ALIVE
Following the Governors Island experiment, the Fire Department had to find a convincing way to publicize their conclusions. This task was complicated by the fact that the results from the experiment, particularly the conclusion that external water from the floor below may be the most effective way to first apply water to the fire, were unintuitive to many firefighters. As Chicago Fire Department Battalion Chief Peter Van Dorpe explained during an NIST seminar about the experiment:
"It's a viable tactic when the conditions call for it. And that's why I love this stuff; getting the science to the street, because if you tried to argue these concepts without the science that these guys provide to us, no one will give you the time of day."
--Peter Van Dorpe, Examining Fire Fighting Tactics
The question then, was how to communicate that science to fire departments across the country, starting with the FDNY, which was still looking for concrete answers on how to avoid another Vandalia Avenue. The solution to that dilemma began at the experiment itself. FDNY Battalion Chief Jerry Tracy, at the same seminar, explained:
"The FDNY is a tough nut, a hard shell. We're used to fighting fires one way for a long long time. For us, this whole project was bridging the gap between science and the art of firefighting. ... To say we have 11,500 firefighters, that's 11,500 opinions...
"The challenge is to train, share, and have the message delivered by credible people. ... All the firefighters that we brought out to Governors Island, we didn't just hire anybody. No, we made sure that every firefighter that was handpicked to join that project were firefighters with credibility in the field. ... They came with skepticism, and that was ok, because we knew at the end of that project, we made believers out of every one of them."
--Jerry Tracy, Examining Fire Fighting Tactics
Thus, the first step in widely publicizing the results of the experiment was to pick the right firefighters to participate. Tracy doesn't explain in the seminar what constituted "credibility in the field," but I imagine that an effort was made to source firefighters from fire companies located across the city, rather than from a few specific companies.
However, Governors Island was just one of many firefighting experiments conducted over the years, and the issue of keeping firefighting practice up-to-date with firefighting science was bigger than just this study. The Fire Research Group at Brooklyn Poly, which by this time had merged with NYU, wanted to create a system that could be used as part of continuing education for firefighters that would be convenient enough to be used often without requiring firefighters to travel to conferences or seminars, and flexible enough to be updated any time new data from a new study became available. Their solution was a software platform called Advanced Learning through Integrated Visual Environments (ALIVE), a series of interactive training modules which could be accessed online.
To measure the efficacy of the ALIVE system, the NYU Fire Research Group tested it against conventional firefighter training techniques in a study led by Dr. Richard Wener, a professor of Environmental Psychology at NYU Tandon.
The study begins by noting that "In too many instances, dissemination and training is limited or may even be absent due to resource constraints or an institutional reluctance to change" (Wener et al. 60). This institutional reluctance to change was mentioned by Tracy in the NIST seminar and it is a perennial problem for fire departments looking to update their operating practices. One article published in Firefighter Nation, a firefighting trade magazine, describes fire departments as having deeply rooted cultures and traditions that firefighters revere to the point of introducing cognitive biases that prevent them from incorporating new policies and procedures. The article describes how "Change is often met with apathy in our service, as the slogan goes: Hundreds of years of tradition unimpeded by progress." An example cited by the article is a paper published by two firefighter trainers who claim that peer pressure is the main reason why firefighters do not regularly participate in their survival training (Rothmeier). The hope for the ALIVE program was that by making firefighter training more accesible, fire departments would be able to overcome institutional barriers and provide up-to-date training at a low cost.
To test the ALIVE system, Wener and other researchers recruited firefighters from New York City, Chicago, and Bloomington. These firefighters were broken into groups which were given either standard classroom training or ALIVE training, followed by a test to compare information retention rates. For the three topics tested, across all three fire departments, ALIVE performed better than conventional classroom training.
It has been difficult to assess the long term impact of ALIVE due to limited secondary source coverage. Other than brief mentions in trade magazines, most of the coverage has come from interviews with and articles written by lead members of the NYU Fire Research Group. I have not been able to find in depth discussion of the ALIVE system from independent sources.
