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Mental Health Near-Miss: The Scott Gieselhart Story – Part 1 (Episode 333)

Scott Gieselhart served 24 years as a firefighter in Frazee, Minnesota. Along the way, several incidents contributed to Scott developing a Post Traumatic Stress Injury that resulted in him becoming a meth addict and attempting suicide.  Then Scott found help and through a treatment known as EMDR, his PTSI was healed and how he serves […]

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Five Fatalities and Lessons Learned from Chesterfield County– Flashback episode – Part 1 (Episode 318)

In the early morning hours of January 17, 2016, Chesterfield County Fire & EMS responded to a residential fire on Wicklow Lane that would result in fire civilian fire fatalities, including 2 children. This three-part interview chronicles the event, the situational awareness challenges and the lessons learned from the first-in captain and the first arriving

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Tracking of Personnel

Accountability: A critically important component of emergency scene safety when personnel operates in a hazardous environment. From the perspective of situational awareness, accountability plays several roles. The obvious role is personnel accountability facilitates the rapid deployment of rescue teams if something goes awry. Command knows the crew sizes and where they are operating and can

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Unexpected Information Can Be a Barrier to Situational Awareness

One of the foundations of situational awareness development is being able to make accurate predictions of future events. Making (accurate) predictions is a fairly complex neurological process that relies heavily on gathering information, comprehending the meaning of the information, tapping into your stored knowledge of past experiences, trusting your intuition and using your imagination to

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The Impact of Oversharing on Situational Awareness

Have you ever been around someone who takes twenty minutes to tell a five-minute story? What does that do to you? I know what it does to me. It lowers my vigilance (i.e., the amount of attention I am channeling to them), it can cause me to become frustrated, bored, tune them out and find

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The Communications Specialist Role in Forming Situational Awareness

Some of the least appreciated members of the emergency response team are the communications specialists (in some venues, termed dispatchers). How do I know this? First, I served as a communications specialist (my job title was “dispatcher”) early in my career and I was routinely subjected to criticism and ridicule from responders because the information

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Big Data Could Spell Big Trouble

There is a lot being written these days about how “big data” can help emergency scene commanders improve situational awareness and, subsequently, make better decisions. While information (data) is critical to the formation of situational awareness, it is very easy for a commander to become overwhelmed with data. I say this often during my Mental

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Commanders in Turnout Gear

I recently read, with great interest, a very long thread on Facebook about whether or not an incident commander should wear turnout gear at a fire scene. As my focus and passion is improving first responder situational awareness, I would like to address this issue from that perspective. The feedback on Facebook was, as expected,

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Physical Condition Assessments Improve Situational Awareness

One of the primary purposes of a Personnel Accountability Report (PAR) is to ensure  the incident commander and safety officer know where crews are and that all members are accounted for. In the event of a rapid change in conditions or an unforeseen turn of events, the PAR can be used to quickly account for

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A Mental Health Mayday. The Laverne Friesen Story – Part 2 (Episode 302)

Today’s episode is Part 2 of my 2-part interview with Laverne Friesen, a first responder who is confronting the stigma of mental illness head-on as he shares his first-hand account of how work-related stress was leading him down a dark path toward suicide.  He shares intimate details of what that experience was like, how it

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