[larrys]

"the fire department does not assume a building is clear just because it's the middle of the night or whatever."

Thank's for pointing that out. In retrospect I can see how assumptions similar to the one that I made can cause plenty of errors in emergency situations.

"a primary search is going to be done (conditions permitting) anyway."

I watched a docudrama on the Reagan assassination attempt last night. One of the mistakes they made I believe was assuming Reagan wasn't hit by a bullet because a) he seemed fine and said he hadn't been hit and b) the secret service said he wasn't hit.

While "a" would seem to be pretty valid info "b" was based on "a". After all you can't really see whether a bullet hits someone generally. So in keeping with your "primary search" with fires, they shouldn't have "assumed" the info they were getting was correct and fully checked him out much earlier. (And in fact I'm sure that is probably they way they would operate in the future learning from that mistake.)