Stay safer on the fireground by changing the way you move!

Stop standing up in the worst heat and smoke. Dropping down puts you right where the temperature is cooler and where the victims actually are. But standard crawling pushes your weight forward—meaning if you hit a hole in the floor, you are going right into it.

Instead, use the tripod position (one knee down, one foot out). This keeps your weight back, lets your front foot sweep for structural holes, and allows you to cover way more area during a search. Whether you use a Halligan for balance or modify it to carry a water can, this movement keeps you protected.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION:

If you want to be safer on the fire ground, the best thing you can do is change the way that you move through a fire. Standing puts me where I’m right in all the shit, right? What’s the temperature up here versus what’s the temperature down here? More importantly, what did we say this can is doing?

Facilitating search. Where’s my victims? Down here, right? So when I’m down here, this is where I want to be. When I’m crawling though, if I’m crawling, what’s the problem with crawling? Where’s all my weight going? Forward. Forward. If I find that hole in the floor, where am I going? Into that f- into that hole.

So for me, we like this knee down, foot out, we call it a tripod position, in how we move. And we like this for a couple reasons. Weight’s back, right? So I got my weight back. This foot right here is gonna act as a sweep, which is gonna catch any hole in the floor. Also with this, the other thing that I really like, uh, is in a search, the amount of space I’m taking.

How as I move, how much area am I searching with this foot, this hand that I come across as I’m being able to do a search? So our movements look just like that. We’ll have this knee down, and there’s some different variations of it out there, right? But this is how I move, right? I can have this Halligan right here.

I call it the Rob Lacetti old man crutch. So if you can’t reach quite all the way down to the ground, you can keep this up off the ground a little bit, right? I can take this, and I can move like that. Mason will kind of take this thing, and he’ll put it in between his legs. He prefers to keep that out of his way, and come back down, move like that.

We’ll do a modification of a water can, move it up like that. So that’s how we move throughout the building. Whether I’m carrying a can, whether I’m doing a search, that’s how we want you guys to move.

* The training views expressed in this video are those of the training instructors, and not Fire Spotlight. The actions in this video are inherently dangerous and could result in death; should the viewers choose to adopt any views expressed in this video, he/she is doing so at his/her own risk. Fire Spotlight encourages viewers to review his/her department’s Standard Operating Procedures when adopting any new training views.