A day in the life of a volunteer incident commander: Errors, pressures and mitigating strategies

To meet an identified gap in the literature this paper investigates the tasks that a volunteer incident commander needs to carry out during an incident, the errors that can be made and the way that errors are managed. In addition, pressure from goal seduction and situation aversion were also examined. Volunteer incident commanders participated in a two-part interview consisting of a critical decision method interview and discussions about a hierarchical task analysis constructed by the authors. A SHERPA analysis was conducted to further identify potential errors. The results identified the key tasks, errors with extreme risk, pressures from strong situations and mitigating strategies for errors and pressures. The errors and pressures provide a basic set of issues that need to be managed by both volunteer incident commanders and fire agencies. The mitigating strategies identified here suggest some ways that this can be done.

► The study identified the key tasks of a volunteer incident commander.
► Errors with extreme risk hazard could occur in nine of these tasks.
►  Wanting to achieve goals can exert too much pressure on decisions.
► Not wanting to be in an uncomfortable situation also influenced decisions.
►  Incident commanders actively sought to manage errors and pressures.