EP5: Transcript

Health and safety isn’t about eliminating risk, it’s about understanding how close we work to it and how routine and trust quietly shape safety on the job. This episode looks at what that means in practice, inside the fire hall and on scene.

[SHOW OPENS]

(Birds chirping) • 00:01

Adam Hueston • 00:04

For breakfast, I had a banana, vanilla yogurt. I used the teaspoon to cut up the banana after spooning out the yogurt. The chunks were kind of big and they were concave.

Cory Ashworth • 00:20

This is Fourhall. I'm Cory Ashworth. Welcome to episode five. It's health and safety. (gentle music) If you've spent any time around a fire hall, you know the truth. We train to save lives. But statistically, the life most at risk is our own. Health and safety in the fire service isn't a side topic. It's the job inside the job. Over the past 20 years, it's changed dramatically too. new materials, different exposures, and blind spots we didn't have before. Today, as we explore health and safety, we're joined by Adam Houston, a city occupational health and safety coordinator. He rides motorcycles, flies planes for fun, and he's a bit of a nerd. - I have many facets, and nerd is a lot of my facets, yes. - Adam pays close attention to details, the small decisions most people don't notice, in the way those decisions can go right or very wrong. Health and safety isn't about eliminating risk. It's about understanding how close we work to it.

Adam Hueston • 01:41

You know, we humans, we have an amazing ability to do very, very dangerous things. I mean, we've seen Cirque du Soleil, you see people juggling chainsaws with enough practice and enough confidence, we can deal with a lot of things. When we talk about groups of people with enough confidence in each other and trust in each other, we can deal with exponentially more things.

Cory Ashworth • 02:06

Experience doesn't remove danger. It can actually expand it. The fire service isn't dangerous because we lack skill. It's dangerous because we're very good at operating in conditions that most people would never tolerate. Turnout gear doesn't make the job safe, it makes the work possible. And when trust is high and confidence is shared, the margin of error gets paper thin. One of the first things Adam noticed when he started working around firefighters had nothing to do with fire or danger, and everything to do with how decisions get made once things start moving fast.

Adam Hueston • 02:47

I was really surprised to see the honestly the amount of latitude that's allowed for a firefighter on scene to do what they need to do to make someone safe or rectify a situation. That the training is practiced to allow you a set of techniques and then at the job you have a lot of latitude to do the right thing.

Cory Ashworth • 03:06

Safety and firefighting aren't two cultures. They're one. And that becomes even clearer when firefighters deal with an injury or don't.

Adam Hueston • 03:16

Yeah, because the focus is on helping others. And you know, when you take it to the sort of mundane day to day safety injury prevention side of things, you know, firefighters get a lot of strange sprains and stuff. And when you look at the administrative side of safety, when you have the clerk saying, well, you know, they reported they were they were hurt on Thursday, but it actually happened on Monday. That's the kind of stuff that drives office people crazy. But I try to explain to them, it's like, look, these people are on duty, these tones go off, they get a call, they jump into a truck, they go to a scene, and they are focused on helping someone or making the scene safe. And so on the way there, if they feel a little ooch in their hamstring or their knees a little tweak, they're not stopping. They're putting that aside almost sacrificially, you know, to help someone else. And so I understand that. On the bigger side of things, if time is of the essence, you may need to just grab a chainsaw and cut a hole in a roof or a door to get someone, and that has to be acceptable.

Cory Ashworth • 04:21

If you have a nickname in a fire hall, that's generally a good thing. Where that name came from, that's usually a bad thing. I worked with a guy we called "The Champ". He actually left our department, but he got a new job in a new city where he got a new nickname. Homo.

The Champ • 04:46

Yeah, once you explain the story of why you called Homo, it's actually not that bad. But if you were just to hear the word Homo, and be like, "Oh God, how did you get that name?"

Cory Ashworth • 04:55

His nickname came from what Adam calls an Ooch.

The Champ • 05:09

I think I was like three or four months on the drive. I landed right down on the steel-till cap on my bunker boots and rolled my ankle. Instantly felt the crack and I knew the feeling. I was like, "Oh, fuck." I tried to walk it off. For the next hour or so, I went and did our nighttime chores, like taking down the flag and chucking the truck prepping dinner and all that kind of stuff. And around the hour mark, I was like, I am a total liability right now if we get an actual working call. And so that's when I told my senior firefighter, I was like, okay, like I think I just broke my foot. He didn't really believe me in freezers, he was like, what?

Cory Ashworth • 06:15

Yeah, he broke his foot in three places. The battalion chief rushed him to the hospital. His foot got amputated. The nub infected. And… he died. For the record, he didn't die. But it makes for a way better story. No one cares that he wore an aircast boot, rolled around town on a knee scooter, and is back on the job. Oh, and yeah, the nickname. was his brittle bones.

The Champ • 06:57

Yeah, that's exactly why they called me homo. Instead I needed to drink more milk. Homo milk.

Cory Ashworth • 07:12

On nights when I'm sleeping at the hall, my socks, shirt, and pants, they're always set up in the same pattern next to my bed. If the tones come in, say at like 4 AM, I get up and dressed on autopilot. When I go down the pole, I know the rest of my gear is waiting truck side and I'm good to go.

Adam Hueston • 07:31

That routine part of you're saying being in the hall and knowing your boots are the same way, your socks are the same way, your coats in the same place, everything, that's a way of keeping that standardization and it almost frees up space in your mind to deal with events that are going to come your way. I use this when I orient people for safety and I say, you know, how's an accident going to play out? You woke up in the morning a bit late and then you maybe had a bit of a tiff with your partner in the morning. You show up to work and then you get in, say the truck and the radio isn't working quite right or your headset plug doesn't work quite right and there's a bit of static there. You know where I'm going with this. It's just all these little distractions that kind of consume your subconscious a little bit so you're not fully tuned into the situation. Yeah, it's great to have this routine. The challenge is pressure testing ourselves so we have the resilience to absorb these little distractions yet still perform and keep your mind on task. It's almost like the one arm bandit factor. Like, you know, when you go to Vegas and now they're electronic, but they used to actually, you know, remember you used to pull the arm and the three cherries would line up or the three, you know, lemons or whatever. It's kind of like that. You're exposing yourself more frequently to these situations. So just law of averages. I would argue that, yeah, you're more likely to have something happen to you if you do it more often. But with that, you're also more able to pick up on little signs of things that maybe you're going wrong or a little indicator that you should change your behavior. So yeah, of course, if you keep showing up to fires, eventually you get burned. But if you keep showing up to fires, eventually you find out ways to do things without getting burned too. There's a lot more responsibility on fire rescue to save people. And you don't always have that ability.

Cory Ashworth • 09:37

Okay, this is where we talk about emotions.

Adam Hueston • 09:43

It's also something that's really easy to avoid. There's an argument that humans, most of the decisions we make are emotional, no matter how clinical or scientific we are, our emotions are such a regulator. And so they play in every situation. And so in firefighting, emotions definitely play in. And I imagine as especially as a younger firefighter or newly exposed to some of the situations you see, it's huge. You know there's ways to minimize the emotions playing in which is repetition as one and training, being confident in the relationships we have with co-workers, And it's very much about emotional management. You have to be conscious that you're also modeling behavior for the people around you. So I sit in a lot of safety investigations at my organization and I've sat in a fair amount before this organization. And the investigations usually hinge on, hey, could you tell us, I'm just gonna take a drink here. I just say, could you tell us, explain what happened or give us a gist or you know, replay what happened. And the most common thing I hear is either it happened so fast or I didn't see it coming. You know, you're in a situation. You don't know quite what's going on, but you know, you're not doing it well. And the antidote for that, I think is play those scenarios out, do those debriefs, discuss things, look at things from a different angle, train slightly different, use your left hand instead of your right hand. Imagine if you had been standing here instead of there. Again, just remember when things happen, they seem to happen so fast.

Cory Ashworth • 11:44

Next episode, you'll hear from Captain Bill Grantham, who just weeks into retirement, Got the call, no firefighter ever trains for.

Bill Grantham • 11:54

So when they first did examinations on me, they did a chest x-ray and they saw a spot. And right then they said, "Okay, we think you have lung cancer." And that was like, "Oh, fuck."

Cory Ashworth • 12:14

For show notes and transcripts, visit fourhall.com

[SHOW CLOSES]