Understanding Coordination Challenges in Urban Firefighting: A Study of Critical Incident Reports

Abstract

This paper explores the central role played by coordination during fire incident response. Following preliminary investigations based on other methods, the authors analyzed a corpus of 29 critical incident reports produced by one fire department's safety services. Urban firefighting is a complex domain in which members' activities need to be highly synchronized in order to reach common operational and safety goals. As the work environment challenges the capacity of firefighters to coordinate efficiently, coordination breakdowns might occur, creating safety threats as role interdependencies become difficult to manage.

Designing for military pararescue: Naturalistic decision‐making perspective, methods, and frameworks

“…In this case, the functional diagram underscores the need to calibrate available resources with priorities and to manage time constraints during exfil planning (this insight is a core objective of the design described below). The representation of functional relationships also supports the identification of interdependencies that are the sources for coordination needs (Branlat, Fern, Voshell, & Trent, 2009). This includes resources outside the GAWS team including aircraft, hospitals, and the tactical operations centre.…”

Development and validation of a questionnaire, the REST-Q Fire, to identify teamwork-related resources and stressors in firefighting operations

“…When this is omitted, coordination is no longer possible as there is no shared knowledge about the current status and tasks of the individual team members [ 38 , 39 ]. As a result, the lack of communication can lead to unsafe situations [ 2 ].…”

“…Coordination makes it possible to manage the interdependencies between the roles and tasks of team members as well as possible conflicts between their goals [ 2 ] without wasting valuable resources [ 40 ]. If coordination breakdowns occur, they can lead to a loss of time or errors, such as the omission of work steps.…”

“…Not only must they always work together as a team but they also depend on well-functioning team processes. Poorly running team processes on the other hand can increase the risk of accidents and might have far-reaching consequences [ 2 , 3 ] as statistics from the Firefighters’ Accident Insurance Fund (FUK) for Germany show. Accidents repeatedly occur during fire service activities, especially during firefighting.…”

“…The same figure applies to firefighters in the USA [ 5 ] where eighteen firefighters died in firefighting operations in 2019 [ 6 ]. Therefore, identifying teamwork-related stressors and resources to counteract the stressors or promote the resources is important for safe and successful work [ 2 , 3 ].…”