Fire Chief

Prompted several years ago by the high number of annual firefighter deaths from preventable causes, the International Association of Fire Chiefs and International Association of Fire Fighters called on the American fire service to conduct a “Safety Stand Down.” The stand down was patterned after U.S. military stand downs: a cessation of all daily activity by operational units, except for mission-critical activities, to focus everyone’s energies and efforts on reviewing operational practices and plans to identify and remediate causes of accidents.

Military safety stand downs typically are prompted by clusters of similar types of accidents in a short period of time involving a specific population or operation. For example, the U.S. Navy ordered a safety stand down in response to several crashes of aircraft during training missions in a short period of time. The original fire service safety stand down was an idea in that same vein: we’ve got serious issues that are leading to unacceptable firefighter deaths and we need to get everyone to stop what they are doing for a short period of time and really focus on solving the problems.

So why do we need a safety week? For years we’ve been saying that our fire prevention activities need to happen 24/7/365, not just during one week in October. So why are we now compartmentalizing firefighter safety to one week a year? We still have the same unacceptable deaths and they’re still happening from the same preventable causes. Shouldn’t safety be a 24/7/365 proposition?

For many years, the American manufacturing industry had quality-assurance or quality-control departments with inspectors who examined finished products. If they approved the product it went out to be sold; if they failed the product, it went into the trash heap. The worker who made the inferior product or who operated the machine that produced the product never knew that they had produced a product that left the plant in a Dumpster. They kept making the same defective product and the inspector kept rejecting it, until a problem became so widespread that it resulted in decreased sales or bad PR for the company.

An alternative was to ship the product and let its quality problems become someone else’s headache. At one time it was acceptable for a new car manufactured by GM to leave the plant with 13 quality defects; the dealerships were expected to deal with the after-market defects.

The Japanese automobile industry took a different tack when its leaders embraced the teachings of Dr. Edward Deming in an effort to change the world’s perception that products produced in Japan were cheap or shoddy. Their efforts, later embraced by the Japanese electronics manufacturing industry, focused on making quality everyone’s business. Their plants didn’t have quality inspectors or quality assurance departments; instead they initiated quality circles of employees who were involved in the product production. Those quality circles examined all of their processes looking for ways to remove barriers to producing a quality product every time and took responsibility for indentifying defects and fixing them before they left the factory.

We in the American Fire Service need to figure out how change our organizational culture so that safety is not an activity, but a way of doing business every day, every week, and every year. We don’t need a safety week or a safety stand down to make that happen. We need quality circles looking at every process that has an impact on safety. We need leadership at all levels of our organizations who don’t just talk about firefighter deaths being unacceptable, but work diligently to identify and eradicate safety deficiencies in their organization today. More importantly, however, we do need leaders who focus everyone’s efforts on changing our culture so that tomorrow’s firefighters never know how to do the job any differently.