NDOT Episode #62 W/ Logan Hinkle

Join the NDOT Crew and Logan Hinkle as we discuss training, realism, and maybe a little EMS

Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:42

Welcome back. Episode 52. Cruising along.

SPEAKER_03 0:46

What's up, Chipaggs? Welcome back. Thanks everybody for tuning in, watching support, everything. You guys have been fantastic sending in questions. We've gotten questions now from our last two guests, Logan here and Jeff and the previous one. You guys are great with that. Be sure to send them in however you want to do it. Make sure we get it, and we'll make sure we get the question included. So thank you guys for that. Thank you guys for the support. And uh without further ado, let's uh go ahead and bring in Logan. Thanks for coming on, Logan.

SPEAKER_00 1:22

Absolutely, guys. I am beyond excited to be here. It's been what, five years since we first met at the end of the job?

SPEAKER_03 1:29

Yeah, something like that. It's been a while. It's been a while. Brent and I were just talking about uh earlier that it was crazy because five years ago, all of this that we're doing, I mean, your training company, which we'll get into, the podcast, like it was all ideas and all very early onset. And now it's like, hey, look at this. So it's pretty, pretty cool. Everything comes around. But uh, why don't you go ahead and give a quick introduction about yourself?

SPEAKER_00 1:53

Yeah, um, I'm Logan Hinkle. Um, I'm 26 years old. I work in West Memphis, Arkansas. Um, I'm a paramedic captain there. Um, not to be confused with an engine captain, just for clarity's sake. But um I do ride an ambulance, still do active fire duty, uh, oversee day-to-day EMS and response operations for us there. Um, I still volunteer in the central Arkansas area. Um I've been a volunteer since I was 17. Um I started all the way back um in late 2016 as a volunteer at the age of 17 years old and haven't looked back. Um, I've worked in part-time volunteer and career capacities in the last nine or so years and full-time on an ambulance sum in between here and there. You know, having my paramedic is uh is a gift sometimes, and sometimes it's really not. So as you guys saw when we were getting set up, uh, I've got a four-year-old son, uh, and then my wife, Jessica, um, you know, kind of keeps the home together. Racker keeps me moving. So we're living life and having fun, man. Awesome, awesome, awesome.

SPEAKER_03 3:02

Well, I think we'll kind of dive right into uh Heath's question that he told you to be worried about, but very interested to see. And in your introduction, you talk about you're only 26, uh, you still have a lot of experience in terms of doing it. But his question is how do you balance being young yet having the level of knowledge that you do when you're going around sharing this information?

SPEAKER_00 3:25

Being young, I am still incredibly excited about the job. Um moving at a million miles an hour when a call comes in, you know, moving with purpose, excited to ask questions, excited to learn. Um the hardest part, I think, dealing with that is the true humility, right? So not just being overly humble on purpose, but taking that information that you may have because it's a little weird, you know. I'm 26, but people will come up and ask questions all the time. They'll say, Hey, you know, you you've been to a class on this, or you, you know, I've watched you do this on the fire ground. And how do you, how do you deliver that as someone who's 15 years younger than this tenured engine captain that just came up and asked you about vertical ventilation? You know, it's it's all you have to be careful with your delivery because I do, I get excited and start drumming, and sometimes the delivery can come off a little sideways, and you have to be cognizant of that. Um, I understand where I'm at in my career. I understand that I have, I'm at the point where a lot of people say you've got just enough experience to be really dangerous. And I don't disagree with them. I've got just enough experience to be really confident at certain things that can spill in the areas of my job that I'm not as confident in. Right? I'll be straight honest. Up until about a month ago, I haven't touched a nozzle on a first end fire in like three months. I've ended up on search, ventilation, rip, things like that. And sometimes that confidence can spill over a little bit into the fire attack. You know, you get a little overzealous, just as an example. You can push a little too far, you can get out of rhythm. Whenever you have, whenever you are kind of where I'm at in my career, you just have to be really careful with your delivery, with the energy that you give with that delivery. That's the biggest part is your delivery may be really solid. Your knowledge base, the way you give the knowledge across may be really solid, but the way you're delivering it is kind of rough, kind of choppy, kind of sounds arrogant, but it's the excitement coming out. You're so excited that someone wants to talk firefighting with you. That's something I still struggle with. I've struggled with it for years, and you know, the guys that work with me, and you know, the men of the RFT cot trails tell you the same thing. And sometimes he gets a little, a little hot about certain topics.

SPEAKER_04 5:56

And definitely have that uh teaching some stuff that I learned on Shift and on apartment too. It's kind of like, yeah, I only have you know six years on or seven years part-time and full-time, and then talking to guys that have 20, 30 years on. It's kind of like, I don't know shit. I've just started my career, right? But I took a class and this is what I've learned, and trying to trying to get that all situated and uh delivered is a very hard part, and I'm trying to work on that myself.

SPEAKER_00 6:28

I think tying it in too is with that humility comes honesty. Um, if someone comes up and asks me about something that I've learned in a class or done a bunch on the training ground, you know, I'll be able to tell them, hey, like I yes, I've learned this, but I've not ever employed it on a fire ground. So I'm not, you know, I'm not gonna advocate either way because I don't know if it works here for us, you know. Um there's certain tactics that with our manpower and staffing and the way that we operate aren't gonna work. You know, we haven't tried them, we haven't done them. And I I run into this issue, I used to run into this issue myself, and I see some younger guys making the same mistake is coming in and being hot and heavy with these tactics and with these ideas. And you kind of look, you kind of ask them, you sit down and be a be a mentor to them, you know, as a not necessarily a senior guy, but someone who's seen a little bit more of the job and say, hey, sprinkle it in a little bit every now and then. You know, maybe that is a good tactic, it's a good idea, but sprinkle it in. See what the see what the guys that have been here a lot longer than us think. And some people struggle.

SPEAKER_03 7:41

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_04 7:44

Okay, go ahead, Bryce.

SPEAKER_03 7:45

Yeah, I was just gonna say the doubling down on that delivery. I mean, if really you come in and you be honest with the delivery, like both things that you were saying, that's where you're gonna get the buy-in because guys will see right through it. Everyone talks about it all the time that like you can bullshit until you get to the fire ground. And so if you're out there and you're like, oh, this is what works great on the fire ground, this is what works great on a fire ground, and it's only because you did it in a training, and you actually get to a fire ground and someone sees you do a different tactic, and you're like, Well, I I've never tried it, like all of it goes out the window. Like, you gotta just depend exactly how you deliver it, needs to be exactly how you learned it. You can't just be out there claiming, oh, I did this, I know this. Like, people are gonna know that because the fire ground proves all.

SPEAKER_04 8:30

Right.

SPEAKER_00 8:31

Yeah, I think that's like you know, I I I ride an ambulance, you know, I do ride an ambulance, but we we are task assigned, we're SOG policies, right? We're SOG fireground assignments. So in the offensive residential strategy, the first arriving ambulance and the second arriving ambulance are assigned rescue duties. Um, of course, being ventilation, backside OV, um, you know, starting a primary from somewhere other than where the truck company went in. Um, so whenever we're speaking on those topics, you know, when we go to the fire ground, most of the time I'm ending up on the roof. So I am 100% comfortable talking about roof work and search with the guys I work with. At the same time, I'm not gonna sit there and lecture about engine work because I get to do that maybe once or twice a year. And usually it's on a building that is well off, self-vented, we're gonna make a transition anyway.

SPEAKER_04 9:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:26

You know, I don't get to, I don't get to push halberds very often.

SPEAKER_04 9:30

Yeah. I think bringing like stuff that you learn to your department and kind of sprinkling stuff that you already do at your department, kind of make a happy medium. I think that goes a long way and kind of creating training. That also comes back in the training ground, too, is you have to train on stuff that you learn too with your crew to kind of get that happy medium so everyone knows what you're doing and kind of develop your own tactic from the stuff that you learn and they're already doing to kind of create that for your department.

SPEAKER_00 10:01

My engine captain, you know, we talk all the time about training for our station. Um, I'm on the east side of town at threes, it's the busiest station in the city. Um, and we take pride in that, you know, we take pride in being the busiest station in the city, which we're not near as busy as some folks are, but you know, out of that station between the ambulance and the engine, there's probably 12 to 14 calls a day, roundabouts between the two of us. Um, and we still take pride in going out and doing training and stuff. And actually, this yesterday we were talking about training um for the guys, you know, trying to figure out some stuff to do because the heat index the next two weeks is gonna be like 120 degrees. Um we're probably not gonna go out. I'm all for fitness on the fire ground. I'm all for working out in our gear. But you know, we kind of talked and said, hey, let's not kill everybody pulling lines 30 times in full gear, you know. But kind of what we talked about was overall training is if you fill a bucket up, if you try to fill up a five-gallon bucket while someone's holding it all at once, it's gonna get really heavy. But if you fill it up one cup at a time, they're gonna get used to the weight. And that builds into that that's the same way that you build a standard, right? If you try to change the standard overnight, you're gonna have bucking broncos all over your fire department. But if you sprinkle little changes here or there and stop tolerating certain things and start encouraging other things, it's the same process. They're gonna become used to it. It's the same analogy as boiling a frog. You turn it up all at once, the frog's gonna jump. If you just slowly turn it up, it's gonna stay in the paint. It's the same, it's the same thing, it's all psychology. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_03 11:50

Kind of sticking with the delivery of this train and everything, because obviously you've used it in your extracurriculars. Talk about uh your training company, I guess, your your cadre. I mean, where did it start? Where's it going? What's the direction that you're you're aiming for?

SPEAKER_00 12:08

Man, it started right about four years ago now. Um JP Gardner, Connor Roberts, and I, all three, you know, younger guys in the service, good friends have been for several years before this ever became an idea. Um, which you guys, I think, met JP and Connor both at uh end of the job. And they were that's kind of where some of this discussion was going on. Um, we kind of saw there's a gap, right? Um I think the best way to put it is there's a there's a gap, right? A lot of the fire departments in America, one, aren't staffed, or two, if they are staffed, they've got like a driver and an officer. You know, that's the majority of America. Um, not everywhere has, you know, four, five, six engines, two truck companies, a battalion chief, a rescue, ambulances. Not everybody has that level of staffing. I mean, especially nobody really has outside of 30 or 40 major cities, has more than 30 people on shift at a time. And a lot of the training and a lot of the tactics that were being put out are geared towards those larger departments. Um, that's kind of the gap that we stepped in to bring people together to fill. You know, we were at points in our careers and we still are. Um, we're we're growing. Um, you know, JP works for a large metropolitan department now. Um, Connor works for one of the busiest, you know, fire duty departments in central Arkansas outside of the two major metros. Um you know, I I am where I am. But we sat down together and said, we aren't the ones to do this. You know, we're not the ones to go out and try to fill this gap. We can be the orchestrators, we can, we can put the logistics together, you know, and we went out and got a got a few really solid guys that have been mentors to us as we came up in our careers and reached out and got with them and said, Hey, this is an idea that we've got. This is something that we want to do. Are you guys interested in coming on and really being the voice behind this, right? Like I, you know, I I I have the social medias and I post and do the videos and stuff, but when it comes to the training, when it comes to the street level experience, it's those guys. You know, it's James Cook, bless his heart. He's out, he's hurt bad right now. He'll be back in about a year. Um Justin Levy. Um, he's been on the job for I don't even remember how long. He just made fire chief at his department there in Missouri. Um, Noah Cassius. Noah's been on a truck company for at least 10 years just west and set just west of San Antonio. Um Wade Ambrose is the training major for Broken Arrow Fire Department there in Oklahoma. Burt Roberts is uh truck captain at Ozark, Missouri. He's been on the job longer than I've been able to drink be, you know, almost as long as I've been alive. You know, so these these these guys are the ones that that put it all together, right? And we took that, we took those guys and said, we want to build classes, we want to build curriculum around the fact that not everybody has staffing to complete tasks simultaneously. All right, we need to talk about prioritization when it comes to mindset. You know, we we talk about the mindset that you have before the call even drops. You know, what are you thinking when that, you know, every some stations we have a fire, we have a tone that's for working fires. When that tone hits, what's in your head? Like, oh, I'm gonna go and stretch a line or do this, or is it, hey, we're gonna do whatever's best for the life in this building? And all of our curriculum is built around supporting life, all of our engine company stuff, all of our truck company stuff, you know, search specific, fire attack specific, um, thermal imaging schools, everything that we've got is built to support life. And that's our mindset, that's our ideology. And it really was never supposed to take off to the point um where it is now, truthfully. It was never supposed to. And that was never the goal. Um, you know, the goal was really to get together three or four times a year, teach a couple classes, you know, go to a couple conferences together, and really that be it. And then um last year and this year, it's this this year especially, it's blown up. Um you know, we're on, we've taught about 25 or 30 classes this year between large ones and small ones, majority of smaller ones. Um, but we ended up in Boise, Idaho in March for March mayhem with Gino in the crew. You know, um we got to hang out with a bunch of really cool dudes from AOTC. Um, Chief is really cool. Gino was awesome to us. Uh, you know, last year a couple of us ended up in Atlanta. Um, this year, not with not with RFT, but you know, two or three of our guys were teaching um with their own group in Atlanta.

SPEAKER_03 17:32

Awesome.

SPEAKER_00 17:32

Yeah, which it's it's huge. And we've got uh work after dark, which is our 14-hour nighttime live fire operations class is coming up in uh on September 19th. Um the weekend after that is before the Bellfire Conference in Little Rock. And we're doing two days, eight hours of live fire engine, eight hours of live fire search. And then in November, we're doing another nighttime live fire class at the first end fire conference. Nice, you know, so there's a there's a there's a stacked fall right before gene season for you, right? Yeah, absolutely. But the it was never the goal to to get to this point, you know. It's not a big push that we've made, like we've got to get more places, we gotta get more classes. It's all just happened generically, you know, just you know, send it to the guys. Hey, they're accepting proposals. Do you guys want to put in for it? Yeah, absolutely. We'll put in for it. And then, you know, put the proposal together and send it in. And we just we got selected. And I couldn't be more thankful for it. You know, it's the one of the the coolest part of it is yes, we get to go teach, we get to go do these things, but you know, like at these conferences, we're going and we're being students if we're able to be students. Um, First End has three three days of lecture before our class is even going, and we don't start class till that afternoon. You know, so we're we're thankful to have these opportunities to not only, you know, help other people grow, but to grow ourselves is really one of the key focuses. And anybody who's taught for any amount of time will tell you that you learn more about yourself and your skills teaching than you ever will in a class.

SPEAKER_03 19:17

Speaking of going around doing these trainings, all the conferences that you've been able to go to and the classes you've been able to teach, what do you think is one training deficiency that you're seeing across all these different departments?

SPEAKER_00 19:33

A lot of it has to do with realism, right? And that is uh for for us, that has become a focus as we've grown as a group is you know, adding realism. You know, um, we focused really, really hard on doing two-day classes. And really, you know, if you ask some of the students, it's two different days. And what I mean by that is day one is very relaxed, very still. There's not a lot of excitement going on. And it's because we're focused on breaking some bad habits, adding some good habits, and reinforcing those good habits, right? We want to build competency before we start stressing out. You know, we it's kind of ill of us to come in and add a whole bunch of stress and crazy day one. Um just it's not good for it, doesn't go well. Um, it doesn't build confidence in these skills. Um, so then we'll come in day two. And day two on a two-day class for us is normally a full-blown scenario day, right? Um and we'll start in the morning. Uh, early scenarios are normally pretty still. Um, a little bit of stress added in, maybe you know, some family members, but nothing heightened, nothing crazy. Um, and then as we go through the day, the stress really starts to crank up. We really start hitting the gas. Um, you know, we've got some, I've we've I've got some props that I'm able to borrow every now and then. Um, you know, we have a couple of scenarios for our search class where you've got jumpers. And it's not an instructor in turnouts laying on the ground, it's one of our wives laying on the ground with a prosthetic leg that's an open tip fib fracture with ketchup on it. You know, something legitimate that you might end up seeing at some point in your career. If they just jump from a second floor window, their legs might be broken. You know, so it's a distracting injury. It's it's it causes your brain. I'm I did a little bit of time um doing some police style work. And you know, a lot of our training there is all about the OODA loop. Observe, orient, decide, act. Um, and that is a part of all of our scenario stuff is as we get further into the day and you start getting Comfortable, we're gonna start forcing you to be uncomfortable. And we we do that by putting things in that aren't out of the realm of realism. None of them are really crazy, but it's there to reset your OODA loop. Um, if you're in a training building that you've been in all day yesterday, what are you gonna do? You're gonna try to play the building. Like, oh, I was in here all day yesterday. What you don't realize is we have moved walls around in here or boxed doors in. You know, we take forcible entry doors and close them in, and you know, we we we call it the gut check, and they'll force the first door, and they can't see the second door. So, you know, every time that scenario goes for the first time, we're waiting for the thud. That thud is them trying to play the building and running headfirst into the second door. Yeah, no, it's little things like that, and it what it does is it's not to mess with the students, it's to create teachable moments. Whenever you've got students that are already super dialed in, super good at it, you've got to create teachable moments. Um, and that's not by setting them up to fail, it's by putting them in uncomfortable situations that make them forget to think, or they don't see, or they just act on instinct. And that, you know, the double door is a great example of that is oh, I forced the first door. Now you've got another one. That was a storm door. Congratulations. You know, now you're in a smoke condition, or you know, you've got jumpers out of windows. Um, we'll you know, we'll have instructors hang out of windows. You know, they'll come around the building and they'll have a fence that wasn't there on the last scenario that now they've got to look at this guy hanging out of a window shirtless and run all the way around this fence and then avoid the power line that's dropped from the fence over to the building and put their ladder up and get this combative smoke drunk victim out of this window. These are all things that happen. You know, we we pulled, I can't we came off the ambulance and pulled the lady out of a window a month ago. She was smoke drunk, she threw her purse down at us while we were throwing the ladder. You know, so these are things that legitimately happen on fire grounds and they create a reset in your OODA loop. You've already made a decision. Now there's a stimuli that comes in and says, I don't know what you thought you were doing, but you're not doing that anymore. Now you've got to change, you've got to make a decision, right? That's that's that's our big focus, and I think that's some of the gaps is certain classes are geared towards certain skills, those are different, right? You know, if we're five if I'm going to a ventilation class, well, yeah, I'm not gonna reset there the loop, I'm not gonna create a bunch of stress because we're learning vertical ventilation. But if we're doing scenario-based evolutions, stress should absolutely be a part of that scenario. Yeah, for some people, it may just make them think. For others, it may gut check them and they may just find out how much they don't know. I'm gonna raise my hand and say that's happened to me several times. No, I'm not afraid to admit it. I've been gut checked a few times on scenarios, stressful situations happened and reacted, probably not in the best way, right? Didn't do the skill like I, you know, dropping a ladder a little bit or messing a stretch up a little bit because of the amount of stress that was applied, and it helps me grow. And so, you know, we try and do the same thing, you know, whenever we go out and do um that is that is a gap, and it's starting to be closed over the last couple of years. You know, going out and watching and doing and and talking to all, you know, all the guys that are doing what we do is you know, everybody's kind of starting to close that that gap a little bit with with the stress.

SPEAKER_03 26:07

Absolutely. Um, I'm gonna pull it back to the smoke drone because I think that's a great transition into the topic that I was most excited to talk to you about here, and that is uh, and that is cyanequit. So I know you're a huge component of it. We've talked about it before on here with the fire rescue survey and stuff. I know people are like fucking medic shit. I know, I know, but we got a meta captain on, we got to ask him about this. So what do you think? How important is cyanequit and today's fire service, and how are is it being used or should it be being used to drive these outcome-based uh and driven tactics?

SPEAKER_00 26:46

So you mentioned the rescue survey. Uh, we we chat back and forth, a few of us talk chat back and forth about this on a decent occasion, right? Um, and we're all of the same mindset. You can be as proactive as you want with search, you can push places that you probably shouldn't be in, you can occupy space that is questionably searchable, questionably, and bring people out of these buildings. What good have you done if you don't have the fix for what's killing them 80% of the time? What good has that done? Oh, we gave them a chance. No, you just made sure they didn't burn to death, they're still dead. And innovation, you could have um this is the analogy I use in class. You could duct tape a level one trauma center to the front door of that house, and if you don't have a cyano kit, they're dead anyway. There's no fix, there's no change. You can innovate them, you can do CPR, you can give fluids, you can give medicine. If that medicine is not cyano kit on the label, or you know, there's not a generic. If it doesn't say cyano kit on the label and it's not beet red, you're not doing anything. And the reason for that is the misconception, right? Around 20% of our victims actually die from burns. And the victims that actually die from burns are the victims who were incinerated, carbonized, or burned so significantly that their body couldn't function anymore. The other 80% is CO and hydrogen cyanide in tandem, right? Hydrogen cyanide is produced in the lethal dose, if I remember right, I'm gonna try and quote it. If I'm wrong, someone throw something at me. Um normal lethal dose in the two-minute range is right around a thousand parts per million. It's produced in most residential structure fires with modern furnishings in excess of 30,000 parts per million. So you're taking that lethal dose, multiplying it by 30, and saying, okay, we're just not going to carry the medicine that fixes that. Yeah. It's it's if you if your department has the capability to be ALS, even if you're not right now, if you have the capability to be ALS, ALS first response, and carry these kits, and you're not, but you're saying and going out and saying we have a progressive search culture, we care about victim survivability, you're only getting about half the puzzle. Right? And maybe, maybe you don't have an ambulance like we do. It was a lot easier for us to integrate these. You know, we we really started carrying them in late last year, and within a week and within two weeks of having it, we gave it twice. You know, in the last, you know, in the last six months, seven months, we've given it four times. Three of those were really good outcomes. One of them got back, but the outcome wasn't exactly what we wanted. That that person ended up passing a few days later. But the best chance was given. All right. We did absolutely every piece of the puzzle was put together, everything was done right. The victim, you know, search was initiated within 60 seconds of the air break. The victim was located within five minutes of arrival in all of these cases. They were out within 10 minutes of arrival. Cyanokit was on board within two minutes of removal from the building. CPR was in progress within seconds of removal, airway, you know, but all these things were done. All of the pieces of the puzzle were put together. And if you have the capability to do that and you're not, you're falling short. Right? It's it's not sexy, it's not pretty, it doesn't sell tickets to conferences. But if we're really going to push as the American Fire Service, we really want progress. We everybody is talking about search, everybody's talking about survivability, everybody's talking about victims, and the reason that we're here is for them, it's for the victims, it's for the people. Cyano kits are for the people. That is the only fix. If they've got cyanide bonded to complex four in the electron transport chain, your body has to use oxygen to create energy, right? Your body uses oxygen in your cells to take sugar and break apart and generate energy, ATP, but we're not going to go that nerdy today. And what happens is it's different than CO. CO is just general cellular hypoxia because the blood cells can't carry the oxygen, right? With cyanide, it stops your cells from being able to use oxygen to produce energy. That creates a whole myriad of problems. The reason that's a problem if you don't carry a kit is with CO, you can hyper-oxygenate and fix that problem, right? You know, we're going to look for a burn center with a hyperbaric chamber and all these things. We can fix that problem with a hundred with oxygen. With cyanide, it doesn't matter how much oxygen we push into these people. The body cannot use it. That's where the issue comes in. So, you know, going back to having an ER duct tape to the front door, you could have the best doctors on the planet and take their cyanide antidote away and have them tubed, you know, innovated, IVs, medicines running, all these things. And within 10 minutes, 10 to 20 minutes, the patient they're gonna be brain dead because their brain can't work, it can't use oxygen. It's just the same as if they weren't breathing at all. And that's where some of the, you know, everybody looks at the costs. Everybody likes to look at cost benefit analysis, right? Um, let's talk a little admin stuff. If there's a chief that listens to this, this is just for you. Cost benefit analysis is a huge thing in the fire service now. It's turned into a business, right? And it's out of necessity, it has to. The city wants it ran that way, and you have to run it that way if you want to be cognizant of your money. A cyano kit costs right at $1,600 from boundary, which is our supplier. That kit is good for two and a half to three years. It's good for about three years from the date of manufacture. If you buy it and don't use it, that's people's biggest concern is buying it and not using it. Okay, that is a valid concern. What happens if you end up like us and you put it on the truck and all of a sudden you pull four people out in six months? What if you didn't have that? How many of those people would have died? How many of your citizens that pay taxes in your city and expect their fire department to do everything for them that they can to survive didn't fulfill their mission all the way? And now instead of having three of those victims alive and one die, now two of the four are dead, or three of the four are dead. Because by the time we got them to a burn center, it was too late. All right. That that's where I'm at on it is if you have the ability to carry it and you don't, you're negligent. That's that's a firm stance on that. It's it's borderline negligent. And it's for the firemen, right? A lot of unions have pushed for the sino kits and gotten them because it's for the firemen. If you have you know a new guy that gets freaked out in the hallway and rips his mask off, even if he only gets five or six breaths of that heavy smoke, that heavy cyanide, he's gonna be altered. He's gonna start having problems. His vital side, you know, he's gonna be full of cyanide. It only takes two or three breaths to start having significant problems with this. It's for the firemen too, you know. And one of the things that Cyano Kit does is if you document a use on a firefighter with removal, they will replace your kit for free. Yep. That is their that is their firefighter's promise, is what they call it, if I remember right, is they will replace your kit. That's what they call it. But just to round that out, is if you have the ability to do it and you're not, it you got to take a real hard look in the mirror.

SPEAKER_03 35:14

Yeah. Firefighter rescue series. I mean, it's we reference it so much, every department should know about it and look at it because it's the hard facts, it's exactly what we are seeing. And there is, if I remember correctly, with I've used it a bunch, the comparison from victims that received it and victims that didn't is a 30% mortality rate. Like you have a 30% increase in survivability chance when you receive it.

SPEAKER_00 35:40

There's nothing with with victims that with victims that still with victims that still that are severely burned but still have a pulse, the change is 41%. With victims that have, or sorry, 31%. With victims that have that are unconscious, it's 41%. Unconscious victims with a pulse, the difference is 41% in survival to the hospital. That's not even the ER. That's the hospital.

SPEAKER_03 36:08

Yeah.

unknown 36:08

Right?

SPEAKER_00 36:09

Firefighter rescue survey is not tracking discharges from the hospital. It's not, it's not a medical study, right? It's survival, it's what's input by the crews. You know, we've documented several rescues in the last two years on the rescue survey in West Memphis. And thankfully, recently, we've been able to start filling out the cyano kit part, which is, I think, awesome. And survival to the hospital. It's 41% for victims that are unconscious, and right around 30% right around 30% for victims with severe burns that are unconscious.

SPEAKER_03 36:39

Yeah. There's still nothing there. There's nothing else that we can do. Say again. There's there's nothing that we do as a medic to increase survivability that much. There's no medication we carry, no skill. There is nothing that we have, not alone, let alone like I'm talking even heart attacks, stroke, what there is nothing that increases survivability by 40% than that one med does for that victim. And that is just why it's even an argument is insane.

SPEAKER_00 37:12

Yeah, when you look at when you look at medical studies, you know, and I'm I'm a nerdy medic. I enjoy medicine almost as much, almost as much as I enjoy firefighting. Yep. And because you you make a difference, you do get to make a difference, you know. That's the other part of this, is if you're in a for them mindset, you should be just as much for them whenever you're going to a shooting or a cardiac arrest as you should be when you're going to a fire. That that's that stuff drives me nuts. That's a rabbit hole for a different day. But when you look at medical studies as much as you know, I look at medical studies when we write our protocols. I'm part of our protocol board, and we we reference medical studies in our protocols. And you know, they 10% is clinical significance most of the time, depending on how the study's set up. If you were to take a medical study and say this has a 41% increase, it would become the national standard and required on every ambulance. There wouldn't be a medical director that didn't carry it if there was a medical study that said it was a 41% change.

SPEAKER_03 38:20

It's crazy that it just it's taken so long because it needs to. And I kind of want you to dive into if you can um what your push for is now at that state level, because I think that's the next incredibly important step.

SPEAKER_00 38:36

Yeah, so um to kind of touch base on the state level thing, this is something like this is incredibly personal to me. Um, you know, not only seeing the number of victims that we do at work and seeing the changes and the outcomes there and the firefighter rescue survey data, um, both of my wife's grandparents died in a house fire in rural Arkansas several years ago. Um so this is uh this is an incredibly personal thing. And with that being said, making the push for this at the state level is it's difficult. It's it's hard to do because so many of our services in Arkansas are privatized, right? They have profit margins to look at, they have all these other things that they have to look at, and that's not doxing the level of service that they provide. I've worked with some exceptional providers at you know in the private level, but it's incredibly difficult to get a medication forced onto every ambulance at the state level, especially when it costs sixteen hundred dollars a dose. Um it is a required medication in Arkansas for every emergency department to have, um which is a great place. It's a great place to start. That's a really good starting point. But whenever you look at rural states, like Arkansas is an incredibly rural state. If we have a house fire 25 minutes from a hospital, um kind of like where I started, a lot of our fires, we were 15, 20 minutes from a hospital. That doesn't count transport. You know, that's transport time, that doesn't count packaging and all the other things. By the time we get them to the hospital, if they're not pulseless already, they're not they're gonna be shortly.

SPEAKER_01 40:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 40:39

Because of that cyanide. Um, it is it is hard to advocate for it to be on every ambulance because you know, on the back side of things, I understand the costs associated with it, and I understand the likelihood in a lot of our communities of it being used is relatively low. Um, you know, I'm gonna use Johnson County where I started as a reference. Um, there's maybe 40 structure fires in the entire county in a year. Out of those, I think they've had in the last 10 years, they've had three people pulled from buildings. Um, the rest of them, you know, they've had more fatalities than that, but several of those were a mountain cabin that old man has lived in for 50 years, and by the time they got there, you know, there was no searchable space, there was no really building left. And that's a reality that whenever you're making a push like this, you have to take that into account. Yeah, right. Some of these ambulance services or some of these departments are operating on paper thin boats already. And the best way, you know, the the progress that we've been able to make is bringing everybody in and just discussing it together and saying, hey, this is this is a significant medication. This is of clinical significance um to this specific patient population. And they agree that it's it's significant. The back end of it is trying to find some way to get funding, maybe from the state or from some other entity to be able to put these at least on like supervisor vehicles or have them accessible at these places. Um, some of the ways that they've been able to do it is um they add them to their protocol and the department has bought them. Um there's been a couple places here in the state that you know the the smaller department said, Hey, we're not ALS, but our ambulance service is. What if we just buy them for you? Well, you're gonna replace them and we use them, duh. They're for us and for our people. Yeah, if you use them, we'll replace it. We just we're not capable of being ALS. And I think that's might be a pathway for a lot of people, um, not just here in Arkansas, but across the country. That might be a pathway to explore is like, hey, if we buy this kit for sixteen hundred dollars, will you add it to your protocol? Yeah, some folks might give you a good answer on it.

SPEAKER_03 43:17

That's awesome. I love just the push for it again. You know, we talked about it a lot. I know people hate when we talk EMS, but some people don't, so you're welcome. Um but um I just love the the thought process and diving into it because it is it is an important med. Um, and it's just kind of tied in there with you know, blood, with cyanicate, like there's so much stuff that I hope in the very near future and through ways, like you say, through cooperation, like we'll be able to break through because we all these things that are coming out, like you said, they're clinically significant, that they are better for our patients, but they're hidden behind just the cost. Everyone, like, everywhere is worried about the cost. So through that collaboration, I hope that not just CyanoKit, but blood, the next med that comes out, the next big uh you know tool, uh whatever it might be, like we can just start getting away from that cost and look at actually what's being beneficial for our patients.

SPEAKER_00 44:18

Yeah, and part of it is prioritizing, right? What level of priority are you willing to put on this? If you don't make it a priority, then it's probably not gonna work out. Thankfully, you know, our admin places almost the same priority on these cyano kits as they do buying turnouts, it's of equal importance. You know, if your turnouts are bad, they're gonna buy you new ones. If we use a cyano kit, we're gonna replace it.

SPEAKER_03 44:49

Absolutely. Going back into uh the fire world now, you're welcome, people. Um, we're gonna move on to our last uh two questions that we have. So we have the question from our previous guests, and Jeff, for you will have your question that you'll ask of our next guest, and uh then we'll get to the kitchen table and wrap it up. So uh this question that we have is from Jeff Wiffemeyer, he's on St. Louis. We were talking a lot about truck work last episode, and his question is what advice do you have for a predominantly urban truck guy regarding the more suburban and rural truck work? How do you like his thought was how do you teach it? How are you showing that this rural versus urban setting is just different? And how can you blend it together and and go into it?

SPEAKER_00 45:38

In the in the urban fire environment, you're not seeing a lot of single family residences, right? Unless you're in an outlying station. Like he's if he's in St. Louis, where I remember he's at, he might not have a whole lot of single-family houses anywhere in his district. You know, he's dealing with apartments, he's dealing with high rises, he's dealing with commercial structures. Truck work, the skills are similar. The why behind it changes significantly depending on what you're doing, right? Um, where he's probably getting to cut a lot more um puck locks and he's cutting a lot more doors. We're not doing that very often. Outside of some occasional, you know, five or six a year, we have a good commercial fire, but we're not seeing that a lot. Um, the last five out of the last six roofs I've been on have been walkable pitch single family residential, right? Um whenever we go out and teach it when talk about the fact that fire is fire, right? It has this is the same chemical reaction. Depending on the construction, the fire is going to move in a similar manner through buildings that are of similar construction. Knowing that and understanding you can take a lot of this why that these awesome urban dudes have from all these cuts they get to do, all this truck work they get to do, and for the sake of like ventilation, you're still just looking at the behavior. You're trying to get as close to above the fire as you can. You're trying to make the hole large enough to relieve the pressure inside the building and change the behavior of the fire so your engine can make the final push. All right. We the the goals are the same. If we're ventilating, well, we're ventilating to make it easier on the engine to get to the seat of the fire, and we're lifting heat and smoke off of victims, right? That doesn't change based on occupancy type. The way you do it and when you do it might change a little bit. Um, search is a different thing, too. You know, with truck work, the objective is the same. We're searching for fire and we're searching for people. The type of occupancy that you're in may be different, but your objective is the same and you're gonna complete it in a similar manner. I'm not gonna speak on wide area search and commercial building search because I don't do it. I don't. We don't, that's not something that we do often enough for me to be comfortable speaking on. But whenever it comes to apartments, whenever it comes to, you know, kind of row home, whenever it comes to quadplexes or duplexes or triplexes, we see a lot of those. Um, not so much on the row homes. We've got an area downtown that's got a bunch of like taxpayer row home style stuff, um, but it doesn't burn. But we see a lot of apartments, we see a lot of single-family residents, and we see a lot of quadplexes. And search-wise, you're still gonna target as close to the fire as you can get when you start your search, if you can. You're gonna try to isolate that fire, and then you're gonna search for people as you're moving through and doing that. Everybody likes to make there's a big disconnect between really super urban firefighting and super rural or rural or suburban firefighting. Uh the disconnect's not as big as you think. Um, it's just the fact of you're used to what you see. Whenever you get something that's a little bit different, it might throw you off a little bit. Um, advice-wise, for somebody who might be making the transition, a lot of guys move from bigger departments out to smaller departments as their career progresses. And it's stick to your guns, right? The ideology stays the same. Yeah, your experience is going to become different, right? You're going from 20-floor apartment buildings, 10-floor mid-rises, to you know, our tallest apartment building in the city is four stories. So that's a change that you have to make, but understanding that the tactics and the ideology remain very similar is important there.

SPEAKER_03 50:05

Absolutely. I like that. You said he was gonna tune back in. So hopefully that's exactly what he's looking for. But um, the last part we have is what people say is the hardest one, and that's you got to do the job that we've been doing, you got to come up with the question. So, our next guest is uh Mike Bernard from up in our neck of the woods, uh a little north too, though. But um, he's go get her, uh, very awesome, does the uh Inglorious Bastard stuff, the just great, great teacher, um, and very into the job. And he's our next guest. What questions you got for him?

SPEAKER_02 50:40

Ooh.

SPEAKER_00 50:42

Mike, what challenges do you guys have in the winter months that we don't see down here in the summer months as often? Or sorry, in the southern states, and how do you guys overcome them in case we run into something like that?

SPEAKER_04 50:58

The same can go to you. How you count back 120 degree heat.

SPEAKER_00 51:02

Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, how do you overcome 120 degrees? We add another engine.

SPEAKER_03 51:10

Fair enough. No, it's awesome. Uh, yeah, it's that's one of the coolest parts about, like you said, fire is fire, and when we go to these conferences, it is the same everywhere, but you don't think about the outer environments. I mean, we had, I think we talked about this a little bit when we had um Pruitt. When we had Dave Pruitt on, he was talking about they were in the midst of this was last summer, they were in the midst of 120 days in a row of 100 plus heat. We were like, That's just insane. We can't imagine something like that. I mean, the heat index hit 100 for a week here, and everyone was dying. Like, uh, but yeah, I mean, thanks for taking the time out for camping. The last part that we have is the kitchen table. So, if there's any trainings you want to shout out, you talked a little bit about some of the trainings that you guys have upcoming. Um, but any people, trainings, anything you want to hit on a little bit more with the last few minutes we have, uh, the rest of the time is yours.

SPEAKER_00 52:11

Y'all, these big conferences are super awesome. Some of them aren't affordable to some of the younger guys. Find some of the local conferences in your region, some of the local classes, right? There's a conference there, or not conference, there's a truck and engine kind of double weekend deal coming up in Mississippi. Um, you know, this this next weekend is the truck half, and then later this fall is the live fire engine half. They have a 10-story hotel from one of the casinos that is theirs. And you're not, you know, you're not gonna see that nationally, but it's up. It's uh I'm trying to remember if it Mississippi mayhem fools is who's doing it, you know. That that opportunities like that, you know, there's play there's opportunities like that all across the country that don't get pushed out all the time. Go looking for them. Yeah, you know, where else are you gonna get a 10-story hotel with a working standpipe system to do live fire in?

unknown 53:10

That's pretty cool.

SPEAKER_00 53:11

You know, that that's wild. There's opportunities like that all over the place. You know, I I talked about some of the places we're gonna be this year. You know, I'm not gonna dig too far back into that, but encourage your young guys to get out of the walls, take them with you. If you've got a six-month rookie, be like, hey dude, what are you doing next weekend? Cool, you're going with me. So just encourage, encourage people to encourage people to get outside of the walls, encourage people to get outside of the windows of the department and go see what else there's that areas.

SPEAKER_03 53:44

Absolutely awesome, man. Well, thank you so much for taking the time, dropping some knowledge. Thank you, everybody, for listening. Uh, be sure to keep sending in those questions. You guys have been doing awesome. Keep it up. Uh, Mike Bernard, next guest. The post will be out before this episode, so you guys should have sent in questions already. Um, but look forward to seeing uh what you guys got for us. Thanks again, Logan. Thank you all for watching. And as always, don't be a shit back.

SPEAKER_04 54:10

Yeah, thanks for calling out Logan. Don't be a shit bag.