 For 50 years, our creed has remained the same. Fight fire aggressively, having provided for safety first. You should recognize this as the 10th fire order. In this module, we're going to look at the history of the standard fire orders. Dr. Jennifer Ziegler is a professor of communications at Valprasio University in Indiana. She recently wrote a paper titled The Genealogy of the 10 Standard Orders. A summary is provided in your student workbook. Listen closely as Dr. Ziegler describes her research into our most fundamental principle. I originally got interested in doing this kind of project when in the mid-90s, I had recently read Norman McLean's book on the man-gulch fire. It's called Young Man in Fire. And I was living in Colorado at the time. And about that time, the South Canyon fire happened. And that was a fatal fire that killed 14 firefighters near Glenwood Springs. And I had read the accident investigation report for that fire. And I noticed that in the report, there was something called the standard fire orders that were being cited as a cause of the tragedy. And I thought to myself, huh, I wonder what that list is. And I don't remember hearing about that when I read about man-gulch. So I became really curious from an organizational communication point of view to me that suggested that if it's OK to make an argument that people died because they broke the rules, then that must be a very strong culture. And that list must be very important in that culture. Everybody must know what it means. And I became really curious about how do you manage to create a list that comes to exert that much control? So I began digging a little bit into just learning about the fire orders as a list in general. And I actually found that they were, at about that time, the subject of a lot of controversy, which kind of surprised me. In the 1950s, the list called the Fire Orders was created in response to public pressure from a fire called the Inaha Fire in California. The then chief of the Forest Service commissioned a task force to study. And it actually has a very long title. They went back and they looked at 20 years of tragedy fires to try to figure out what those fires might have had in common. And in particular, they focused on the five worst fires that killed 10 or more people at once. And they found that those five fires had about 11 things in common. And the task force actually called them sins of omission that firefighters who otherwise knew what to do simply forgot in a critical emergency. So in a sense, that is compatible with the previous storytelling mode of praise and blame. By calling those firefighters sinners, the task force was kind of blaming them for faulty actions. So the task force wanted to develop a tool that could help firefighters to remember or to not forget what they knew in the time of an emergency. But they had a little bit of a problem is that they couldn't really put their finger on what the heroes were doing right. For example, the task force, in addition to looking at the tragedy fires, they also looked at successful near miss situations. So fires that really could have become critical, but somebody saved the day. The task force decided that those fires were successful because some coolhead, they literally called them some coolhead, sized up a change in local fire behavior in time to get them into safety. You can tell from that explanation, they really didn't know how that worked. It was sort of a personal virtue, seemingly unconscious. And so the task force had a sense of what the sinners did wrong. In fact, they had a whole list of 11 things. And they had an outcome that they knew that the heroes or the coolheads did right. They kept the fire small. They kept people safe. So what they did was they took the list of sins of omission and kind of flipped them around and said, well, these 11 things must have been what the heroes were doing right. The task force came up with one list, which they spelled out the mnemonic fire scalds. But Chief McArdle, actually, he kind of monkeyed with that list a little bit. He deleted one thing. He combined a couple of them. And he added one important fire order at the bottom. And this is a very well-known fire order. Fight fire aggressively, but provide for safety first. And if you think about it, that fire order captures the two simultaneous virtues that those coolheads were somehow able to do correctly. Fight fire aggressively keeps the fire small. Provide for safety first keeps people safe. And so that's why I say it's a kind of personal taskbook, because if you can come to internalize all of the other nine items, you can literally become the 10th fire order. You can literally become one of the coolheads who automatically knows how to do both at once. And really, in a sense, doesn't even need the list anymore. By the 1980s, the fire orders had migrated from an individual list to an organizational one. And specifically, they became a kind of employee-employer contract, where the fire orders were understood as duties that firefighters had to follow. And they were specifically reorganized in 1987 to make them easier to memorize. And they were revised to spell the mnemonic fire orders. And during that time, in that kind of second era of the fire orders, the fire orders shifted from a list of personal virtues that an individual firefighter came to embody to a set of duties that the firefighter owed to the fire organization. So in a sense, that second list was a kind of employee-employer contract. And you started to see particular fires being evaluated using the fire orders. So for example, it became possible in the late 1980s, early 90s, to actually violate the fire orders, to break them. That language was not necessarily used in the 50s when they were originally created. In 1990, the investigation into the fatal dudefire in Arizona was one of the first accident investigations to actually use the fire orders as a checklist to try to figure out what went wrong on the fire. And from what I've seen, that kind of set the standard for how investigations were done throughout the 1990s. Investigation teams would write the story of a fire and then kind of filter it through the fire orders and find instances where this or that fire order was not followed on an assignment at some given time. Perhaps even in a way that led to the tragedy that they're there to investigate. That's when they became kind of controversial. And there were opinions on both sides that one group thought they're hard and fast rules. They're called orders for a reason. And another group thought, well, no, they're really just guidelines for you to use in your work and exercise individual judgment. So it's interesting that in 2002, there was kind of a proposal to let's reclaim the original intent of the fire orders as a systematic tool. I hesitate to say checklist, but a systematic set of steps that you would take on a fire to ensure a safety. So we have, in a sense, remembered the original intent of the fire orders in a way that resonates with contemporary discourses of risk management. And if you look at the way that last fire order has been changed from fight fire aggressively but provide for safety first to fight fire aggressively, having provided for safety first, there is a sense that the first nine fire orders are intended to kind of create safety. And by the time you get to the 10th fire order, you've kind of earned an organizational permission to fight the fire aggressively. So if you think about it, now we have the same list in the very same order as we did in 1957. But in 1957, the fire orders were a group tool that could help exert control over the individual. But now we talk about the fire orders as a tool that an individual can use to question the potentially irrational decision of the group. Now that you've been given more of a background on the standard firefighting orders, let's go to the student workbook and complete the exercise. A link to the article written by Dr. Ziegler has been included in the student workbook.