By Jake Hammond
By now, it is a foregone conclusion that fire service in general is in serious trouble, with no end in sight for the foreseeable future. Nationwide staffing shortages are creating struggles with full-time and volunteer firefighters alike. Overtime rotations are spiraling at career establishments and volunteer houses are desperate for new members. This uncovers a much more complex issue for incident commanders than ever before: Do you honor the oath you took and dive into the action with the minimal staffing you have? Do you wait for mutual-aid companies with extended travel times to make an interior effort? Or are we going to begin to write off more buildings than ever before?
John Wayne Time…?
In one of the very first scenes of the movie “Backdraft,” Brian McCaffrey gets his first fire. As the engine company makes their move on the interior, the lieutenant asks the engineer outside: “Where’s the second-in companies?” The engineer replies: “Sorry. It’s John Wayne time. You’re on your own, boss.” My crew has adopted that saying here as well. On any given day, there are five to six full-time members covering an area of roughly 300 square miles. Our closest mutual aid department is 15 road miles away, responding with a similar-sized crew, depending on the time of day.
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National Fire Protection Association 1710, Standard for the Organization and Deployment of Fire Suppression Operations, Emergency Medical Operations, and Special Operations to the Public by Career Fire Departments, states that minimum staffing for a low-hazard, single-family residential home with a working fire should initially include a minimum of 15 firefighters on the initial dispatch. On our best days when we are fully staffed, we can muster 12 firefighters between both first-alarm companies combined. This is with the assumption that there are no other active calls or interfacility medical transports happening simultaneously. For example, if we have one transfer on the road, our staffing drops to four firefighters with our closest mutual aid a minimum of 20 minutes away, depending on the geographical location of the incident. This is not a cry for help, but it does bring up a rather new and intriguing question as far as initial company operations with short staffing.
Decision Making and Staffing
For the sake of this scenario, let’s say that there are four firefighters on the initial dispatch from the closest department. The decisions start before dispatch is even finished dropping tones: Do I drop engine staffing to send the ladder? Do I drop an automatic second- or third-alarm due to decreased staffing? How many people are coming on the mutual aid truck? Five? Three? Two? It’s all done by the skin of our teeth. Even when we are at our top staffing levels, we fail to meet the recommended initial dispatch requirements set forth by years of science, research, and data collection. The thought process then turns to crew safety vs. the oath we all took.
Typically, for a residential fire with this level of decreased staffing, we do not staff the tower ladder unless there are reports of people trapped or we’re responding to a commercial building. Given this scenario, the initial dispatch will likely include two crew members in the lead engine assigned to fire attack/search; one member in the pumper tanker for water supply (whether it’s a pressurized water source or drafting from a static source); and one member in the ambulance. Even with the initial dispatch of four members, you cannot meet criteria for two-in/two-out, due to the fact that our policy is to pump our hydrants with the second-due engine or that the operator of that truck will be setting up a folding tank and leaving the scene to refill and shuttle water to and from the scene. You also cannot count the mutual aid companies responding that are not on scene yet. Thus we are already down to three people working on the fireground. So what now?
Making the Case to Go ‘John Wayne’
For better or for worse, this is what happens more often than not. Crews are trained and eager to go get it. They want to go make a difference immediately, if not sooner. In this case, you’re going against the science, the research, the facts, and the data. You’re rolling the dice knowing that if anything goes wrong, any hope you have for getting yourself out of this mess and anything remotely resembling a respectable rapid intervention team is 15-20 minutes away if the weather is perfect. In essence, it’s up to us because if we don’t do something, who else will? We all want to go make things happen, but at what cost? We’re all taught from day one that “the first five minutes of an incident dictate what that next five hours look like.” But again, I’ll ask: at what cost? There is always a risk-benefit analysis done at every call, and obviously, if there is entrapment, we will make every effort and then some. But without entrapment, at what point do we go defensive? With three people on attack/search and one person handling water supply responsibilities, the understanding is you are dead-manning the attack engine and abandoning the command structure of the first-arriving units. This is a textbook definition of pushing all of your chips to the middle. The moments following initial knock down, assuming all thing go well, are then focused on regaining control of a scene that has already evolved. By this time, mutual aid is rolling in. Mass chaos and freelancing is taking place, and now the task becomes taking charge, delegating, and playing catch up. Hoping that everything goes well should not be a routine game plan, but when it’s our citizen’s only hope at the preservation of life and property, hope is all we have initially.
Making the Case to Go Defensive
Given the persistence of lightweight construction in the built environment, homes these days are built to burn. Firefighters are already faced with furniture that is made of solidified petroleum products and flimsy construction. Every line-of-duty death in this country is a stark reminder to company officers everywhere. We all have families, wives, babies, parents, and lives to return to after the shift. Not going inside goes against every fiber of my being, but if we have a confirmed all-clear of the building, are we essentially adding an unneeded risk or are we just doing our job? This question isn’t as easy to answer as it used to be. My department used to have two 30-person call crews that alternated days they were allowed to respond to calls unless there was a large-scale incident that dictated both crews being called out. Now? Anywhere from one to six guys show up that are full-time members and zero to three call members. That is all. Expectations are at an all-time high, and we are defying the odds at a lot of these calls, but it will catch up with us eventually. The last thing anyone needs is to have their town and department under an international microscope because of a few guys who are just trying their best. The odds of success are stacked against us. Does the fact that we’re still making these stops make us a great group of firefighters, or are we insane? Both may be an acceptable answer.
High Standards
The public obviously has a certain level of expectation from a full-time department that their taxes are paying for. How good of a service can we provide, though? And at what cost? We’re already burnt out, stretched too thin, and you could make a comparable wage flipping a burger or two at a local restaurant. These days it would seem very few are ready and willing to do this job. No one wants the responsibility or the liability anymore, but the public expectation is unwavering and unchanged. Recruiting campaigns are falling sort, retention and longevity bonuses aren’t attractive enough, and the divorce and suicide odds are stacked against us. It feels like we’re treading water at this point. The ship is sinking, the lifeboats are gone, and there’s no other form of help coming.
There’s no one who wants to provide that quality service to our citizens more than those of us who have stuck with it thus far. We are the ones who are still here, willing, and able to do the job are getting older, or burnt out, or at the very least compassion fatigued when one person is routinely handling the workload of four. The scariest part of the job these days to me is not the risk we take day in and day out, not the new construction, nor the random inspections, policy changes, or new expectations. It’s the simple fact that there is no one coming to help. There is no backup for 15-20 minutes for us, and in the bigger picture, there is no sustainable “new” generation coming in unless something changes and people become interested in this job again.
Who Has the Answers?
There is not and never will be an overnight solution to the state of the fire service; this is true of any problem that persists from within, whether is large or small. It takes committees, and campaigning, and voting, and persuasion to do something as simple as changing the way the hose is packed on the truck, let alone solving a generational problem that we are faced with. Magazines and articles have a way of exposing common problems of the fire service, but rarely are people throwing out the solutions to the problems. They either cannot come up with answers themselves, or they’ve come up with some sort of system that works so well for them that they’re not willing to share in an attempt to keep their cards to their chest, if you will.
These are the things that keep me up all night. Do we have to plead with our employers for tax breaks? Will we have to implement some sort of civil service draft? Will the fire service and its traditions change as we know it completely? And would that ultimately just drive more people out of it entirely? As long as man will walk the earth, there will be fire. There will be sick people, and accidents, and emergencies to respond to. But will there be enough staffing to meet the demand? It remains to be seen.
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As firefighters, our sole purpose is to be here for our neighbors in their time of need: a real-life, human insurance policy that the public can lean on during their worst days. We swore to protect their lives and property under oath and we will continue to uphold that promise—sometimes to our own detriment. As long as there is a life to save or property that can be salvaged, it is our job to do so. The fact that we cannot scrounge up enough staffing or even enough willing participants to make the act of doing so relatively safe, effective, and efficient is not fair. The fact that this conversation needs to be had is not fair on so many fronts; it is not far to members of the public who have nigh-impossible expectations of those three guys stepping off that truck. It is not fair to those three guys to have to choose between being an aggressive and all-around good firefighter or returning to their families. And it is not fair to our families to have to surround their home lives with fear and worry every time they hear a siren in the distance when their spouse is at work. The jobs is getting more dangerous, more demanding, and less appealing to newcomers with every day that passes. I hope everyone is comfortable with being uncomfortable, because we’re digging in for the long haul, by the sounds of it.
It’s worth mentioning that John Wayne’s character died in nine out of 76 of his movies.
Stay safe and be smart out there. You and your crew are more irreplaceable now than ever.
Jake Hammond is a captain with the Lincoln (ME) Fire Department.