Fire Chief

I was in London on Sept. 10 of this year when pictures of American firefighters at the World Trade Center published in The Guardian caught my eye. They were illustrating an excerpt of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein, an award-winning investigative journalist from Canada.

How many unsung heroes have you lost? I’ve lost two in the past six weeks. Both were long-serving firefighters in their mid-50s who died of cancer. Like cardiac disease, cancer is much more prevalent in firefighters than in the general population.

I have been thinking that we need to approach fire investigation and reporting more holistically, much like the National Transportation Safety Board treats a transportation wreck and like many jurisdictions reconstruct vehicle collisions. We need to address the root causes that allow deaths to occur rather than just focusing an origin and cause determination.

I was in Charleston, S.C., on the three-month anniversary of the fire that killed nine firefighters. That day Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr. gave his first report to the community. The report outlined the behavioral health and financial assistance to the fallen firefighters’ families and praised the Post-Incident Assessment and Enhancement Review Task Force that was brought in to assess the fire department and make recommendations to help bring the department into the current century.

Where will the fire service’s next generation of employees and members come from? The focus for many years has been recruiting women and minorities to reflect the community that a department serves. Today the challenge is how to attract and keep people from the newest pool of potential employees or volunteers: the members of Generation Y.

My previous comments come from the energy of having groups of people nationally networked in an e-mail group called ePARADE. The ePARADE group is a simple Yahoo group composed of more than 400 fire marshals and fire and life-safety professionals who originally got together and identified a communication gap among fire marshals.

How often after a fire or response do you hear firefighters complain of headaches, dizziness or achiness? These symptoms are pretty typical after a long, strenuous physical activity, dehydration or lack of sleep. Recent research indicates, however, that these symptoms could indicate cyanide poisoning, which occurs in firefighters more often than recognized.

Dr. Thomas Bay was one of the keynote speakers at Fire-Rescue International in Atlanta. As a cancer survivor, his main theme was to remind us as chiefs to protect both our firefighters and ourselves from the carcinogens that surround us daily.

A recent outbreak caused approximately 198 deaths in four months. The medical examiner found pulmonary edema and damage to the trachea, bronchi and alveoli in the upper areas of the lungs. Most of the victims were children, who have been particularly vulnerable to this menace.

This week, I watched as the Lisle-Woodridge (Ill.) Fire District lead Rolling Thunder, a group of motorcycle riders, while it escorted the American Veterans’ Traveling Memorial Wall into my hometown. The traveling memorial wall is a replica of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C. It is 378 feet long and has 58,245 names listed on it. This includes the names of fallen soldiers from the both Gulf wars and a separate panel with the names of those who died on Sept. 11, 2001.