Fire Chief

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.

There are as many books on leadership as there are theories on how leadership works. One of my personal favorites is a short series that was started over 20 years ago by Dr. Wess Roberts, a former Army officer who turned his attention to leadership and motivation with such companies as Fireman’s Fund Insurance and Northrop. His most interesting books are Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun and its sequel Victory Secrets of Attila the Hun.

A group of probationary firefighters got me to reflect on how much they had left to learn, how much they had to learn from first-hand experience, and how much I had learned from those who took the time to teach me.

The value of any department’s fire and life-safety program is rarely known, but recently we had a call that personally helped me measure the success of our public-education programs. While it turned out to be a fire with less than $100 loss, it was one where despite the adult resident, smoke detectors and proper actions made the difference.

While we all understand why there are separate federal agencies with known expertise that are planning within their own ESF, how do we avoid them planning in “silos” so they don’t exceed a combined realistic level of fire service response in these emergency service functions?

We all know that June 17-23 was the week set aside for this year’s Fire and EMS Safety Stand Down. Tragically that same week, the Charleston (S.C.) Fire Department suffered the single largest number of line of duty deaths since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Earlier this month I was privileged to attend a meeting in Kansas City hosted by the International Association of Fire Chiefs as a member of the NRP ESF-4 sub-committee. That stands for the National Response Plan’s Emergency Service Function 4 (Firefighting), which translates into how fire service assets will be dispatched and deployed to major incidents across the country when there is a declared disaster.

The quint owes its evolution as a piece of fire apparatus to a lineage that began almost a century ago. The “triple-combination” engine — a vehicle with a pump, hose bed and a water tank — first appeared on the scene around 1910. The “city service” or quad, which added a full complement of ground ladders, soon followed, with the quint and its 55- to 100-foot aerial appearing just prior to World War II.

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.

When was the last time you tapped the resources of one of the major fire service organizations to help answer a difficult question? Four times this year I have gone to the research sections or the expert personnel of several fire service agencies to help with answers to difficult questions. These have ranged from questions on the lighting package and visibility standard for a new aerial ladder on order, to data on the reliability of home smoke alarms when asked to comment to the media “on the record.”