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In most instances, the initial RIT responsibilities will fall upon the two support personnel arriving on the initial unit as required by the OSHA two-in, two-out regulation and will later be transferred to a second or third due company. We know through training scenarios and case studies that in most cases a firefighter rescue and removal is going to be more manpower intensive than utilizing just two standby personnel, especially when they are generally involved in other operations and cannot commit themselves entirely to listening for a fire fighter in distress. To address this type of operation, most Departments currently dispatch a minimum of one additional engine or truck company, not assigned to the initial alarm. This dispatch gets a minimum of four personnel on the incident scene to at least be able to initiate a rescue while other resources are assembled or dispatched. However, the one area of this process that we may have neglected to consider is the amount of time that it takes for the assigned RIT company to arrive on scene after the arrival of the initial engine and the commencement of interior fire fighting operations.

A large number of fire fighter fatalities occur at the type of fire that we respond to the most often, the single-family residential. Obviously, we have very little control over when the events that kill a fire fighter (ex. flashover and collapse) occur. Some of these events take place within minutes of placing the crews on the interior. In at least one residential incident, it is believed the fire fighter fatality occurred as early as four minutes following the arrival of the first due engine. In some cases, even having a capable standby RIT on scene, the outcome would still not be any different.

By taking a casual look at 40 separate incidents where fire fighters were killed in residential dwellings between 1995 and 2001 (for which either a NIOSH or NFPA report was available), the average time that either a MAYDAY occurred or there was an indication that a firefighter was in trouble was approximately ten minutes. This time was calculated following the arrival of the initial unit on scene. In some of these cases, a RIT was on scene and fatalities still occurred; however, at some of the incidents where fatalities occurred other distressed fire fighters were rescued and survived due to the RIT. In other situations, a RIT was not established and, therefore, on-scene resources had to be gathered to attempt a rescue. This then limited the personnel available for suppression and other necessary fireground activities. Still in other cases, a considerable amount of time, as much as ten minutes, passed before anyone on the fireground even realized that there was a problem.

Although it is probably every Department's goal to have the RIT established as early into the incident as possible, I would think that anything over ten minutes may be too little too late if we are expecting the on scene arrival of the first due company in under 5 minutes (1 minute turnout time, 4 minutes response) under NFPA 1710. For a large Department, the amount of time it takes for the RIT unit to arrive may be minimal, but in many smaller Departments and volunteer departments, the arrival of the RIT or mutual aid company can take considerably longer, sometimes exceeding fifteen to twenty minutes. Even with all of the steps we have taken to speed up the fire fighter rescue process, there is obviously no way that we can be effective if the RIT hasn't arrived on scene prior to something going wrong. Even in the most well-designed system, there will continue to be instances where there will be a need for RIT prior to their arrival, yet there also has to be a set response time and anything longer is simply unacceptable. In the next revision of NFPA 1710 or possibly in an entirely separate standard dealing specifically with rapid intervention, maybe we should also consider the deployment times of Rapid Intervention Teams to ensure that we are deploying the resources that protect us, as well as those that we think we need to protect our customers, in a timely fashion.

Nick Sohyda is a career firefighter with the Mt. Lebanon Fire Department, PA and an Adjunct Instructor with the Pennsylvania State Fire Academy and Rapid Intervention Training Associates.