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This version of the door size up series is a little different than our previous ones. Below we have multiple doors that have a few things in common. Sometimes the most important part of door size up is recognizing when to move on to another door. Obviously some buildings may have all of their doors that are equally secured and they will all give you trouble. However some doors like the ones below would have been your worst choice to start your forcible entry operations.

These doors all have signs telling us that they are not used very often, or not at all. If they appear they have not been used in years, there is probably a reason. Sometimes we just have to trust what the size up is telling us and move on. Here are the examples.

Door  1

The first door has obvious signs on the outside that it is not being used any more. You can see it has two pieces of steel welded to the frame, covering the outward swinging door. The other side of this door has been covered and walled over. In the lower picture the door would have been behind the shirts that are hanging.

Door #2 

This door would have appeared to be pretty straight forward from the outside and has common security features showing. Luckily someone tried to warn us on the door that this is a poor choice to make entry. I am glad to see someone else spells like I do. The door you see in the interior picture is not the one we are looking for. The door we are sizing up is actually behind the shelves containing the cups and bowls.

Door # 3

Lastly we have an aluminum stile storefront door that has become a blockade. This was a side entrance of the building and is obviously rarely used, if at all. This would be easy to identify unless smoke had stained the windows, but it shouldn’t take us long to see this one isn’t a great choice. Could we get through these doors?…..Sure we could eventually, but on these particular buildings it would not have been the best choice, and it means we failed to notice key size up points that would have clued us in to their potential difficulty.

Thanks goes out to our fellow “South Siders” from Engine Co 11 for some of the photos and insight for this post.

This entry was posted on 03/26/2010 at 10:09 pm and is filed under 1. Forcible Entry. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

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