## 3 Communication Problems and Issues
### Monitoring and Overload  
An important role for radio communication is to support coordination mechanisms. The IC and the engineer keep a table with the readings of the remaining air supply for the team, and contact the attacking team at fixed intervals to update the information. The team also contacts the commander to inform him of relevant events, such as entering a room or changing the movement direction. In the following excerpt, an IC and a fire chief (FC), who may also take the role of the IC, report from this practice. The interview is directed by another researcher (R).  
**IC:** \"(...) we are the leadership here; our job is to observe from outside, so to say, what the teams are doing inside, and I can't tell what's going on in there because I've lost my sight (radio contact). The only thing I can see is if they are still pulling the hose after themselves, so if the hose is still moving.\"  
**R:** \"Just so that we understand each other: what is the incident commander taught to use as indicators and tools in order to get a picture of what is going on? He can use radio communication and he can use sketches, right?\"  
**FC:** \"The normal case is really voice communication. He can use his writing pad, but he can only use that to put down what he sees from a building: how many apartments there are per floor, how a house is divided up inside, right apartment, left apartment, front to back. Then he gets the information, 'we're going into the apartment on the right.' And then he doesn't hear anything for a while. Every once in a while he'll hear breathing. When he hears 'we've got something' or something like that, those are things that are communicated, 'person found,' that would be a typical point of communication, 'I found something.' At that point they give an immediate response 'I have something, I'm bringing someone out.' And then he responds 'yeah, get him out.' That would be the normal command from the incident commander and I would get everything ready down below, emergency services, getting people in position in the stairwell to be able to start resuscitation as soon as possible.\"  
The use of radio was often perceived as a disturbance by the members of the searching teams. The flow of information during a reconnaissance was kept small consequently, and was reduced to brief coordination information or requests of reports from the IC on the outside of the building. At some points, for instance in situations such as the one depicted in Figure 2, even this communication can be forgotten or obviated by a searching team, creating diverging perceptions of the situation on both sides:  
**FC:** \"There is always what is supposed to happen and what actually happens. Normally, every change in the situation should be communicated, every significant piece of information should be told to the incident commander. Except no fire department actually does that, and the Cologne fire department doesn't do that either, because it's just annoying and stressful. He's got a job to do, he has things to do in front of him. It's a job on top of his other tasks, he has to push the button, control his breathing to speak, it limits his actions. And his goal is generally like, well, when it's just a subterranean burn then it doesn't matter, but when he's saving somebody, he just doesn't have the time to talk about what he's doing. They go in there and look for people who are fighting for their lives right now.\"  
**Figure 2.** The various water hoses shown in this image caused confusion in the team during a trial mission with occluded breathing masks. The firefighters did not respond to requests of the IC while trying to find out which of the hoses was the right one to follow.