The Fire Equipment Manufacturers & Services Association started in 1966 to improve the quality of equipment and services for the fire service. Jerry Halpin, the organization's current president, is the director of sales for the Kochek Co., where he has worked for more than seven years. Halpin has served as president for three years and is in his fifth year on the FEMSA board of directors.

What should fire chiefs know about the association?

FEMSA has taken a lead in promoting the fire service in the last two years at a federal level. It's important for chiefs and firefighters to know that because if we can promote what's good for the fire departments, they're going to buy more products and services, so we're tied together that way.

Also, fire chiefs need to understand that if FEMSA works alongside them at the state and federal levels, together we can make an impact on improving standards and performance of equipment. Higher standards are better for fire truck and equipment manufacturers because it keeps better products in the hands of the firefighters and departments.

The last thing is that fire chiefs need to understand is that whatever is good for the firefighters is good for the manufacturers. If we can get the fire chiefs to interact more with FEMSA members, they are able to give us feedback of what their real needs are. We find it very difficult to get feedback from our marketplace because of the smallness of the industry, and the funding that's used to purchase the products doesn't allow for a lot of professional routes to take. We need to talk to the fire chief, and the only way to do that is to meet each other up somewhere.

How do you propose to get the feedback from the chiefs?

The best opportunity for any dialogue between chiefs or officers with a fire equipment manufacturer is to use the trade shows to their advantage. They're coming to see the products and hear the pitch. As a result of that, maybe we need to create a regular gathering under the FEMSA banner and create some kind of a forum at the major trade shows to get a dialogue about products and needs of the fire departments.

A lot of FEMSA companies attend a lot of small regional or state shows, and what we don't do often enough is set an hour aside to let personnel from fire departments provide input to manufacturers about products. We need them to say, “We need a flashlight that will do this…” and have a manufacturer say they've been waiting to hear that idea because no one has ever wanted to put that together.

U.S. Fire Administrator David Paulison has appealed to the manufacturers for standardization in equipment and tools. What has been FEMSA's response?

Our members have embraced the idea. There were some concerns that to make products interoperable there would have to be a sharing of specific engineering and intellectual property, and that the marketing advantage might be given up by competitors, but a lot of that has been worked out where interoperability can be achieved with a certain cost in mind and where means of collaboration is possible. We've had some quick success with the air bag manufacturers. With air bags made by any manufacturer in the United States, you will be able to connect the bags even if you did not buy some of the other equipment that connects to that bag from another manufacturer.

What else are FEMSA members looking at?

A big one is the thread standardization, which is why the International Association of Fire Chiefs originated more than 130 years ago — because of issues of inoperability due to variations in hose threads. To great degree it made a dramatic impact over a long period of time, but due to a variety of reasons, differences and variations still exist in threads. Interoperablity in the thread level — a common thread — is something several FEMSA manufacturers are working on to get some of the larger customers to understand that they need to go to a standard thread that will benefit everyone.

FEMSA has become quite visible on a federal level.

FEMSA promotes the fire service, because we travel hand-in-hand.… I think the thing that's important for chiefs to understand that we need the chiefs' help from a political point of view, but from a product development point of view, too. We need to know what they know and we need them to tell us what works and what doesn't work. They need to tell us what they'd like to have. It's hard for us as individual organizations to ask; it's a tiny industry compared to any other they might be aware of. As a result, and as efficiently as possible, we need to meet up with these chiefs wherever we can and have them tell us in a relaxed environment what they need to do their job better and safer.