NYC Fire Department Forcible Entry Manual (2006) [pdf]

One thing I really appreciated as an non-practicing observer was the frequent reminders to consider safety concerns, e.g. try a door knob before forcing it, take care with how padlocks may turn into projectiles, taking care that operating a chainsaw doesn't pose a threat to people inside a warehoused window, etc.

Long time lurker on hacker news. This topic inspired me to finally register.

Wildland operations are a completely different skill set from structural firefighting. That is why there is a separate certification (red card).

While I never was red card certified, our small town department in Colorado was asked during the occasional summer to provide structural support (or wildland if certified) for some of the mountain towns (lodgepole pine beetle kill). This freed up the wildland folks to do their thing.

We got enough training to learn that basically the only tool that should be carried when speed is of the essence is your portable shelter. Granted it looks like out training came a decade after the above fire, so lessons learned are being disseminated.

Sad to hear about the 27 brother and sisters who lost their lives on the line.

Regarding admired fire departments, Phoenix fire seemed to show up a lot in our trainings as a source that really focused on data driven strategy and tactics.

(10 year retired volunteer Firefighter)

Haven't read this yet, but here's the thing about forcible entry that might surprise a lot of people. Many doors are much easier to force than you might naively expect. Even with a deadbolt.

Think about it like this... say the bolt extends into the jamb by a full inch. That means you only need to move the door frame by half an inch, and the door by half an inch, or some equivalent combo. But here's the rub... many doors aren't well installed or the frame has warped, etc. and the bolt does not extend into the frame by an inch. It might be half an inch or less.

So, insert a decent sized prybar (halligan bar, or flat pry bar, whatever. Sometimes a big screwdriver will do) and pry... it doesn't take that much effort to get the door to flex a quarter of an inch and the frame a quarter an inch, and bob's yer uncle.

This is really true on wooden doors/frames on residential construction. It's a little less true for something like a steel door set into a steel frame in some kind of commercial building, but there still tends to be a little bit of give which can be exploited.

This is emphasized heavily in vehicle extrication training as well. No sense pulling out the hydraulic spreaders / cutters and shit, only to find out that the door would open from a nice sharp tug.

I don't know if there's a West Coast / East Coast "thing" in firefighting or not, but there is definitely a marked difference from very urban departments (FDNY) to very rural departments (my department in rural NC).

For one, we had little or no reason to training in high-rise firefighting tactics. We had no buildings more than 2 stories in our district and those were residential, with no standpipes or any of that stuff.

OTOH, I guess most FDNY companies don't respond to a lot of brush fires, or have to deal with a lot of urban/wildland interface stuff. I'm sure there are some, depending on the exact location, but how much wildland / brush is there in downtown Manhattan? For us, brush fires, including very large brush fires (think thousands or tens of thousands of acres) were something we dealt with semi-regularly.

There are differences in equipment as well. FDNY can usually rely on hydrants, whereas we had to do a lot of stuff with running tanker shuttles and drafting from dump tanks, drafting from static water sources (ponds, etc.). And even when we had hydrants they would probably be further away due to the difference in spacing (ours were every 1,000 feet where they exist, most major cities have a "hydrant on every corner" or "hydrant ever 500 feet" or something policy), which mean longer hose lays, more relay pumping, etc.

I've sort of always seen the urban/rural difference as one of the main "branches" in the fire service (aside from paid vs volunteer).