Are You Taking Care of Your Own?

Download LODD preplan form . 

We pre-plan buildings, practice accountability, embrace incident command, and train for RIT-yet we're probably not as prepared as we should be with regard to our own personnel. Aside from your department's membership application form-which probably hasn't seen the light of day since it was accepted, or your accountability tags-how much information do you really have on each of your firefighters? Do you think it's sufficient in the case of a life-threatening injury? How about a tragedy such as a line-of-duty death? If you're answering these few simple questions with a "no", then you're not alone!

Last year, ABBET-RIT hosted the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation (NFFF) "Taking Care of Our Own" program in October and November. If you had the opportunity to attend the program, then you walked out with a lot of questions and concerns about your individual departments' ability to handle a line-of-duty-death. In fact, it is an overwhelming event that each of us hopes that we never have to personally face, but we have to realize that we need to be prepared for it now-we've got to start "pre-planning our personnel" to ensure that we can provide the best support to their families-as well as to our own department!

ABBET-RIT has organized a new committee to help educate and support our membership in gathering important information and preparing for the inevitable-the LODD. This committee is very interested in hearing from you to ensure that we are providing the necessary support.

During the meeting at Etna, the committee presented to the attending members on the various levels of support that it could potentially provide--which can be broken down into three levels: basic, medium, and high.

Basic Level Support

1. Continue hosting "Taking Care of Our Own" classes to help educate line officers
2. Develop LODD personnel pre-plan forms for departments to use in gathering the correct information
3. Develop basic non-LODD funeral policy and procedures that can be adapted by each department

1. Develop LODD funeral contingency plans
2. Create an Honor Guard that would support member departments' funeral needs

1. Work with the NFFF in becoming part of the state-level LODD response team