Bill Manning responds:
Congratulations to all those who missed the point of my January column. I wrote it in English, and you read it in Greek.
My first reaction was to respond to all specific points and charges, but prudence and time demand more restraint. So I will only say the following:
I have written 82 “opinion” columns in Fire Engineering. I hope that by now most readers have recognized both my intent and my passion, both of which are unassailable, consistent with the mission of this publication and appropriate for someone who tripped and landed happily in the lap of the fire service.
However, being right in all matters 99 and 44100 percent of the time leaves me susceptible to rare lapses in perfection. I don`t usually flinch from negative reactions by readers–any editor doing his job is bound to receive “pan” as well as “fan” mail–but my January editorial was construed by some as a personal attack on a certain few individuals, which for me was disturbing. In no way have I ever intended to use, nor do I use, nor will I ever use, this page in such a fashion. It`s ideas I`m after, not people. And that`s the last word on that.
The charge that Fire Engineering has no technical oversight and encourages known unsafe and impractical acts is a lie. The articles in Fire Engineering are subject to peer review analyses. Articles are reviewed for technical merit/accuracy by at least two editorial advisors–experienced firefighters–with expertise and knowledge in the subject. No other publication in the fire service holds itself to the technical checks Fire Engineering does. I invite all respectable readers who think they have found a technical error or inaccuracy to provide me with their argument, citing the specific example (not, for example, “Fire Engineering runs cover photos of kamikaze firefighters”), and I will set up a mini-forum with our editorial advisors to examine it and respond. That would be fun and a lot more useful than furthering one`s own agenda by lying, as was the case with this square-rooting reader.
As for words, I prefer those that run straight to the heart of the fire service`s core mission. I`m not attracted to shallow words misused by managers whose genius lies in artificially applying 1980s management concepts to the 1997 fire service. If you want to “revisit” something, how about firefighting, and the undermanned, undertrained, and underappreciated whose fireground injury rate per fire has steadily increased since 1977? We wouldn`t even care if you gave it a fancy name and sold it as a progressive new concept (we wouldn`t snitch to the city managers, honest).
Turn around, friends. Firefighters and civilians are dying while you lead the paradigm shift to partnership with the public safety matrix and accelerate internal customer-friendliness output mechanisms, satisfying statistical projections of value-added potency that raise public approval ratings of the mayor, the city manager, and the fire chief. n
