Size-up training for company officers

Giving officers and acting officers enough repetitions at the front of an incident that the first radio report stops being the hard part.

Why the first five minutes are hard to train

The initial size-up is one of the few fireground skills that a department cannot practice very often, because practicing it honestly means arriving at a building you have not seen before and saying something useful about it on the radio inside a minute. Live burns are expensive and rare, and a tabletop discussion tends to become a conversation about what somebody would have said, which is a different exercise from actually saying it.

The result is that a newly promoted officer may get only a handful of genuine first-arriving reps in a year, and an acting officer covering a shift may get none at all before the night it counts.

How this helps

Scene SizeUp lets you build a scenario from a real address in your own district, so the building an officer is looking at is one they may actually be dispatched to. You can pull the front of the building from street-level imagery or upload a photograph your crew took on a walk-through, and then place fire, smoke, victims and hazards where you want them. Because the scene is a photograph rather than a drawing, the reading an officer has to do is the same reading they would do from the front seat.

When the drill starts, the dispatcher gives the call and the officer has the same short window they would have on the street. They transmit their size-up over push-to-talk radio, and that transmission is recorded and transcribed, which means you can go back to the exact words afterward instead of relying on anyone's memory of them.

This feature also lets you run the same building more than once with different conditions. You can save several arrangements of the same scene as situation levels, so the same house on Example St can present as a room and contents on one run and as a well involved attic on the next. Officers stop recognizing the scenario and start reading the picture, which is the whole point.

A way to run it

A common pattern is to build three or four scenarios on buildings in one district, then give each officer the same set in a different order. Each one takes a few minutes, so a shift can get through several in a single training period. Because every drill is recorded, you can play a size-up back in the debrief and let the officer hear what they actually transmitted, which is usually more persuasive than being told about it.

You can also use this for acting officers who have not yet been promoted. Time spent holding command is tracked separately from time spent as crew, so their training record shows the reps they have had in the seat, and that record is available when the promotion conversation comes around.

What you get out of it

Every drill produces a one-page after-action record you can save as a PDF and file, and the training report totals each member's hours for whatever period you choose. If your state or your insurer asks what officer development you are doing, the answer is a document rather than a description. There is more about this in the documentation on records and retention.

Seeing it for yourself

If this sounds like the problem you are trying to solve, the quickest way to judge it is to watch one drill from beginning to end. We will walk through building a scenario on an address you choose, running it live, and reading the after-action review afterward. Request a demo and we will email you to arrange a time, usually within 24 hours. One subscription includes everything described on this page, at $49 a month or $499 a year per block of 30 seats.