While the acrid smell of smoke still permeates the air, nine families are preparing for funerals in Charleston, S.C. Wives, children, parents and grandparents, brothers and sisters, relatives, and friends — lots of friends — are in various stages of grief. The Charleston Fire Department and surrounding departments are preparing to bury these men with all the dignity and honor they can muster at a time when their hearts are broken.

National Fallen Firefighters Foundation Executive Director Ron Siarnicki and his team have responded to help the firefighters‘ families. The International Association of Fire Fighters, the International Association of Fire Chiefs and the U.S. Fire Administration are in Charleston to assist the department. Rumors abound that President George W. Bush will attend the memorial for the nine fallen firefighters.

While every detail of the incident and subsequent investigation floods the media, the truth of what really happened will take longer. Right now, there is no right or wrong, only the task of burying nine firefighters and comforting their families and co-workers.

Last week in Command Post, I wrote about this week‘s Stand Down for Safety, ending with the question: “Will we lose a firefighter or EMT during the Stand Down week that could have been prevented?” Well, we did. Nine-fold. Could it have been prevented?

This week during the Stand Down, you owe it to these fallen firefighters to take their last call to heart. Look around your town or neighboring communities. Do you have a super-structure like the one in Charleston that you would respond to in your area or as part of mutual aid? Have you and your crew walked inside this type of structure or anything similar and discussed tactics? What would you do? Who goes inside? When do you get- out? Who makes the call? Would your RIT respond? If these nine dead firefighters could speak in your preplanning meeting, what would they tell you?

In College Station, Texas, this week, the Texas Engineering Extension Service and FEMA‘s Texas Task Force 1, in conjunction with the Department of Commerce‘s National Institute for Standards and Technology, will conduct the fourth in a series of tests and evaluations of robots to determine their use for urban search-and-rescue teams. These human-transportable robots, designed for commercial and military use, are ground-based and will be tested in realistic scenarios including confined-space rescues and wall-climbing.

Will robots replace firefighters? Not in my lifetime, but they will become one more tool for a fire chief to use in situations that are too hazardous for a firefighter. It‘s the same with commercial and residential sprinklers: one more tool in the toolbox. Until that time, that‘s a mighty, heavy gold badge you wear, my friend.

Our deepest sympathies go out to the families, friends and particularly to the Charleston Fire Department for this devastating loss.

The store in Charleston was only a building with stuff for sale. No building with stuff is worth a firefighter‘s life — not one firefighter and definitely not nine firefighters.

In preparation for the International Association of Fire Chiefs’ Stand Down for Safety next week, I asked Dr. Burton Clark, training specialist for the U.S. Fire Administration’s Management Science Programs, about his goal to have one million firefighters sign a National Fire Service Seatbelt Pledge by the end of the month.

Clark said the pledge has been signed by almost 40,000 people. An increasing number of departments are 100% compliant, and certificates have been sent to these departments. The certificate includes a logo and signature from the IAFC, National Volunteer Fire Council and the National Fire Protection Association — but nothing from the International Association of Fire Fighters.

I asked Patrick Morrison, IAFF health and safety director, about the union’s support of the Stand Down. He assured me that the IAFF is committed to the IAFC’s Stand Down and that members’ interest is about the same as last year.

“We’re making it a pretty high priority, yet a lot of people are complacent,” Morrison said. “They don’t realize that they get a true benefit from participating in the Stand Down. It’s back to the basics and what kills us. Whether it’s communication, size-up and seatbelts, all of those things are what we want people to focus on.”

I asked Morrison why the IAFF logo wasn’t on the National Seatbelt Pledge certificate.

“It’s not that we disagree; we don’t think signing a piece of paper will make a difference,” he said. “We’re really sick and tired of the accountability on the seatbelt thing. Does it make a difference if a guy doesn’t sign?

“No fire truck, no ambulance, no unit should go out of a firehouse that the occupants are not buckled up. We want accountability in leadership: from our own members; the union; fire chiefs; and in every single fire truck, ambulance and unit. If a person is not buckled up, they should be looked at right away and dealt with immediately. We don’t say ‘Let’s sign a pledge to put out fires’ — we do it!

“I’m so tired of the leadership not taking responsibility,” Morrison went on. “If a fire chief finds out someone is not buckled up, discipline them! If you have accountability, when those people that are not buckled up are disciplined, their behavior will change. Put the damn seatbelt on now!”

Morrison’s frustration was obvious: “We lose over 100 firefighters every year because of heart attacks. In almost every case, there has not been a heart screening. We’re going to continue to lose firefighters again and again.

“A fire chief has a lot of priorities, but [medical] screening never gets the number-one slot. It’s a leadership issue that we are missing today, and we’re picking and choosing our priorities. NIOSH repeatedly recommends a stress test. I wonder how many of these firefighter fatalities we could have saved with a screening?

“When I was a recruit at the academy they taught us about safety, but when we got to the fire station, other firefighters would say that stuff’s for the academy. Yet when I worked for some officers, when they said, ‘You will buckle up and you will follow the rules,’ we did it.”

Will we lose a firefighter or EMT during the Stand Down week that could have been prevented?

Every morning I drive to and from work along Virginia‘s Route 10, one of the major thoroughfares in my county. Each day I note how many people are talking on their cell phone while driving. It seems like very few people can manage to drive without having their cell phone to their ear, and those are just the drivers whose phone I can see — who knows how many are talking on hands-free devices.

Unfortunately, my observations usually include a significant number of police officers and fire officers talking on their cell phones while in their official county vehicles. Shouldn‘t we know better?

In my organization, the past several years have seen an emphasis on managing the safety hazards associated with operating in and around motor-vehicle crashes. (We have several major limited-access highways that criss-cross our county, including I-95, one of the most heavily traveled interstate highways in the country.) Something I hear constantly in our training and safety messages — it‘s even included in our highway safety procedure — is that we need to be highly vigilant when working around these types of calls because drivers today are doing everything but giving their full attention to the task of driving: They‘re talking on the cell phone, applying makeup, eating, reading the paper — and then we do the same thing.

Exxon-Mobil took the extraordinary step in 2004 to ban cell phone use by all of their employees worldwide. Period. Exxon-Mobil employees are prohibited from using their cell phones, even with hands-free apparatus, while driving.

“Employees are not required to turn off their cell phones while driving, but are expected to allow incoming calls to be answered by voicemail and to wait for a safe stopping place before making outgoing calls or checking messages,” according to Lauren Kerr, spokesperson for Exxon-Mobil, in an August 2004 interview with Drive & Stay Alive Inc. “In nine studies on the effects of cell-phone use on driving, researchers found that talking on a cell phone significantly degrades driving performance.”

These are some of Exxon-Mobil’s findings:

• Talking on a cell phone, regardless of whether the phone is hands-free, results in a braking response time three times longer than that of drunk drivers.




• The relative risk of an accident while talking on a cell phone is similar to that of driving with a blood alcohol level at the legal limit.




• Drivers talking on cell phones change lanes and weave through traffic without full awareness of their surroundings and are less likely to maintain safe following distances.




• Overall awareness of potential hazards and situations is reduced by cell phone conversations. The risk is less severe in conversations with passengers in the vehicle because those conversations tend to ebb and flow according to traffic conditions. The person on the other end of a cell phone conversation is completely unaware of those conditions.

Shouldn‘t this give those of us in public safety — fire, law enforcement and EMS alike — just cause to consider our own behaviors when it comes to using cell phones in a moving vehicle? What kind of message are we sending to the people we serve? Do as I say — don‘t use cell phones while driving because you‘re not paying attention to driving and can cause, or become part of, a crash — not as I do?

What about the liability exposure we‘re creating for our local governments or organizations? Braun Consulting, in its August 2005 safety newsletter, outlined the hazards associated with cell phone use by employees and the legal liability exposure to employers and organizations should their employees be involved in a motor vehicle crash while using a cell phone.

If it‘s good enough for the employees of Exxon-Mobil, it‘s certainly good enough for those of us in public safety — the people who have to deal with the aftermath of poor decisions that people make on a daily basis. Let‘s all get on the stick: Hang up and drive!

There was an article in The Washington Post of significance to those of you who need to and want to influence people. The article talks about a young California woman who suffered unwanted attention after her photo was included in a sports blog. There were significant statistics in the article that we should pay attention to and are relevant to connecting us with people. The Washington Post described how, “she had more than 1,000 new messages on her My Space page. A three-minute video of [I am redacting the subject’s name because I don’t want to perpetuate her problem] standing against a wall and analyzing her performance at another meet had been posted on YouTube and viewed 150,000 times.”

This is critical stuff to the fire service. We could have people reading our recruiting message all over the world. What is of interest to the fire service is our constant need to facilitate positive attention to market ourselves, recruit the best and brightest new members, change people’s risky behavior, and compete for scarce resources. Even if we choose not to enter this venue, we need to know that other successful organizations will. This will be our benchmark. Trust me (no wait, you don’t know me that well yet, do you?). Even though the environment is changing, the mechanics of connecting has not changed much. What has changed is the speed by which it operates. The Washington Post article reinforced the power I had begun to notice about networking electronically. This power can be negative as described above or unbelievably positive.

While there is some luck (Denis Waitley considers luck an acronym meaning “laboring under correct knowledge”) to getting influential information to target recipients, there is a growing body of information about how information, fads, fame and notoriety can spread like a virus. In the best-selling book The Tipping Point, author and researcher Malcom Gladwell describes how concepts and ideas can go from obscurity to all the rage. It’s mostly due to factors that are as common in spreading an idea as a sneeze and contaminated hands are to spreading disease. One critical component of this process is a key person called a connector who generally makes a great effort to know many people from diverse backgrounds, careers and interests. Connectors are either sought out to spread the word about something, or they have a natural process for this as they communicate within a network of peers and friends. They also generally carry established legitimacy, which makes any message more readily received and forwarded.

Consider the number of legislative bills passed in the last two years related to flammability standards for cigarettes. One critical element is people who can connect the issue to people who vote, both on the assembly floor and for the legislators. Those people contacted by the connector, if convinced of the legitimacy of the issue to be supported, then will flood the legislators with e-mail and faxes to state their support. Those people who send the faxes and e-mails often will be connectors themselves and will send the message to their sphere of influence. Before you know it, the support increases exponentially in relation to the effectiveness of each connector’s sphere of influence. Elected officials monitor their mail like a cardiac monitor in the cardiac-care unit. The electronic communication process makes it easier because it takes little more than pressing “send.”

If a connector becomes aware of important information that can help someone else or just wants to recommend a consistently good restaurant, he or she generally tells someone about it, usually within a familiar and well-established network. Two important fire service connectors are Chief Ronny J. Coleman and Chief Billy Goldfeder. These two connected people have built long-term relationships and contacts as they went about doing their jobs, delivering speeches, teaching, writing in national journals and, in general, connecting.

Chief Coleman has a very powerful and long-term profile of connectedness. His is one of more traditional routes that took many years to establish and — key to connectors — continues to grow. He will cross paths with his connections time and time again. My first exposure to him came when I used his book as a college text in my “Strategy and Tactics” class at Montgomery Community College. In 1984 I attended the ISFSI Company Officer Development I course in Framingham, Mass., where Ron presented several subjects and was the first fire service person I had heard to talk about the benefits of reading both Fortune and Ms. magazines to broaden your sphere of knowledge and awareness. I have also had monthly doses of topical interest from Coleman’s “Chief’s Clipboard” column.

While I have had many other direct and indirect contacts with Chief Coleman (and remain possibly an unidentified connection to him), these connections with me and thousands of other people are important to his sphere of influence. Just last week I had the opportunity to talk to him directly at the International Code Council Hearings in Rochester, N.Y. Ronny testified on behalf of the fire service and the fire protection industry in favor of an effort to include a requirement for residential sprinklers in the International Building Code for residential structures.

In 23 years I have had an unusual number of contacts with Chief Colemen. Many of you probably have as well and also will have had similar experiences with other connectors, such as Dennis Compton, Meri-K Appy, R. Wayne Powell and Billy Goldfeder. If you visually mapped out all these people and their interactions with you, there would be a very interesting web of interconnections and influence between them all.

Billy Goldfeder has built a base of connectiveness not unlike Coleman’s. The difference is Billy’s targeted use of electronic media to deliver information. He has used an Web site and e-newsletters to build a widely seen, effectively delivered, and highly relevant and repeated message about firefighter safety and survival. Possibly with all the other attention being paid to firefighter safety and survival, such as “Everyone Goes Home” and the National Firefighter Near-Miss Reporting System, the context for the ongoing message was ideal for an information epidemic, and word spread in an extraordinarily short period of time.

My first contact with Billy was around 1989 when he was director of a fire and rescue service in my region. Billy had done some work and research into increasing assignment, recruitment and retention of volunteers. At the time my department was researching ways to better facilitate and assign human resources, and we were looking at how we could schedule volunteers to fill staffing gaps. I talked to Billy at that time, but I hadn’t heard much about him until 2005 when I heard about his extraordinary presentations on firefighter safety and survival. That same year Billy was awarded a “President’s Award” from then-IAFC President Robert DiPoli for his safety work.

Around the same time, Billy was getting his now incredible FirefighterCloseCalls.Com established online. Billy’s experience is the positive counterpart to the negative story mentioned earlier. He is a prime example of how connecting helps to spread ideas and influence. I recently asked Billy about how many people he has on his lists. The list of formal subscribers to his electronic newsletter “The Secret List” is one known layer of a huge network. Beyond the formal layer of subscribers is a downstream information system where the list is handed off to an extraordinary informal network that is hard to conceive. Here are recent statistics related to Chief Goldfeder’s site and e-new letter: “The Secret List goes direct to 80,000+ via our server … and gets forwarded to many, many more. The Web site gets 250,000+/- (average) unique hits monthly and 4 million hits monthly.” How about that for circulation?

None of us need to perform to the same remarkable degree as some of the people discussed here, but I hope you will see how strategic connectiveness begins to produce positive influence. Getting your message to stick is a subject I’ll look at in the future.

In March, the New England Journal of Medicine published a study that examined the duty specific risk of death from coronary heart disease among on-duty firefighters in the United States. The study looked at data from 1994 to 2004, as well as estimates of time spent at fires and other emergencies from 17 metropolitan fire departments. A similar study released in May by the Center for Disease Control concluded that firefighting duties were associated with a risk of death from coronary heart disease that was 10 to 100 times greater than the risk from the non-emergency duties of the general public.

The study published in the NEJM looked at the significant impact that firefighting has on the physiological stress to a firefighter‘s cardiovascular system, including elevated core body temperatures and other vital signs.

Over the past 10 years, the fire service has made significant progress on the need for firefighter health and safety. These steps include wellness and fitness Programs, a rehab sector at major incidents, and the evolving design of PPE and SCBA.

With the obvious significance of these studies on the relationship of firefighting with coronary heart disease, what do you think will be the impact on firefighting and firefighters in the next five years? Do you feel there is also a relationship between this higher incidence of CHD among even the fittest firefighters and reduced staffing levels that could cause even more physical stress especially on the first arriving crews?

Many of us in the American fire service have been placing a great deal of emphasis on safety for many years now; witness most recently the now-annual Stand Down for Safety, Dr. Burt Clark‘s campaigns for firefighter mayday procedures and the National Fire Service Seat Belt Pledge. We all have an appreciation for the physiological and psychological impact of on-the-job injuries, not to mention the financial impact of accidents and injuries in the workplace, for both the individual and the organization. But how many of us think about safety away from the job?

One of my colleagues, Bttn. Chief Jim Fitch, recently published the following in our daily e-mail newsletter that goes out to our organization:

This weekend I was wrapping the trim on my garage with aluminum. I was trying to get as much done as time would allow until I had to take my son to a baseball game. All was going well until I managed to slice my finger open with the edge of the aluminum. Later in the day, it occurred to me that my accident occurred for two reasons. First, had I been wearing a pair of gloves, the accident would have never occurred. Second, I was rushing to do something that required more time than I allowed. I did not respect the potential hazards of the situation; I failed to operate with the proper attitude toward safety.

Think back to an accident you have experienced or witnessed. Were you respecting the potential hazards, were you wearing your PPE, or did you have the right attitude? I bet you can place yourself in one of these situations during some accident in your past. You know, you have control over these conditions. We are issued some of the best PPE available, we just have to use it. Every time! You have the ability to embrace a safe approach to your job. You control your attitude and actions.

Safety is our responsibility, not the [Tactical Safety Officer]‘s, not your supervisor‘s, not the Fire Chief‘s. Everyone in our department makes contributions to our safety. Training and Safety provides excellent training, Plans Review ensures fire protection systems are properly designed and functioning, Logistics keeps us supplied so we can perform our job &hellip everyone‘s efforts can be linked to our safety and well-being.

Our organization has long embraced and emphasized safety through training, equipment, and operating procedures all of which assist us in the performance of our duties. So regardless of your rank or job function, if you see an unsafe action, show your respect for that person‘s safety and address the situation. If someone addresses a safety issue with you, don‘t get miffed; thank them for showing their concern. We have to watch each other‘s back.

Have a safe day!

JEF

Good stuff, eh? How many of us take our safety attitude home with us when our tour of duty is complete? Perhaps we would all profit by doing our best to make safety a 24/7/365 behavior, not just a work behavior that we leave at the fire station or office. What do you think?

Why is the Department of Justice being a Scrooge by withholding the benefits rightfully earned by survivors of fallen firefighters? How can we expect to recruit the best and brightest to a profession where at least 100 colleagues die each year?

Firefighters will continue to die as they do their job. But we offer them some comfort that their survivors will be assisted through a federal law known as the Public Safety Officer Benefits Act. I first learned of this outrageous “Scroogery” the day of the recent Congressional Fire Services Institute activities in Washington, D.C. I was shocked when an unassuming lady approached me and asked if I could offer her some advice about how she can obtain benefits owed her after the loss of her husband a firefighter who died in the line of duty. This was after the news conference announcing the Whistle Stop Tour of the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation at Washington’s Engine 3. She told me her story of how the DOJ denied her and 38 others PSOB survivor benefits based on an interpretation of a “… phrase [in the law] to mean that claims should be denied if there is evidence of a non-duty–related medical factor.” The law says that the presumption of a line-of-duty death could be overturned “by competent medical evidence to the contrary”

The next day I searched the Web and discovered that in fact people had been denied benefits as reported on MSNBC.com. I asked this lady to contact me afterward so I could help.

In the mean time I am proud to say that the fire service leadership groups took action and are going right to President Bush for help. Our leaders sent the president a letter requesting his review and correction of the problem. When our efforts to make sure that “Everyone Goes Home” don’t work, we need to take care of our own by supporting their every need.

Recently I took a road trip with two safety officers to the National Fire Academy for a meeting. During the trip, we had a discussion about new construction materials that pose serious threats to firefighter safety — threats that are increasing rather than decreasing.

Dave Murphy, the health and safety officer for the Harrisburg (N.C.) Fire Department and an assistant professor at Eastern Kentucky University, and Dan Paulsen, assistant chief of staff development and safety for Saskatoon Fire and Protective Services in Saskatchewan, Canada, explained to me that the new lightweight materials and construction techniques being used in new buildings pose a serious threat to firefighters. They pointed out and described the variations of building trusses and the hidden dangers of glue-laminated beams or composite lumbers. Wooden trusses are used in more than 60% of buildings in the United States.

They explained how the heat from a fire would quickly melt the glue and metal, resulting in the quick collapse of roofs and floors. They also discussed the increase in great rooms or open spaces in new and larger homes along with the threats that these designs pose to fighting a fire.

This then leads to concerns about the contents of these buildings — the synthetic materials and the poisons they expel as they burn. Both men agreed that residential sprinkler systems aren’t a luxury; the issue needs to be introduced to local code councils and local governments, and the public, need to be educated.

The U.S. Fire Administration has recognized the serious threats of lightweight construction. It teamed with the American Forest & Paper Association and launched a comprehensive

Web-based education program for firefighters on the problems of lightweight construction and its components.

The Web site reveals that I-joists made of composite materials have a much higher flame-spread rate. A firefighter who steps onto a floor made of engineered wood products could fall through quickly. The site also has a link to FireFrame, an interactive tool that explains building construction methods.

The Web site features the NIOSH Alert,

Preventing Injuries and Deaths of Fire Fighters Due to Truss System Failures, which goes into even more details about construction problems and includes case studies.

All in all, this was a very educational road trip!