“The number of years you serve in the fire department or the number of fires you go to are not enough to give you the experience necessary to keep yourself and your brother/sister firefighters safe,” asserted Bill Gustin, captain, Miami-Dade (FL) Fire Rescue Department, in Thursday morning’s keynote address at FDIC 2011. “We must also learn the lessons from fires we did not personally experience by being lifelong students of the fire service.”Gustin told the younger members of the audience:
Veteran firefighters pass the torch to a new generation of young firefighters and tell the younger generation the same thing: ‘You will never see the amount of fire or have as much experience as we did in our day.’That’s what I was told that when I became a volunteer firefighter in 1973, and my Dad, a 33-year veteran of the fire service, was told the same thing in 1948 when he began his career on the Chicago Fire Department.Old guys like me like to brag about all the fires we fought; we tell stories of the ‘war years’ of the 1970s and 1980s …. How many times have you heard an old-timer say, ‘I’ve got 30 years of experience in the fire service’? No mister, you may have 30 years in the fire department, but you have only three years of fire experience!So you think that you don’t have enough fire experience? Well, nobody does, regardless of how much time they have in this job. We all have more to learn, and we can never stop learning. If you ever reach a point in your career when you think you know enough about firefighting, then that’s the day you need to hang it up.
The Fire Service that you young people are inheriting will be different from the one that I will retire from in the foreseeable future. The next generation of firefighters will face challenges that their predecessors never faced and, consequently, many of you will experience your own version of the ‘war years’.My message to the young folks in this audience is that you can be every bit as great as the generations of firefighters who have preceded you.
Among the challenges Gustin cited were having to do their job with a “fraction of the people we had in the past” and a decrease in public support. “Career firefighters have gone from hero to zero in the eyes of the public because they have become an easy target for hypocritical politicians and their cronies on Wall Street who are looking for someone to shift the blame on for their own fiscal mismanagement that caused this economic crisis and turned public opinion against us.”
Gustin described the volunteer fire department as “an endangered species, underappreciated and underfunded by a public that largely takes them for granted until its their house that is on fire.”
Alluding to the necessity of the fire service having to do more with less for the several years, Gustin noted: “As staffing of both volunteer and paid fire departments continues to diminish, there gets to be a point where we will have to accept doing less with less. Unfortunately, that’s probably going to be the only way for the public to realize that you get what you pay for and [that they should] stop taking fire protection for granted.”
Gustin urged the audience:
“Let’s learn from the experiences and the tragedies of fires that we were lucky enough not to go to ….. You do not have to lose two of your friends in a roof collapse of a McDonald’s to know that there is inherent danger with lightweight truss roofs on fast food restaurants. And, you don’t have to witness the deaths of nine firefighters when they were overwhelmed by fire in a furniture store to gain an understanding of fire behavior and the critical rate of flow. We can avoid line of duty deaths and career-ending injuries by learning from the experiences and tragedies of other firefighters who have been there.
We do this by attending conferences such as this, reading Fire Engineering and similar magazines, and visiting their Web sites. We should study every firefighter death and injury that is documented in the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health reports. Every lesson that you learn from what went wrong at a fire that you didn’t go to is another bullet that you dodge.
Among other aspects of today’s fire service Gustin addressed was “the disturbing number of incidents at which firefighters were killed or seriously burned in flashovers with a charged hoseline in their hands.” He admonished: “If we are going to aggressively fight fires from the interior of buildings, then we had better get water on the seat of the fire!” The only way to eliminate the source of a flashover is to get water, and plenty of it, on the fuel vaporizing the flammable fie gases burning over firefighters’ heads, Gustin stressed.
If necessary, direct streams from outside the building, he said. “I am not advocating that we routinely fight structure fires from the outside,” he explained. “I am advocating that you have to consider what’s worse: attacking a fire from the outside or allowing a fire to burn and burn and burn, endangering more occupants and further weakening the structure while you attempt an interior attack that is delayed for whatever reason.”
Gustin concluded on a positive note: “Technology is on our side,” he said. “I never dreamed that we would be able to see through smoke with thermal imaging cameras or look at the heads-up display in my SCBA mask to determine my air supply. And the SCBA of the future will be much lighter and safer than today’s …. Most importantly, information is on our side, like never before, so we can learn how to avoid tragedies without having to experience them ourselves.”
