Unit 3

Barriers to Situation Awareness

Introduction & Instructions

Uncontrolled barriers create inaccurate perceptions.

Instructions:

Review the presentation and pages from the student manual.
Review all of the videos, read the drop downs and complete all of the knowledge reviews before moving on to the next unit.

Objectives

Identify hazardous attitude barriers and their impacts on situation awareness.

Identify stress reaction barriers and their impacts on situation awareness.

Agree that firefighters have a responsibility to minimize barriers.

L-180_Unit3_BarriersToSA

L-180 SW Unit 3.pdf

Barriers

The wildland fire environment can present many barriers that we must face in order to do our job safely and efficiently.

These barriers can be broken up into two categories: Physical and Internal.

Physical barriers represent anything that can physically come in the way of firefighters completing their task or objective.

Internal Barriers are not caused by the physical work environment. It’s all about you! We can influence and change internal barriers to a much greater extent than we can external barriers.

Internal barriers affect our perceptions, our ability to gather information, and the way we communicate. In other words, barriers degrade our situation awareness and impair our decision making abilities.

Just as we have work to mitigate physical barriers, we have a professional responsibility to mitigate internal barriers.

Internal barriers come in two forms:

Attitudes
Stress

We'll look closer at each of these in the next sections.

Attitudes

Attitudes come from your own experiences, and the experiences of others (family, friends, media, school, co workers, etc.). What happened to someone else can affect your attitude about something or someone.

Attitudes can be very powerful because they cause you to establish a perception prior to gathering more information.

Attitudes tend to filter out or change the relative weight of new information. This weighing isn’t right or wrong, just a fact of life.

Hazardous Attitudes “Hazardous Attitudes,” a term coined by the aviation community, describes attitudes that often lead to accidents. These are attitudes that are particularly destructive to effective communication and good situation awareness.

Invulnerability: “That would never happen to us.”
Anti-authority: “Those morons, they don't know anything!”
Impulsiveness: “What the heck! Let’s just do it.”
Macho (competitive): “We’ll show them how the pros do it.”
Resignation: “What’s the point? It will never happen anyway.”
Complacency (casualness): “We’ve done this so many times that we could do it our sleep.”
Escalation of commitment—target fixation: “We almost have it whipped; we can’t quit now.”
Other attitudes: Sexist, racist, agency bias, and so on.

Stress

Stress is the term for an individuals response to demands placed on them. We respond to these demands in three stages.

Alarm reaction—in this stage the body recognizes the stressor and prepares for a fight or flight response. Stress causes physical, mental, and behavioral reactions.
Resistance—in this stage the body repairs any damage and may adapt to some stressors such as heat, hard work, or worry. During our lifetime we cycle through these first two stages on a daily basis.
Exhaustion—when a stressor continues for a long duration, it will cause the body to remain in a constant state of readiness. Eventually you will be unable to keep up with the adrenaline and awareness demand, leading to exhaustion.

The Stress Curve

Some stress is good. Performance and awareness improve with moderate amounts of stress; however, performance and awareness both decrease rapidly with high amounts of stress.

However, complacency can show up at the low end of the stress curve and at the extreme high end of the stress curve information overload or task saturation can begin.

In an effort to control the overload of information or task saturation firefighters will cut off the flow of information into the Situation Awareness cycle. This is often referred to as "tunnel vision."

Types of Stress

There are two types of stress:

Background or non-environmental stress that stems from what is happening outside the workplace—at home or in one’s personal life.
Duty or environmental stress that occurs due to task assignment or the work environment.

Cumulative Stress

Stress is cumulative—background or non-environmental stress provides an on-going baseline level of stress. Stress overload can occur even with moderate amounts of duty stress if the level of background stress is high.

There are many things that cause stress on the job. Some are within your control; most are not.

Stress Reactions

Everyone reacts to stress differently. These reactions are the root cause of the errors that impact communication and situation awareness. There are physical, mental, and behavioral reactions. Knowing your individual stress reactions is the second step toward being able to operate effectively under stress.

Physical

Heart rate increase
Respiration rate increase
Profuse sweating
Muscle tremors or twitches
Dehydration
Nausea

Mental

Disordered/confused thinking
Loss of orientation to time and place
Difficulty in accessing long term memory
Changing your beliefs to match your actions
Transformation of detail or expectation error (seeing what you expect or want to see, instead of what is actually happening)
Tunnel vision (decreased awareness)

Behavioral

Irritability or emotional outbursts
Nervousness or erratic movements
Change in usual communication patterns (excessive use of humor or excessive talking or becoming non communicative)
Regression or action tunneling (reverting to minor lower level tasks or freezing up)
Panic

Controlling Stress

The first step toward developing controls to manage stress is to know the causes of stress.

The second step is to know how you react under stress. You must learn how to deal with your specific stress reaction tendencies.

As a firefighter, it is certain you will encounter stress. It is important that you plan for it. One method to do this is to pre-identify situations where you know the stress levels will be high so you can be prepared when encountering those situations.

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