Emergency responders’ safety in fire evacuation and rescue: Exploring safety awareness and decision-making aiming at multiple firefighting operations

Emergency responders, particularly firefighters, play a critical role in mitigating fire emergencies and ensuring public safety. However, they often face significant risks, and casualties can occur due to decision-making challenges in rapidly changing environments. This study examines how safety awareness—comprising experience and preparedness—influences decisions across three tasks: fire suppression, locating trapped individuals, and withdrawal. Surveying 129 Shanghai firefighters and using SEM and K-means clustering revealed key insights. Experience enhanced suppression and withdrawal decisions but could induce cognitive biases, hindering adaptability in complex tasks like locating individuals. Conversely, preparedness consistently improved performance across all tasks by enabling strategy adjustment to evolving conditions. Clustering identified three firefighter profiles (adaptive, average, rigid), suggesting tailored training is needed. The findings highlight the necessity for training programs that combine experiential learning with adaptability exercises to mitigate biases, enhance real-time decision-making, and improve operational safety and resilience.