Abstract
Portal experiences are said to be those potentially life threatening experiences that enhance emergency workers’ appreciation of risk and transform their attitudes to safety. This research examines the frequency and impact of threat experiences on the risk perception and attitudes to safety of volunteer fire fighters. Results show that life threatening experiences are common among volunteer fire fighters with over half the sample reporting such incidents. Those fire fighters who had had a threat experience reported a significant change in their approach to safety on the fire ground and identified significantly more risks in response to fire ground scenarios and were significantly more likely to identify human error and instability in a situation as risks, than those who had not had a risk experience. Results support the notion that portal experiences do enhance fire fighters perception of risk. It is suggested that the mechanism for this change is via an “affect heuristic” rather than rational cognitive analysis. It is recommended that fire agencies improve their incident reporting systems in order to gain training advantage from fire fighters’ portal experiences.
