Examine case studies and lessons learned from the chief’s personal experiences in almost 30 years of crawling down hallways on the Chicago (IL) Fire Department. Each incident is brought to life through exciting pictures and video. Each story reinforces a powerful lesson learned, including risk management, reading smoke, building construction and collapse, fireground tactics, flashover, communications and accountability, commanding the Mayday, and RIT rescue. This course is geared to the seasoned veteran as well as the new recruit. The goal is to prevent firefighter deaths through safer and more effective fireground tactics.

Upon completion of this course, students will:

• Students should have better ability to read smoke conditions in formulating his/her size-up
• The students ability to understand collapse probabilities based on construction type and fire conditions should be enhanced
• Students should have an increased ability to formulate proper Risk Management decisions on the fireground
• To enhance students knowledge of coordinated fireground tactics

Steve Chikerotis is a 29-year member of the Chicago (IL) Fire Department, where he is a battalion chief of the 22nd Battalion. He has also served as assistant director of training and chief of fire academy operations. A fire service instructor for more than 20 years, he has taught classes nationally. He is the author of Firefighters from the Heart (Thomson Delmar, 2006) and has had articles published in fire service journals. He has worked on dozens of major motion pictures including Backdraft.