Standard Practice
Your SOGs should match your staffing. Most borrowed ones don’t.
Standard operating guidelines for fire departments under 60 members, built from NFPA and CFAI public language and adapted to the crew you actually put on the street.
The binder problem
Here’s how most small departments get a policy manual. The chief emails a neighboring chief and asks for their SOGs. A Word file comes back. Find and replace swaps the department name, it goes in a binder, and nobody opens it again.
That binder was written for a different department. Different staffing, different apparatus, different response model. It might say four-person engine companies when you run two. It might reference a rescue you don’t own.
None of that matters until it does. Then it’s an injury investigation, a state inspection, or a plaintiff’s attorney holding up your own written policy and asking why you didn’t follow it. A borrowed SOG that doesn’t match your staffing is worse than no SOG at all, because now the gap is documented.
What you get
- 45-plus standard operating guidelines written from public standards. Every one cites its source by number, so you can show your board exactly where the language came from.
- Staffing adaptation. You enter your roster count, your apparatus, and your response model once. Documents come back written to those numbers, with a plain-language note on every line that changed and why.
- Revision tracking. When NFPA publishes a new edition, you get an email that names which of your documents it touches and how badly. No more finding out three years late.
- Word and PDF export. Adopt them, sign them, put them in the binder.
Source standards include NFPA 1500, NFPA 1521, NFPA 1561, NFPA 1407, NFPA 1710, NFPA 1720, and the CPSE Fire and Emergency Service Self-Assessment Manual.
Start with three, free
Emergency Scene Accountability, Rapid Intervention Crew, and Vehicle Fire Response. Complete documents, not samples with the good parts cut out. Read them, adopt them, and decide for yourself whether the rest is worth paying for.
Founding departments
The full library ships in 60 days. The first 25 departments to sign on get the first year at half price and lock that rate for as long as they stay subscribed.
Who’s behind this
Jamie Jent. Twenty-nine years in the fire service, Chief Fire Officer through CPSE, Professional Emergency Manager, Pro Board Health and Safety Officer under NFPA 1521, and a Blue Card train-the-trainer. He writes for Fire Engineering and Firefighter Nation.
Every document here is built from published standards. Nothing comes from any department’s internal files.
Also from Command & Consequence
ProbieTrack. Training records for probationary firefighters. Daily observation reports, phase sign-offs, and the export that goes in the personnel file.