Tactics Tuesday: Read the Smoke

Through the poorly written smoke I read CUT A HOLE! With the advances in PPE sure we can push in with out proper ventilation and maybe be successful. But if we are not and conditions get really bad, it just makes it that much harder to cut the hole and interior crews are probably now in trouble.
Without getting into to much detail I have seen the results of cutting a hole from the inside (read laying flat on the floor with fire on top of us, there was a bad event happening) and go back to tenable conditions.

This is why a walk around of the structure is so important. By actually reading the smoke you can make an educated guess about a few things.
1) There is fire in the attic. Look at the smoke coming from the A side gable vent. It is pressurized, white/light gray. Don’t be fooled by the pressurized smoke though. You have to compare the openings. This would be very concerning if you had the same pressurized volume coming from the garage area. That would indicate a hot well delveloped fire.
2) Thick dark smoke in the garge area that is not pressurized. This lets me know that without a walkaround that there is fire in the back side of the structure and not directly next to a heat source.

3)Wind is playing an important role in this fire as it is masking the true location (again without a walk around).
In the video when the camera man gets a partial walk around complete and you see the actual location of the fire and it has vented. We know now that we have interior exposure problems. The fire has left the fire room and moved else where. With the smoke moving from a rear of the structure into the front yard this is actually playing in our benifit and may aid in the fire not spreading from the B to D path. With the smoke conditions not changing to drastically during the length of the video, this would be a offensive operation. Vertical ventilation would be up to the local agency and the mind set of the IC since the fire has already self vented.