The economy is tight, but fire departments still are investing in safety, as could be seen by the attendance of more than 180 safety officers and instructors at the 20th Annual Fire Department Safety Officers Association Safety Forum in Orlando.

The week began with two-day academies for incident-safety officers and health-and-safety officers, followed by certification tests for the 91 participants.

Chief Ron Siarnicki (Ret.), executive director of the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation, gave a four-hour pre-conference workshop on LACK: Leadership Accountability Culture Knowledge, part of the NFFF’s Courage to be Safe series.

“Are you on the path to a line-of-duty death or injury?” Siarnicki asked. “Every 78 hours, a firefighter dies in the line of duty.”

The NFFF’s intent is to create programs that offer specific steps to raise awareness of safety in fire and emergency departments and train the trainers to take the program back to their local departments.

When Siarnicki asked the safety officers about continuing safety problems they dealt with, responses included: unbuckled seatbelts, non-use of SCBAs during overhaul, freelancing on the fireground, motivation to change and not buckling helmet straps.

“We must all accept responsibility for our actions and consequences starting from the top down and starting from the bottom up,” Siarnicki said. “Train, learn, teach, every day.”

In another Courage to be Safe workshop, Billy Hayes, director of communications for the District of Columbia Fire/EMS, and Chief Ron Dennis (Ret.), executive director of the Arizona Fire Chiefs Association, updated attendees on progress made since the implementation of the 16 Life-Safety Initiatives five years ago.

“Last year there were 23 LODDs from motor vehicles,” Dennis said. “It’s almost October and as of right now, there have been nine LODDs from motor vehicles, and three were unbelted. The number is down and we believe there is hope that we are changing.”

They also offered suggestions on how to implement the initiatives in individual departments.

“Over time, minor safety issues escalate to moderately significant safety violations.” Hayes said. “Watch how fire engines respond out the door on a daily basis to automatic fire alarms because that will tell you how they respond. We don’t invent new ways to kill firefighters we keep doing the same thing.”

Courage to be Safe other NFFF programs are available at no cost to departments. Information is available on the foundation’s Web site.

The conference’s keynote speaker, D.C. Fire/EMS Chief Dennis Rubin, features his “Lemons to Lemonade” program. After a series of disastrous fires in historic buildings, D.C. Fire was able to turn the incident into a teaching moment.

After receiving the wrong address for a house fire, which resulted in the death of a young girl, the department launched. Smoke Alarm Verification & Utilization. The program not only provides smoke detectors, but it puts firefighters out into the community to educate residents about the importance of working smoke detectors.

Rubin ended his program with “Rube’s Rules.” Among them is visibility in the department and in the community. “I do two community events a week, one during the day and one evening,” he said.

I particularly liked Rube’s Rule, “Someone is always watching you,” which can be comforting or cautionary.

This week, a Missouri volunteer firefighter was sentenced to three years in prison for voluntary manslaughter for a fatal crash that killed a 17-year-old boy. In November 2006, the volunteer was responding to a brush fire in his private vehicle — no lights or sirens — at an estimated 84 mph. While passing one car on a blind hill, he hit another car head-on, killing the high-school junior.

According to the U.S. Fire Administration‘s provisional report on 2007 firefighter fatalities, two of every 10 firefighter fatalities occurred while responding to or returning from an incident. While seatbelts and speed were not necessarily factors in all of these fatalities, they were contributing factors for most of them.

I sit on the program committee for the Fire Department Safety Officers Association‘s 20th Annual Apparatus Specification and Maintenance Symposium. We discussed including a program on driver safety. I pushed hard for the committee to bring in a speaker on the Smith System, which trains drivers and instructors for a number of large commercial fleets. I learned about the Smith System when I worked for United Parcel Service as a customer-service manager. I was required to take the same driver-training class as all UPS package car drivers, and the Smith System‘s five keys to safe driving remain with me to this day.

The symposium begins on Jan. 20 in Orlando, Fla. The afternoon speaker will be James A. Smith, senior vice president of training for the Smith System. Smith (no relation to the founder) will talk about safe driving for emergency vehicle apparatus.

“Reading the [National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health] reports, I kept seeing two things: departments had to put SOPs into practice and that people needed to be trained in driving,” Smith said about preparing for his presentation. “Is that training being accomplished?”

Smith will talk about forward-motion accidents, rollovers and the issues involved with higher centers of gravity and cornering. “People aren‘t seeing it early enough and are letting their head and feet get ahead of their minds and eyes,” he said. He also will discuss safely entering intersections, based on his experiences training ambulance drivers.

“We‘re going to give attendees options and something that they can take back and use — the keys to safer driving,” Smith said. “It‘s not how to operate specific vehicles; it’s about driving safely.”

As I‘ve said in previous years, this is my favorite no-frills, common-sense symposium for chiefs and officers involved in specifying emergency vehicle apparatus. Other speakers include Chief Billy Goldfeder on “The Apparatus People: Why You Do What You Do?” and my favorite dynamic speaker, attorney Jim Juneau, delivering a reality-check with “How to Keep Your Butt Out of Jail: The Liability of Apparatus Operators and Spec Writers.”

It‘s too late for the Missouri volunteer firefighter to stay out of jail, but the programs offered at the this symposium will help you specify and maintain safer apparatus and hopefully will keep you out of jail or the funeral home.

Wow! We are still talking about and mourning the nine firefighters killed in a South Carolina building collapse. There is truly nothing new under the sun.

Here’s what we already knew from 200 years of firefighters dying unnecessarily in America:

• Certain construction is prone to earlier collapse.




• Truss roofs kill.




• Fire load contributes to failing structural members.

After approximately 20 minutes, if firefighters haven’t darkened the fire down significantly, officers should consider pulling all personnel out from the interior of the building and have them fight the fire defensively from outside the collapse zone. If your assessment at the 20-minute mark indicates a high probability that the structural integrity will remain, then continue with firefighting operations, as required. There are certain construction types should have officers thinking, “we are going to wash this one down the street in six hours, but we should still be committed to taking everyone of our firefighters home at the end of this thing.”

Remember that the term for fuel (the structure) in the fire tetrahedron is “reducing agent.” If structural members are being reduced (consumed), why are we surprised when the building falls down? The media and really poor fire officers always say tragedies were “without warning.” We’ve been warned for the past 200 years, only some of us aren’t listening.

A primary search in an unsprinklered, high-piled rack storage furniture store can’t last an hour in any community on the planet. I fear that an entire system of fire response was asleep at the switch!

I will refuse to add the words “brave” or “hero” to the nine killed in Charleston. They were innocent victims. This was fratricide — brother killing brother — in another death by friendly fire. When are we going to stop the madness and senselessness of these preventable deaths? This is a public health emergency. The occupational death of one worker every three days is unacceptable in every profession but ours. The rest of the world gets it. They value their firefighters and any firefighter death is a national tragedy.

We just yawn and call them “brave heros.” Then we add insult to injury by putting stick-on letters on the back window of pick-up trucks in commemoration. Where is the outrage from the fire service? I know. Let’s add a bullet to next year’s safety standdown. That ought to help.