By Station Officer Warwick Kidd, Senior Rescue Instructor

[ED: This article was written before the World Trade Centre catastrophe but is none the less relevant to every rescue worker]

I don't have a professional mental health background, that's not to say that I have not experienced my own lapses in mental stability. I mean every time one of our crews respond to a motor vehicle accident were a drunk driver kills or injures unsuspecting members of the public, my thoughts towards the drunk could easily be deemed questionable. But I have witnessed the emotional highs and lows that every rescue worker goes through and the stress involved with managing these highly motivated individuals.

For my own thoughts on managing rescue crews I have found that "People are lead and situations are managed" .

My earliest memories as a firefighter were of me as a very young 19 year old, fresh out of school and being stationed with men that were fairly hardened by the years they'd spent responding to different types of emergencies. Some of these men were veterans of the Vietnam war and for the most case hid the emotional baggage well. Only now can I begin to imagine what nightmares they were dealing with. and in those days without the help of trained counselors. Most of these men believed that if you couldn't chew smoke or handle seeing blood and guts. then you shouldn't be there. I remember being placed in a concrete room at the Brigades training college, it was sealed and filled with the smoke of wet straw. if the instructors were feeling a bit agitated, they might put a bit of diesel or sump oil on the straw to make a particularly noxious compound. Each firefighter would be sent into the room, without breathing apparatus and all under the guise of acclimatising you to being in smoke. These were the Jurassic days of Occ Health and Safety and a far cry from the training and working conditions we have today.

There are some things you can never forget, for me I remember vividly the first body I saw. We were responded late one particularly cold winters night to a unit (apartment) alight. We arrived to find a fire in a home unit, we made entry and extinguished the small fire only to discover the remains of what was an elderly woman. She had been so cold that she placed the single bar radiator in the bed with her.the results were as you would expect. In those days before we saw preservation of evidence as part of our job, our motto could easily have been "we came, we saw, we hosed it away". As I worked away at clearing the fire damage from within the room and with the smell of the woman, my stomach was turning and I hoped that I could finish the job before I was ill. Afterwards I remember being patted on the head and given the consoling thought that the first ones the hardest. professional counseling at it's best.

Humans put a lot of credibility in what we call normal behaviour, but what is normal. The dictionary defines it as conforming to a standard and it's probably a good analogy but it's missing one additional statement. pertaining to the situation. Imagine the Officer in charge at a fire station, every day that person leads a team of firefighters into various and sometimes dangerous conditions. They attend many road accidents and on occasion witness horrific scenes, all the while managing it like the true, level headed professionals they are and striving to save a human life. Now take the same group and have the same accident, only the victims in the cars are the children of the Officer. what would the behaviour be now, and could it still be classified as normal.

I've spent the last ten years training rescue workers, preparing them to deal with the types of situation they might face. We prefer to start training these firefighters in general land rescue work, after they have been in the Brigades for a few years in the hope that they will have obtained a bit of emergency response experience and perhaps are just a bit more street wise. but the truth is you can't fully prepare someone to be in the front line of their first major disaster. Part of their structural Collapse training encourages them to identify their individual work personality, and that of their co-workers. Categorising people as Diggers, Bullets, Involvers and Dreamers, in this way we can determine how an individual might act in a pressure related, work environment. It's not my intention to say that everyone fits neatly into these categories, nor would I say that people can be pigeon holed. but with this knowledge it makes leading people into an emergency situation, easier to manage and a bit more predictable, giving us some insight as to how that person can best contribute to the situation.

A landslide in August 97, destroyed the peace and natural beauty of a small Australian alpine village called Thredbo. The landslide took with it, two lodges, a couple of cars, several tons of dirt and trees and the lives of nineteen people. I worked the incident as an Operations Officers on one of the three watches. The incident was as unpleasant as you could imagine. the recovery of the deceased is never a joy, yet this site held a couple more issues. Firstly we were searching for one of our own Firefighter colleagues and secondly. it was freezing. The Friday night recorded -12 C and I can assure you keeping people motivated at 3am in that temperature is tough. I think the secret is a flexible roster and keeping people busy, we went from a double watch 12hr shift to a triple watch 8hr shift. This gave the crews a 16hr break, which is terrific if they can be taken away from the incident to a remote location. however many didn't want to leave the area and another case of conflict resolution began. The way to solve this issue was to listen to their concerns and obtain a compromise. giving the crew their break and in the environment they wanted, this is simply preparing people to be disciplined through training.

Managing people requires the adherence of a few basics principals

Be consistent . people can't cope with inconsistency. Most people would prefer some one that's arrogant and bloody hard all the time to someone that's hard one minute and a pup the next.

Be empathic . the ability to identify oneself mentally with others is a sure fire way of ensuring that people are placed in situations they can cope with.

Communicate through listening . you must allocate time to listen to the concerns of the your team and tell them your concerns. If you can't listen to them they sure as hell won't listen to you.

Be Visible . sometimes you have to get into the trenches with your team in order to understand what they are going through.
Lead by example. make sure you walk the talk. You can't expect the team to be positive if they see you dragging your chin along the ground.
All of these points blend into a philosophy called human resource management. Rescue workers are no different from other people, they just work in some very testing environments and it's because of these environments and the types of situation they encounter that they can attract a high profile. Having a profile isn't a bad thing but it needs to be managed. carefully. The public can have a perception of Firefighters as leading a glamorous life, saving the day and earning the admiration of every man woman and child along the way. But the truth is, we don't always save the day and believe me there is nothing glamorous about removing a dead body and there are plenty of us that have been on the end of a barrage of rocks and abuse from adults and children.

Being a rescue worker will never be an easy profession, but it's a rewarding one and never boring. I've had it said to me on more than one occasion that Firefighters live in the real world. but the truth is the real world only exists at the end of the shift, when we go home and have to deal with the realities of family life. the house needing a repaint, the grass needing mowing and the kids wanting the latest Nintendo game. Every now and then we have to enter someone else's nightmare, and learning to deal with that is the key to surviving the emotional roller coaster of being a rescue worker.

By Station Officer Warwick Kidd

Senior Rescue Instructor

New South Wales Fire Brigades, Australia