In June 2009, I blogged about spontaneous bystander response, or rather, the difference between that and a bunch of people jumping into their Fire SUV and driving to say, Bastrop, Texas, only to be turned away from the action.  I don't expect civilians to understand.  On the face of it, it looks like the Feds are turning away perfectly acceptable resources. The response community, however, obviously needs a big-ass brick dropped on their head with a note wrapped around it that says: "Don't go if you aren't invited."

Let's put some perspective on the issue AGAIN.  I've been dealing with disaster response for a very long time.  When I need additional resources, I have found that there is an electronic device in most response apparatus that I can use it to call for help.  In case you are wondering, this would be the radio.  In these days, however, a cell phone, e-mail or any other number of methods may be employed (in case you didn't know).

We are not discussing the desire for people to help their neighbors by bringing clothing, money, food, water, labor, etc.  We are talking about bringing yourself (and usually not much more) and saying, "I can fight fire".  We are talking about popping a sleeping bag in the car and going for a road trip, thinking that in a lot of these situations, it is going to be like camping, sans Kumbaya and S'mores, but with an extra helping of excitement.

As I and countless others have said, time after time after time:

The main problem faced by those of us in the disaster community when it comes to spontaneous response, is the fact that as the designated adult supervision at these events, we have a responsibility to insure not only mitigation (or depending on the complexity and scope, control) of the incident, but the safety of those who were not necessarily part of the problem before, but now are. 

My whole reason for saying this is that while most of us in the response community can certainly appreciate the altruism in bystander response to an emergency, there are cases upon cases in every aspect of disaster and technical rescue response where the spontaneous bystander response in and of itself became an additional rescue mission for us on our arrival.  If anyone wants to be bored to death, I can cite example after example, and even put you in touch with others who can do the same.  This has not changed for any emergency in decades.

You may say, "Hey, these guys were calling for help and nobody came."  That is YOUR perspective on the situation.  The reality is not that there is a true lack of resources.  At Katrina, for example, there were plenty of resources.  There was just a little problem of certain parties not knowing the plan for getting those resources, or not knowing how to deliver them, or sending them to the wrong places.  There isn't a lack of resources, there is a lack of knowledge on how to put them in place and make the work.

This is where the Feds come in, believe it or not.  Because the Feds have a few things going for them that in a lot of cases, the locals, the counties, and the state don't have.  Principally, that would be money and coordination.

Having been involved intimately with a few of these little dances, I have witnessed firsthand the dialogue going on in the command post with some of these elected officials:

Fire Chief: "Okay, we have fourteen houses burning over on XYZ Circle, but we don't have the engine companies necessary to cover that area. I need to have the authority to call the state and have them declare a state of emergency."

Mayor: "Well, that's your job, dammit!  Hell no, I don't want a bunch of people from Capital City over here telling us how to do things their way!  Don't you have a plan?  Why don't you just use those guys with the pickup trucks who showed up this morning?  Doesn't the state have a bunch of those thing-a-ma-jigs they can send over?  You know, strike forces, or task teams or something?"

Fire Chief: "Strike teams and task forces.  Yes, but this is the representative from the State here.  They are offering their help, but since this hasn't been declared a disaster by the Governor yet, before I agree to sign this Memorandum of Understanding, I needed to let you know this is going to cost us money…"

Mayor: "Is that all you are waiting on?  Dammit, sign whatever you need to sign!"

Fire Chief: "By ordinance, I am required to get your permission before creating a liability for the city over $100,000."

Mayor: "WHAT?  How much are we talking about here?"

Fire Chief:  "I don't know, but more than that.  So this guy says we can have the Governor declare a state of emergency…"

Mayor: "I don't want those a#$%$@*s from the Capital down here telling us what to do.  Just see what you can do for a little while."

Fire Chief: "Ohhhh-kay…"

Now, I have no idea if that's what is going on in this situation.  I would actually doubt it, because they declared a state of emergency pretty quickly.  But most localities are pretty reluctant to declare that they need help, because to them it is a loss of control, and when faced with that breakover point (where they can't control it, but don't want to release it), that's when the chaos thickens.  I actually wrote a paper a number of years ago on why local fire departments won't develop plans or call for help when they need it.

So let's cut to the chase.  Feel free to read the earlier article.  Feel free to hunt down any other number of articles I have written on the subject.  But while the dates have changed, the situation has not.  The system for deploying emergency response assets around the country, while not perfect, is better than it used to be.  And the situation is improving.  But if you are just dying to go somewhere and help out, instead of piling into the family roadster and hiking out for the unknown, instead, determine what equipment and apparatus you can send somewhere, decide who you will send, identify their capability using relatively well-known recommendations out there, and get with your state to find out where you can list your resource through mutual aid agreements.  Do this ahead of time and when the time comes, if your services are needed, they will call you.  

Or even better, establish "sister community" arrangements in advance: work with other agencies and communities out there on a special agreement that if your community is impacted, you will call them and likewise, they will call you.  Do this with communities who are in other regions or states that permit you to get assets no one else is likely to be drafting from.

The short story is this though: Although the sentiment is appreciated, drama is not something the locals need when chaos has come to call.  They need coordinated assistance of the right kind.  And they need an asset, not a liability.  If you are going to help, go to help, not to add to the problem.  And you may not like to hear that, but it's the truth.

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In this case the researchers are using the Green June Beetle, but given the size of the cockroaches (or Palmetto Bugs, as we like to call them in South Carolina) I have seen, we could probably equip them with a hammer drill and let them tunnel the victims back out of the rubble once they find one.

Cyborg insects are low maintenance, can get into very restricted and virtually inaccessible areas, and with these new developments, can be adapted for a number of different tasks.  Some of these cyborg applications could also be used for monitoring hazmats or terrorist attacks, doing pre-entry search and recon for SWAT teams, or spy work.  As far as our use of these creatures, the sky (or the basement) is the limit.

Never lose sight of this constant: Change is inevitable.  It''s how we deal with it that makes the difference. What we know today as the way we do business may be radically different tomorrow.

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"Despite the lives at stake, the recommendation to improve radio interoperability for first responders has stalled because of a political fight over whether to allocate 10 MHz of radio spectrum … directly to public safety for a nationwide network, or auction it off to a commercial wireless bidder who would then be required to provide priority access on its network dedicated to public safety during emergencies," says the report, whose authors include 9/11 Commission chairmen Lee Hamilton and Thomas Kean.

I distinctly recall the shouts of support from the American public for firefighters everywhere after the Towers fell, and how shocked people were when we let them know that one of our biggest problems is communications interoperability.  Then, in 2005, when Katrina blew through, the politicians were adamant that we needed the tools to combat this problem of communications interoperability.  And here we are, in 2011 and the politicians still will tell us one thing and do another.

Congress seems to find the time and support to help out their fat cat buddies when times are tough. Banks and corporations get bailed out and corporate big-wigs continue to get record bonuses.  In the meanwhile, public servants I work with get lacerated over getting a miniscule pay raises over the last three years, like these firefighters, cops, EMTs, teachers, and city administrators are sitting at home, counting the dough in their offshore accounts and laughing maniacally.  Really? And many other people, not just our brothers, are losing benefits, taking furloughs, or worse, losing their jobs altogether.  

It makes me sick when I see our politicians sucking up to the ones who shout the loudest on the right or the left while forgetting there are many more of us out here in the middle who are just trying to get by.  These are the same individuals with the nerve to take government pensions, government health care, and government paychecks, the whole while saying "government is bloated".

This proposal was meant to make our job safer, to improve our ability to save lives, and to combat disaster in our communities, but instead, our politicians want to continue to discuss the possibility of awarding the block to a commercial wireless company who, of course, stands to make billions off our first responders and probably still give us communications that suck.

If you really want to get mad about something, find a battle worth fighting over.  I'm throwing you the ball now, you are supposed to swing at it.  Here's one: Call your representatives today and tell them what you think of their continued stalling and their greedy tactics.  We need support.  This would be the support the politiicans continually promise us when the news cameras are on them and they're hawking their platform on the graves of firefighters, cops and EMTs.  It's the same support, of course, that is quickly forgotten when the lobbyists show up and when the big money is up for grabs.  

If you don't know who represents you, try this link: ContactingtheCongress.org.  It makes it easy for you; there are phone numbers and comment links.  Put your money where your mouth is.  Or better yet, get some balls and tell your representatives what you think.  Your representatives are supposed to be representing you.  Instead of taking a few minutes away from your valuable Facebook time posting an anonymous rant against a brother who had a lapse in judgement caught on video, try venting against the real enemies: the political hacks who tell you they support you but can't work together to fund necessary things like fire departments, fire education, and firefighters.  Here's a message you can send them: If they want that photo op with dirt on their face, shovel in hand, and helmet on their head, tell 'em they have to earn it first.  Support the brotherhood.  FTM.

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A while back I posted an invitation to anyone who would listen about coming to work here. I don’t know for sure what impact I had on the numbers, but we had hundreds of applications submitted. From there we provided access to written testing locations around the country, because we sincerely are interested in obtaining the best candidates available. Of those who passed the test, invitations were offered to take a firefighter candidate physical fitness assessment and oral interviews, which are being conducted this weekend. The next steps in the process involve the ranking of candidates on a list from which we draw to fill openings for roughly the next 18 months.

Even there the fun doesn’t stop. When we have an opening, we have to justify the need to fill that opening, which in this economy, sometimes is tougher because of our need to remain fiscally responsible to the citizens of the Island. But with an overwhelming desire to maintain our reputation as a world-class resort destination as well as an excellent community in which to live, public safety is responsibly maintained.

There are a few more steps along the way and when we hire you, there are a lot of expectations placed on you in the first year between requirements for National Registry and South Carolina EMT certifications, IFSAC Firefighter 1 and 2, and HAZMAT Operations certifications, and a whole host of others. Not to mention you are expected to be able to work as part of a team, be customer service oriented, and maintain your ability to do the job through physical fitness and mental preparedness.

It’s not a job for everyone and sometimes we lose a few along the way when they wash out. It’s not necessarily a reflection on their ability to do the job, but more so that we have very high expectations of our employees and it just isn’t for everyone.

The overall compensation package is good though, and we have innovative benefits like zero-interest computer loans, tuition reimbursement for degree-seeking individuals, and incentives for obtaining certain educational benchmarks like HAZMAT Technician or BCLS Instructor certifications. We have state-of-the-art fire apparatus and ambulances, having recently replaced the entire fleet, and opportunities for participation in special operations programs, as we host (in partnership with Bluffton Township Fire District) a state-designated regional HAZMAT Response Team as well as a regional US&R response team.

I wish I could be up there to welcome you and to tell you good luck, but I plan on enjoying the weekend with my family at home. We may walk from our home to the beach, or go for a bike ride on the miles of activity trails across the entire Island, or take part in one of the weekend festivals that go on frequently at Shelter Cove Park. This is a tremendous place to work and to live. Good luck and hopefully, if you want to work with us, we can find a way to work together.

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SC-TF1 Demobilizing From Chalmette, LA after Hurricane Katrina, 2005.

I was pretty self-conscious about that decision, even though nobody knew who answered each question and nobody would have known it was me that graded us so. I actually thought about it long afterward, in an attempt to understand in my absolute certainty with 10 seconds on the clock, that we deserved the highest mark on a standard grade. It was, frankly, a little presumptuous of me.

The quick answer is that we don’t deserve an “A”. We are definitely customer oriented and we are definitely aggressive firefighters who use best practices and manage our risk appropriately. We are definitely on the leading edge of EMS delivery and while we are not THE organization by which all should be measured, many would be doing pretty well to do so.

But while we are definitely making huge strides and we have many accomplishments, we aren’t where we feel we should be. That is universally agreed upon in our organization. There is just too much to do, and while we are hitting the high priority items, there are so many things we want to do, and have begun doing, but there are only 24 hours in a day and finite resources otherwise at our disposal.

It is for the same reason, perhaps, that I should instead embrace the criticism of some in the knowledge that the minute we stop reassessing our service we become complacent. Don’t believe for a second that I don’t take the criticism personally, because although I shouldn’t, I do. Just as you know all the idiosyncrasies of your own children, you’d never stand for anyone else criticizing them. And, after 29 years of being part of the core individuals who pushed, pulled and shaped what is now known as our department, I have very little patience for the particular individuals who have come along since with a lot of criticism and no substantive contributions. My personal take on it, in fact, is that we have a list of people who would be happy to take their jobs.

Our line of reasoning, however, should be to embrace the constructive criticism that can be drawn from some of the comments. We should always perform self-critique, but self-critique is not self-immolation. We should always be pulling lessons from where we are and where we want to be, and the reason why we aren’t where we want to be. But this isn’t an effort to tell us what a bad job we are doing, but ways in which we need to improve.

The minute we begin to believe we are Number One in the county, the state, the region, or the nation, and we begin to believe we are “The Best”, we (all of us) tend to believe we can’t learn from others or from ourselves. It also demeans the rest of those who do an excellent job providing service with the resources they have in the community they must serve. Of all things, though, it’s pretty presumptuous again to suggest that we are the best at anything other than delivering the emergency services on Hilton Head Island, because really, that’s all that matters.

My own personal vision for our organization is to be one of those departments that others hold up to say, “This is the gold standard. This is how we want to be”. We continue to make leaps in that direction. We are, though, our own worst critics. We need to always be looking out for better ways to improve. Daily, we must try harder.

The effort must be placed on continual improvement. “Zero defects” is a pretty lofty goal, but in our business, zero defects may be the difference between life and death, between going home in the morning or going home in the hosebed of the rig under a pair of crossed aerials.

Never get complacent. Never believe you are the best, at least not for longer than it takes to get to the desired result, then to take a breath, look around, and say, “Where to from here?” The moment we stop, we die. We should always resolve to do better each time we are presented with a new challenge and to dig out whatever lessons we can observe from our current situation. There is no time to dwell on it, though. Digest it, make the adjustment, and move on.

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Hilton Head Island Fire and Rescue

EDITORS NOTE: THE PERIOD IN WHICH THIS APPLICATION WAS OPEN IS NOW EXPIRED.  I ASK THAT IF YOU ARE STILL INTERESTED IN A JOB WITH HILTON HEAD ISLAND FIRE AND RESCUE, THAT YOU CONTINUE TO MONITOR FOR THESE OPPORTUNITIES IN APPROXIMATELY 12 TO 18 MONTHS.  AS A RESULT, THE LINKS TO THAT APPLICATION ARE NOW DISABLED.

The Town of Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, has opened up the floodgates for anyone interested in applying for the position of firefighter.  I have worked for this agency since it was created from the merger of three other emergency providers in 1993, but I also worked for all three of those other agencies at one point or another since 1982.  I have stuck with this team for so long and continue to do so for at least one main reason: Because Hilton Head Island Fire and Rescue’s leadership and personnel are committed to a vision of excellence and service and prove it regularly.

We have seven stations serving a world-class beach resort community with all-hazards emergency response.  Since 2008 we have completely replaced our entire fleet of 10 engines and in two months we will have completely replaced our fleet of 10 ambulances.  Our tillered aerial is also scheduled for upgrades within this budget year and the other TDA in the next five.

Everyone on the line is required to be cross-trained and certified.  By the first year, all newly hired firefighter/EMTs must carry at least an IFSAC or ProBoard Firefighter II credential and a National Registry EMT Basic credential.   Within your first year, a stack of other required credentials will quickly accumulate from the classes we send you to if you are hired and don’t have that training.  But that’s just the beginning of a long career in which education is encouraged.

Hilton Head Island Fire and Rescue supports earning a college degree if you don’t yet have one, and more than a few personnel have gone on to graduate with degrees through the Town’s tuition reimbursement program. In addition to the number of personnel who regularly attend the National Fire Academy, our organization also boasts its share of Executive Fire Officer graduates.  HHIFR is well represented by a number of personnel who write, teach and consult on the national and international issues in emergency services.  We have representatives on NFPA and IAFC committees, national and state training committees, and serving as instructors of the South Carolina Fire Academy.  In fact, all line officers are required to maintain an instructor credential with the South Carolina Fire Academy in addition to a number of other certifications.

If you truly believe that our mission is to prevent disaster first, we are the department you want to be affiliated with.  Our building and fire codes are some of the strongest in the region and they are enforced by our excellent Fire Marshal’s Bureau as well as the Town’s Building and Codes Enforcement teams.  A great number of occupancies on the Island are protected by fire sprinklers and equipped with monitored alarm systems.  We have a very proactive outreach to youth through participation in school education programs.  Our personnel teach regular CPR and first aid courses to the public, and we had one of the first community-wide AED programs in the nation.  Disaster planning and management is conducted by the Town’s own Emergency Management staff, located in our Headquarters and working hand-in-hand with the rest of the team.  If all else fails and disaster does strike on the Island, citizens and visitors call our own enhanced 9-1-1 communications center, operated by public safety communicators who are also part of the HHIFR family.

Our CFAI-accredited department runs advanced life support ambulances along with our engine companies and we not only respond, but we transport as well.  Hilton Head Island Fire and Rescue co-hosts (with our brothers at Bluffton Township Fire District)  one of five recognized US&R Regional Response Teams in the South Carolina US&R Program as well as the regional HAZMAT Emergency Response Team, with responsibilities as part of the state-wide counter-terrorism response plan.  We have a brand-new training facility with a tower and propane props, our own fleet maintenance facility, and are in the process of rebuilding our fifth station out of seven, with the remaining two scheduled for demolition and re-construction in the next three to five years.

Hilton Head Island is a unique place to live and work.  While the United States Census lists Hilton Head Island with a population of 48,000, the average daily population exceeds 100,000 when you add in visitors, workers, day-trippers, and at peak can be up to 275,000.  The residents of the Island are very particular about their level of expectations. There are many CEOs, managers, military leaders, and retired executives who call Hilton Head Island home, as well as native Islanders, young families, and immigrants.  We have to serve all of them with a very high standard of care, no matter what their emergency is.  It is what we expect from our personnel, 24/7.

I have passed on more than a few opportunities when after reflection, I realize how good it is here and how much I enjoy it here.  We have amazing personnel working with us and we have a very supportive community to work in.  If you would like an opportunity to work with this team, please check out the links I have embedded in this post to learn more about us and our community, and take the time to apply.  As a parting note: While sharing this information via my blog does not qualify me for a referral bonus (I have to actually KNOW you), I’d rather that if given the opportunity, you mention that you found this process through the Firehouse Zen site.  My request is simply to illustrate the power of networking through this type of media.

Good luck! And click here if you haven’t already for the application site!

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When you don't have the resources internally, develop partnerships.

Successful coaches don’t force a system down the throats of their personnel without a very good reason. Instead, through careful evaluation of skill sets, they point their personnel toward positions in which they will have the greatest impact.

I’m a huge football fan. I’m impressed by teams that are able to recruit and develop personnel to fit their particular schema.  But there are also those who try to take a scheme they have bought into wholesale and refuse to adjust based on what their personnel can and can’t do.

If you wonder about what I’m getting at, look at it like this: If you are a fire chief in a small town or suburban department and insist that your department uses tactics employed in the big urban departments, I would suggest that you objectively evaluate the success you have with that and consider using different tactics.  Truly urban fire departments can bring resources to bear quickly. Urbanized areas often have great water supply and relatively short response times.  In a lot of departments around our nation, we don’t have an unlimited amount of companies to throw at an incident. We don’t have great water supplies everywhere.  As a result, we must find alternative delivery methods.

If you fail to admit this to yourself and choose to ignore the need to develop other abilities, you will continue fighting the same battles with the same results.  Develop vision and understand that there are other ways to do the job you do and to provide the service desired by your community, by getting them to help solve some of these issues.  Open up some planning sessions to the public and solicit ideas.  See if the people you serve have ideas that can provide resources you didn’t think were available.  If anything, the participants will enjoy learning more about what it is we do, as well as to educate the public on the things we really need.

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There’s a lot more.  But I’m not here to brag.  I’m here to tell you that while “pride goeth before a fall”, pride is also necessary to motivate your personnel, and a little pride can go a long way.  If you are going to implement change in your organizational culture, there should be a reluctance to be where you were and a desire to go where you are going.  You can quote me on that.  But pride has to be tempered by a few things, reality being one.  Knowing that even the best are fallible is another.

It isn’t easy.  We have had our bad days just like everyone else, and we continue to have bad days just like everyone else. We too have people in our department who, given a million dollars in a briefcase, would be upset that it wasn’t on a silver tray.  I certainly don’t view everything with rose-colored glasses, although some people might believe that to be the case because I’m not talking about the negatives, but discussing the positives.  We have challenges and I have personal challenges.  But instead of seeing these as roadblocks, I see them as opportunities.

If you know me well, you know that I am actually a deep-seated cynic.  But I have been places where I have found such turmoil and trouble that I know I have absolutely no right to complain.  Unfortunately, I have been in a lot of these places.  Conversely, I have been in places where they have got it right.  They may not have every resource they ask for, but they make the best of what they’ve got and they remain hopeful and optimistic, knowing that each day brings them another little piece of the puzzle they can work toward completion.

There’s a fire department in a neighboring community where the Fire Chief used to be my chauffeur, a long time ago.  This guy gets “IT” and he has done everything he can do to infuse “IT” into his people.  When I ask his personnel how things are going with “Big Daddy”, I have never heard a single one of them complain.  They are upbeat and positive about their department, about where they are going, and about the leadership.  They make things work and they have fun doing their jobs.  And that Chief isn’t just letting people come to work and play checkers either.  They train often, they do all the jobs we do short of ALS transport, and all kinds of other things.  These people have a lot of pride in their organization and it shows.

I am extraordinarily proud of my department and most of all, of the people we work with, and the people we work for.  The community here is generally pretty proud of their department also.  We get a lot of letters of thanks and praise.  We get awards.  Our Town Manager pretty much says we stay off his radar, and that’s a good thing.  But it’s not all sunshine and roses and it’s important you know that.

There is being proud and there is being delusional.  While we are very honored to have our team and the resources entrusted to us, we also realize that at any time, at any instant, things can go wrong.  We realize that one saved building isn’t a far stretch, maybe nine or ten minutes from being a total loss.  While our community relies on the entire system to be good at what we do (through education, prevention, protection, service delivery, and customer care), one slip in the well-oiled chain can wreak havoc on the entire machine.

Not that this is a good time to be paraphrasing Brian Kelly (the head football coach at Notre Dame), but he tells his players that when they are on the field, they are 1/11th of the team. If everyone does their part, things will work according to plan.  When someone doesn’t, someone else has to do MORE than their job to take up the slack.  We can be as proud as we want, but if one person lets us down, we are all toast.  For those reasons alone, a little humility will go a long way when things don’t go as expected.

We tell people in our organization all the time, if you screw up, own the situation.  Raise your hand and say, “My bad” and we’ll do what we can to fix the problem together.  None of us, most of all, me, is perfect.  We’d better be ready and willing to say, “I’m wrong, I’m sorry” when it is warranted.  Our informal motto is, “Do the right thing”.  When you have that kind of an outlook at all times, it can solve many equations.

If your own organization is reaching and it seems frustrating, know that everyone, including the Phoenixes and the FDNYs and the Metro-Dades and the Fairfaxes all have their days.  Just like our department has, and I’m sure your department has.  The element of success, however, is to ride out those days as an intact team, absorb the problems, fix what is necessary, and move forward.  Don’t dwell on the problems, learn from them and move on.

Even the best have their moments, but if you take the time to reflect on what you have accomplished, realize how far you have gotten, and look forward to the trip ahead, the pride in that journey is a significant motivator to keep the team together.  Pride acts as one of many force multipliers.  Like any other tool, use it carefully.

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While I created Firehouse Zen to educate others, my Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Firefighter Nation accounts have become essentially my “research sources”.  The more minds I can get exposure to, the more likely it is I am going to get an idea from somewhere, or be able to answer a question, or just generally help.  While there are still a few skeptics, I know of many who find this new frontier exciting and intriguing.  It is apparent that electronic media and social networks have really begun to find a place in the emergency service world, if used correctly.

Knowledge is most certainly power; your network is the essential element in communicating that knowledge.  It used to be that you would have to attend dozens of conferences a year to connect with others, now I can do it from the desk in my office, or on a good day, on my porch with my toes in the pool.  Day after day, social media is revolutionizing our industry.  The more people you can connect with, the more likely you are to have an answer if called upon.

Although these applications were designed for socialization, many of us realize the utility of having access to names from all over the globe.  These contacts are not only from within our ranks but from business, NGOs, military, and a host of other classifications we once didn’t have ready access to, people who may have faced similar challenges and can provide insight, or people who might at least know a source for further inquiry.  While there are downsides, there are upsides we haven’t even begun to touch on yet.  I continue to add pretty much anyone who asks to “friend” me, mostly because I’m not looking for exclusion, I’m looking for inclusion.  I want anyone who wants to gain access to what I know to be able to, and likewise if they have something to share with me, to be able to do so easily.

So here’s to you, my Facebook buds, my LinkedIn compadres, and all of the rest of you out there who provide me a secure base of information, education, and friendship.  And to those of you who aren’t yet, feel free to come by and friend me, because while today you might have something I need, hopefully someday there’ll be something I do to return the favor.  Reach out and meet some people.  Like they say at Disney, “It’s a small world after all”.

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As was quoted by at least one of my friends from the CFD prior to that night: “We’re the FDNY of the South.”  When your fire department has a Class 1 ISO rating and homes aren’t burning into the dirt on a daily basis, the public is just fine with whatever it is you are doing.  Whether your organization is using the most modern equipment and techniques, or whether they are utilizing tactics thrown away in the 70′s, there are much more important things on the public radar.  Things like whether or not the garbage will get picked up, or who the next contestant is on The Bachelor, or which rehab facility Lindsay Lohan is skipping out of.  The entire community of Charleston and the fire department itself, prior to that day, was fine and happy with the status quo.  Just like any disaster, it isn’t until people die that questions begin to be asked.

This isn’t an indictment of the department, its culture, or anyone in particular.  All I know is what I know and the things that were said before, on and after that night.  A big reason why I have never said anything really about it until now is that I wasn’t asked (I was this time).  But nothing I care to say would be intended to disparage the reputations or the character of the brave members of the CFD.  I simply believe that the charismatic style of their leader at the time led them down a primrose path.  He thought he was doing the right thing, everyone else there thought he was doing the right thing, and nothing seemed like it could go wrong, until it did.  Catastrophically.

I wasn’t at the incident in the beginning and frankly, in retrospect, there were many disasters converging at that exact location that evening.  It was inevitable that something bad would happen, given some of what we knew before, and of course, given what we know now.  I had to shake my head in wonder when I saw that one poster on a blog page wanted to know, “Where are all the chiefs in SC?” on the issue.  ”Why wouldn’t they do something before this disaster?”  Well, let me tell you a little bit about fire departments in the United States: Unless the public or their elected officials detect a problem, there is never going to be any change, no matter WHAT the chiefs in the neighboring communities or the state have to say about it. After the disaster, it is true, the collective anger and frustration not only from within, but from the overall fire service community was instrumental in causing a change, but really, it took the deaths of nine brave souls to make that change manifest.

All we can do now is honor the lives of those who go before us, pray for the families and help them deal with this tragedy, and hope we all learn from the events that evening.  Senseless doesn’t begin to describe the loss suffered by the principals of this story, and although I chalk up a great deal of what happened to hubris and over-confidence by the Fire Chief, and by default, the organizational culture, I don’t take anything away from the extremely fine and dedicated brothers who serve the community of Charleston, SC.  I can only pray that we don’t experience something like this again anywhere else on the globe.  In my heart, however, I know there are departments out there who learned nothing from this, therefore, we are only a heartbeat away from repeating these mistakes again.

I was lying on the couch in my living room when I got the first call.  The power was out at our house, so I was just working on my laptop, having just put the children to bed.  At the time, I was the Acting Director of the South Carolina US&R Task Force and awaiting our hiring a full-time Director to take my place in Columbia.  One of my Task Force Leaders rang my cell phone and asked if I had been briefed on what was going on in Charleston.  He said that there were several firefighters unaccounted for in a fire at the Sofa Superstore.

I am intimately familiar with Charleston.  I did the majority of my paramedic clinical time there in the 80′s and fell in love with the place.  My mother-in-law grew up in Charleston and we would go up there to visit her family, especially her well-connected sister and brother-in-law, often.   And when our second daughter, Caroline, was born, she developed complications resulting in a helo ride to the Medical University and a subsequent six-week stay in the neonatal ICU.  In response, my wife and I literally moved to Charleston and lived at a friend’s second home at King and Broad for the entire time.  We go back often and have developed many close friendships there.

I am also friends with a number of Charleston’s firefighters, although I never had the honor of meeting any of our brothers who passed that evening.  But at the time, no one really seemed to know who was involved, much less who was missing, so for all I knew, it could have been any one of the people I had grown to know over the years of interacting with the department.  And yes, I knew Rusty and many of the command staff who were there that evening, much as a result of my capacity with the Task Force and the ultimate oversight of their regional response team’s interaction with the State US&R Plan.

There’s really not much you can say when you get one of those calls.  I’ve been called for others like it before and several hours later find that the news was completely distorted from the original message.  You know, everyone ends up accounted for, or there was a mistake in transmission, or something like that.  And although I had every reason to believe what I was being told was true (this TFL has always been a good friend and dependable officer), I have to admit I was a little skeptical.  I told him to call me if he had any other information, and I’d call the State Fire Marshal, John Reich, who as the ESF-9 coordinator for the state, I technically reported to, and give him a heads-up.

When the power came back on a little while later, I clicked over to the Charleston news station and saw the coverage, and was immediately swayed by what was going on: an active search and rescue incident looking for multiple companies of missing firefighters.  Needless to say, things began to move pretty quickly, and it was really pretty much a blur after that.  Multiple phone calls between multiple state officers and the next thing was, the State Fire Marshal was asking us to represent the state at the incident and to offer whatever assistance was needed.

I can tell you this, given any State agency’s relationship with local entities, we were instantly cognizant that what we DIDN’T want was one of our incident support teams (IST) rolling in there and announcing we were there to take over, because we weren’t.  Not only would that be extremely callous and insensitive to the situation, we have no statutory authority to do so, short of a gubanatorial declaration of disaster (and that wasn’t coming).  So this was going to be a mission of extreme delicacy and an offer of assistance from the State Fire Marshal’s Office, and as such, I felt like it would be best if I went personally, even though we had an IST sitting across the river in Mt. Pleasant.

I called up Ed Boring and Jason Walters, who at the time were both Task Force command officers and work with me at Hilton Head Island, and told them I was heading up to Charleston on direction from John Reich.  Ed and Jason continue to work with me and over the years have become two of my closest friends not just because of our shared interests, but also because we served together at Katrina.  Nothing like a disaster and riding around in a dark-colored Suburban to create a bonding experience.

On our arrival, we were each stupified by the absolute desolation on the scene.  We got there before midnight, and at that point it was still not clear how many souls had been lost.  Everyone was in shock, or so it seemed.  The fire was still burning in places, but everyone seemed to be moving like their feet were in concrete.  Not in a slow, poorly organized way, but in a stunned, defeated, bewildered way.  It was definitely the scene of an enormous and horrendous event.

We delicately announced our need to report to the command post so we could speak to the incident commander, and kept getting pointed in a direction until we were finally pointed toward an empty pop-up tent with a single fold-up chair in the middle of the parking lot.  No one was there.  So we began to again poke around a little bit more, until we found Battalion Chief Robbie O’Donald, over by the ladder truck, which was still in the air.  Robbie, who was a member of SC-TF1 and also a member of the Charleston command staff, had very obvious burns across his hands and arms, but was standing at the front of the building with a portable radio.  I remember very softly calling to Chief O’Donald, because I honestly believed he was in total shock.  The burns on both of his arms were pretty graphic, with skin literally falling off of his arms, but here he was, still at his post.

After a brief discussion about who was in charge and where he was at, I asked Robbie if he realized his arms were burned.  He just kind of nodded and made a quiet, brief comment about trying to get someone out.  I asked him if he wanted to get his burns checked out, he just said he’d be okay.  Ignoring my suggestion, he led us over to a nearby gas station where the police had set up a command post of sorts, but no one was there either, so we went back over to the front of the store and stood around for a little.  Finally, I said to Robbie, “Hey, John Reich sent us up here to see if there’s anything we can do for you.”  Without answering me, he began to detail out for us where all the firefighters were lost at, including two on the other side of the wall from where we were standing.

I remember there was a back hoe sitting in front of the store.  ”You aren’t going to dig them out with that, are you?” I asked.  Given the state everyone was in, I didn’t quite know what to take for granted.  ”Man, I can bring you the entire task force down here, or just trucks and equipment if you guys want to do this yourselves, but you tell us what YOU want, we’ll do whatever it is YOU want.”  Trying to push him a little, I gave him my official business card, to indicate the official nature of my being there, and told him to take it to Rusty, and to let him know that whatever he needed, we’d get it there, just name it.  So Robbie took the card and went into the building and out of our sight, which was where Chief Thomas was.

After a while, Chief O’Donald came back out and told me, “Chief Rusty says we’re fine.”  Something in his face told me differently, and I’ve had enough experience to also know that things weren’t fine.  But I wasn’t going to argue.

“Robbie, we’ll be right over there,” I pointed to the street, “if you guys change your mind.”  He was staring back into the building again and I put my hand on his arm to let him know we were serious.  ”I don’t have the authorization to make a decision for Hilton Head, but given what’s going on here, if you need people up here to cover you guys, I know we can get a bunch of guys up here to cover you at least on a volunteer basis.”  He shook his head again and said, “Chief Rusty said we’ve got it.”

So we just wandered back to the road and got out of the way.  I called John Reich and gave him my report and said that we needed to send another representative later on when some of the shock wore off.  Then Ed and Jason and I stood by the road and watched as they carried the first five or six out, I don’t even really remember because at that point, I felt like this was something they needed to do themselves, and I wasn’t going to push the matter.  If they were my people, I’d want to be the one who carried them out, so I understood.  I also felt like our presence there, at that point, was more of a bystander than being of assistance, so we made our offers again, and with them saying once again they had everything under control, we left.  The ride home was pretty quiet.

I look back on that night with a certain amount of disbelief.  Did a department who fought as many fires as Charleston did really think they were going to make a knock on a commercial building fire with a single 2 1/2 inch supply line from a distant hydrant?  Did they really think an attack on a heavily-loaded big box with booster lines was a sufficient attack strategy?  Did they completely forget about the thermal imager sitting on their apparatus?  Did their hubris really lead them to reject the notion of calling for outside resources early into the incident?  Did the idea that “we fight these fires every day” with no semblance of modern command and control overwhelm the logical need for a coordinated rescue supported by protective lines?  Rather than trying to attack a fast-mover without opening up the overheads, might we have not approached this with a more defensive attack once it was realized that a victim was trapped in the rear of the building?

We can “what if” this incident to death, but it doesn’t reverse the past.  I personally know many of the key players in this saga and I can reassure you, none of them went to work that morning thinking, “Hey, I think I’ll kill off a few firefighters today”.  But that’s what happened and no matter how sure you are of yourself, when you lose nine firefighters and someone asks you, “Given what you know now, would you fight this fire differently?” and you say, “No”, you have got a serious problem.

Resources will always be a problem in the fire service.  We never have what we really need to do our jobs and we are always going to be understaffed.  We will always be questioned by the public as to why it takes so many of us to fight a fire and why does it all cost so damn much.  Then when all hell breaks loose, if we don’t make things happen, the public will scream that we didn’t do our job.  It’s the never-ending dichotomy of public service.  But to look at the lessons learned that evening and ignore them, well, it’s tantamount to killing your people.

It’s this simple: if you can’t fight the fire without killing your people, then why bother?  If a rescue were being made, it’s one thing, but the men who lost their lives weren’t in any position to mount a defense for the rescue teams; they were in attack positions and eventually retreat positions with nowhere to go.  They were actively trying to seek out a hidden fire while the whole time they were playing a game stacked against them.  There WAS no “Plan B”.  I’m not sure there was a “Plan A”.  If you drive by there today, it’s a big vacant lot.  These guys gave up their lives for their community, they gave what is identified in the Bible as being the greatest gift one can give to their fellow man: their lives.  But just like the 343 men who died in the World Trade Center, the public has a short memory of these people and their mission.  And when we ask for more funds, more manpower, or more equipment, more training, more support, or more apparatus, unless the stain of blood is still on the hands of the civilians from the latest disaster du jour, they have moved on to the next media extravaganza of the week.

Me, I have an obligation to my family to come home in the morning.  I have an obligation to the families of my personnel to make sure they leave in the morning as well. If I don’t keep sharp, if I don’t fully comprehend the situation I am sending companies in to engage, and if I don’t have the means to put the tools in their hands they need, then I am failing them.  No amount of pride, a patch, a label, or honors will do you any good when you are carrying out your dead and for what?  If we can’t be there for each other, what have we really got?

Where were you that night?  You may not have been there, but the lessons are all available for us to read and to learn from.  If we fail to address the deficiencies, or short of that, at least identify methods of modifying our approach, or even less, realizing we simply don’t have the appropriate resources and stating: “we’re going to let it burn”, then we are ignoring the legacy of these fine men, these Charleston Nine, who have gone on before us.  As leaders, we have a responsibility to learn and not make the same mistakes again.  Honor these men by perfecting our craft and striving for positive change in the fire service.  I never knew them, but I’ll bet that’s what they’d have wanted.  Let’s keep them forever in our memory and insure they are never forgotten.

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