Earlier this year, Chesterfield Fire & EMS responded to an early morning blaze in the Village of Ettrick, an unincorporated area southern end of Chesterfield County, Va. The 1.5-story single-family dwelling on Totty Street was practically outside the backdoor of Fire Station #12, home to Engine and Truck 12. Though those units were on scene within minutes, the 6:30 a.m. fire already had an advantageous head start. Intense smoke and heat from the fire claimed the lives of two young children, and a third child suffered burns and smoke inhalation. It’s been a long time since we’ve had a multiple-fatality fire in Chesterfield County; in the early 1980s four children lost their lives in another early morning fire in a single-family dwelling. This fire prompted me to think about the stuff that firefighters do every day to help make Chesterfield County a safer place to live.
Working smoke detectors in family dwellings are the real deal. One big factor in my not being able to readily recall the last multiple-fatality fire is the great work that we’ve done in pushing the installation of smoke detectors and ensuring that they work. We put them up for free, we hand out batteries for free, and we check them for free while on other calls for service. Many firefighters can recall stories that either begin or end with, “if not for the smoke detector going off.” Unfortunately, there were no smoke detectors in the dwelling on Totty Street.
The challenge today is to ensure that immigrant populations get the smoke-detector message. We must work to ensure that there are working smoke detectors in every family dwelling that we go into. This is going to require a different strategy because of the language barriers. We’re working to establish working relationships with existing community groups like churches and social service agencies that already have connection with these new populations to get our message out. Many of these folks are on the lower end of the socioeconomic scale, their housing is in poor condition, and that housing is more densely populated.
Fire company in-service training scenarios aren’t make-believe. Green Bay Packers coaching legend Vince Lombardi once said, “perfect practice, makes perfect.” Every officer that I’ve ever known who has had responsibility for developing in-service training has tried to provide realistic scenarios that challenge firefighters to “practice well so we can play well.” Each of the fire companies in our combination system — we have three platoons of 22 engine companies and five truck companies, approximately 600 career and volunteer personnel — receives a full day of in-service training three times per year. Many of our in-service scenarios over the past couple years have featured a burned-out stairwell or a fire-threatened stairwell as a critical factor. The house on Totty Street had stairwell that was completely burnt out, denying access to second floor via the stairwell.
We are a fire & EMS department. Like many of our colleagues across the country, about 70% of our calls for service involve EMS. Of the remaining 30%, many are calls for a wide range of services having little connection to structural firefighting. In the words of Gordon Graham, noted speaker and subject matter expert in the area of organizational risk reduction, fighting fire has become a low-frequency, high-risk activity for our department and many like us. Therefore, we must continually be prepared, regardless of where we are stationed, to engage in the physically and emotionally charged atmosphere of firefighting where lives are on the line. Our “first name” is still Fire.
