Every close call is a warning that showed up early. Nobody got hurt, so it’s tempting to laugh it off, shake it out and move on. That’s the most expensive mistake a crew can make, because the next time it might not be a near miss.

Lucky isn’t the same as safe

When something almost goes wrong and doesn’t, the outcome tricks you. The line burned through but nobody was standing there. The ladder kicked out but the firefighter was already off it. The mask came loose but the room had already vented. Everybody walks away fine, and the brain files it under “no big deal.”

But the conditions that caused it are still there. The same habit, the same gap in the briefing, the same shortcut. The only thing that changed was luck. I’ve been in this service a long time, and I can tell you that luck is not a safety plan. It runs out, and it never tells you when.

The fire service has a habit of measuring safety by injuries. No injuries, no problem. That’s backwards. By the time you’re counting injuries, you’ve already missed every warning that came before them.

Why nobody talks about it

If near misses are so valuable, why don’t we talk about them more? Usually it comes down to pride and fear.

Nobody wants to be the one who admits they lost their footing, missed a step or got turned around. On a lot of crews, owning up to a mistake feels like handing everybody a reason to give you a hard time. So people keep quiet. The story might get told later as a joke, but the lesson never gets pulled out of it.

The mistake I see most is officers who react to a close call by looking for someone to blame. Do that once and you’ll never hear about another one. Your people will still have near misses. They’ll just stop telling you.

How to actually use a close call

A near miss only pays off if you do something with it. That doesn’t take a formal investigation every time. It takes a crew that’s willing to stop, talk about it honestly and change something. When something almost goes wrong, walk through a few simple questions:

• What happened, in plain terms, without softening it?
• What was the plan, and where did reality split off from it?
• What almost happened, and how bad would it have been?
• What are we changing so it doesn’t happen again?

That last question is the one that matters. If the answer is “nothing, we’ll just be more careful,” you didn’t learn anything. Be specific. Change the briefing. Add a step to the setup checklist. Move the staging area. Assign someone to watch the thing that got missed. Then write it down so the next crew gets the lesson without having to earn it the hard way.

Formal near-miss reporting systems exist for a reason, too. When you share a close call beyond your own crew, somebody across the country might avoid the same problem on their training ground. That’s a lesson that costs you nothing and could save them a lot.

Instructors set the tone

On the training ground, this falls on us. A live-fire evolution is one of the few places where we create the hazard on purpose, and that means every close call during a burn deserves our full attention. If a crew gets caught out of position, if a line gets kinked at the wrong moment, if the fire grows faster than we planned, we stop and figure out why before we light it again.

Students watch how we handle our own mistakes. When an instructor says out loud, “I missed that, and here’s what I’m doing differently,” it gives everybody else permission to do the same. That’s how you build a crew that reports problems instead of hiding them. Credibility doesn’t come from never making mistakes. It comes from owning them.

Make it safe to speak up. Thank the person who brings a close call forward, even if it’s embarrassing. Especially if it’s embarrassing. The firefighter who tells you about the thing that almost happened is doing the crew a favor.

The bottom line

A near miss is the cheapest lesson this job will ever offer you. It costs a scare and a few minutes of honest conversation. Ignore it, and you’ll likely pay full price later. Talk about it, fix what caused it and share what you learned. The goal isn’t to look like a crew that never has close calls. The goal is to be a crew that never has the same one twice.

Stay safe, and train like it matters.

Eric Makowski