By Lauren Keyson
An Interview with William Goldfeder, Battalion Chief, Loveland-Symmes (OH) Fire Department
Weak staffing and weak training are two subjects that have been debated, derided, and “disgusted” for years. But the issue boils down to this: The tasks needed to be completed at a fire cannot be accomplished when only four or five people with bare-bones training answer a call. In most cases, limited funds have been blamed for this situation. But according to Chief William Goldfeder, lack of money is no excuse for deficiencies in staffing and training. In his 29 years as a firefighter, he has spent time evaluating this problem and has taught thousands of students on the issues of staffing. Here he expounds on numbers, people, and plain old-fashioned common sense.
LAUREN KEYSON, FIRE ENGINEERING: Why don’t people like to talk about staffing problems?
BILLY GOLDFEDER, LOVELAND-SYMMES (OH) FIRE DEPARTMENT: Because it costs money and is usually the reason for many of the problems we have in the fire service. When responding to a fire, you must accomplish certain tasks. To accomplish these tasks, you’ve got to have people to do it. It’s a real basic formula-people are putting their heads in the sand about it. Unfortunately, certain chief officers, city managers, and mayors continue to ignore the fact that, even on a single-family dwelling fire, it takes a certain number of people to accomplish the tasks.
Over the years, fire departments have had their budgets cut. People think that if you have five people on your apparatus, you could probably do with four. Well, if you have four on your apparatus, you could probably do with three. They’ve whittled it down and whittled it down-now you’ve got fire departments operating on ridiculously low staffing.
LK: So, when you talk about weak staffing, you’re talking about numbers.
BG: Yes, numbers that are clearly associated with the tasks required. There are certain basic tasks that absolutely must be done-you must have somebody to turn on the hydrant. You must have somebody to operate the pump. You must have three people at minimum on a hoseline.
LK: But departments do it with less all the time ellipse.
BG: And people get hurt or killed.
LK: If local fire stations have only three or four people on an apparatus and still accomplish what they need to, how do you resolve that?
BG: To solve the problem, they have to go and figure out how many people they do need. There is a way to calculate it. You have to look and see what is in your community. For example, if your community has mostly single-family dwelling fires, and you do a lot of those, you’re probably pretty good at them. But maybe you’re not-maybe you just think you’re good because you don’t have a lot of fires. You have this false sense that, “Hey, we’re okay with less.”
LK: That’s understandable because by some estimates, in many communities 70 percent of the calls are other than fire.
BG: That’s correct. But you’ve got to still get the task done based on what kind of buildings you have: occupancy, size, construction, height, and so on.
LK: But aren’t you just beating your head against a wall when the issue is getting more money?
BG: Absolutely. I’ve been banging my head against a wall on this issue for years; that doesn’t mean I’m going to quit banging my head. This attitude of just giving up, of “Hey, it’s no big deal, we’re okay, we’ll do with what we have,” is killing people-it’s injuring firefighters. Or we’re losing the risks we’re expected to protect.
If you have a working fire in a couple of rooms of a home, you cannot possibly safely deal with that fire with three or four or five people on the first-alarm assignment. There is a big difference between the first-alarm assignment and the first truck. First-alarm assignment is all the trucks that are going. Unfortunately, in a lot of towns, that’s it. I go back to Keokuk, Iowa-there was a horrible fire there a couple of years ago. They had five firefighters for the first-alarm assignment. They responded to a duplex fire with kids trapped. Not only did all three kids die, but also three of the five total firefighters were killed-clearly because of poor staffing.
You’ve got to be able to stretch hoselines; on a house fire, you need at least two lines-that means six people. You need somebody at the hydrant-that’s a seventh. You need somebody at the pump-there’s an eighth. You need between two and four people to properly ventilate-you’ve got to ventilate. You can’t just say, “Oh we’ll ventilate if we need it,” because then it’s too late. And all these tasks have to be done simultaneously.
LK: But when it comes to staffing, what can small, local fire departments do if they don’t have the money?
BG: They need to work with their neighbors and combine forces-not officially, but set up a response program. Let’s say you live in an area where there are five or six little towns and each of them only has three or four on duty. Well, then send five of those stations to a fire. It doesn’t cost a nickel, other than running the trucks up and down the road, which is miniscule.
Then it gets you 15, 18, 20 people on your first-alarm assignment. You’ve got to have another three firefighters to stretch a backup line. Then there are certain requirements: You’ve got to meet two-in/two-out requirements. You’ve got to have numerous firefighters for a rapid intervention team, a firefighter to handle the water supply, a truck operator for the ladder truck, two more for ventilation. It goes on and on.
We’re getting people injured or, if no one is getting injured, then we are not putting the fire out quickly enough. And this is because we don’t have enough people to do it.
LK: Do you think that in addition to a lack of money creating the weak staffing situation, it could also be that enough people are not applying for firefighter positions?
BG: No, I don’t think that’s the issue. Recruitment is a whole other discussion.
LK: Some of these smaller towns don’t have a lot of fires, so maybe they don’t feel that they need to have a lot of firefighters on hand.
BG: But whether you have one fire or a thousand fires, it needs to be handled right. Time needs to be spent training and drilling. Does your town not let your cops carry bullets because you don’t have a lot of crime? What is the difference-“Oh, we’ll give you more bullets if you need them”? No, the cops are prepared. We’ve got to look at it from a realistic standpoint. The reality is, there will be a fire and when that fire hits, instead of us all going, “Oh, woe is us, people died, firemen died,” why don’t we think ahead of the curve and figure out what we do need in our community and work toward that?
LK: Why is it that some fire departments have a hard time getting people to volunteer?
BG: Unfortunately, people not volunteering, in most cases, is because of the internal politics of being involved in a volunteer department. There are fire departments that have so much politics, many people think, “Why would I want to be here?” The good volunteer departments focus on the mission and the training and don’t make the members do fundraising and so on.
Everywhere you look over the past couple of months, all the politicians are rallying behind the firefighters. You see the politicians take advantage of the tragedies that have occurred in the past year. Maybe that praise is nice, but it’s time for the politicians to put up or shut up, instead of just gaining on the backs of our brothers who were murdered on 9/11. How does a town expect their firefighters to handle an occupied structure fire with only five people on duty? It’s physically impossible. Now, the Vanna White “Wheel of Fortune” may have spun in their directions a couple of times, but they’re going to get caught.
As the politicians are glad-handing everybody, we still don’t see any increased staffing. I’ll bet you there is not a department in the nation that will tell you that NFPA 1710-the staffing standard that is a big deal-has helped them at all. It’s being ignored. Nothing is happening. But we’re our enemy, too. The mayor will say to the union, “Why do you need that many men?” and the union will say that it doesn’t know. There are scientific ways to figure it out based on the size of your community, your response times, distances, and risks. Then you apply the necessary tasks to “if that’s on fire” and tie the people to the tasks. It’s a simple formula.
There are fire departments running one or two people on an engine. They’re fooling the public and themselves. The public rides by and says, “Beautiful fire trucks, beautiful station,” but in a lot of cases, there’s one firefighter and a blind dog, and that’s the extent of it. Whom are we kidding? There are departments out there with one on-duty career firefighter. There are volunteer fire departments that know very well that Monday through Friday, during the day, they probably won’t get a truck on the road. But they’re burying their heads in the sand, thinking, “We’ll be okay, we might get out and we might not.” They have to get their heads out of the sand and work on more aggressive recruitment. They’ve got to have more rules and regulations. They must go on a certain number of calls. They must pull duty time in the station.
There are solutions that are not all about money, although it does come down to just that at times. But let’s say your town doesn’t get along with other towns-that’s another issue, too. What if you don’t get along with the fire department next door? You have to deal with that. You had better start having lunch together. You need to start working out your differences so that three or four of your towns can go to fires together-and not when you realize that you need it. Because then it’s too late. It has to be on the first alarm. If you get to a fire and you’re losing it, it’s too late.
LK: Let’s move now from weak staffing, which is a numbers issue, to weak training, which is a people issue.
BG: In most cases, firefighters are not spending enough time getting good quality training. This quality training doesn’t mean the training officer driving around visiting the station and showing training videos. Videos are interesting, but the real issue is that firefighters have to get up out of their chairs and have a systematic program where they know what the drill is for the day. They need a lesson plan tied to it and someone who is qualified and competent teaching that subject. And they have to do it every day for a couple of hours. A typical firefighter works either a 12- or 24-hour shift. There is nothing wrong with spending two or three of those hours per shift on training.
LK: Well, this does bring back the numbers issue. Can all the towns afford to have someone there just for training?
BG: Who is leading the fire department? Somebody better be in charge. And that person should do the training. Training is also free in a lot of areas. County training centers have all sorts of courses. The issue with training isn’t money. The issue is leadership vs. laziness. There are a lot of opportunities for a lot of good training. You can pick up a training text, which might have two or three hundred hours of basic training in it. Use that! Set your drills up that way. You don’t need anything fancy to do that. Then get up off the chairs, stretch hose, climb ladders.
Basically, any fire chief or fire officer should want to know this: Is every firefighter who rides my apparatus an expert on all the tools, equipment, and tasks they may be assigned? And that’s the goal-they all have to be experts.
LK: So does weak training start at the top?
BG: It only starts at the top. If a department isn’t properly trained, it’s the fire chief’s responsibility. Now, some people would say, “Our chief doesn’t support training.” Well great-do it yourself then. You lieutenants and captains-where the rubber meets the road as far as leadership in the fire service-should do the training on your own. Come up with a program. Pick up Fire Engineering every month. There’s enough information here to provide people with hours and hours of training. See if you have a building in your town like the one mentioned in the magazine. How would you handle it? Write on the board. Then go out and visit the building. Preplan it. Where would you ventilate it? Where are the utilities? Where would you put the lines? Where are the hazards? What is the occupancy?
LK: What if departments don’t have the resources to do live fire training?
BG: That’s a problem. There’s nothing like live fire training. But it’s better than nothing. The statement is “no excuses training.” Someone has got to be able to lead the firefighters and provide them with the skills and training. The same thing goes for a volunteer fire department. Volunteer company members should be training two to three hours a week. Pick a night. Not when you have the meetings or cleanup-I’m talking about training and drills.
Volunteer time today is precious. Volunteers don’t want to go down to a fire station and waste a lot of time. If you say you are going to do training, then have a lesson plan and bring in an expert. Maybe a neighboring department can swap chiefs and train others on something they are expert in. Most areas have county or state training programs. These people don’t charge. Invite them to your station. But make sure it’s time well spent.
Another issue with volunteers: A lot of departments have them come down and then spend three hours washing and waxing, cleaning the fire station and the trucks, and then maybe they’ll do an hour of training. Forget that. Find somebody else to clean your trucks. Get a prisoner to come do it-they have work-release programs for that. We are wasting our people’s time. And we wonder why they don’t want to come around anymore. Make them feel valued, and don’t jerk them around when it comes to quality training. They’ve got to learn stuff!
Chief Billy Goldfeder serves as a battalion chief for the Loveland-Symmes (OH) Fire Department. Previously, he served as a chief in Ohio, Virginia, and Florida; an engineering/public protection representative covering southern New York for I.S.O.; and a lieutenant with the Manhasset-Lakeville (NY) Fire Department. A 1993 graduate of the National Fire Academy’s Executive Fire Officer Program, he is the former chairman of the International Association of Fire Chiefs Volunteer Section. Goldfeder was recently named honorary battalion chief of the Fire Department of New York.
Lauren Keyson is executive editor of Fire Engineering and conference manager for the Fire Department Instructors Conference. Previously, she directed digital and print publishing in high tech and finance. She has a bachelor’s degree in political science from UC Berkeley and a publishing certificate from Stanford University. If you have a burning issue to discuss in this column, e-mail her at laurenk@pennwell.com.
