BY CHRISTOPHER TRACY
In an age of international and domestic terror, fire service and law enforcement representatives along with elected officials and technology researchers across the country are working collaboratively to find ways to enhance their response capabilities and better secure their emergency scenes.
WHERE WE’RE COMING FROM
As we prepare to respond to the pressing issues facing the fire service today, it’s almost impossible to remember our relative innocence of 15 years ago, mere months before the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building brought the threat of terrorism home with a vengeance. Although just three years previously, six people were killed and more than a thousand were wounded in Osama bin Laden’s earlier attempt on the World Trade Center, and seven years before that members of the Rajneeshee cult in Oregon committed the first domestic bioterrorist attack, it took Oklahoma City and the days and years that followed, culminating on 9/11, to make us truly understand that we had experienced a revolutionary change and would thereafter be living in and responding to an age of terrorism.
Ted Kaczynski’s earliest foray on the grounds of the University of Illinois in Chicago back in 1978 and his many other improvised explosive devices that led to his eventual Montana arrest as the Unabomber, just days before Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols’ truck bomb 1,400 miles away killed 168 men, women, and children in Oklahoma, barely registered as a blip on the national fire service radar. Because his attacks were spread over several decades and his victims were separated by thousands of miles, and since those communication technologies we now take for granted that allow local fire and law enforcement agencies to share data had not yet emerged, first responders took a traditionally bifurcated approach to the separate police and fire threats posed by Kaczynski and his kind. Today, first responders can no longer accept such a compartmentalized approach, and the aphorism citing “two hundred years of tradition unimpeded by progress” cannot continue, as the threats we’ve faced in recent history and those looming on the horizon requireeven demandthat we change the way we do business.
MAKING CONNECTIONS
Whether your fire department is large or small, career or volunteer, its charge remains the same: to protect the lives and property within your community. Your expected response capabilities may include fire prevention and suppression, medical response and transport, rescues and other special operations, even environmental protection, with public education and arson investigation thrown in for good measure. However expansive your responsibilities are, it’s safe to say that they’ve evolved considerably over the past 15 years and it’s highly likely that they’ve involved far more interaction with law enforcement than the brief encounter at motor vehicle accidents of only a few years earlier. It’s also a good bet that, like everyone else in the public and private sector, you’re being asked to do more with less. With that in mind, and considering the complexity of the new threats we face, it’s time to reach out to law enforcement, the medical community, and the private sector to develop stronger ties and shared resources.
The evolutionary and even revolutionary changes that have taken place in fire departments around the country over the past few years may offer ideas that you can apply, though they will require adaptation by your department to fill immediate needs and address long-term challenges. Some of these changes may have come from the top down, through directives and standard operating procedures that articulated a vision of collaboration and cooperation held by management; others came up from the troops, either formally through challenges and needs you identified and addressed and then codified into changing procedures or informally through ideas and relationships you developed that became established practices through their successful employment. Still other changesand not necessarily the most welcome or easiest to incorporatehave come from the outside in, whether through statutory laws and regulations or revisions to nationally recognized standards and practices, which required greater accountability and interoperability among agencies.
Like the changes coming from within, you must find ways to use these mandates as a means to improve your operations and capabilities, seizing them as opportunities for communication and collaboration while overcoming the objections of those who would seek to maintain the comfort zone of their status quo. If you don’t take advantage of the evolutionary challenges as they come along, the demands of the moment will almost certainly require revolutionary changes.
SEIZING OPPORTUNITIES
In the past, fire personnel interacted with law enforcement only briefly, occasionally working against them in power struggles rather than with them in partnerships. But recent years have brought emergency scene hazards and line-of-duty deaths within every response discipline, creating a greater respect for our shared risks and needs at emergency sceneshelping us to understand that our separate tactical responsibilities must not blind us to our shared strategic goal of protecting lives and property and allowing us to perform our duties more effectively. Postincident analyses and critiques involving all agencies have provided participants the opportunities to learn how their fellow first responders operate and discuss how to improve those operations. Even an informal invitation to the firehouse for coffee, a meal, or cleanup after a messy call can lead to frank discussions and improved relations.
From that dialogue, you can develop shared training opportunities, with fire personnel taking the lead on hazmat refreshers and incident stabilization, law enforcement addressing scene safety and spoliation of evidence, and medical responders providing bloodborne pathogen refreshers and EMT recertification where needed. Develop and hold multiagency practical evolutions at a local level, just as mixed company operations are a standard practice within the fire community. Although federally funded extended scenarios are useful tools at a regional level, the ability to learn and adapt locally is priceless and can be accomplished at minimal cost within existing training time blocks. Changes in response tactics at school-related incidents are examples of why we need to train together, sharing strategic ideas and tactical resources as we evolve our approach to such events.
Along with training and routine scene response almost inevitably come special operations, those resource-heavy scenes where all hands are working. Find the areas of convergence with other agencies and capitalize on them, find holes in your operations that they can fill, and discover ways in which you can collaborate rather than compete. Perhaps you can embed personnel in marine or air units, providing medical or tactical assets to what had been a law enforcement resource. Or you can use law enforcement and medical personnel within your hazmat/WMD response team to ensure evidence protection and collection while ensuring the safety of your team. Investigate the need for paramedic and other special skills within law enforcement’s SWAT or clan lab entry teams, and examine your own special operations teams for areas where embedded personnel from other agencies could improve or enhance your response.
DEVELOPING PARTNERSHIPS
Don’t forget prevention and administrative divisions either, as lockdown drills join fire drills in school schedules; talking points for teachers and school administrators may initiate interesting conversations in areas where agencies can learn from one another. Some school officials may be more familiar with the National Incident Management System (NIMS) than their first responders, and the concept that a teacher or principal serves as incident commander until the arrival of emergency services is sure to start a lively discussion. Public education initiatives ranging from Officer Friendly and DARE to the staged crashes held at prom time are all areas around which you can develop communication and collaboration, creating conversations between agencies and individuals and enhancing mutual understanding and cooperation when “the big one” happens.
And just as you use NIMS every day at routine scenes, start practicing the concept of Unified Command throughout the year by holding regular press briefings with the media involving public information officers from across disciplines to develop routines and relationships that will serve everyone at the emergency scene. Work with other departments within your community to establish a safety-conscious approach to incident responses and daily activities so law enforcement or medical personnel can address the risks and hazards that fire may overlook and vice versa. Preplan target hazards and practice tabletop responses with multiple agencies to ensure that everyone knows what the other will do and expect; you may be surprised to learn of their capabilities, limitations, and expectations, just as they may be surprised at yours.
Finally, sit with your peers in these other agencies and share your resource lists, not just for logistical response needs down the road but to discover tools and equipment you might have alternate uses for. Find out what they have and how they use it, and consider new applications within your discipline. Fill them in on your assets, both human and material, and see if they have uses you never considered. Identify areas of shared need and see if you can’t share the cost as well, using apparatus, equipment, and personnel skills to raise your response readiness to a whole new level.
WHERE WE’RE GOING
Sometimes these newly forged relationships may take you to unexpected places, whether onto an extended surveillance mission as part of a multiagency joint hazard assessment team (JHAT) or into the halls of our nation’s capital to work together with your legislators toward more effective legislation. Joint operations such as the JHAT response developed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation are federal examples of the direction we need to go in, and there are similar models at the regional and local levels. The proliferation of clandestine drug labs and the plethora of white powder calls in recent years have brought together an alphabet soup of federal, state, and local agencies, challenging our previous boundaries and forging new alliances as criminal, medical, and public safety issues converge at the emergency scene.
Recent efforts in Washington to update cellular legislation for the 21st century are other examples of expanding alliances, as law enforcement and fire officers seek to use new technology breakthroughs to secure scenes more effectively by working with their elected officials to rewrite laws written a generation before such technology even existed (see the article “Controlling Communications During a Critical Incident” in this supplement). Friendships first forged at motor vehicle accidents, hostage negotiations, or public education events can evolve into partnerships for change in the public sector. By merging our networks and sharing our resources, we can make things happen collectively that would never be possible individually.
In today’s world, first responders more than ever need to actively reach out to one another, to other public agencies and agents, to the private sector, and to our elected government officials. They need to hear from us; we need to hear from one another. We all need to seize the opportunities as they present themselves to be proactive and work with our peers in the first responder community to prepare for changing demands, expectations, and available resources rather than miss those opportunities and having to react to deteriorating conditions in an emergency. The lives of our citizens and our peers quite literally depend on it.
CHRISTOPHER TRACY is assistant chief for the Fairfield (CT) Fire Department, where he is a safety officer, a public information officer, and the chief of training. He has been training director for the Fairfield Regional Fire School since 2007. Tracy began his career in the fire service as a volunteer in neighboring Easton and a civilian fire dispatcher for Westport and Norwalk before being hired in Fairfield in 1990; after a decade as a firefighter, EMT, and hazmat technician with the Fairfield County Hazardous Incident Response Team, he became lieutenant and then deputy fire marshal. He sits on the National Fire Protection Association’s 472 Hazardous Materials Technical Committee as well as the Executive Board of the Uniformed Professional Fire Fighters Association of Connecticut and has taught extensively as a state-certified fire, police, Red Cross, and hazardous materials instructor for the past two decades.
