The thesis is buried pretty far down: It isn’t enough to have systems and safeguards in place in an organization. The personnel who run the day-to-day operations must know when, where and how to employ them successfully.

Quite surprised to see something firehouse related show up on HN. To add some context, the fire service is both extremely proud of and notorious for it's adherence to 'tradition'. some of that means wonderful things, and some of it means being slow to adopt newer safer practices.

Around the time I was first starting out, I remember somebody saying "The fire service is 225 years of tradition, unimpeded by progress."

OK, that's a little bit of hyperbole, but one can see echoes of an underlying truth there. Just to illustrate one thing that I see a lot: watch Youtube videos of fire departments operating on calls today.. and I mean recent videos from this year, and including ones from FDNY, LAFD, and the other "world class" fire departments out there... and you'll see time and time again, firefighters doing active supression work, wearing their SCBA on their backs like ornaments, but not clipped in and breathing air. Everytime I see this I just want to scream "do you think just having that tank on your back is going to protect you from all the toxic shit you're breathing right now!!??!??"

I mean, how long have we known that firefighters experience cancer at a highly disproportionate rate? How long have we known about the connections between cancer and the various toxic by-products of combustion? And yet...