Last month in Washington, D.C., two Metro-transit trains crashed, killing nine people. More than 200 firefighters and public-safety personnel from D.C., Maryland and Virginia responded.

Dennis Rubin, chief of the District of Columbia Fire and Emergency Medical Services Department and 40-year fire-service veteran, talks about the incident.

What stands out to you about the response to this crash?

There are a couple of issues I would share. I have seen so many positive changes in the command, the strategy and the tactical levels.

The command structure, like it does at every event, fell into place as the units arrived and the event began to unfold. Within the first six minutes command was established by the initial-arriving officer and transferred in a few minutes to the battalion chief. The assistant chief of operations, the lead guy on that part of the operations, was there in about the first eight or nine minutes.

Command was moved into our fixed command post facility, a mobile unit, and from there the incident ran very effectively with a tremendous amount of coordination. The coordination included folks such as our various police departments — metro police, the Metro Rail, the municipal police or our city police, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Because of the location, federal agencies responded quickly. Did you have time to prepare?

We had the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Rail Administration on location within the first two hours, along with the Transportation Security Administration and the Department of Transportation, so there was a huge amount of resources both at the federal and the city level arriving all about the same time and that had to be coordinate. That happened seamlessly, because of the strong command-and-control structure. …

The call came in at an opportune time, when the staff officers on duty that workday began heading for home, so that dumped a large amount of senior, experienced individuals into that event quickly.

[Another important factor] was the skills and ability of the firefighters. This is probably based on about 15 or 20 train crashes in some form or fashion.

It always seems like with the measure of damage, the hydraulic equipment and other related rescue equipment is designed for vehicles, but when you reach the scale of trains, it usually gets bogged down and doesn't perform as well.

In this case it didn't seem at all to be an issue. We were able to effectively and quickly remove the folks that were in the immediate area. Then, it took a crane to do the de-scaling of the layers of steel that encased the bodies that remained and were recovered the next day.

The train crash was a highly visible incident. How did you prepare to deal with the media?

The media played a major role. The media's first concern is: “Was this terrorist connected in any way shape or form was it an attack on our country?”

In this case, it was pretty evident it would be an international story. Not very often do you see a rail car sitting on top of another, so that was going to cause a tremendous amount of interest knowing that it would have a high number of fatalities and injuries. I think we handled the media very well.

I guess, too, the other thing that jumped out, having had the chance to work for the past four decades in our business, was the media and social media. Information was flying out of there at a tremendous pace. I think we counted 58 or 59 news vehicles that had international implications and I'm talking satellite trucks and vehicles that could get messages out to the world. Social media such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, played out at that event, along with tremendous interest from news agencies.

We had requests for interviews [from the national and local media]. They were all filled throughout the fire department. [Media relations is] part of command structure, and we were very lucky in that we had that we had three of four members of our public-information officer team on location in a very short period of time.