MAKE STANDARDS A WIN-WIN FOR THE FIRE SERVICE
BY BILL MANNING
If our journey along the fire service standards highway is to be less fraught with potholes, firefighters must respond with insight and levelheadedness to national minimum standards issues that confront them, and national fire service groups must carefully heed the voice of the membership. It is incumbent on the fire service to place the issues in proper perspective to avoid the recent driving pattern of detours, traffic jams, collisions, and broken axles.
The issue of separate standards for paid and volunteer firefighters is especially contentious and demands objectivity. Unfortunately, the instinctive reaction from many is predictably defensive: “Fires don`t know the difference!” and/or “Volunteer or paid, we`re all professionals!” Both these overly simplistic statements are true, but they miss the fundamental points by a longshot. (I must add, by way of quick rebuttal, that if the former statement were a legitimate argument, a separate standard for industrial fire brigades would be unjustifiable. As to the latter, our research indicates that, of the U.S. states with established minimum training-hour requirements for firefighter certification, the large majority require fewer training hours for volunteers before certifying them for line duty.)
We must remember, first, the primary objective of the national “recommended” minimum standards: to provide a goal-oriented framework for improving firefighter health and safety, emergency response operations, and fire department management–no more, no less. They are a protective umbrella of conformity to help ensure that neither fire department members nor the public can be cheated of certain “inalienable” levels of care and safety. Do our standards perform this function?
To a degree, certainly. Then they blast off into hyperspace.
To understand why the standards don`t always match up to reality, we must understand that the fire service by its very nature is a “standards-unfriendly” environment. The fire service cannot be compared with businesses that operate privately within the free market economy or as satellites of federal or state government. Most fire departments operate–and operate best–as municipal entities beholden to the dictates, and subservient to the needs, of the local taxpayers who fund them. As such, the fire service is as diverse as the fire protection needs of thousands of communities. There are very basic differences in the ways fire departments are structured and managed, in what they are expected to accomplish, in the ways they fight fire, and in the functions of specific members in accomplishing firefighting objectives.
There`s no room for argument when it comes to mandating that firefighters wear full protective clothing, wear and use (at appropriate times) SCBA, and don PASS devices that are turned on during interior operations. To expect fire departments to perform community fire risk analyses and ensure that sufficient fire flow is available to handle the expected worst-case-scenario fire load is inarguable. But when it comes to a single standard specifying the number of personnel on an apparatus, when it comes to applying stringent “interior attack” physical requirements to someone whose sole function is to drive an apparatus safely to the scene, when it comes to requiring training on aerial apparatus for a fire department that has only one- and two-family dwellings in its jurisdiction–then applying a single standard to the fire service can only be counterproductive. Would a minimum staffing standard have benefited paid firefighters? You bet. Should volunteer firefighters have practically been forced to block this safety advance, supported by a majority of career personnel, because it is unrealistic for most volunteer fire departments? No. To my knowledge, no one has written the Play-doh standard that can be molded to fit the needs of all. No one has written the standard that can compensate for and do justice to the true, diverse fire service–again, the fire service driven by local jurisdictions funded by finite local dollars.
Yet, the one-standard-fits-all approach not only is preferred but adamantly defended. Despite that the standards were designed presumably to protect firefighters, fire departments, and citizens, the fire service`s perpetual state of less-than-full compliance actually increases the burden in a world crazy for lawsuits.
Using standards as a springboard in the search for excellence is admirable. But the fire service cannot allow its standards-writing delegates to waltz in a dreamy world of ideal standards while so many fire departments stand at the bottom of the mountain wondering how they`ll ever make it to the top. Is there a fire department that can say, “We are in total compliance with all pertinent NFPA and OSHA standards”? Does any fire department foresee being totally compliant by the year 2005? The words “combat challenge” well describe the strenuous task of funding a fire department program that even approaches the level of compliance imagined by fire service idealists, politicians, and manufacturers in control of the fire service standards process.
Idealism, after all, is the fuel for legitimizing the standards business. We probably can agree that the greatest result of the standards is an increased awareness and attention to operational safety. But the NFPA reports that the firefighter injury rate per 1,000 fires has remained relatively constant between 1984 and 1993. What does this mean? Standards in themselves cannot make you safe. Only training and experience can do that. Standards are propelling the fire service forward, but are they making the fire service better? In some ways they must be, I hope. But I can`t help thinking it may be better to channel some of the energy and money that go into standards into making fire companies better trained, manned, and equipped for the fight.
Standards are here to stay. So let`s suck in a few breaths of fresh, objective realism. There are a host of complicated issues–such as multiple standards-making bodies; standards that differentiate between urban, suburban, and rural fire department operations; and “site-specific” standards–that bear scrutiny, but another discussion, another time for that. First, let`s agree on the bottom line: the availability of usable, goal-oriented standards that address fundamental fire service differences so that, in accounting for the differences, all fire departments will be able to share in the realistic pursuit of excellence. If we can more adequately address local needs through separate, “dual track” standards–without diminishing essential safety and operational factors that must be followed in every fire/emergency–then the fire service will be in a win-win situation and the fire service standards highway that much smoother.
