BY ALAN BRUNACINI
We have in recent columns turned into a prep school for young firefighters who are attempting to learn lessons that will help them better understand operating and surviving on and off the fireground. Hopefully, some of what we discuss will increase their level of understanding of the conditions they encounter out in the real world.
Developing and maintaining an effective level of understanding are challenges for all of us regardless of our age or amount of experience. This is particularly critical now, simply because current conditions are changing so quickly that if we ever stop learning about the world around us, those changes will outperform our ability to deal with them; and, sadly, getting behind in our hazard zone survival school work can also kill us.
The recession we are trying to survive (right now) has created an interesting new reference: I read and hear the comment that the American fire service is now moving toward a “new normal.” This is a challenge for an old guy like me because I am still struggling with a lot of current confusion that would fit into the “old normal.” As I listen to the current discussion, I hear smart people say dumb stuff like we must now “do more with less”—trying to do this with current levels of firefighting resources (already reduced by the past five years of reductions/blackouts/brownouts) defies logic and physics.
When I think about the smart old guys who raised me at Station One, they would instinctively say, “What is wrong with you, kid? You can do different with less, but you can’t do more with less.” These guys would be somewhat disabled in today’s somewhat convoluted “do more with less” discussion because they did not use graduate school language to describe grade school baloney.
Laborers: Eternally, the Core Component
The lesson for the youth of today (regardless of age) is that firefighting has always and will always involve the smartest form of manual labor. The cold hard basis of effectively doing manual labor is really pretty simple—it has been regulated (at least historically) mostly by how many laborers show up. This is particularly true when the required tasks must be done quickly in a very narrow and rapidly disappearing and dangerous window of opportunity, such as when Mrs. Smith calls us because her kitchen is burning.
Early in your schooling, you should begin to understand the connection between the rescue and firefighting problems present and how much and what kind of standard labor is required to engage and solve those problems. You should also pay attention to how your position as a firefighter fits into that work. You are generally the lowest seniority member of your fire company. It is your role to make the coffee, raise the flag, ride backward, and take the hydrant. You have joined a service that has been in place for almost 300 years, and we have developed and refined work routines that are effective because we engage in methods that have survived the test of time—if it works, we do it again.
A major result of the tried-and-true approach is that our industry has developed a work routine standard that started at the beginning of our service that describes how many firefighters it takes to perform standard firefighting operations. These standards are formal and informal/contractual and cultural/sociological and written; they all are the result of field application, task analysis, extensive research, and a ton of actual testing. That long-standing fire company staffing standard is that fire company staffing for protecting against normal fire risks is four firefighters.
This “doing what has always worked” approach is now being questioned (read: assaulted) based on shrinking local resources because of the current recession. I guess this is what is driving the “new normal.” All this staffing stuff is clearly expressed in National Fire Protection Association 1710, Standard for the Organization and Deployment of Fire Suppression Operations, Emergency Medical Operations, and Special Operations to the Public by Career Fire Departments. Every firefighter should read that standard to develop a perspective of what a standard structural firefighting response looks like.
That level of standard response capability should become the foundation of an understanding of what rescue and firefighting tasks (and the resources to perform those tasks) are required to effectively and safely control a benchmark residential fire and a comparison of how the standard compares to the current staffing and deployment level of the departments of these younger members—this comparison will become the basis of an objective evaluation of the “street” (actual) performance capability of that department.
My interest in this staffing rant in my current prep school craze is to perhaps orient our young members to some of the current insanity that is now going on in local government. I think a major part of this alert is that everyone in the service is in for an interesting and more than somewhat exciting “ride.” The younger members of our service have come into the business at a very interesting time. They will be able to, like every generation, evaluate what the last generation left for them to deal with. I have somewhat mixed feelings when I think about their inheritance and how they will eventually feel about the old geezers who then will be in rocking chairs at the Elderly Fire Chiefs and Old City Managers Home.
The most expensive part of any career fire department is responder staffing (85-90 percent) of the overall budget. Local government is now basically broke, which is just the hometown effect of the current recession. The level of our fire company staffing currently has a huge target on it. City administrators and politicians now are critically looking at the cost of our personnel levels. They are asking questions that revolve around the price of traditional staffing levels. We respond with a defense in which we passionately describe the value of our service to the community and the rescue and fire loss that will occur if we go below those levels. The price (them) vs. value (us) argument will go on until the recession goes away.
The youngest generation of firefighters always has the longest time left in the service. Today, that young generation must live for the rest of their careers with whatever happens with the current local government financial mess. It is fairly safe to say that our service will not be the same for them as it was for us (hopefully, it will be better); but, whatever the future holds, today’s fire kids will have to live with those changes. When I try to imagine how our service will come out of these bucks-down times, it reminds me of a significant change that occurred in our service a long time ago and how it affected the generation that had to manage that change.
Adapting to Our New Future
Around the turn of the last century, our service changed from horse-drawn to motorized apparatus. We developed a love affair with the horses during the time they were with us. We literally lived with them, and they became an integrated and highly affectionate part of our regular routine. They were noble, powerful, and enormously loyal companions to the firefighters whom they propelled. They would literally pull their hearts out getting to the alarm. Pictorial accounts of a full-size steamer, belching black smoke, being pulled by a team of beautiful horses created a dramatic, romantic, mind-blowing emotional impression that symbolized our “rushing to the rescue,” as the Currier & Ives antique fire art shows. I had that picture on the wall of my office for the 28 years I was chief.
The change from horse to motor was characterized as the most dramatic and highly resisted internal change that had ever occurred in the American fire service. We are told that the generation that worked with the horses never got over the loss that came with the change. I joined my department at a time (1958) when the older members (40+ years) had joined the service soon after the horses went away. They spent the beginning and most formidable part of their careers listening to and living through the continual response of their elders, who were actively grieving the loss of their beloved steeds.
My first captain at Station One, where I was assigned, spoke of “Rex and Jenny,” the horses that pulled Engine One (a full-size steamer), as if the two of them were still downstairs listening for the telegraph fire alarm circuit to click open so they could do what they did best and enjoyed the most. I loved my captain (fine officer), and I must admit that as I listened to the fire horse reminiscence, I felt a little cheated that I did not get to take part in the steam period of our job.
The connection that my horse story has to the recession is contained in a cryptic comment the old-timers always included in their war story. Somewhere in the often-repeated description of how painful the horse removal change was, they would add a very philosophic line: “When they retired the horses, they should have retired everyone who worked with the horses.” I heard that statement a ton of times and really never very effectively engaged what it really meant until I became a boss who landed in the middle of a period that had the most fire service change since the horses went away. I can’t recall the number of times I would quietly, mentally repeat that statement—as a boss, I guess that I took their “horses” away over and over.
I am not qualified to even comment on the duration, depth, or dynamics of the current recession, but I can pretty much figure out that in some ways, perhaps many ways, our service will be different after the crash than it was before. What I do know is that young firefighters will sentence themselves to a career of painful emotions looking back at the “horses” they loved and they miss—and that are never returning. The past gives us our identity; the future gives us our purpose. Let’s take control of our future and then live in that future.
Retired Chief ALAN BRUNACINI is a fire service author and speaker. He and his sons own the quarterly fire service magazine BSHIFTER.com and the Blue Card hazard zone training and certification system. He can be reached at alanbrunacini@cox.net.
