What Dish Soap Teaches Us About ARFF Readiness and Leadership
Cannon Air Force Base just ran a week of live aircraft fire drills using dish soap instead of foam. Not a typo. Not a budget cut either.
For over a decade, the fire service has been fighting the fallout from PFAS-laden AFFF. Departments have been caught in a real bind: how do you keep crews sharp on live-fire scenarios without burning through the actual extinguishing agent meant for the real emergency?
Cannon's crews found an answer. Dish soap produces the same foam behavior for training reps, and it preserves the real agent for when it's actually needed. This isn't a story about soap. It's a story about how the best ARFF leaders solve resource problems.
The departments getting readiness right aren't the ones with the biggest budgets. They're the ones asking the better question first: what actually needs to be real here, and what doesn't. I see the same pattern in every high-performing public safety organization I work with. Leaders who separate "how we've always done it" from "what the training objective actually requires."
That distinction is worth more than most budget increases. If your department is wrestling with the same readiness-versus-resource tradeoff, that's exactly the kind of decision-making the ARFF Leadership Series is built around.
Curious how your department has handled the AFFF transition. Training workaround, budget reallocation, or something else entirely?
#ARFF #AirportSafety #FireLeadership #PublicSafety #EmergencyManagement #AviationSafety #LeadershipDevelopment
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