Rapid Intervention Team News
Do you have an insurance policy on a car, house, or boat? If you answered yes, you have identified something valuable that you wish to protect.
A properly trained and well staffed Rapid Intervention Team (RIT) is an insurance policy for your firefighters. Firefighters continue to die year after year in structural fires. Why then do we continue to short change our most valuable commodity?
RIT training has become a necessary evil for many fire departments. We need to understand that as an industry we have a responsibility to provide the safest possible environment for our firefighters. Our training must to be challenging, realistic, and worthwhile. It must be more than simply an annual training requirement.
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Over the past ten years, fires declined by approximately 30,000 yet there were seven more firefighter deaths. Once could conclude that we are not doing a good job protecting our firefighters.
Rapid Intervention is not the only factor to consider; it is however one important piece of the puzzle. We need to consider the entire picture of firefighter safety including, cardiovascular health, emergency vehicle operations, rapid intervention, safety and survival, to name a few.
Many departments lack appropriate manpower, funding, or equipment to devote to rapid intervention. These departments should consider working with mutual aid companies to implement a regional RIT program to allow organizations to share in the costs.
In a regional system, as with any RIT program, consistency is of the utmost importance. Each department should institute identical RIT protocols and all team members should train with each other on a regular basis to ensure smooth operations. Departments should also standardize radio communication frequencies and protocols.
Firefighter’s lives are commodities we can no longer gamble with. We need to take a proactive approach to training our firefighters to be as safe as possible; this includes the highest quality rapid intervention training.
