By Dave Murphy

I recently read an excellent book by Yogi Berra, You Can Observe a Lot by Watching/What I’ve Learned about Teamwork from the Yankees and Life.  As expected, it was punctuated with Yogi’s insightful one-liners.  Although Berra was primarily referring to the winning attributes of the unstoppable New York Yankees of the 1950s, his remarks are easily applicable to the United States fire service.  Let’s examine of few of these attributes in that context.

The delivery of emergency services is not a game; somebody is most likely having a very bad day when we go out the door.  People die, and sometimes these people are firefighters.  You cannot change what you find when you get on scene; however, your team’s initial actions should strive for a best possible positive mitigation scenario in the first few minutes.  So what exactly constitutes a “win” for us?  Just for the sake of simplicity, here is a very elementary checklist:

Read More→