A “NEW” PLAYER IN THE STANDARDS GAME
EDITOR’S OPINION
Shortly after the International Association of Fire Fighters officially returned to the fold as a participant in the National Fire Protection Association standards process, the Alliance for Fire and Emergency Management (known until recently as the International Society of Fire Service Instructors) announced the creation of its own separate, consensus standards-making body.
Directly or indirectly, establishing an Alliance standards division is a power play against the NFPA’s National Fire Codes, a challenge the NFPA could avoid only by publicly apologizing, in effect, for some of its most important fire service standards.
It appears the Alliance has assigned itself a daunting task. The NFPA’s size, history, renewed financial stability, and political clout are in its favor. And the IAFF’s jumping back onto the NFPA Love Boat wouldn’t appear to make things any easier for an alternative standards body.
The Alliance is betting heavily on receiving the support of both its membership and the fire service at large, betting that thousands of firefighters will “just say no” to the NFPA. And yet, there is some weird political logic and balance to the Alliance move. Alliance officials say its standards division will focus primarily on volunteers. If volunteer firefighters truly are unhappy with the NFPA standards, and as they see the NFPA readily accommodating 1AFF demands for career firefighter standards, they may be sufficiently enticed by the Alliance to make a change, or at least pull back enough to create a vacuum of doubt the Alliance hopes to fill.
But the politics stray from the real issues. Do firefighters need more and different standards? Are separate standards for paid and volunteers necessary? Will the new standards make the firefighter better trained and prepared? Is another standards body—are competing standards bodies— good for the firefighter? Is the NFPA off track? Will the Alliance process and product be different, better? Will more standards cut through the confusion or create more?
According to Larry Davis, chairman of the Alliance Commission, more realistic standards, particularly for the volunteer fire service, are desperately needed. Davis says the philosophy behind these new standards should follow that of two industrial fire brigade standards created several years ago by his organization when it was the ISFSI—“performancebased standards…written like the old 1001. where everything was specified by performance; each objective was measurable.”
“When we were creating the brigade standards,” Davis explains, “people said, *1 don’t have CO, extinguishers in my plant, and I don’t want to waste time teaching about CO, extinguishers because some standard says so. I want to teach them specifically about what w-e have in the plant….’ And as we were working on la standard that would be both general and site-specific}, l kept telling people, ’This is what the fire service needs….’
“And what prompted a whole lot of this stuff is three years ago I told Ed McCormack [Alliance chief executive officer], ‘There’s nobody out there training to all of the 1001 requirements. Everybody’s out there certifying people..,.’ I said. ‘Call New York, call LA, call the big cities and ask them.’ Ed made 38 phone calls to metro departments and asked how they tested their people on setting up a folding tank. Most of them had to comment. ‘Well, we don’t use that stuff, so we don’t test them on that.’ So I asked, ‘Ed, if they’re not doing that, are they really meeting the criteria of 1001?”’
Especially for small-town and rural fire departments. Davis says, the standards are unrealistic; “They’re idealistic in that they’re going to make everyone perform at the same level … W hen we IISFSI] were up at NFPA a couple of years ago. we said 1500 in a lot respects is unrealistic for most fire departments. And they said you have to write a standard for the biggest departments. We said we understand that, but when you put stuff in a standard that state training agencies adopt. they make everybody live up to that….
“We’re not saying that you dilute the standards for volunteers. We’re saying: Why would you want to spend hours teaching a volunteer fire chief how to deal with grievances when he’s not there to deal with labormanagement conflicts? What really needs to happen is that every fire department, whether volunteer or career, rural or metro, has got to have a site-specific program. This idea that we’re going to make everyone come up to the same level—hell, that’s never going to happen….
“Here’s what happens [with unrealistic standards]: It gets people afraid to make common-sense decisions. I see people making decisions on the fireground not based on what they know is right but based on the fear that somebody’s going to break their ass if they do something wrong. Same with training. The Alliance goes to the state training agency, the state says, ‘You have to meet 1001….’
“When 1001 was created it was a laundry list. Every objective was measurable…. Now you have these Job Performance Requirements that are nebulous and difficult to measure. The intent behind [the Alliance’s] volunteer standards is to have cut-and-dried performance objectives. You pick the programs or pieces of the performance standard you need for your department….
“The truth is, the real fire service doesn’t have much input into the NFPA process. The real world of the fire service can’t get to the meetings…. We’d have [committee] meetings on weekends, we’d take care of their transportation, we’d operate as a committee that doesn’t necessarily have to [meet in one place]—there are conference calls and fax machines.
“We wouldn’t say our standards have to be revised; nobody ever gets up to speed with revised codes…. Our primary purpose is not to sell standards…. Anyone can submit comments; you don’t have to pay to register to come to a meeting and have input. It’s a process that’s clean, that nobody can say is a self-serving thing—it’s not….
“[The Alliance] has a standards process in place with the industrial standards. Most of what fire departments would need in terms of the tasks related to Firefighting—not haz mat, not EMS, but the fire stuff— those standards are already there, and we need to pull it together and make it available to the volunteer fire service….
“Twenty years ago. we had all this ideal vision, but the system isn’t working. The pendulum has gone too far. We need to swing it back someplace where reality is. That is the intent of the Alliance standards division.”
What do you think? We want to know!
- Should there be separate standards for career and volunteer firefighters? If yes. circle #1 on Reader Service Card; if no. circle #2 on Reader Service Card.
- Should standards be written so they can be used in a “site-specific” way? If yes, circle #3 on Reader Service Card; if no, circle #4 on Reader Serv ice Card.
- Should the Alliance for Fire and Emergency Management create new fire service standards? If yes, circle #5 on Reader Service Card; if no, circle #6 on Reader Service Card.
- Should the Alliance and the National Fire Protection Association work together to create new fire service standards? If yes. circle #7 on Reader Service Card; if no, circle #8 on Reader Service Card.
Circle the appropriate numbers on the Reader Service Card, page 19. Please be sure to fill out the information about yourself and your department. Thanks.
