. However, there is one fundamental component of motiva...

We have many traits that make us uniquely human. Among them is our ability to engage in complex communications. We can look at black ink squiggled on a piece of bleached paper and derive meaning from those symbols.  We call that skill reading comprehension. And we can listen to and comprehend the meaning of more than 10,000 words. We call that listening comprehension. Indeed, our ability to commun...

  A person displaying bravado is not concerned with his or her own safety. They are only concerned with looking courageous. This does not make the individual brave. It makes the individual dangerous.  Once a person gets into the bravado mindset, the critical first two steps in the formation of situational awareness (purposefully capturing clues and cues and comprehending clues and cues into meanin...

The foundation of situational awareness is capturing clues and cues in your environment – what some would call "paying attention" – and then making sense of those clues and cues – what some would call "understanding" – and then making projections of future events – what some would call "prediction." One of the challenges in the formation of situational awareness that can arise during the "understa...

  One way to control your reaction to stress is to first understand what causes you to be stressed. There are the obvious stressors – physical demands of the work, time compression to make quick decisions, dangerous and unpredictable work. Then there are the less than obvious stressors – peer pressure and the fear that can result from not meeting citizen expectations and/or elected official expect...

It is so easy to trudge over your intuition and to trust your logical, rational form of thinking. Not only can this be unwise, it can also be deadly. Today's guest shares an experience where he trusted his intuition and it saved his life. Unfortunately, others working on this job site were not so lucky as there were 13 injuries (3 critical) and one fatality.   Our sponsor: Midwest Fire MidwestFire...

If you have spent time reading a large number of firefighter fatality reports you might start to see the real-life manifestation of Einstein's definition of insanity. In fact, I would go as far as to say we've gotten to the point where we are discovering very few new ways to kill firefighters. Rather, we're taking all the ways we already know how to do it and we're perfecting it by doing it over a...

If you have spent time reading a large number of firefighter fatality reports you might start to see the real-life manifestation of Einstein's definition of insanity. In fact, I would go as far as to say we've gotten to the point where we are discovering very few new ways to kill firefighters. Rather, we're taking all the ways we already know and we're perfecting it by doing it over and over… and...

If you have spent time reading a large number of firefighter fatality reports you might start to see the real-life manifestation of Einstein's definition of insanity. In fact, I would go as far as to say we've gotten to the point where we are discovering very few new ways to kill firefighters. Rather, we're taking all the ways we already know how to do it and we're perfecting it by doing it over a...

If you have spent time reading a large number of firefighter fatality reports you might start to see the real-life manifestation of Einstein's definition of insanity. In fact, I would go as far as to say we've gotten to the point where we are discovering very few new ways to kill firefighters. Rather, we're taking all the ways we already know and we're perfecting it by doing it over and over… and...

  If you have spent time reading a large number of firefighter fatality reports you might start to see the real-life manifestation of Einstein's definition of insanity. In fact, I would go as far as to say we've gotten to the point where we are discovering very few new ways to kill firefighters. Rather, we're talking about all the ways we already know how to do it and we're perfecting it by doing...

Developing situational awareness is a three-part process that begins with perception, and then understanding, and finally prediction – or forecasting what is going to happen in the future. Many first responders are good at the perception and understanding part, but the prediction part can present some real challenges. This episode discusses the process for predicting future outcomes.   Our sponsor...

In this episode, I interview three members of the Lynchburg Fire Department who responded to a structure fire where conditions changed rapidly and caused the crews to leave the structure just short of being over-run by the fire.       Our sponsor: Midwest Fire MidwestFire.com   Intro music Safety Dance (1982) Men Without Hats GMC - Virgin Records Licensed by BMI Music   Situational Awareness Matte...

  In this episode, I interview three members of the Lynchburg Fire Department who responded to a structure fire where conditions changed rapidly and caused the crews to leave the structure just short of being over-run by the fire. Our sponsor: Midwest Fire MidwestFire.com   Intro music Safety Dance (1982) Men Without Hats GMC - Virgin Records Licensed by BMI Music   Situational Awareness Matters!...

This episode is an interview Karl McNorton, Dusty Nichols and Joe Hawkins who were involved in a brush fire incident that was complicated when a tornado was reported in their vicinity, casing the crews to take cover in nearby homes.   Our sponsor: Midwest Fire MidwestFire.com   Intro music Safety Dance (1982) Men Without Hats GMC - Virgin Records Licensed by BMI Music   Situational Awareness Matte...