Into the Fire: Researcher, Firefighters Team Up on Life-Saving Searches

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It's a scene drilled into every firefighter's training. A room blanketed in thick smoke that covers their facemasks like a blindfold. With every step, visibility drops to zero as heat rolls along the ceiling and down the walls. Their gloved hands skim doorways, raspy breaths rattle through regulators. Inside a blazing house, one wrong turn or missed room is the difference between rescue and recovery.

That's the environment firefighters prepare for-and it's the setting for a collaboration between George Washington University Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience John Philbeck and the D.C. Fire and Rescue Squad.

Together, they're tackling one of the most dangerous and least studied problems in firefighting: how to navigate, search and stay oriented in smoke-filled buildings where vision is useless and mistakes are fatal.

"Firefighters are trained to go into burning buildings that are completely filled with smoke-where they're essentially blind-and search for anyone inside," Philbeck said. "It's incredibly dangerous work. And navigating without vision also happens to be in my expertise area."

Philbeck, a vice dean for faculty affairs at the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences (CCAS), has spent his academic career studying how humans perceive and navigate space-how we keep track of distance, direction and turns when visual information is limited or absent. He conducts most of his work in controlled laboratory settings. But after answering a cold call from D.C. Fire Captain Oleg Pelekhaty nearly two years ago, Philbeck is now applying those same research strategies toward guiding rescue workers through enclosed spaces so dark and disorienting that Pelekhaty calls them "an abyss."

Now the team is combining Philbeck's specialty with factors like firefighters' lived experiences, the input of internal experts on everything from architecture to training techniques and even lessons learned from practice runs through a full-scale replica of a D.C. rowhouse floor. Their long-term goal is to fill the gaps in training standards with evidence-based teaching methodologies-and to keep both firefighters and civilians alive.

"We're trying to take information out of the laboratory and into the burning buildings," Pelekhaty said.

Life-or-death strategies

For Philbeck, the partnership began with a random phone call from Pelekhaty, a training expert who has long sought to bolster traditional search-and-rescue instructional approaches.

Nationwide standards for teaching firefighters how to remain oriented in smoke-filled environments are limited-in some cases nonexistent. They often rely on the anecdotal experiences of veterans, explained Jordan Legan, a firefighter with the Seattle Fire Department whose architectural background has helped the team understand floor-plan designs.

"Firefighters are a completely understudied population. The public has an expectation that we show up at a burning building within four to six minutes and know exactly where to look for people trapped inside," Legan said. "We have a limited amount of time with the fire environment so we have to be really good at knowing where to go."

But not everyone's navigation skills are equal, Philbeck said. Even in difficult situations, some people-maybe two-thirds of the population, he estimates-are able to remain oriented for a time. Another third lose track quickly. "It's actually pretty normal not to be able to navigate very well-much less under the kind of extreme stress firefighters face," he said.

In his work, Philbeck examines visual space perception scenarios that tie directly to firefighting training-like how people estimate distance without vision, how accurately they turn angles and how well they can return to a point of origin.

Firefighters can't practice those techniques in an actual hazard setting. But the team built the next best thing-a life-size model of a typical D.C. rowhouse in a warehouse behind Engine Company 24's Northwest headquarters. Based on architectural designs from existing homes, the structure serves as a realistic training environment, complete with doorways, furniture and tight corridors that can be broken down and reconfigured. Sometimes props like tricycles are placed in firefighters' paths to help them quickly disregard irrelevant objects and stay focused on locating victims.

Trainees practice Philbeck's strategies while maneuvering through the course-such as streamlining their route into navigable 90-degree angles or picturing mental floorplans before charging into a smoky house.

While the collaboration is ongoing, Philbeck says he's already seen some "easy wins" among the early takeaways. The team devised a performance score that goes beyond simple stopwatches and covers both speed and thoroughness-how quickly they cleared spaces and how much viable area they actually covered. And reviewing video of their own sessions has helped them improve their performance on subsequent runs.

Pelekhaty hopes the project results in science-based training guidelines that could ultimately improve search operations for firefighters in D.C. and across the country. "If there's something we can do to make firefighters better here, that same thing can be applied in Seattle, in New York, in Chicago and everywhere else," he said.

And Philbeck says he's appreciated the opportunity to translate his insights into action-especially in life-saving situations. "It's been fascinating to see how my research on human navigation plays out in real-world settings," he said. "This is a life-or-death issue for [firefighters] and the people they rescue. I feel so grateful to work with them and to maybe make their jobs a little bit safer."