If you didn't have standards, this might be your first out engine. Swan Creek/Emu Creek Bushfire Brigade, Queensland, Australia 2002

Authentic Neapolitan pizzas are typically made with tomatoes and Mozzarella cheese.  Genuine Neapolitan pizza dough consists of high-protein wheat flour (type 0 or 00, or a mixture of both), natural Neapolitan yeast or brewer’s yeast, salt and water. The dough must be kneaded by hand or with a low-speed mixer. After the rising process, the dough must be formed by hand without the help of a rolling pin or other machine, and may be no more than 3 mm (⅛ in) thick. The pizza must be baked for 60–90 seconds in a 485 °C (905 °F) stone oven with an oak-wood fire.^[4] When cooked, it should be crispy, tender and fragrant.

Those were just a few of the standards for an authentic Neapolitan pizza (published on Wikipedia), as recognized and protected by the Associazione Vera Pizza Napoletana.  Likewise, most of the things you take for granted in the world, with the exception of things like knock-off Rolexes, are constructed from materials meeting standards, are built to certain standards, and if they carry any kind of guarantee of quality or workmanship, must meet performance standards.

Unless your organization is living in a 1950’s time warp, the people in your community, when they call the fire department for help, expect help for many things that exceed the scope of “firefighting”.  Regardless of whether your community is staffed with a career or a volunteer department, there are increased expectations on the level of service being provided.  I can rationally argue the need for standards on a number of different levels.  I will, however, only provide you with this one today; it’s the minimum.

If you want to call yourself a firefighter, there are certain things you should be able to do.  If you cannot do these things, you run the risk of hurting yourself, not to mention others.  You also run the risk of making an emergency greater than it was when you arrived.  As a reasonable and prudent individual with a duty to act, you agree that your “job” (as a firefighter) entails certain knowledge, skills, and abilities to allow your organization the ability to advertise a product. What that product is in your jurisdiction could be limited to fighting fire or could be all-hazards, or anywhere in between.

Your community, in supporting the “fire department”, does so with the understanding that you are what you say you are.  The community defines that expectation; if their only expectation is that a group of bubbas show up to put out a fire when it occurs, then maybe you don’t need to meet a standard.  If that’s the case though, when insurance companies decide the risk is too great in your community, don’t be surprised when the citizenry can’t get coverage and they hang you (or your chief) in effigy at the town square.  And that may be getting off light.

Minimum standards, among other things, define.  Since a group of individuals representing different aspects of the world affected by a certain thing decided and agreed on a definition, and that group is recognized by the others affected by that thing, the definition becomes a standard.  I could write a standard on constructing nuclear plants and declare it the minimum standard, but since I have no authority or expertise in doing so, my standard would likely be considered meaningless and useless.

For those who aren’t in favor of standards, I’d suggest that it’s not that you aren’t in favor of standards, but what is in those standards and how they came to be.  If that’s the case, I’d say that before you make any proclamations on a standard being a “bad” standard, you seek to understand how that definition came to be and how it happens to be the minimum.  In many cases, I’d bet that you’d find that others wanted a much stricter or more restricting definition and the end result was what everyone on that committee agreed was acceptable for use or was prudent.

Like I tell the people who work with me, don’t complain about anything unless you tried to do something about it.  If you don’t like a standard, feel free to get involved.  But the long and short of it is this: standards exist for at least one primary reason, and that reason is to define what something is.  In the absence of any other meaningful definition, if something close fills that void, that standard will be the one that defines the subject matter.  You can be angry about it if you like, but if you don’t like it, change it.

In the meanwhile, if it’s an accepted standard, you can assume you’ll have to meet it.  You can say all day that you choose not to meet certain standards, but if you are like me, you will understand that to not do so will leave you open to a number of things, including liability.  The only way to escape it is to lay that decision on the people who are at that payscale: the politicians. But that’s a blog post for another day.

Stay safe and do the best you can with what you have.  But remember, the standard is what defines you.  If you have no standard, you have no definition, and in that case, a monkey can do your job.  Even pizzas are made to standards.  If having no standard is what your community believes to be okay, then know that you ultimately get what you pay for, and if your community doesn’t support a department with minimum expectations of members, they shouldn’t be surprised when everything within the city limits are a smoking ruin some weekend.

In their latest issue of Disaster Research, there is an article regarding government response and recovery and the increase in governmental partnerships with faith- and community-based organizations to assist in cleaning up catastrophes.  In the recent past, we have seen ineffective response from certain portions of government that have assumed responsibility for this service at the local, state and federal levels.  I don’t think anyone who works in our field and  is taken seriously about their views on the subject feels like “government” alone can deliver an entire package of assistance to a disaster-stricken community.  However, there is plenty of debate about how to most effectively coordinate assistance in the wake of a calamity.

Of all things in our industry, our frustration with failure of some politicians to continue to apply heat (and funding) to the problem BEFORE disaster strikes is only compounded by the political “outrage” when disaster occurs and we are accused with not properly preparing in advance (still with limited or no budget or legislative action on our behalf).

In an answer to some of these challenges, some state and local governments are forming coalitions that guide organizations providing emergency response. Missouri, Florida, Texas, and a few others have, according to a recent article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, begun to develop alliances between emergency managers and NGOs.

There are many discussions regarding the potential for blurred church and state separation which can’t even begin to be adequately addressed in a short blog post.  However, those issues aside, NGOs over the past decade have been efficiently providing disaster recovery assistance and have been successful in finding resources that governmental bodies can’t seem to scare up.

This discussion doesn’t also begin to factor in the entire over-reliance on “outside” help in the event of disaster.  This was a point made by Alan Kirschenbaum in earlier works referring to the growth of the disaster response community that seem to be related to the decline in perception of individual responsibility for preparedness.

While this all has some serious discussion ahead of it, I have less of a problem with this type of assistance than I do with pseudo-qualified responders self deploying to events with little or no capability or self-sufficiency.  I think there are plenty of avenues for a person with altruistic motives to get involved with an organized response; it’s the poseurs and con-men I’m interested in keeping away.

I’m open to some observations on the subject.  I think if managed correctly, these NGOs have access to resources currently limited to those of us charged with response, and we should take advantage of creative partnerships, as the organizations I am affliliated have already done.  Look around your community and identify capability that lies outside of the conventional response.  You’ll be surprised by the resources that lie out there and I think you’ll find that instead of spending essential funds on assets that already exist, you can find better uses for that money in areas that are currently underserved.

I was thinking about the use of RFID, or “radio frequency identification” for you non-geeks out there.  Now while we have discussed the use of RFID for personnel accountability (which you could embed in your credential we have been beating on about over the last month and I have decided to let rest for a bit), where as you pass through a checkpoint at an incident, the RFID chip would log you in, plus pertinent data, and make it much easier to manage the locations of your valuable assets (that would be your people).

But another application that private industry and the military have used RFID for is for logistics management.  For a while I have gone on in our department about the use of bar coding to produce a reliable determination of asset location (if you can’t scan the code, the item is obviously not there).  But in the case of RFID, what I was thinking is that you could have a portal- like at the bay doors- that would scan your vehicle, with all of the RFID-chipped tools and assorted equipment, and tell you what was there and what wasn’t.  While you were at it, you could actually tell WHICH item it was; for example, the generator on your engine is Acme Fire Department Generator #3.  Well, Generator #3 is due for maintenance.  Or Generator #3 was swapped out at your last preventative maintenance cycle and you actually have Generator #21.  And your Maintenance/Logistics folks just happen to be looking for Generator #21 because it has to have a whatsit retrofitted.  You see where I’m going with this?  You could actually know if Engine 1 went out the door with everything on it or not.

If your department is anything like my department, and your firefighters anything like my firefighters, you are asking, “isn’t this going to be expensive to replace when we break the chip?”  You all know that if you put a firefighter in an empty locked room with two ball bearings he will break one and lose the other.  Well, if this stuff is ruggedized enough for the military, it’s likely that it will last at least a week in a fire station.

The sad part is, like I said, this is stuff that has been out there for a while.  But do YOU know about it?  Can you advocate for change and improvement if you don’t know what kind of change and improvement we are capable of?  What other ideas do you see being used in everyday life that have an application to our jobs?

When a man will say that a project is a waste of time, yet take credit for it when the project is being hailed by the media, that, my friends, is a hypocrite.  Likewise, there are “leaders” in this world who like to trumpet their budget cuts and their saving of taxpayer funds, despite being warned that their efforts could prove dangerous, but when things do go badly, they slip free of any blame, and those people are also hypocrites.

When a man will make claims that he has accomplished something spectacular, but won’t permit scrutiny of his claims, is that man a hypocrite?  Shouldn’t we, if we have indeed done an amazing deed, be willing to permit people to look into our claims, to see just what it is that we have done and how we can replicate that “success”?  Hypocrisy is claiming you are all about something, when really you are not; so if you make claims of expertise, shouldn’t you expect critical review of your work?  If it is truly what it is, it will stand up to the examination.

When people go around pretending to be leaders by making claims of their honesty, they should in fact be honest.  If they are about being a good steward of taxpayer funds, they too, should be actually doing just that.  If they think that their cost-cutting efforts are actually beneficial to the community and they prove to be wrong, they should be willing to take that heat.  And when we say we are professionals in what we do, we should permit others to review our works and determine if they hold up to a critical examination of the content.

Change freightens the entrenched and the hypocritical; the entrenched because of their anticipation of loss and the hypocrites, because they will be exposed for what they are when the light of truth shines in.  If you are one who embraces change, it’s probably because you know you don’t have anything to lose.  If you are what you are and you do what you do, and you practiced your art and you learned from the masters, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain from change.

In 1984, things were relatively easy.  I only had to worry about coming to work and making sure my Captain was okay with the things I did, and making sure I didn’t screw anything up.  So long as I did what I was told and tried not to overthink things too much, I could blend in with the team and work together, not worrying too much about how my individual issues affected anyone else. 

When I was hired in 1982 I already had some experience in rescue and I was already a certified EMT.  So in 1984, with my prior experience and the two additional years, I had some credibility that I brought to the team.  My job was to drive the squad, which in our department, carried all the rescue and medical tools we had in those days.  If we had a structure fire, I would slide over to drive the ladder truck instead and my officer would drive the squad.  The rest of the crew was on the engine.  That was pretty much the extent of my decisionmaking responsibility.

In 1984, we hadn’t embraced the computer as a tool.  Alarm and routine information was entered by hand into the station log book, so one of my most important tools was one of those Bic multi-color pens.  Alarms could be entered in red, other stuff in black or blue, and I can’t even remember why we used green, but we did.  Now that was technology.  Things changed in 1985.

By the end of 1984, we had the beginnings of huge changes.  We were adding fire stations and personnel.  The numbers of occupancies in our jurisdiction were growing by leaps and bounds.  We were going through Fire Chiefs as fast as they could be replaced as our commission was being challenged on issues.  We unionized and I was elected the Vice-President of the local.

But my main focus was on the changes in the national industry, because they intrigued me.  As the guy who brought in updated rescue technology from my previous department, I struck forward with the effort to train personnel in confined space entry and rope rescue, in advanced extrication techniques and in the techniques used for structural and trench collapses (when I went through Rescue I and II in Montgomery County, PA in 1981, we were creating tripods, gantries, and a-frames from hemp rope and timber, but the technology went through the roof in a matter of four years).  I got involved on a deeper level and at times, took a lot of heat for it from my colleagues and my superiors as well (nothing like being teased with “Calling Dr. Mick, calling Dr. Mick” because you decide to get your paramedic; ah, but those were the days).

I talked about Heifetz and Linsky in an earlier post and their observation that with change, there is danger.  If you are an agent of change, you will undergo attacks and even character assassination (or ACTUAL assassination: just ask MLK and Gandhi) because you represent a shift from what is comfortable and safe, to unstable and experimental.

Now that we have global access and reach we can share ideas that can both be widely popular and widely challenged.  We have a much more diverse audience and what seems to be understood as a logical solution to an issue may not even be feasible in a different culture or under a different circumstance.  To us, what may be the obvious might be the unreal.  Therefore, it is our responsibility, no matter how surreal the situation, to at least listen and try to comprehend, in an effort to achieve understanding.

That all being said, we all, from our differing viewpoints, carry a responsibility to accept what is right – and by right I mean understood to be realistic and applicable as a result of scientific evaluation and confirmation of our theory, as well as what is right by our fellow man – and not rely on innuendo and supposition.  But when we confirm something to be fact, we need to appreciate it for the change it represents, and regardless of our views on the subject, consider embracing change for the sake of doing what is truly right; that is, what is considered efficacious and for the betterment of our fellow human beings.

Just because someone claims to be the expert, or has insinuated that they should be followed as a result of their experience, fails to understand that what is accepted today is not necessarily the reality, nor is it the ultimate.  Things change.  When someone makes spurious claims, they should back them up with evidence.  Evidence isn’t someone saying “this happened”, evidence requires substantiated proof.

Things have changed a lot since 1984.  We now have expectations in the emergency service field that require us to challenge the people who say “this is true” not for challenging their authority, but to prove that what it is we take for gospel is correct, and that the service we provide based upon those theories are accurate and for the best of the people we serve.  Failing to operate in a transparent manner is only asking for trouble.   We have to accept criticism for what it is and understand that if we put emotion aside, there might be a grain of truth in what is being said.  By being introspective and realizing our faults, we achieve enlightenment. ‘Nuff said.

First, an excerpt from a letter Mr. Doug Copp sent to my employer:

In his zeal to please some nefarious people at FEMA I believe he has decided than he will promote himself, at my expense..and your town’s expense. I have had a running battle with FEMA for 20 years because they have used major disasters as an opportunity for military and espionage activities while the ‘victim’ country has been in chaos, from the disaster.

As a person who only cares about saving lives..they hate my guts.

Before 911, I was the most experienced rescuer, in the world; since, 911 I have been sick every minute of every day and after 8 years am still being treated by 7 MD Specialists, for my 911 injuries.

 

This is twisted, perverted and a disgrace that this little man should find it necessary to cause me harm. 

How much do I have to suffer? How much abuse do I need to put up with? If he is so twisted…then he should spend his time mutilating small animals and leave me alone.

 

 

 

Then, his comment, which I retrieved from the spam folder:

This is what I submitted to him as a comment, on his blog site. I do not expect that he will have the courage to post it:

http://www.firehousezen.com/2009/05/29/the-case-for-credentialing/

 “It is disgusting that my name which was so destroyed by a psychotic, twisted pervert,,,aka Thomopson Lang..owner of the Albuquerque Journal ..because I refused to give him an emergency pass,,not because he was wearing women’s clothes..not because of his disgusting behavior but mainly because he was an evil, evil man..and even more so because some wannabee phony pretend rescuers see me as an easy target..get a life..go credential your phony ass.

My 20 years of selfless volunteering saved the lives of more than 200,000 lives..go see the proof at www.amerrescue.org

<http://www.amerrescue.org/>  “

On June 15, Steve said:

Yes, credentials would help but WHO is the final authority on issuing them? WHO sets the standards? How are you going to avoid the age old paid vs volunteer bias in any credentialing agency?

My quick answer: I am against the bias in the career vs. volunteer.  If you can meet the standard, you can meet the standard.  I think there is plenty of room for volunteers, especially in disaster response.  So some career guy is going to tell me my docs can’t be part of the team because they aren’t career guys somewhere?  And I have said in regard to SC-TF1, where I do have some pull, if one person in a one-station volunteer department down the road wants to be part of our team, we need to let him if he meets our criteria (background check, physical agility, etc.)  As Ray Wilkinson, our past Director once said, “I can teach someone to break rocks, what I can’t teach is desire.”  If someone wants to do the job, and goes through the requirements to meet a position, why should I care if he’s a member of FDNY or of Acme Fire Department?  So Steve, I’m with ya, brother.

On June 16, Kevin said:

I live in a state where there is no agency tasked with certifying or credentialing Search and Rescue dogs. I have seen (many times) where someone will buy lights for their POV and load their pet dog into the truck and call themselves a SAR team! If I didn’t know better, I might think all volunteer SAR teams were like this. However, there are a number of excellent non-governmental SAR teams in my state as well. I myself and a member of a volunteer K9 team.

Kevin goes on to say that they have a volunteer K9 SAR team because there isn’t an existing asset and law enforcement has asked for it.  Well, Kevin, as they say in Australia, “good on ya”.  You have identified a need and you have tried to meet that need.  No one else has that asset and it sounds like you have tried to do a good job of using accepted industry standards to meet the need.  THAT is good stuff.

However, I just went to discuss the concept of “those of us who want to do this right, but there are people with authority screwing things up so we can’t get in”, and realized that the post I wrote for that last week never posted as scheduled!  So that is now on the post schedule and I hope it does discuss some of the feelings I personally have in that regard. 

On June 16th, SAR Volunteer also commented:

I totally agree with your points. Please understand this are a handful of small volunteer K9 SAR teams in the state of SC who do NOT self deploy, do NOT work for anyone but the proper state or municipal authorities, train hard, carry their own liability and workmenscomp insurance, align their standards with NIMS Resource Typing, and are working to ensure they meet the proposed credentialing requirements.

And to you too, SAR Vollie, I applaud your efforts.  I think there is a place for the small volunteer K9 teams at the table as well, if they meet a standard.  Let’s take SC-TF1 again for example.  I have said over and over again, if we have people out there who want to do this stuff, let’s get them involved.  But not being a canine guy, I have some difficulty understanding some of the things the canine types are telling me.  So when I get national experts telling me one thing, and some guy with Rover in a pickup truck (or Expedition, as it were) saying his dog can detect live scent, cadavers, lost pets, and get a beer and catch a frisbee, understand that I am skeptical.  And the self-deploying thing is just purely bad in my book, but that’s a whole other issue as well that doesn’t stop with canine SAR teams, and DOES include career guys, departments, and organized teams, etc.  Frankly, if you (SAR Vollie) or anyone else in SC have dogs trained to find LIVE HUMANS in collapsed or damaged buildings, and feel like you can meet a standard, send me an e-mail.  I’d love to hear from you.  But anyone who calls themselves “Urban Search and Rescue” and they are running around doing wilderness searches, well, go back to my box of rocks comment.  Be what you say you are.

Anyway, I hope this illustrates some of the issues considered so far and we’ll get back on track with the next post (which should have published before the last one- go figure).  Please continue with your comments.  I certainly appreciate your perspectives.  Stay safe.

A credential is only as good as the standard by which it is issued.  The point of having a credential should be to identify an individual or other resource as a certain type and kind.  If there is no standard, you might as well tell the carrier of a credential, “just stand over there until I can find something you can’t screw up.”

A worthwhile credential should also have some security associated with it.  After all, if anyone could get one, what good would it be?  So there are issues of validation involved as well.

In disaster after disaster, free-deploying individuals and “organizations” (and I use that term very loosely) go to “help” and in many cases, put a drain on an already over-taxed system and cause the diversion of legitimate resources from going to areas in need.  And while there is obviously some merit in the use of bystanders for certain aspects of disaster response, that has to be weighed seriously against the risk of their involvement, including the risk to themselves and the affected community, as well as the risk to rescuers, who ultimately must rescue the well-meaning if things don’t go according to plan.

There is no way to eliminate the truly altruistic in their quest to render aid.  Nor should there be.  But likewise, the civilians must understand implicitly that there comes a point when they must be diverted from the scene so the professionals can take over, especially when it comes to the extremely hazardous parts.

The standards in themselves seem to be quite the sticking point with some.  Standards utilized for the purpose of credentialing should be consensus standards and all keyholders included in the development of those standards, versus the exclusivity of some of the currently suggested drafts.  But once these are done, ratified, and chosen to be the driving force in identification of the qualified, there needs to be the embracing of the concept.  If organizations can’t agree on and use a standard that has meaning, then the credential is useless.

Like anything else, the change in this concept might be painful for some.  There are departments out there who are struggling with the unfunded mandates.  I can also sympathize with the organizations who want to become part of a greater plan like a National Mutual Aid Box Alarm System but don’t seem to know where to start or how to get involved.  I guess my first order of business, then, is to tell you how to get involved.  If there’s anything I can do, it’s point you in a direction toward activism.

Change will only come about if we work together to make it happen.  If you won’t stand for change, you don’t stand a chance to change.  Our industry is going through some important times but as you might notice (as I do all too well, sometimes), these initiatives take off for a while then they lose momentum.  Of course, that’s just until the next disaster.

Let’s work together to make something move.  In the next post, I’ll talk about opportunities to get involved.

SC-TF1 in Chalmette, LA during Katrina ops.

And then, there are the profiteers.  My intent with Firehouse Zen is not to use it as a place to vent, but as a place to enlighten.  Venting may be entertaining for some, but for the most part, productive it isn’t.

So let’s talk about why opportunists would be against credentialing, which should probably be obvious.  The reason is because for most of them, it would require them to validate their claims of expertise, and thus exposed as not having the skills or knowledge, would blunt their mercenary motives for financial reward. 

These are not “buffs” or “whackers”.  I have heard some of my colleagues use the term “buff” when referring to these groups, but I feel that this gives the real fire buff community a bad name, since there are so many out there who genuinely have a deep interest in the fire service but are unable for whatever reason to gain membership, (or just don’t care to be IN the fire service) and many really do contribute in their own way either by helping operationally, or contributing to the body of knowledge about the history of the fire service.  And although I wonder if those who choose to call themselves “whackers” really get that we aren’t laughing with them, we are laughing at them, the “whacker” mindset might be annoying and mostly about self-esteem issues; they act on more of an emotional reward for their ego, and still don’t come close to the opportunists I am referring to.

Opportunists are those who profit financially from being associated with response to a disaster.  How does this work?  Those who attempt to profit by defrauding the response community do so either by direct effect or by diverting attention from legitimate organizations. 

Profiteering also comes in the form of using the event to establish credibility, despite the individuals questionable contribution toward the outcome (and again, detracting from the actual attempts to mitigate the event), which also often comes through self-deployment to an event.  In doing so, these groups divert attention from the real responders.  While they were taking short-cuts, the ones who did all the hard work of meeting requirements and responsibilities given to them by their legal authority were not able to get the legitimate message out.  Likewise, these individuals and groups intentionally or unintentionally siphon off donations and community support from groups that legitimately could use that support.

In one way or another, these opportunists find ways to profit from their involvement in the disaster, be it reinforcing their claims for injury or from “credibility”, despite their lack of official involvement.  It should really go without saying that credentialing will help keep these people away; if forced to produce a recognized credential, most of these people would have been stopped at the door.  In the case of others, it would allow us to at least force them to affiliate themselves with a legally authorized responder, hopefully requiring them to undergo some background check and examination of their reason for obtaining credentials (“Why do you want to be a disaster responder?”). But by requiring the credential it also causes them to be placed in a group of some sort for accountability and would keep them from wandering off to do their own thing.

I wrote an article in 2002 for withthecommand.com discussing even back then, accountability in regard to disaster resource management.  Accountability doesn’t stop at causing you to know where people are, as you know, it keeps people from freelancing and doing things outside of the operational plan, as well as eliminating the unauthorized from accessing the scene.  Control and command of an incident requires that you isolate and deny entry to anybody that doesn’t have the authority to be in that hot zone.  These types of people clearly have no business being where they are and the negative things they bring to this type of incident don’t even begin to scratch the surface against requiring credentials, in fact, they reinforce the argument. 

In the next installment, we’ll talk about the final area of concern with credentialing, which really isn’t a valid argument against credentialing, but the concern of who determines who gets credentials and how they go about measuring the KSAs of people who genuinely desire to help.  After that, we’ll talk about the pros and cons and discuss other initiatives that also benefit from credentialing.

There are indeed a few challenges with this kind of emergent response, problems that if resolved, would go a long way toward goodwill with the community in general (it seems like everyone’s got some kind of beef with FEMA in every disaster, despite their extraordinary efforts to educate people that they need to be more self-sufficient and less reliant on the government), and provide resources to the jurisdictionally responsible agencies that seem to be strapped for bodies when the big one rolls around to their neighborhood.

What am I talking about?  This announcement, from FEMA’s Craig Fugate, which came out in today’s Washington Post, advocates the idea that the public could effectively be used.  What a concept.