LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Tampering with fire detectors
On December 31, 1990 our department responded to an apartment fire in the newly constructed Overlook Apartments. The fire, which was caused by carelessly discarded fireplace ashes, was promptly extinguished but caused moderate damage to the unit of origin.
During the investigation and overhaul operation, a member of the scene analysis team observed a pull chain attached to a hard wired smoke detector. The tenant in that apartment freely admitted that he had equipped the detector with an on-off switch and a pull chain so that it could be easily silenced.
If your community has or is proposing an ordinance requiring hardwired detectors, it would be helpful to include language making it illegal for the owner or occupant to tamper with or alter any fire detection or fire protection equipment. In this particular situation, the detector was turned off, but the occupant woke up and got out unharmed.
Leonard Heydt
Chief
Hamids Creek (KY) Fire Department
“Firefighters don’t lose people”
I just finished reading Tom Brennan’s Random Thoughts in the December issue, and I’m in full agreement with the strategies and technical content he presented. There is, however, one point on which I disagree.
In two instances he says that firefighters “lose” people at fires. Tom, firefighters don’t “lose” people. That particular expression has always been inappropriate and conveys the unjustified connotation of an inability to save life.
Admittedly, the expression is used throughout the fire service in an almost traditional sense. In the 25 years I served as a firefighter and officer in the City of New York Fire Department, I never felt that anybody was “lost” through my efforts or those of my brave brothers and sisters.
The fire service has many valuable traditions, but this expression — lose— is one tradition that should be lost. Loss of life, however tragic, should be referred to as loss of life due to fire. No longer should statements like “We lost three kids last night” be part of a firefighter’s vocabulary.
Bob Buxton
Don’t shed gloves for temperature check
With regard to the “Flashover” article by Deputy Chief Vincent Dunn in the December issue, the information presented is very useful, but I do not agree with one of Chief Dunn’s suggestions.
Under the heading of “Rollover,” the practice he suggests for checking the temperature of a rollover goes against safety guidelines found in most departments. He speaks about the flame that is visible in and mixing with the smoke as it is being released from the room; therefore, as he states, this is close to becoming a flashover situation. If a firefighter were to remove his/her glove and raise the unprotected hand above the head, the hand could be seriously burned. I agree that there should be a way to tell what the temperature is, but I do not know how this should be done. I believe that firefighters should be trained to use their sight and hearing to greater advantage. Using the information given by Chief Dunn and through repetitive training, it should not be necessary for firefighters to have to take off protective clothing and expose our bodies to dangers in order to determine when flashover is about to occur.
David R. Bergeron
Chief
Winooski (VT) Fire Department
911: An important link in the chain
The Rhode Island Statewide Enhanced 911 System (E911) described by Francis X. Holt in “Shared Dispatching” in the November 1990 issue is an impressive state-of-the-art emergency telecommunications system-comprehensive, but also very expensive. While the article states that it is only a question of time before the entire country changes to E911, it also states that less than half the U.S. population is now served by basic 911. Having been a member of the FCC staff in the early 70s (I was responsible for the 911 program from 1972 to 1975) when the basic 911 concept was just gaining a foothold, I was surprised to learn that today less than half of all U.S. residents have access to basic 911, even though the International Association of Fire Chiefs more than 30 years ago had recommended the adoption of a single nationwide fire emergency telephone number and the 911 number had been reserved by the U.S. telephone companies more than 23 years ago as the nationwide emergency telephone number.
A public safety agency that procrastinates on the adoption of 911 is inviting trouble. With the nationwide publicity given to 911 through TV programs like “Rescue 911 ” as well as the fact that most major cities now have 911, there are many Americans who now believe that 911 is, in fact, a nationwide emergency number and have come to rely on it.
As the Holt article points out, an emergency telephone number has been in use in some European countries for half a century. It should also be noted that in January 1993 the entire European community will go to a single three-digit emergency telephone number, 112, which is now in use in Germany. The basic 911 concept is sound, and its deployment throughout the country is inevitable.
Implementation of the 911 concept—a single nationwide telephone number answered at a single point within a given jurisdiction for all lifethreatening emergencies requiring fire, police, or rescue services—has been resisted by some public safety agencies for a variety of reasons— none of which, in my view, makes good sense. Some of the objections I heard most frequently when 1 was with the program and my answers follow.
- The adoption of 911 would lead to combined police/fire dispatch services. Even though 911, by having a single answering point, makes combined dispatch technically easier to accomplish, combined dispatch was not an element of basic 911 The reasons for separate dispatch systems are sound. Generally speaking, it would seem to be penny-wise and pound-foolish to combine dispatch services in order to save a few dollars and run the risk of chaos, which easily can occur in an emergency situation when one person is attempting to provide radio communications control for a variety of public safety agencies.
- There ought to be separate threedigit emergency numbers for fire,
- police, and rescue services. This proposal was rejected as long ago as the late 60s when the 911 concept was first announced. The potential for public confusion when there are three emergency numbers instead of one ought to be readily apparent. In addition, the transfer of erroneous calls would require the installation of expensive telephone tie lines between agencies and distract operator/ dispatchers from their regular duties.
- The cost is too high. The only costs to the public safety agencies are the salaries and expenses of their operators, and the cost of local telephone loops among the telephone company switching center, the 911 answering point, and the fire, police, or rescue dispatch point.
- The police or civil defense personnel (or anyone else) ought not to be answering fire emergency calls. In many places the 911 answering point is located in the police communications center because nationwide about 85 percent of all emergency calls are for police assistance, 10 percent are for rescue/emergency medical, and about 5 percent for fire. Common sense would seem to dictate that the 911 answering point ought to be at the agency with the most emergency calls. Long before 911 came into service, the telephone company operator was publicized as the person to dial in any emergency, including fire. With universal automation in telephone service today, many communities have no telephone operators, and those areas that do have operators are no better off because operators are not trained to handle emergency calls.
- It would mean the end of municipal fire alarm telegraph systems. Basic 911 was intended as a supplemental emergency communications service; it was not intended to supplant any existing system. With a telephone in virtually every dwelling, the use of street fire alarm telegraph boxes to report fires had diminished drastically even before 911 came into service. While a street telegraph might not be worth the cost of its upkeep today, the same cannot be said for municipal telegraph systems employing detection and/or fire suppression devices in schools, hospitals, nursing homes, public buildings, and industrial establishments. Despite the advent of sophisticated technology, there still is much to be said for the retention and expansion of systems employing the tried and true master fire alarm telegraph box.
Even though E911 was not offered during my FCC service, it was nevertheless in its early development stage, and it was widely feared that if basic 911 should be adopted, that community would inevitably be required some day to go to E911. Whether a community should go to E911 is for it to decide in the same way that it decides whether to acquire new fire apparatus or build a new fire station. As the Holt article makes clear, E911 is not cheap, with an operating cost of about 10 cents per call. While that cost is met by a 42-cents-per-month assessment on every telephone subscriber’s phone bill, it still adds to the cost of living or doing business in Rhode Island. In this day and age of massive population shifts out of highcost metropolitan areas, the fire service must do its own cost-effectiveness studies to determine if the service provided by E911 should be met in a less expensive way.
Whether basic 911 or E911 is involved, only one link in the fire protection chain is involved. No matter how good or expensive that link may be, it will not by itself accomplish the fire service’s mission. In the last analysis it is the courage, dedication, and expert knowledge of the firefighter that count most I fail to see the wisdom of installing a gold-plated communications system and acquiring extremely expensive and complex fire apparatus at the same time when many municipalities are reducing crew sizes on fire apparatus.
The fire service certainly needs to change with the times, and articles on services like E911 are needed and useful. Everything, however, should be kept in perspective to meet the fire service’s fundamental mission, which, as I see it, is to promote the employment of systems that detect fire at the earliest time; transmit a fire signal to the fire department in the fastest, most reliable, and least costly way; and suppress fire expeditiously without undue risk to human life.
John J. O’Malley Jr.
Washington, D. C.
Prevention: first line of defense
Tom Brennan has written many columns stressing the importance of fire safety education and the need for early warning devices in the homes. It must have been an oversight that he did not mention that firefighting combat tactics is the third line of defense in saving lives in residential fires. Numbers one and two are fire prevention in the home and early warning devices, respectively.
No matter how many firefighters are stacked on the engine company, if the occupant is trapped, exposed to superheated and toxic gases, or unconscious for about four minutes, death is imminent. Given that it takes two to four minutes to discover a fire and three to five minutes to arrive on the scene, if the occupants have not made it out on their own, the odds for survival are not in their favor. It is doubtful that additional personnel on fire apparatus will reduce the number of fire deaths in the home.
It is regrettable that many people in the fire service fail to realize that when we must fight a fire, we have failed our number one priority and that when lives are lost, we have failed our number two priority. Yet so much emphasis is placed on the number three priority (firefighting) that funds and resources are diverted here from numbers one and two.
When all the importance is placed on suppression to save lives, sadly we must have “acceptable” losses of life. To me, no life lost is acceptable. What formula do you use to determine what is an “acceptable” loss of life?
There is absolutely no excuse for a fire death with today’s technology. Smoke detectors are affordable and reliable and should be in every home in America. Why don’t we put more emphasis on educating the public to this fact? We have lulled the public into believing that the local fire department can save them from a burning building. It is time we told the public the truth and placed more importance on fire safety education and early detection than on a lastditch effort of rescue.
J. Greg Taylor
Fire Marshal
Amarillo (TX) Fire Department
Torn Brennan’s response: Your letter was well received and your points were on the money. Dialogue is one of the keys to our fire problem in America. However, some of your conclusions about what you think I mean need addressing.
I am talking to firefighters, those people who must enter structures on fire—America’s only uncontrolled atmosphere wherein the human being operates. They do that to calculate risk analysis based on training expertise, and experience. Firefighters couple that with courage— the level of which they will know only at the moment it’s called for. A lot of us, even in the firefighting game, talk a good story, but the moment of truth may be different. Firefighters are America’s rescuers of life from fire. The preventor and educator is another story—still important, but another story.
It’s not the educators and the prevention specialists or inspectors who have to commit their oum lives for another’s safety. It’s the firefighter u ho has to go home and deal with the physical and psychological horror of thinking that he/she could hai>e done a better job and not understanding why things can go so right sometimes and so uTong at others. We are losing people at fires. They are lost because of lack of sufficient manning levels that will not allow us to intercede in all areas of the fire building—all at once. It’s when the victim is left in place for an extended period of time because of the lack of understanding of the fire, the fire building, risk analysis, firefighting priorities, and, yes, lack of personnel, that the rescue cannot be made and the firefighter can secondguess himself. Sure, death is not acceptable; however, there comes a time when the firefighter has to know that he/she did everything right, that the outcome could not be different, that it’s all right!
It seems that risk analyzers—who evaluate what we do in the split second available for us to decide to do it—always look for formulae. My formula for an “acceptable” loss of life is and always was simple: If you can answer for every part of the structure that a firefighter can access; have sufficient personnel to get water between the fire and the occupants, have sufficient personnel and equipment to search the searchable area up to the fire location; and have sufficient personnel, training, experience, knowledge, and courage to search the areas behind the fire before that area becomes untenable because of time or interior fire operations— if you can do that—then the firefighter can feel that he’s done all that can be done. If we have a fire death under these circumstances, it is acceptable to the firefighter, but, as you said, never for the fire prevention and education person. But I wasn’t talking to or with them on that one page.
Mr. Taylor, you are wrong when you assume that people within buildings are finished on our arrival. I have responded to more than 33,000 alarms for fire in my career and know the reverse to be the rule of thumb. It’s training, experience, dialogue, commitment, courage, understanding, and expertise that make the difference. I really don’t know any experienced and sincere firefighter who would give any credibility to your remarks, “…if the occupants have not made it on their oum, the odds for their survival are not in their favor. ” There has been too much gold melted down for awards for what you say to be true—at least in the real world of firefighting. What you say may be good marketing to get your point across to civilians, but certainly not as a comment to any firefighter!
You say that there is absolutely no excuse for any fire death with today’s technology. Let me remind you, technology doesn’t start fires and technology doesn’t prevent fires—people do. As long as that is a fact, we still will have structural fire and people still will be trapped and firefighters still will risk their lives to assure these people’s safety.
There has been considerable attention given to education, prevention, smoke detectors, EDITH, and all the other wonderful programs that have evolved over the years to impact on America’s dreadful fire death record. I support those endeavors and have said so or have given others the space to say it more often than any other periodical. I didn’t say that there was enough, either. The prevention efforts must accelerate if we are to be even more successful, not only for the civilian, but also for the firefighter who is forced to operate in structures that defy gravity only because of today’s technology. My point is that it seems apparent from time to time that there is very little understanding. information, and compassion for, or dialogue with, the ones at most risk—the firefighters!
The unusual poses a threat
Recently my company responded to a working fire in a commercial occupancy. The fire was confined by sprinklers to a storage room. My company proceeded to the floor below to spread salvage covers over desks and furniture to protect them from runoff water damage. As I searched for a bathroom drain within which to pump the runoff water, I came across a poorly locked screen door that led to a vacant bathroom. The area was not well lighted; I saw the bathroom fixtures through the beam of my flashlight. I notified my colleagues of my find and entered the room to see if the fixtures were operable. As I lifted the toilet seat, something began to move toward me. As I focused my flashlight on the object, I saw that it was a large snake. We later learned that it was a 17-foot, 200-pound boa constrictor. I hastily retreated from this nonoperable bathroom and secured the door as my colleagues and I stood in amazement.
While this incident can be looked at with humor or as “one for the books,” it raises serious concerns. If the fire were on this floor and there was a heavy smoke condition and no one was there to warn firefighters of this hazard, what might have been the consequences for an unsuspecting firefighter searching the room?
This incident illustrates the reasons firefighters should always wear full turnout gear, which possibly could lessen the injuries inflicted by an attacking pet. Also, firefighters should carry two operable flashlights—one for backup—as well as a portable radio and a PASS device to call for help, if needed, and at least one tool for defense.
This unusual incident is a reminder that w e in the fire service must be on guard against the unexpected.
Anthony J. Pascocello, Jr.
Patrolman
New City (NY) Fire Patrol
Fire service not a closed operation
I have been a subscriber to your magazine for several years, and find it controversial, enjoyable, and enlightening. On numerous occasions in the past, I had the desire to write in response to articles, both pro and con, but elected not to, but after reading Burton W. Phelps’ article, “The Path to Fire Service Excellence” (January 1991), the desire to write was irresistible.
I was fortunate to have attended a class taught by Burt at the NFA in the mid 1980s. At that time he was touting a book, also written by Tom Peters, In Search of Excellence. Reading that book and Thriving on Chaos, I found that there are many similarities between the private and public sectors. Since then, I have read several books and articles on the management principles of private industry.
We in the South Florida area are privileged to have a motivational radio station that presents excerpts from numerous motivational speakers such as Peters, Dr. Wayne Dyer, and others. Since I started listening to these people, reading their books, and adapting their ideas to the fire service,
I find it easier to motivate people and deal with the public.
Today’s fire service parallels the private sector in the concept of customer service. This concept was forced on us by Proposition 13 and other taxpayer revolts against publicspending. We now must justify how we spend taxpayer monies. They want more bang for the buck, and rightfully so. If we in the fire service operate in a closed circle of firefighter innovation and talent ignoring the perspectives and attitudes that are characteristic of the private sector, we will find that we continuously will have to reinvent the wheel and correct problems that already have been solved by others.
In short, management principles, personnel motivation, and customer satisfaction are the same, whether used in the private or the public sector.
I would like to thank Mr. Phelps for an article whose time has come. Hopefully others will capitalize on his and Peters’ theories and ideas.
Wayne Mailliard
Assistant Chief, Support Services
Hollywood (FL) Fire/Rescue
A note of thanks
A few months ago I wrote a letter requesting assistance in locating surplus equipment for my rural volunteer fire department.
I would like to thank the departments and personnel who contacted me and made arrangements for my department to receive this muchneeded equipment.
Tom Lewis
Fire Chief
Amble (MI) Fire Department