Most of what we train on is what we already do every week. That feels productive, and it is comfortable. But the calls that hurt firefighters are rarely the ones we run every shift. They’re the ones we see once in a career and wish we’d practiced more.

Frequency isn’t the same as risk

I’ve been in this service a long time, and I’ve noticed something about how training calendars get built. We drill on what’s in front of us. Medical calls, alarm activations, routine fires. Those deserve attention, and nobody is saying stop.

The problem is that the high-volume calls train themselves. You run them so often that the reps pile up whether you plan for them or not. The rare, high-consequence calls never get those reps. A hazmat release, a mayday, a structural collapse, an aircraft on the ground with fuel running. When one of those comes in, there’s no muscle memory to fall back on. There’s only whatever you practiced, and if the answer is nothing, you’re making it up under the worst conditions possible.

That’s the gap that gets people hurt. Not a lack of courage. A lack of reps on the things that don’t happen often enough to teach us on their own.

Know which calls belong on your list

Every department, every airport and every crew has a different list, and the first step is being honest about yours. Sit down with your officers and ask a simple question: what call would we be least ready for tomorrow morning? The answers usually come quickly. People know where the soft spots are. They just don’t say it out loud until someone asks.

Here’s what I’d look at when you build that list:

• Calls where a mistake in the first few minutes can’t be undone
• Calls with specialized equipment the crew rarely touches
• Calls that require coordination with agencies you don’t work with every day
• Calls your newest people have never seen, even once

If something checks more than one of those boxes, it belongs on the training calendar on purpose, not whenever there’s leftover time.

Make the rare call feel familiar

You can’t make a rare event common. What you can do is make it familiar, so the crew isn’t meeting it for the first time on the real call.

That doesn’t always mean a full-scale exercise. Those are valuable, but they take time and money, and they happen once in a while at best. In between, use smaller tools. A tabletop walk-through at the kitchen table. Pulling the specialized equipment off the rig and having every member set it up and break it down. Talking through the first five minutes of a scenario at the start of shift. Reviewing your plan for that one hazard in your district that everybody knows about and nobody discusses.

The goal is decision-making as much as hands-on skill. On a rare call, the hardest part is often knowing what to do first. When a crew has talked through it a dozen times, that first decision comes faster and cleaner. They’ve already had the argument at the table instead of on the scene.

And keep the reps coming. A skill you practiced once two years ago is barely a skill. Rare calls need regular refreshers precisely because the real thing won’t refresh it for you.

Officers set the tone

None of this happens if the company officer treats it as optional. Crews follow their officer’s lead. If the officer rolls their eyes at a hazmat refresher or a mayday drill, so will everyone else. If the officer treats it like it matters, the crew will too.

I’d also say this to officers: don’t wait for the training division to schedule it. You know your crew, your district and your weak spots better than anyone. A half hour of focused work on a low-frequency call, done right, is worth more than an afternoon of going through the motions on something everyone already knows.

The bottom line

The calls you run every day will keep you sharp on the calls you run every day. They won’t prepare you for the one that only comes once. Figure out which rare, high-consequence calls your crew is least ready for, put them on the calendar on purpose, and keep coming back to them. When that call finally drops, you want your people thinking, “We’ve done this before,” not “What do we do now?”

Stay safe, and train like it matters.

Eric Makowski