Mutual Aid

Home Sick

Janet Wilmoth — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 14:39:12 +0000

What keeps you up at night? For Guntersville (Ala.) Fire/Rescue Chief Tracy Battles, it’s the health of his firefighters and his inoperable fire station.

Guntersville Fire/Rescue has 37 personnel trained and certified by the Alabama Personnel Standards Commission. Firefighters include 15 paramedics who staff three ALS engines, one ALS/brush truck, and a special-operations response truck and trailer.

After receiving a SAFER grant in 2007 for additional staff, Guntersville opened a much-needed third station in an old aircraft hangar. The staff built crew quarters in the temporary facility.

In 2008, the department found out that the hangar was on top of a septic tank. Flooding had resulted in mold, and the building had to be decontaminated. Firefighters also had problems with brown recluse spiders that bite. Station 3 is located near Lake Guntersville, where the spiders are a problem and require costly pesticide treatments. Apparatus exhaust leaks into the crew quarters, and during an unseasonably cold winter, the station’s pipes froze.

Battles has thrown a lot of money at fixing the station’s problems. He knew it would be a long shot, but he also applied for a 2009 Station Construction Grant to replace the hangar — and was frustrated that he didn’t receive one.

“I maintained optimism that we had valid issues for replacement and that our local economy would justify the economic need for our small career department,” Battles said. “I committed to close the current temporary station due to living conditions.”

Battles has contemplated replacing the hangar with a mobile home or pole barn, yet he hesitates investing any more money in a temporary facility.

It’s tough to look at the 2009 Station Construction Grant application statistics and not think about the need for a second round of funding. Last year, FEMA received 6,025 applications requesting a total of $11.5 billion. Of those applications, 58% were for new construction and 42% were for renovations. Interestingly, 280 applications were for less than $50,000 and 20 applications requested in excess of $15 million.

A representative from FEMA’s Station Construction Grant administration process will speak at the 2010 Station Style Conference next month in Kansas City. There’s currently no talk of another Station Construction Grant, but that doesn’t mean we can’t encourage support for additional funding.

Perhaps it’s time to see if Habitat for Humanity would consider helping to build much-needed facilities for fire departments. I’m pretty handy with a hammer and am sure others would volunteer also to build fire stations in needy areas.

A Study in Women’s History

Guest — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 21:37:57 +0000

By Jeanne Paschalek

In honor of Women’s History Month, here are a few things you might not know about your sisters on the front line.

According to Women in the Fire Service, the first paid female firefighter was Sandra (Forcier) Waldron, who was hired by Winston-Salem, N.C., in 1973 as a public-service officer. Her duties were for both police and fire protection. She retired in 2003 at the rank of battalion chief.

For many years, Judith Livers Brewer was believed to be the first woman in a paid fire department until Waldron contacted Women in the Fire Service, Inc. to accurately record the history of women in the fire service. Brewer was the second female firefighter. She began her career with Arlington County, Va., in 1974.

However, women served as volunteer firefighters dating as far back as the 1800s. The first known female firefighter was Molly Williams, an African-American slave who served with the Oceanus Engine Company No. 11 in New York City in 1818. Other notable women who have served are Marina Betts, a French-Indian woman who served with the Shinbone Alley District of Pittsburgh in the 1820s; Lillie Hitchcock Coit, who at age 15 served with the Knickerbocker Engine Company No. 5 in San Francisco; and Adelheid von Buckow, who served with the United States Fire Company No. 1 in Atlantic City, N.J., in 1875. She was the only woman to serve with that company as through 2000.

There have been several all women’s volunteer companies throughout the history of the fire service. According to “A National Report Card on Women in Firefighting” (2008), the 2000 Census reports that there were 350,000 paid professional firefighters in the United States and 11,000 or 3.7% are women. Even more striking is that among 291 metropolitan areas, 51.2% did not have a woman firefighter in the metropolitan area which included several departments. This statistic places the fire and emergency services occupation in the lowest 11 percent of occupations for employment of women. Women actually account for 47% of the workforce and according to the researchers the fire and emergency services should have a workforce of women totaling 17%. That means that an additional 39,742 women would need to be hired today.

Similarly, the Department of Defense had 14 % women and two percent were officers. More recent statistics provided by Women in the Fire Service, Inc. (2005), indicate that California leads the nation with the largest number of women in the paid profession of firefighting. This is followed by Florida, Texas, Maryland, and Virginia. In contrast to that statistic, New York City has the least number of women with 28 women out of 11, 500 firefighters. That is approximately one fourth of one percent.

How many of these women hold chief officer or leadership positions? According to the International Association of Women in Fire and Emergency Services (2008), there are about 150 women battalion and deputy chiefs and 31 department chiefs. As of 2004, according to the International Association of Fire Chiefs, San Francisco was the largest department led by a woman.

Jeanne Paschalek is the battalion chief of Emergency Services with the Lincoln Fire Department. She began her career as a firefighter in 1990 and has held the positions of hazmat technician and team captain, nationally registered paramedic, captain, and EMS supervisor.

Boots on the Ground

Janet Wilmoth — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:53:59 +0000

As I sat in on last weekend’s Everyone Goes Home Safety Summit, I realized that the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation is the perfect organization to lead firefighter safety efforts. The organization honors fallen firefighters and helps their survivors, offering support with job training and scholarships. And by doing that work for so long, it’s easy for the NFFF to notice fatality trends year after year.

We all know what the foundation noticed: Annually, more than half of firefighter line-of-duty deaths result from heart attacks or stress-related illness. Vehicle accidents and training accidents are the second- and third-leading causes. In fact, fire fatalities aren’t common.

The NFFF created the 16 Life-Safety Initiatives five years ago appear to help prevent such preventable fatalities. As part of that effort, the organization also launched the Everyone Goes Home program to deliver these training initiatives. And the programs seem to be making a difference.

With the support of the Assistance to Firefighters grant program and Fireman’s Fund Insurance, the NFFF can deliver the program across the country at no charge. Regional Advocate Manager Billy Hayes oversees the 10 regional advocates, plus state and local advocates.

Advocates are the boots-on-the-ground volunteers. In the three-month period between November 2009 and February 2010, they spoke to 733 attendees at 72 sessions. Advocates conducted more than a third (34.7%) of their visits in all-volunteer departments, followed by 26.4% in combination departments and 19.4% in career departments. During the visits, three topics dominated the discussions: incident safety and situational awareness, health and wellness, and emergency vehicle operations/response driving.

Former Deputy U.S. Fire Administrator Charlie Dickinson spoke to summit attendees about success of the Everyone Goes Home program. Dickinson recalled his experience in 1995, as the fire chief in Pittsburgh when three firefighters were killed. “It’s a horrible thing to carry as a fire chief, that it could have been prevented,” he said.

Are you doing everything you can to make sure everyone in your department returns home safely? Consider investing the time in the Everyone Goes Home program for your department.

Help Where You Can

Janet Wilmoth — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 18:41:42 +0000

The current economy has caused difficulties for non-profit organizations. Contributions and volunteer numbers decline when money and time become scarce. But two non-profit fire organizations are receiving some much-needed help.

For the second year in a row, Pierce and Harley-Davidson are sponsoring “Full Throttle Support 2,” which benefits the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation. Through March 31, anyone who makes a donation will automatically be entered for a chance to win a one-of-a-kind FLSTF Fat Boy Firefighter motorcycle. The sweepstakes winner will be announced at a special ceremony next month at FDIC.

Last year’s “Full Throttle Support” campaign raised $135,000 for the NFFF through donations and sales of officially licensed Pierce and Harley-Davidson shirts, hats and jackets. The Oshkosh Foundation also presented the NFFF a check for $25,000.

Also receiving a little help from its corporate friends is the International Fire Relief Mission, which currently is collecting gear and equipment donations for earthquake-stricken fire departments in Chile with major support from Rosenbauer America and donations from GearGrid and Task Force Tips. IFRM President Ron Gruening is appealing to fire departments across the U.S. to donate any used equipment that is still serviceable. The organization plans to ship the gear to Chile next week.

The IFRM recently shipped two containers of used gear to Bolivia and another shipment is planned in the fall. And former FIRE CHIEF editor Rick Markley, who is a volunteer with the organization, recently went to Honduras to help with a delivery. Markley said gear items that may no longer be NFPA compliant in the U.S could help fire departments in third-world countries.

If you have equipment available to donate, contact Gruening at 612-699-8500 or Markley at 219-730-5155 or 312-840-8446.

LAFD’s Got It Good

Mary Rose Roberts — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 18:34:04 +0000

Put aside the sunshine, ocean waves and Santa Ana winds, and folks in Los Angeles still have it good — especially at the Los Angeles Fire Department. For example, many fire departments are not lucky enough to have an in-house IT staff to build out their computer-aided dispatch system. But such a resource has been a LAFD mainstay for years, said Dennis Bloemhof, the department’s director of systems.

I recently spoke to Bloemhof about how the LAFD managed to get its IT group. He said the department originally hired a vendor to build a CAD system, but at the end of the day, it didn’t meet their requirements. The city staff took over and, in April 2004, rewrote the CAD system in C++. In addition, it doesn’t hurt that the initiative is supported by a mandate in the Los Angeles city charter that states there must be a centralized IT shop, known as the information technology agency, to establish IT standards for all first-responder agencies.

“We are very fortunate,” Bloemhof said. “We have a programming staff on the business side and on the 911 dispatch side to support us, in addition to having our own IT staff in the fire department.”

Bloemhof admitted that there’s a certain convenience that comes with an in-house team of IT experts. Specifically, an in-house IT department is essential to modernizing radio and computer systems and more effectively serving the public. He recommend fire chiefs recruit someone who has the education, training and experience in systems to be able move projects forward and work closely with subject-matter experts, whether they are civilians or uniform members. (In Los Angeles, all dispatchers are uniformed members of the fire department.)

The department also is preparing to handle data. It currently uses Oracle to support data applications, including incident data housed in a production database that is updated every minute and used to run reports. Bloemhof said the database also is used to track EMS incidents and can be accessed during emergencies by Los Angeles County’s health services department to identify any patterns early on during an incident.

But capturing text and video from callers is a completely different issue, Bloemhof said. So they plan to build a next-generation system that converts the current 911 telephone system into an IP-based system.

“With that, we believe we will be in a better position to receive those text messages from the public and better track them in our CAD,” he said. “Right now we would have to have separate workstations to capture the text and any photos and then associate that in our database with the call. What some agencies are trying to do is to tell the caller to call another number or go to a website to upload the data, and we don’t want to really do that. So we are focusing on getting this new phone system up and running, and then we will focus on capturing that future data.”

Bloemhof said the most important part of the process is getting feedback from users of the technology and making sure to fix all problems.

“We record issues and problems, and we follow up,” he said. “We then go back to our test environment, isolate the problem, write up the functional specs and then the programmers fix the bugs. We then test it, make sure it works and have it redeployed on the floor.”

There’s no doubt folks at the LAFD are lucky to have IT resources on call 24/7. But it’s not cheap to run an IT department, Bloemhof said. The city sustains the department through revenue-generating programs, such as ambulance billing and small fees added to permits issued, for example, building inspections done by fire-protection personnel.

“It lets us sustain the staff and the systems we have without having to try and find millions of dollars for any particular project,” he said.

But the department also is feeling the pressure from the current economic climate.

“Currently, we are feeling the effects of the economy,” Bloemhof said. “And I know that we are in the position in the next fiscal year of losing some IT positions.”

The Readers Always Write

Janet Wilmoth — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 16:04:36 +0000

My editorial last week generated a number of reader comments expressing anger and concern over chiefs’ inappropriate behaviors.

“Have we reached the end of our road, losing all dignity; or have we just worked beyond the breaking point,” one reader asked. “This has not been occurring just recently it has probably been going on for years and just not put in the public light ‘for the good of the organization.’” How many times have you heard that?

A North Carolina fire inspector shared his concerns over the lack of training and education for chiefs on what they can and cannot legally do to members — particularly for volunteer departments. “This extends well beyond obvious common sense criminal activities and goes into how a supervisor must legally deal with subordinates on a volunteer department,” the inspector wrote. “To date, I have not seen any courses on the legal aspects of being a volunteer chief and how they must comply with federal (and even state) laws that protect the basic rights and freedoms of a volunteer firefighter.”

Another reader suggested departments review the Boy Scouts of America’s Youth Protection & Adult Leadership policies and guidelines for junior or cadet firefighter programs. “Youth protection from adults and from other youth in the program is critical to the overall success of any activity that engages young people,” he wrote.

The Boy Scouts’ policies not only protect the youth, but also “protect adults from false accusations.” Stated rules and policies include two-deep leadership, which requires two registered adult leaders or one registered leader and a parent of a participant on all trips and outings. No one-on-one contact between adults and youth members is permitted.

One comment I found particularly interesting came from Brenda Brown, a former career firefighter/training officer in New York and South Carolina, who currently works as a training specialist for a major insurance company. She also volunteers to maintain her paramedic certification and is an adjunct instructor for the South Carolina Fire Academy. From her corporate experience, Brown wrote of her corporation’s devotion, dedication and money allocated to “our values” and all subsidiaries are upheld to the same code of conduct.

As a fire academy instructor, Brown began research on the fire service code of conduct. The International Association of Fire Chiefs developed the Fire Chief’s Code of Ethics, but Brown found that very few individual departments have a written program or even talk about it.

“When teaching classes, I ask students about their department’s code of conduct policy and get the perplexed ‘deer in the headlight’ look,” she wrote. “I probe deeper to ensure the understanding and still find that there is very little knowledge the student has on his/her department’s policy. Do department’s have and uphold the standard code of conduct and hold those accountable for not abiding by them?”

Brown is compiling examples of fire department codes of conduct. If your department has a formalized set of values or codes of conduct, send a copy to Brown at engine23@sccoast.net.

Giving, Not Giving Up

Rick Markley — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 15:22:57 +0000

Rick Markley is a volunteer with the International Fire Relief Mission, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization that collects donated used fire and EMS equipment and delivers it to needy fire departments in developing nations. Once a delivery is made, IFRM sends a team to that country to train its firefighters on the safe and proper use of the donated gear. Markley is with IFRM team on the Honduran island of Roatan and will be sending a series of dispatches to FIRE CHIEF about his experience.

Read Markley’s previous dispatch.

On Thursday afternoon a man was shot three times during a robbery attempt: once in the abdomen and twice in the leg. It was the second shooting in two days. This time, the man was a friend of my host, Joe Peterkin.

People in Roatan know that ambulance service is spotty. The island’s one ambulance runs out of its one fire station. The wounded man’s friends called Peterkin rather than call for an ambulance. Peterkin is a retired American paramedic; his wife is a retired nurse. Peterkin instructed the man’s friends to bring him to his house and phoned for the ambulance to meet them there. This made sense because Peterkin’s house is between where the man was wounded and the hospital.

At Peterkin’s house, they stabilized the man as best they could and waited for the ambulance. And they waited, and waited and waited. They waited nearly 30 minutes. They loaded the wounded man in the ambulance and set out for the hospital. Peterkin followed in a private vehicle. The ambulance plodded along the two-lane road that serves as the island’s main artery at about 10 mph.

The ambulance’s back suspension is so shot that even the smoothest road feels crater pocked–I made one ambulance call with the fire department earlier in the week. This was as fast as the ambulance could safely go. Frustrated, Peterkin moved his injured friend to his vehicle and drove to the hospital. Had he done this from the start they probably could have delivered the patient 45 minutes sooner, which was a greater frustration.

This incident prompted Roatan City Councilman Leland Woods, who also serves as fire commissioner, to ask one of the cruise ship companies to donate another ambulance. The company agreed to do so and set the cost ceiling at $100,000. Peterkin and Woods are exploring if they can get two smaller ambulances for the same price and be able to leave one at the fire station and one at the other end of the island.

What’s been more amazing than the lack of resources and training on Roatan has been the outpouring of generosity. If the cruise ship company makes good on its offer, that will be extremely generous. And not to diminish that generosity, the company has a vested interest in its guests being cared for at one of its ports of call.

More impressive has been the generosity of those on the island. Peterkin, for example, opened his home to me and arranged for free accommodations for the other International Fire Relief Mission team members. Woods donated food for some of our meals and made sure the team had a free rental car. The Pelican Tree resort is donating a meeting room for the weeklong EMS training that IFRM will conduct. A nearby auto junk and repair yard donated a car for the firefighters to practice extrication.

Back home, companies like GearGrid and Rosenbauer have provided the equipment and money IFRM needs to make these firefighters safer.

There’s a flood of generosity pouring into Haiti to relieve the suffering from its earthquake; one of the doctors I met here had just come off 10 days in Haiti. Haiti was devastated and desperately needs immediate help.

Roatan has not been devastated, yet still needs immediate help. But where tragic events such as that in Haiti bring sympathy, the constant dysfunction in places like Roatan, and I suspect in Haiti before the earthquake, brings frustration. This frustration wears on people; it erodes their desire to help. The local leaders and residents need to take the steps they can to help themselves. But they don’t, or at least not at the pace needed or expected by those from developed countries.

It is hard to keep caring and keep trying, and yet, some very generous people do. It is their generosity that left a marked impression on me; I can only hope that it will have some impact. I hope that IFRM’s efforts will make firefighters safer and better capable to protect their civilians. There is always room for improvement, but given the resources available, IFRM did all it could to boost the island’s response capabilities.

After IFRM’s two-week stint, it will fall to local officials to improve their fire and EMS service. And likely, it will fall to those committed individuals living in Roatan to keep the pressure on those officials and to keep donating their time and resources to improving the situation.

Previous dispatch.

Immersed in Bubbles

Janet Wilmoth — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 16:25:50 +0000

Compressed-air foam systems frequently get a bad rap from mechanics and emergency vehicle technicians, partly because of the systems’ complexity. But rather than look at the system as a whole, instructors at last week’s International Class A Foam and CAFS Academy recommend that technicians look at the three components that make up a CAFS as separate systems.

“[Technicians] need to break it down into the three main components: traditional fire pump, a traditional foam proportioner and an air compressor system,” said Ray Frey, customer service manager with Waterous Arizona, who was one of the instructors for the foam academy’s mechanics’ track. “Most technicians look at the whole system and say it won’t work. We teach them to break the system down and what components are we working on.”

About seven years ago, Frey and Keith Klassen began to develop mechanic-specific classes on foam systems. They found that they couldn’t fit all the information they had to deliver into an 8-hour class and now they insist on 16 hours for a training class in order to really delve into CAFS.

“In years past, maintaining a CAF system would be a problem because of the lack of information and lack of classes on how to maintain the system,” Frey said.

Frey, Klassen and other CAFS instructors teach the basics of CAFS, and then go in depth with the each component of the systems, focusing on the foam proportioner and the air control circuit because, according to Frey, that’s where they see most issues.

“Once we do that, it clarifies the rest for the technician. From there we take them outside to run the system,” Frey said. “We make the system not function and have the students troubleshoot and make the repairs.”

Most CAFS instructors I have met are very objective and eager to dispel myths and rumors about CAFS. In fact, due to the high number of participants in the Glendale foam academy’s mechanic track, Pierce’s Clarence Grady jumped in and helped teach one group of students.

“Rather than teach just our system, we feel we should educate on all systems,” Frey said. “It’s better for the industry and for the fire service. Our goal is to get the information out and let the customers decide which one they like.”

“If technicians don’t know how to repair CAFS, they do the firefighters no good; the technicians should be higher skilled than the firefighters, otherwise how will they know if CAFS is operating or not?”

I’ve been writing about Class A for more than 18 years, and I’ve found that three arguments keep fire departments from embracing foam: lack of training, myths, and cost. I think the benefits of using foam, however, far exceed the arguments, but then again I just spent three days immersed in bubbles.

Communications Arsenal

Mary Rose Roberts — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 17:51:10 +0000

Reliable radio communications are essential for first responders. But the truth is radio systems may fail — from a lack of terrestrial infrastructure, interference issues or background noise that muffles communications.

It’s an issue that Charles Werner has been working on for years. Werner is a 34-year veteran of the fire service and currently is the chief of the Charlottesville (Va.) Fire Department. In addition, he is a board member on the International Association of Fire Chief’s Communications Committee and is SAFECOM’s executive committee chair.

I specifically asked Werner how radio systems perform in the fire service. He said all first-responder agencies face the same challenges, for example, radio-system coverage. Coverage issues affect both the public and private sectors, but he is right: Agencies need adequate signal strength for effective radio communications throughout the response area to make sure they can communicate in all of the areas they serve. One area where this most often falls short is inside buildings, a hurdle many researchers are trying to overcome by adding repeaters and sensors into the infrastructure of a building. Yet, such efforts still are falling short.

“Effective penetration of large and tall buildings and below grade areas is critical,” Werner said. “We are finding there are some really serious challenges and then new building materials, like window treatments, elevate that challenge.”

Werner said voice intelligibility while operating in high-noise environments is another challenge — and it’s not just an analog versus digital argument. Analog and digital systems each have their own unique advantages, he said. For example, digital has the ability to handle capacity issues. Analog, on the other hand, often performs better in high-noise environments.

“But often the comparisons out there regarding such systems are not apples-to-apples,” Werner said. “What I mean by that is you can compare a new system with better coverage yet it may have issues with high-noise environment operations, so you may be measuring two different things.”

So what’s the solution? Werner doesn’t have a straight answer, but believes the future of public-safety communication systems will be a combination of multi-band radios, satellite networks and data run over the proposed national public-safety broadband network. For example, multi-band radios let firefighters communicate with other agencies on a wider variety of frequency bands, he said. Yet in the most rural areas of the country that lack radio infrastructure, communications still are spotty. So there’s some promise in implementing deploying satellite technology, leading to perhaps a multiband satellite radio that will let firefighters communicate across bands if terrestrial networks are unavailable. Data also will assistant responders by providing situational awareness prior to arriving at an incident.

Still, LMR systems are essential and will be part of first responders’ communication arsenal for years to come.

“I think satellite has a lot of promise to take use beyond some of the terrestrial systems,” Werner said. “But as we go forward we have to make sure we maintain our current LMR system because there is nothing that will substitute that anytime in the future as far as our mission-critical operations.”

Chiefs Behaving Badly

Janet Wilmoth — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 16:13:12 +0000

Last week, the fire chief in Tarpon Springs, Fla., resigned after alcohol-related inappropriate behavior at a fatal house fire. While I was following up on that story, I found similar — and disturbing — incidents of chiefs in trouble.

For instance, according to the Rapid City Journal, 15 former fire cadets who claim they were molested by former fire chief Gary Scott have filed a notice that they intend to sue the Campbell County (Wyo.) Fire Department for $150 million. The notice claims the victims were psychologically scarred by the abuse, and each is seeking $10 million in damages. The notice as a precursor to a lawsuit is required before suing a government entity.

Scott started the junior firefighting program after he became fire chief in 1991, and most of the victims were cadets. The sexual abuse began in 1992 and continued until Scott’s arrest in 2007. According to other reports, the abuse also took place on trips to fire conferences across the country.

Scott, 55, is awaiting sentencing after pleading no contest to 14 state charges of sex abuse. Scott currently is serving a 24-year federal sentence on 10 felony convictions of taking children across state lines for sexual abuse. The fire department’s insurance carrier would pay any damages or settlement awards.

However, the Gillette News-Record quotes Seattle attorney Michael Patterson as saying that the fire department cannot be held liable because it had no knowledge of Scott’s acts.

Unfortunately, Scott’s story isn’t the only incident of bad behavior I found. Last week, the former fire chief of the Locust Creek (Va.) Volunteer Fire Department was sentenced to 88 years in prison for sexually abusing an underage girl. The chief was sentenced to 323 years in prison with 235 years suspended for 20 felony sex counts, which occurred regularly between February 2007 and January 2009.

Last month, a jury found a retired Los Angeles County fire chief guilty of savagely beating a neighbor’s dog. After ongoing problems with the neighbors and their free-roaming collection of animals, the former chief beat the six-month old dog with a rock, and the dog had to be put down after the injuries. The former chief now faces up to four years in prison.

Also in Los Angeles, an LAFD assistant fire chief and his family pleaded no contest to charges from a hit-and-run cover up. The chief’s son was involved in the accident, subsequently covered up by his parents. The chief, his wife, and son were each sentenced to 36 months probation and community service.

The St. Louis Dispatch reported that a 51-year-old deputy fire chief was arrested for driving a stolen vehicle and other traffic violations.

And last week in England, three Warwickshire County fire service officers were told they would be arrested over the deaths of four firefighters killed in a vegetable-packing warehouse blaze. According to the Fire Brigades Union, the three officers were believed to be involved in the incident command process and could face allegations of gross negligence to the four deaths in November 2007.

Sometimes even lack of action is bad behavior. A fire chief in Michigan avoided disciplinary action after keeping a registered sex offender employed as a paid, on-call fire department lieutenant for four years. The lieutenant’s history as a sex offender was revealed after he was arrested in November for allegedly soliciting sex from two minors on Facebook.

The comments posted to these news stories were almost as interesting as the stories themselves, ranging from pity to rage and frustration to embarrassment for the profession.

Good or bad, the Internet has made it easier to track and spread the stories. Fortunately, the good-news stories about fire chiefs far outnumber the stories of chiefs in trouble. But it is still up to us to police ourselves — before the real police have to get involved.