Page 8 - UFRA Straight Tip Spring 2023 - Volume 24 Issue 2

BATTALION CHIEF
Battalion Chief:
Permissive Dissent
In June of 1893, while practicing maneuvers
off the coast of Tripoli, a British ship, the HMS Victoria, collided with another British ship and sank, killing 358 sailors. Among the dead was Vice Admiral George Tryon, the commander
of the fleet of eleven ships. The ships had been traveling in two parallel columns in a tight formation (too tight to be able to turn) when Tryon ordered the ships to turn 180 degrees. His deputy, Rear Admiral Albert Markham, who led the second column, hesitated. He knew that the order would require the two columns to turn toward one another and that they lacked sufficient room. Tryon quickly rebuked Markham’s hesitation, yelling, “What are you waiting for!” Following orders, Markham turned his ship, the HMS Camperdown, toward the sharply turning Victoria, striking and sink- ing the Victoria in 13 seconds.1
In November 2007, four firefighters died while searching a smoke-filled warehouse in War- wickshire, England. A report had been received that everyone had evacuated and “no person was reported missing or unaccounted for,” but the firefighters were still sent in to perform a search. Following the deaths, three Warwick- shire fire service “managers” (the incident commanders) were indicted for “manslaughter by gross negligence” for needlessly sending the firefighters into the building.2
The commonality in these stories is that good soldiers (that includes us) died needlessly after following bad orders. And I would imagine this is not rare. It has been well established that many line-of-duty deaths have been attributed to some form of command failure. In these cases, how many firefighters knew or felt that they were venturing into dangerous territory and followed orders to their peril?
Following Orders
As a quick disclaimer, this article isn’t about not following orders—it is about whether we make following orders an absolute. We all understand that safe fireground operations rely on our ability to give and follow orders. Our operations depend on strong, fixed, capable incident com- manders who give orders based on sound risk analysis. In a perfect world, the IC never makes mistakes—but we all know we do not live in a perfect world.
The fact is, no firefighter should ever be expect- ed to take an unacceptable risk. In the Incident
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