When the Air Runs Out: Buildings, Bottle Brigades, and the Worst Day of a Civilian’s Life Somewhere in your city, there is a building someone is sleeping in tonight. It could be a 22-story residential tower, a 900,000-square-foot distribution warehouse, or a big-box retail center the size of four city blocks laid on its side. […]
Read MoreWhen Albuquerque Fire Rescue set out to rebuild its high-rise SOG, the department faced a choice that every fire service leader eventually confronts: do the work yourself, or trust your people to do it better. Deputy Chief Clint Anderson chose the latter — and the result was one of the most operationally rigorous high-rise programs […]
Read MoreWhen a building burns, the community looks to its leaders and asks a single, fundamental question: did you do everything in your power to keep people safe? For the occupants who could not escape and the firefighters who went in after them, that question is not rhetorical. It is the foundation of a legal and […]
Read MoreAlbuquerque (NM) Fire Rescue Driver Matthew Klosterman — AFR’s 2025 Firefighter of the Year and chair of the department’s Pre-Incident Planning Committee — contributed a feature article to the FAC Supplement documenting how AFR rebuilt their high-rise program from the ground up. AFR serves a city with 50 high-rise buildings. Their high-rise SOG hadn’t […]
Read More