BY BILL MANNING
A phoenix rose from the ashes of the tragic Seton Hall University dormitory fire early this year.
Fire safety professionals struck while the iron was hot, working swiftly and with strength of conviction to spearhead landmark automatic sprinkler legislation. Fire safety support programs for college students sprung up. Fire safety procedural readiness in dormitories increased. Media coverage raised public awareness of fire safety issues, at least for a while.
But the local fire department? Not much ink for it.
The South Orange (NJ) Fire Department responded to the Seton Hall chaos with eight members-three firefighters and an officer on the engine, three firefighters and an officer on the truck-better than this career department’s minimum on-duty strength of six firefighters.
On arrival, students were hanging out of windows. Some were about to drop, driven out by heavy fire in the hallway coupled with bedroom doors left ajar. The truck chauffeur raised the aerial ladder to potential jumpers. The other two firefighters and the officer raised ground ladders and began to remove students down to safety.
Meanwhile, the engine company captain had radioed immediately for additional companies, supplied through mutual aid agreements with neighboring cities.
The first hydrant was bad. A firefighter handstretched a supply line to a second (working) hydrant while the pump operator connected to the building’s standpipe. The third firefighter and captain prepared to attack the fire. Once fire attack was underway, the captain positioned himself outside the building to better command the incident.
The first mutual aid unit arrived 17 minutes after they were called. The next units began arriving four minutes after that. That reflex time is not unusual, even for a densely populated urban area such as South Orange and the surrounding cities.
For the South Orange firefighters, it was a high-stress situation without the prospect of additional help in the critical first minutes of the response. What did they do? They performed like the professionals they are. They performed like the heroes they are. They did what they had to do, did more than maybe they thought they could do. They removed scores of kids down ladders. They knocked down the fire and removed more kids from the interior. They took on chaos and won.
They did what you would have done. They are not much different than most fire departments in the 21st century. They’re a sometimes outgunned group, hoping help is on its way in a hurry but not counting on it, who do the best they can with what’s available.
Immediately following the Seton Hall incident, the focus was on the kids, on the human tragedy. Three were dead, several were critically injured, and many more might have fallen. The focus was on the investigation. On essential legislation to mandate built-in fire protection. On civilian preparedness for and behavior in fire situations. On healing and community proaction.
But there was no such intense investment in the South Orange Fire Department. Shortly after they took up from Seton Hall, members were placed under what amounted to a city-ordered gag rule regarding the incident, presumably to protect the city from the lawsuits that were to follow.
The firefighters silently went about business as usual. There was no public dialogue on initial response practices, on fireground staffing issues, on mutual aid response, on additional training or other improvements for the fire department. Just business as usual, with eight or seven or six firefighters responding to the calls, day in and day out. Sometimes the mutual aid crews arrived early; sometimes they did not.
But then, the South Orange “gag order” is typical of most political responses to significant incidents across the country. The fire department is silenced and a golden opportunity disappears.
Tragedy is the mother of change for the fire department. It’s a bitter irony, but true nonetheless. If the fire department is not permitted to advocate its position in the public interest in public forums, change dies in the womb. If there’s no advocacy, the public doesn’t know and can’t care. Gag orders that clamp down on vital public issues such as fire response levels pave the way for future tragedies-and the cycle continues.
The litigation monster looms large. No fire chief wants to throw away or tarnish a career by bucking city management. No mayor wants to admit to his voting constituents that fire response levels may not be what they should be. No city attorney wants a “loose cannon” jeopardizing his case.
So we are driven into a profound silence. But what could a fire official say that hasn’t already been discovered by a competent attorney for the plaintiff? And if fire response issues are germane to the case, all the silence in the world leading up to the trial would not prevent the plaintiff from calling a fire official to testify.
In the past 10 years, I can count on one hand the number of times politicians have taken the courageous and dutiful response to a terrible tragedy in their towns by encouraging their fire department leaders to go public with the painful lessons learned, providing communities nationwide with an opportunity to grow from the experience. In none-repeat, none-of those cases did such public discourse prove to be a legal liability. And no one was fired.
Unfortunately, though, in most cases, our future is bound to expedient politics, whereby aggressive handling of immediate legal matters preempts the much larger fire protection and response issues. In most places, the politics of today does not coincide with the fire response of tomorrow. For politicians, attorneys, and some fire chiefs, fear dominates, so much so that public ignorance or public delusion is preferred. The emperor is wearing beautiful clothes.
Our years are filled with hundreds and hundreds of fire tragedies, tragedies by ones and twos and threes, locality after locality. As we pass silently through these tragedies, as memories quickly fade and public apathy returns, we forfeit opportunities to do the right thing by our brothers and sisters and the public that relies on us in their hours of greatest need.
We must, somehow, remove the gags. The silence is deafening.
