Every month, Don Van Holt posted a photograph of a real fire scene and asked a simple question: What do you see?
Firefighters from across the country — rookies and chiefs, engine men and truck men — wrote in with their tactical assessments. What unfolded was something remarkable: a peer learning community, built from photographs and hard-won experience, at a time before anyone had a name for that kind of thing.
“I realize that you can only get so much information from a photo without actually being there, but let’s give it a try.” — Don Van Holt, October 20, 1998
In October 1998, Don Van Holt was scanning an old photograph from his friend Alex Donchin — a top-floor fire in a 4-story wood frame building in Brooklyn — and had an idea. He posted it on the NYFD.com message board and asked members to weigh in on what they saw.
The response was immediate. Lieutenants, rookies, chiefs, and firefighters from departments they'd never heard of all piled in with observations about apparatus positioning, ventilation, life hazard, exposure protection, and building construction. Within days, the message board was alive with the kind of detailed tactical discussion that normally only happened around the kitchen table in a firehouse.
By the third scenario — an old law tenement (brownstone) — the page drew 73 responses. Firefighters from Chile wrote in. Young probies thanked the veterans. Veterans learned from questions they'd never thought to ask. It was the most popular thing on the site, and it was all Don’s idea.
The concept was simple, the execution was pure Don: a photograph, a question, and an open door. What came through that door was a generation of firefighters helping each other get better at the job.
“This is a great idea. It’s a great way to learn the essentials of size-up!”
Three days after Don posted the first scenario, his daughter Tracy wrote in with her own response. She was one of 25 people who replied to that first photo — right there in the community her father built.
The original. A top-floor fire in a 4-story wood frame building — the kind of working fire FDNY companies saw regularly in Brooklyn. Don posted the photo on October 20, 1998. Within hours the first responses came in. The thread ran for days.
Photographs by Alex Donchin, taken in Brooklyn in the 1970s. A six-story new law tenement fully involved. By now, the community knew what was coming each month and came ready.
The old law tenement — the brownstone — is the most iconic building type in New York City firefighting. This scenario drew 73 responses, the most of any month. Clearly, this building type struck a nerve.
The final scenario. By 1999, Don had added password protection to keep the quality of responses high. He shared a historic black-and-white photograph from 1969. John T. Vigiano himself weighed in.
Rookies and veterans. Engine men and truck men. Firefighters from Brooklyn, from Toronto, from Chile. All learning from one another around a photograph — exactly the way they did around the kitchen table, except the kitchen was the whole world.
Don started something in 1998 that was ahead of its time: peer-based, photo-driven, community-powered fire tactics training. Today, that idea has a natural home as a mobile app — putting a fire scene photo in every firefighter’s pocket and asking the same question Don asked twenty-six years ago:
“What do you see?”
A modern Size-Up app could bring Don’s vision to an entirely new generation of firefighters — with expert commentary, continuing education credits, and a community that honors the tradition he started here.
Coming soon — in honor of Don Van Holt, Ladder Company 108