Every incident and every response offers new lessons learned. As Hurricane Ike narrowed its path toward the Gulf coast last week, task force units and response teams from across the country packed up and drove in while the locals drove out.

Ike’s arrival was no surprise. Anybody with a television or radio heard the hurricane was approaching almost a week in advance. Residents had time to play “What if?” and decide whether to evacuate or stockpile food and water. Hourly weather reports narrowed the path of the wily storm‘s target.

The storm passed, and out-of-state response teams returned home. Soon, after-action reports will offer lessons learned for improvements before the next call out. Already Louisiana State Fire Marshal B. “Butch” Browning has offered insight on two areas: pre-hurricane communications and care of incoming response teams.

A former fire chief, Browning became state fire marshal five months ago and immediately assessed the fire departments in the state — volunteer, combination and career — and their experiences with Katrina.

“During Katrina, the 200 fire marshal deputies had no pre-plan function emergency plans,” Browning said. “This time we changed that and our deputies were assembled into response teams to provide medical and rescue and assistance to firefighters in local communities.”

Three days before Hurricane Ike, Browning assigned 60 deputies to touch base with every local fire chief and preparedness director in what they anticipated would be the affected parishes.

“We did it for three reasons: first, to establish a line of communication; second, re-remind them of the process to request state assets, and third, to let them know we were going to be there before, during and after the storm to check on them,” he said. “It built the confidence that if they needed state assistance, they knew somebody was carrying the responsibility for the fire service to get what they needed.”

Based on input from those departments, the state fire marshal‘s office determined it needed 450 firefighters — 200 firefighters to backfill the big cities and the remaining to support volunteer and combination departments. Browning advised fire departments to move their equipment from low-lying areas. “I think we maybe lost only one or two pieces of apparatus, mainly because of response,” he said.

Browning sent an Emergency Management Assistance Compact request for an incident management team from New York City. In addition, 200 New York firefighters and 260 Illinois task force members with equipment responded.

“We deployed about 80% of those firefighters within a day and a half of their arrival,” Browning said. “There wasn‘t a single request that we didn‘t fill with in-state or out-of-state firefighters within hours of request.”

Browning also committed to improving the care and feeding of incoming response units. As with any disaster, blocked roads, downed power lines and flooding prevented food and water from reaching some of the incoming response teams. While the incoming units are prepared to self-sustain for 72 hours, time spent for re-assignments and deployment holds can eat through their provisions quickly.

Browning gave a lot of credit to the local fire chiefs that communicated with the fire marshal‘s emergency operations center.

“Fire chiefs know what they need to do,” he said. “What fire chiefs need is someone on the state level who can give them the resources when they need them and as quickly as they can and that‘s exactly what this fire marshal‘s office has done.”

To me, September always feels more like the start of a new year than does January. Schools are back in session and fall conferences are scheduled. Typically this “new year” starts out slow for the fire service and ramps up in October with the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation Memorial Weekend and Fire Prevention Week activities. This year is a little different, however.

Right now, hurricane season is in full swing. FEMA Urban Search & Rescue Task Forces from Ohio, Virginia, Maryland, Missouri and Florida are pre-positioned for Hurricane Ike‘s arrival in Texas. Illinois‘ MABAS resources also have been deployed to secondary positions.

Last month, the U.S. Fire Administration offered fire and emergency response agencies a new special report, “Fire Department Preparedness for Extreme Weather Emergencies and Natural Disasters.” According to USFA spokesman Tom Olshanski, the report includes lessons learned from Hurricane Katrina, Pennsylvania storms and flood incidents.

The report offers fire departments a comprehensive guideline on staffing assessments, notification and callouts, accommodations and food, and support from other public service agencies. The report offers case studies on blizzards, power outages, earthquakes, hurricanes and more. The report is good example of the USFA‘s efforts to assist and educate fire and emergency services on disaster preparations.

And speaking of preparations, this September is the fifth National Preparedness Month, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security‘s Ready Campaign.

Admittedly, National Preparedness Month is not quite a Hallmark holiday, marked like the Halloween decorations you’ll soon be seeing. But why not campaign to convince Americans to take responsibility to prepare for disasters — natural or otherwise? We urge residents to check smoke alarm batteries during Fire Prevention Week or when they change their clocks. It‘s definitely time to expand that effort and urge people to prepare for other possible disasters.

A couple months ago, I gave a talk to a local women‘s organization about disaster preparedness for senior citizens. Many of the members are seniors or care for aging parents. I shared that my daughter made sure that her grandmother has a bag near her door with a list of things to take with her in the event of a disaster or emergency evacuation. The list includes eyeglasses, medications and her wallet with insurance cards and identification. I also distributed a brochure from Ready.gov that is designed to help senior citizens prepare for a disaster or emergency evacuation.

Natural disasters are going to happen, naturally. Doesn‘t it make sense to be prepared? News reports said the evacuation plans for Galveston and New Orleans went well recently. Fire departments have a responsibility to be prepared, but also to educate their communities to work with them.

It‘s sort of like educating the consumers.

My dentist always can tell when he hits a nerve — he has to put the drill down and pry me off the ceiling. A similar phenomenon happens in the world of journalism. When we write columns that hit a nerve, our e-mail boxes get inundated with reader responses. This is a good thing. Thoughtful responses from readers help to further educate us — and other readers — and help to keep us on our toes.

Readers offered many thoughtful responses to a column I wrote recently on the alleged problems digital radios are having in high-noise environments such as those found on the fireground. Evidence is mounting that digital radios are unable to distinguish between a firefighter‘s voice and background noise in some circumstances, leading to garbled transmissions that could put firefighters at greater risk. This obviously is reason for concern, but I had cautioned against the knee-jerk reaction of abandoning digital systems, that offer some performance advantages over analog, such as greater spectral efficiency and a stronger signal at the edge of the coverage area.

We shared many of these responses last week and today we share more. They have been edited for length.

“Performance advantages? Can you name any as they relate to the fire service? It‘s almost like you’re saying ‘other than intelligibility, digital radios work great.‘ Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln? In most cases, fire went digital because they were dragged along with police that wanted digital encryption. Contrary to what you read in all of the ads, digital isn‘t better because it‘s digital. Digital is better when it offers the customer something they need. When they don‘t need it, there‘s nothing wrong with analog. The industry needs to stop selling the customers something they don‘t want or need. Fireground radios should go digital right after the hydrants go digital.”

“There is no place for digital on the fireground. None. Not now, not ever. There are NO advantages to digital. None. We have enough trouble with good radio training, good practice, experienced people, and excellent equipment with analog, but we have coping mechanisms to deal with it. Introducing digital will get people killed. It already has, or has contributed to deaths, if even incidentally. Please be aware that we are not Luddites, and we are not opposed to new technologies. But we are opposed to any new technology that introduces problems rather than solves them. We do not have a problem with fireground communications in the analog world. That is the point. We do not need a solution. To be driven to digital by the market is to put us in danger.”

“I participated with NIST in helping to review and provide input to the language included into this report that did identify that using any radio, not just digital, may require a different location or position to be used, in a high-noise environment. Our experience on this issue is that radio use and tactical positions cannot always be selected to optimize the best voice quality. There are many times, as in an enclosed room or near a saw, in which a “mayday” or other information has to be sent from the position the radio is available in. Training is always important in how to properly use a radio, but even with this knowledge, the best tactical positions are not always an option.”

“I’ve been listening to handheld and land mobile radios for 50 years and today‘s digital cell phones and digital (P25) radios sound like crap. To suggest some training will fix what is inherently poor audio quality due to the low sampling rate is just silly. When I first heard a P25 radio demonstrated and read the technical specifications, I expected the emergency services users to shoot it down because they were so hard to understand. That hasn‘t happened, and I still don’t understand why not. Perhaps, as is so often the case, it will take a major loss of life due to radios that can‘t be understood for a groundswell of

resistance to develop. I pray it‘s none of my guys and gals that prove the point.”

“I agree training in proper use is important, but training should not be asked to make up for real technical problems that have technical solutions. Humans have a tendency to speak louder and louder to get their point across or when they are excited and stressed. In a typical radio, it is possible, when full of adrenalin, to reach the compression ceiling where the signal is loud but heavily clipped and garbled. Unfortunately, many digital radios suffer from this problem more than their analog cousins.”

“I have been working in communications for over 30 years, and the shoving of digital radios down the user‘s throat is the last straw. All too often, the manufacturers do not listen to the users before they release a product. If the users have ideas, they might show up in later product. As far as more training to be better users — suffice it to say that the tool should be almost idiot-proof. When you are facing the devil, you don‘t want to have to think, ‘I have to hold the radio in just the right place to make myself heard.‘”

Again, thanks to everyone who weighed in. We appreciate the feedback and love the fact we have such a passionate and engaged readership.

In the July issue of FIRE CHIEF, two editorial advisory board members, Robert Rielage and Mark Wallace, and a long-time columnist, Ronny Coleman, offer their views on what the Phase II report on the Charleston Sofa Super Store means to the fire service. In Size Up in that same issue, J. Gordon Routley, who headed the task force that authored the report, gives his thoughts on the situation. A month prior, task force member Brian Crawford shared a reflection on the year-old tragedy.

The situation at the Charleston furniture store overwhelmed that department and revealed flaws in its incident command, culture, equipment, water supply and communications. It also revealed flaws in how structures are inspected and permits issued. The report is the industry’s leading topic of conversation, and rightly so.

In the variety of directions this industry-wide conversation has gone, one common theme consistently rises to the top: The Phase II report holds lessons that could improve any fire department, and the greater tragedy would be if those lessons went ignored.

The latter part of that summary is, of course, a very real concern. As humans, we exhibit a profound tendency to repeat the mistakes of others and shun the advice of the wise.

My commute takes me past a large roadside cross, placed to commemorate the well-publicized tragedy of a woman and her children who died nearly two years ago when she failed to beat a freight train to a crossing grade. Earlier this week, I came on the scene of three people who were killed trying to outrun a train with their car.

Deciding not to shoot your car around down crossing gates does not come after soul-searching, analysis, research or any of the other weighty elements that lead to safer firefighting. Generally, people resist change and believe that bad things only happen to others. Poring over a nearly 300-page report, examining the flaws of a department (and its chief) and instituting meaningful change is intellectual and emotional hard work.

We can look at the Charleston Fire Department one year after the tragedy to get an idea of how hard that work will be. It is far too early to judge whether that department will improve. Yet there is concerted effort in that direction.

Because the task force’s Phase III report will assess Charleston’s improvements, the industry will have a reliable view of how much change was implemented.

That raises another concern. How can we measure the affect the Charleston fire and the recommendations have had on the larger industry? In truth, we probably can’t. The industry does not have the luxury of having a task force in every department analyzing and reporting on the level of improvement.

In place of a comprehensive solution, let me offer this proposition to all chiefs and chief officers in the United States and abroad: send me an e-mail telling me what changes you are making or already made after the Charleston tragedy, and I’ll publish those in the pages of FIRE CHIEF.

My hope behind this is two-fold. I would like to see and share evidence, albeit anecdotal, that nine Charleston firefighters did not die in vain. It also is my hope that seeing what some chiefs are doing will inspire other chiefs (through idea sharing and peer pressure) to undertake the hard work of self-examination and change.

You can reach me at rick@firechief.com. Please indicate where you are from and that I have permission to publish your e-mail.

Next month, the American fire service will remember the nine Charleston, S.C., firefighters who died in the Sofa Super Store fire on June 18, 2007. The local media will carry reports and tributes. The fire service media, however, will be asking questions.

In the immediate aftermath of the fire, publicized photos and radio transmissions revealed how out of touch with modern firefighting strategy and techniques the Charleston Fire Department was. For example, dispatchers called each fire station for a report of which firefighters reported for duty and which were missing.

Shortly after the fire, Charleston Mayor Joe Riley hired a group of esteemed fire service professionals to investigate and review the fire department and make recommendations. These task force members — who I know and have endorsed for their knowledge and expertise — devoted countless hours to the investigation. They had free access to personnel and the department and made numerous trips to Charleston.

The task force released the Phase 1 report later than first expected, allowing Riley to first review the findings. While the Phase 1 report required serious and immediate changes, the task force also suggested two additional levels of recommendations.

I’ve had many conversations with task force members, and their comments always were restrained but firm — “wait until the fire investigation report comes out” — and implied the report would be straightforward and unpleasant. The report was first due in late fall. Then December. Then February. Now we understand it will be Thursday, May 15.

Nine firefighters died in that fire. The people responsible for their deaths are still working their jobs, still going home to their own families after work and tucking their kids in bed each night. The department has new station uniforms, new 5-inch hose, new training procedures and new SOPs. But too many questions still remain.

Why has the task force tolerated this delay of its hard work? Knowing the caliber of these individuals, I‘m surprised no one has resigned over the repeated delays and excuses for not releasing this report.

According to recent news reports, Charleston‘s beloved Mayor Joe Riley will finally release the report May 15th, eleven months after the nine firefighters died. Thursday night, the Mayor decided to release a draft of the National Institute of Occupational Health & Safety. Was this to try and soften the blow of the Task Force report to be released on May 15th? The Task Force will deliver the final report to the mayor this week and then to the families of the fallen firefighters before it is released to the media.

Nothing will bring the nine fallen firefighters home to their families, but what really is being done to prevent more firefighter deaths in this “Class 1″ department? Something is still smoldering in Charleston.

By Dave Murphy

Safety has become the latest buzz word in the fire service. But should we expound on the virtues of safety and the cultural change it necessitates when, in actuality, not much has really changed?

In the fire service, there have been countless speeches given, classes taught, articles written, and presentations offered on safety all across these United States. Yet we continue to kill firefighters at the normal and predictable rate — which averages one every three days. Talk is cheap.

Most of us profess to be advocates of proactive safety, but do we really mean it? It is easy to talk the talk, but do we actually walk the walk? The National Fallen Firefighters Foundation drafted 16 common-sense life-safety initiatives that would have a significant positive impact in reducing firefighter injuries and fatalities if adopted, practiced and enforced at the departmental level. Have you read them? If so, do you plan to actually do anything proactive?

Take a look at some of the initiatives.

Define and advocate the need for a cultural change within the fire service relating to safety, incorporating leadership, management, supervision, accountability and personal responsibility. An incident scene will always be a dynamic place, but we can still be aggressive without being stupid. There is a safe way of operating at an incident without the macho, egomaniac image that we often promote.

At a recent FDSOA conference, Chief Kelvin Cochran said, “… [T]here is a very fine line between a medal of valor and a 30-day suspension.” It put many things in perspective for me. If an outcome is good, you’re a hero; if not, you most likely were hurt or killed or injured someone else. Does your department promote unnecessary risk-taking or allow freelancing? Do you routinely pin medals on your lucky idiots and belittle those who question stupidity?

Enhance the personal and organizational accountability for health and safety throughout the fire service. Everyone, regardless of rank, must be involved in the change process. Change is never easy and seldom is welcome. SOGs and SOPs should always put firefighter safety foremost. Do we hold our people accountable? Is anything done to those who do not follow the established protocols?

Focus greater attention on the integration of risk management with incident management at all levels, including strategic, tactical, and planning responsibilities. Who makes the rules in your department? Those who actually do the job or the upper brass who never get out of the air-conditioned Crown Vic at the scene? The entire membership must be included in the change process and allowed input in areas of importance. Firefighters create most of the problems, but they also hold most of the solutions.

All firefighters must be empowered to stop unsafe practices. The paramilitary organization of the fire service does not easily adapt or tolerate subordinate questioning in the heat of battle, but maybe it should, A four-person company with the freedom to speak up increases your potential visual and mental acuity and ultimately your decision-making capacity by 75%. Think about it.

Develop and implement national standards for training, qualifications, and certification (including regular recertification) that are equally applicable to all firefighters based on the duties they are expected to perform. The National Fire Protection Association standards are written by a diverse group of intelligent, experienced, well-intentioned professionals from many different perspectives. NFPA publications outline the minimum baseline qualifications essential to safety and efficiency in the ever-changing modern fire service. Do we use them? They apply to all departments, not just ones in the big city.

Develop and implement national medical and physical fitness standards that are equally applicable to all firefighters, based on the duties they are expected to perform. Look at what’s killing us. Pre-employment and annual medical/physical re-testing are absolute must. As the adage says, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” The nature of the job will always require a fit work force. We must make the distinction between those who are able to perform and those who are not — end of story.

Create a national research agenda and data collection system that relates to the initiatives. Every national fire service agency that deals with firefighter safety issues should attend a U.S. Fire Administration–sponsored/funded annual summit where safety is the only focus. Committee assignments then could focus on specific areas and make subsequent recommendations. Don‘t reinvent the wheel. If a specific safety intervention has worked for your fire department, it will most likely be of benefit elsewhere.

Use available technology wherever it can produce higher levels of health and safety. We should strive to fix what can be fixed before it hurts someone. It may be a simple as eliminating the water in the bay floor or adding a ladder guard to the end of the rig. Search for possible injury-causing mechanisms before they hurt someone. Technological advances occur almost daily that can affect firefighter safety. Assign some of your younger recruits to investigating possible inclusion of these advances into our daily operations. A national task force (possibly arising from the USFA summit suggested above) should be formed to foster needed innovations through the federally funded National Science Foundation and other key research think tanks.

Thoroughly investigate all firefighter fatalities, injuries and near misses. Let‘s give NIOSH broad investigative authority and support it with adequate funding to quickly respond and investigate to every line-of-duty death. Most fire chiefs dread the thought of big brother being in their fire department, but NIOSH is there to help not hurt. The near-miss program is another valuable tool that is either ignored completely or isn’t mandated by fire chiefs, therefore is very limited in its usefulness. As my third-grade teacher aptly said, “only the guilty flee when not pursued.” Would you welcome these tools into your station?

Grant programs should support the implementation of safe practices and/or mandate safe practices as an eligibility requirement. Instead of handing out funding to those with the greatest political alliances, show us what you have done to improve your existing safety program and how money will further what you are already doing. We will never completely remove politics from a system that systematically hands out free money, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t continue to apply for them.

National protocols for response to violent incidents should be developed and championed. The world is changing and will continue to change. Don‘t wait till it happens to you. Anticipate your worst-case scenarios and act accordingly. Again, don‘t reinvent the wheel. An existing standard can be tweaked to meet your specific needs.

Find a like-size department with well-written, proven SOGs to adapt to your department. An effective SOGs is the first piece of an effective risk-management puzzle. State what you will do, train for it, test for comprehension/documentation, and re-evaluate at least annually. Once adopted and trained on, your incident responses will standardized, resulting in a much safer and efficient outcome.

Each town, regardless of size, should strive to promote interoperability to affect an acceptable outcome before the actual event transpires. The inability to communicate and work together will make a terrible event much worse.

Firefighters and their families must have access to counseling and psychological support. Let‘s take it a step further. Families should be contacted to explain the available services and possibly schedule an appointment. There are many positives that can be realized form this effort.

Public education must receive more resources and be championed as a critical fire and life-safety program. Very little of a typical fire department budget is applied to this proven life-saving activity. In the firehouse, members often complain about this type of duty and look down on those in prevention and education as lesser beings. It is often hard to measure what does not happen. But as Ronny Coleman once said, there is no honor in fighting a fire that could have been prevented.

Advocacy must be strengthened for the enforcement of codes and the installation of home fire sprinklers. We are most often our own worst enemy. It is not uncommon for firefighters to speak against sprinkers. But sprinklers in the home save lives, and there is no valid argument against them.

Safety must be a primary consideration in the design of apparatus and equipment. Engineering is always the best solution — let‘s fix it before it breaks. Fire apparatus and apparel manufacturers exemplify this concept. Why? Fear of litigation. We should learn from them. The fire service is no longer exempt from liability. Why must we wait until we are sued to do something that should be done anyway?

I commend the NFFF on the drafting these common sense and achievable recommendations; however, they are merely words on paper if ignored by those who can actually affect cultural change.

What is missing from the initiatives? There is no mention of the importance of higher education. When is the last time you visited a doctor who did not have a diploma on the wall? To be viewed as a true professional, we must elevate the fire service requirements to what other professions have long mandated. But this alone is not enough. A well-rounded firefighter/fire officer will always require a mixture of common sense, actual experience, physical ability, training and education to be effective. Every fire department should strive to promote and provide the means necessary to obtaining and maintaining all of these essential elements.

Who do we expect to effect cultural change within the fire service? If we don‘t reach the younger generation, the cycle of 100-plus annual LODDs will continue if not rise. Higher fire service education offers the greatest opportunity for us to change the current culture. Please make a valid attempt to follow these 16 initiatives - your department will be much safer if you do. I would also encourage you to support higher education; I am convinced they go hand in hand.

Dave Murphy retired as assistant chief of the Richmond (Ky.) Fire Department and is currently an associate professor in the fire safety engineering technology program at the University of North Carolina–Charlotte. Murphy is the eastern director of the Fire Department Safety Officers Association and also serves as the health and safety officer for the Harrisburg (N.C.) Fire Department.

With no particular allegiance to either the Patriots or the Giants, I watched Super Bowl XLII. I did so after a year of weekly updates on the Glendale (Ariz.) Fire Department’s four years of planning for the game from Asst. Chief Tom Shannon, who also wrote our January cover story.

Immediately after Glendale was awarded the game, Fire Chief Mark Burdick established a planning team to create a comprehensive fire service strategy for the game and all sanctioned events in surrounding communities. The plan established working groups of surrounding cities, and county and state agencies to plan and provide support services for the entire valley.

This plan needed public safety, public health, public works, transportation and environmental agencies within the region to partner for effective communications.

Did it work? According to FIRE CHIEF Associate Publisher Greg Toritto and West Coast Sales Manager Andy Van Sciver, who were onsite for the event, Glendale‘s game plan set a new precedent for safety and security support.

“The challenges that the public-safety sector was facing were amazing,” Toritto said. “Going forward, there are huge challenges for future cities of Super Bowls and similar large-scale events.”

Toritto and Van Sciver were invited to participate in the Public Safety External Liaison Group, which included representatives for the next three Super Bowl cities: Tampa, Fla.; Miami; and Arlington, Texas.

“Every fire department in the country could learn from Glendale‘s approach and its use of a unified command system for this type of event,” Toritto said. “All the agencies involved worked together — and with the public — and were on the same page. All the agencies worked as peers and left their egos aside.”

“… Incident Command was clearly unified and spelled out,” added Van Sciver, who also is an officer on the Ventura County (Calif.) Search and Rescue–Upper Ojai Team. “Area command was very important. Eyes on the actual event in any given location reported up to the local emergency operations center and were monitored by the joint-operation command.”

For medical emergencies, first-aid teams roamed the area with EMS backpacks with ALS capabilities. Two ALS mini ambulances also were staged. Small John Deere Gators with slip-on suppression systems were available for first response.

Glendale will share its lessons learned in an upcoming issue of FIRE CHIEF.

“The cooperation between all of these departments and the willingness — starting at the top — to share control and take care of their assigned responsibilities was very impressive,” said Toritto. “Continuously, the message was that it was everyone working together.”

A great deal of time, effort and money was put into planning for the what-ifs. Thankfully, they didn‘t come last Sunday, but there are always lessons to be learned by every first responder from every size department — from what goes wrong and what goes right.

When I recently purchased new living-room furniture, I glanced at the label and asked the salesperson if the material was flame-resistant? She said yes, but I knew better.

Last month I attended Underwriters Laboratories‘ two-day Smoke Characterization Seminar. The sessions covered fire smoke basics, hazards and research, and the audience included firefighters, training officers, arson investigators, Centers for Disease Control officials, and smoke alarm manufacturers.

“When I look at this room, I don‘t think of tables and chairs, I think about fuel,” said J. Thomas Chapin, Ph.D., UL‘s director of research and development in his keynote address about fire and the smoke continuum. “You can‘t have a fire if you don‘t have fuel.”

Chapin quickly translated scientific terms into understandable language. He explained the fire event timeline, mitigation operations and the concept of fire rewind. “One of the most significant ways to improve life safety is with early intervention,” he said. “By rewinding the fire event, we can focus on new and improved forms of intervention.”

Chapin suggested five means of early intervention:

• Early detection with smoke and fire detectors;
  


• Early suppression with residential sprinklers;
  


• Efficient containment with fire doors, walls and floors;
  


• Creation of a hardened environment with fire-resistant furnishings; and
  


• Improved education and training for key audiences.
  

Chapin showed video of tests conducted to study fire and the differences between mattresses, one that was Consumer Product Safety Commission–compliant and one that was not. He also showed an upholstered chair fire that was an eye-opener.

“Upholstered chairs have three-times the chemical energy of wood,” Chapin cautioned. “The energy we’re building into our homes is three-times higher.” That’s because the raw materials are different, and much of it is imported

Chapin added that a frequent problem in universities and colleges is that students will bring foam padding to put on top of their dorm beds. The synthetic fibers add to the potential fuel load.

“Synthetics are a part of our lives — polyurethane material in the soles of shoes, cellulose in newspapers and polyesters in fleece materials,” he said.

At home, I pulled the label under my couch‘s cushion and looked closer: polyurethane foam and polyester fiber. According to Chapin‘s PowerPoint, my couch has a heat of combustion of over 10,000 BTUs per pound — that‘s not a couch, that’s kindling.

Make your choice in gifts cotton and wool this holiday season; they are fire-safe choices.

Recently I was asked at one of our area hospital’s quarterly employee meeting. The hospital‘s CEO gave a “state of the hospital” briefing, and I followed with my presentation on fire and EMS response in the post-9/11 world.

Obviously there always will be natural and intentionally caused disasters that will produce injury and death and require the services of a hospital. These include an airplane crash, bridge collapse, fires, floods, tornadoes, and hazmat and mass-casualty incidents. A disaster also may involve a pandemic with response currently being preplanned by the Centers for Disease Control and others in public health and the threat from both domestic and foreign terrorism.

My discussion centered on recent events with common threads that could be relevant when discussing what hospitals might expect in the future. I drew on such attacks as the Oklahoma City bombing, the Sept. 11 multi-pronged attacks, bombings in Malaysia and Madrid, the London bus and subway bombings, the failed London car bombs, and the Glasgow Airport attack. The common denominator in these incidents was the terrorists’ desire to cause a maximum number of casualties and disrupt a normally safe environment. In several cases, the attacks included a small detonation designed to draw the crowd into the path of a secondary and much larger explosion.

These incidents produced an overwhelming number of walking wounded who found their way to the nearest hospitals on foot or by public and private transportation, reserving ambulances, medic units and onsite triage for the most critical patients. My discussion with the hospital staff included how to deal with this surge of wounded, including the gross decontamination of potential patients before they could enter a medical facility. If, for example, local fire and EMS resources are dealing with the most critical injuries, rescue and extrications, who is left to set up any decontamination? Alternate means might be needed to treat the masses.

The discussion then turned to the order of any emergency response activation. Unless there is a prestaged event such as an impending hurricane or the Super Bowl, the order would most likely be:

• Local fire/EMS responders and initial mutual aid departments: up to 12 hours




• Regional and intrastate mutual aid: four to 24 hours




• EMAC activation: 24 to 72 hours




• Federal resources: 72 hours to demobilization

The bottom-line discussion determined that the hospital staff needed to be self sufficient for at least 72 hours with food, fuel, decontamination equipment and supplies, as well as manage the schedule of their professional and support staff to avoid burnout. If this sounds familiar, it should; This is what FEMA has begun asking the fire service to do when it is deployed to other locales. The final discussion points included the need to consider revising their plan and practice for future events including those of longer durations caused by both natural disasters and terrorist attacks.

What‘s in the future is anyone‘s guess, but preparing for emergencies of longer durations with more casualties is probably a good guess.

I was in Charleston, S.C., on the three-month anniversary of the fire that killed nine firefighters. Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr. gave his first report to the community that day. 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.

Riley repeatedly praised Fire Chief Rusty Thomas and his officers for implementing 19 of the task force’s 27 initial recommendations, including mandating seatbelt use, assigning an assistant to the fire chief, and designating the first dedicated safety and public-information officers. Interviewing procedures have been changed and are under way for hiring additional firefighters and dispatchers; the task force recommended that two dispatchers be on duty at all times.

Riley has committed to finding the money to fund all the recommendations. He’s also pledged to change the city’s fire-sprinkler code and to wave the water system‘s impact and tap fees. Riley, Charleston’s mayor for 32 years, also is up for re-election.

Thomas has committed to changing both his management style and his department. That‘s a pretty big pill to swallow. Can Thomas and his officers do it? They are pretty hungry, but the cost for this meal will be staggering, and the mayor and the community might choke on the tab.

I will have more from Thomas and Riley in FIRE CHIEF’s October issue.

A television reporter tracked me down while I was in Charleston to ask about my editorials and other blog postings. (Read the video and see the interview She asked me if I had questioned the chief about his statement that he would fight the fire the same way.

No, I didn‘t ask him why he made that statement. I didn‘t ask because when he made the statement only 36 hours after the fire, I‘m sure he was grieving his lost firefighters and his mind was on fighting fires the only way he knew how. I didn‘t because I see the widespread changes he is desperately trying to implement.

And I didn‘t ask because more task-force recommendations are on the way and because there are voices out there calling for him and the mayor to resign. He doesn‘t need stupid questions right now.