Look, all we ever want to do is run into a burning building. Firefighters will knock each other over to get to the hose nozzle and be the first one on the scene. But sometimes, the possibility of death is so great that you have to fight all of your instincts and stand down. Left unchecked, it's often a losing battle. When your buddy goes down, you're going to try to save him, and when you go down, someone's going to try to save you, and so on and so on until you have a dog pile of downed firefighters. Firefighters might worry about dying, but we never have to worry about dying alone.

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"Time to go out in a literal blaze of glory."

That's why there's someone whose entire job it is to monitor working structure fires and make sure that we fight the raging inferno in a safe and secure way. They're called safety officers, and every fire department has one. The worst thing they can do is declare that a structure or situation is deemed unsafe to go into. At that point, all that can be done is what's known as a "surround and drown," which entails sitting around a building pouring water on the fire as best we can. It doesn't matter if people are trapped in there. It doesn't matter if your brothers are trapped in there.