A recent column published in the Washington Post suggested that because overall losses from fires have gone down in recent years, career firefighters are therefore largely irrelevant and their ranks could be diminished or replaced by part-time or volunteer workers.
The column went on to describe firefighting as mostly about “eating and sleeping, mopping floors, lifting weights, grocery shopping....” You get the idea.
The online reaction was immediate and predictable.
- The author didn’t know what he was talking about.
- His statistics were skewed.
- He had a long history of anti-union bias.
- He was clueless about the reality of trying to recruit good volunteers in 2015.
But only a couple of the comments echoed my first reaction to this column.
Why is it when crime rates fall, law enforcement is thought to be doing a wonderful job, but if fire losses fall, firefighters are seen as a bunch of lazy bums?
The problem is in perception and how the message is presented and understood.
Like a lifeguard
A number of cities have taken an approach to law enforcement that addresses smaller incidents as a precursor to larger ones, and focuses on education and community policing.
Police departments that have adopted this philosophy of crime prevention vs. intervention have often done a good job promoting this approach in order to gain public support.
Fire departments in general have not done a very good job in this area. Firefighting is like being a lifeguard — you’re vigilant, you work to create safe conditions and you teach people how to be safe. That is really the essence of firefighting: vigilance, readiness, education and prevention.
Fire chiefs must be the number-one advocate not only for their own departments, but of the fire service overall.
If fire departments are doing a good job, fires will be rare, but that does not mean they are any less important to the ones who experience them. And it certainly does not mean that less response capability is needed for any given incident.
True readiness
Most fire departments have at least one slower station. Department members may joke that such stations are retirement assignments, but for me, our slowest station was also the scariest.
True, in the early days out there, we did not have many runs on average. But we had a major rail line running through the district, a large reservoir used for recreation, countless industrial occupancies of various size and function, and a huge manufacturing and research facility.
A bad call out there would be really bad, and backup was a long way out. We had to be ready.
Readiness is not about busy work. True readiness is about training, fitness, district knowledge, maintenance, relationships with people in the service community, optimal communication and scenario planning.
Police agencies that focus on crime prevention produce metrics that prove the effectiveness of this approach. They measure prevention.
But fire departments often still focus on reaction and response, which is measured in loss rather than property and lives protected.
All saved
Many years ago I worked as a lifeguard at a resort swimming pool. For the most part, it was a pretty uneventful job. Mostly I just sat there and watched.
A couple times when I was working there, someone would come up to me and say sarcastically, “So, how many lives did you save today?”
My response to them was, “All of them. I didn’t lose a single one.”
This is the message that the fire service, and fire chiefs in particular, need to convey. The value of the fire service is not in response to inevitable fire loss, but rather in creating conditions in their communities where fire loss becomes rare and manageable.
If asked, “How many lives did you save today?” not only should firefighters be able to nearly always say, “All of them” but also be able to point out specifically how that goal was achieved.
Fire service culture must take as much pride in readiness as it does in response, and make sure the service community understands how much value there is in readiness and vigilance. And this message must come from the top down.
