Long before Sept. 11, former Arlington County, Va., Fire Chief Edward Plaugher predicted he would stand on a certain hill in his community one day and see columns of smoke rising from the Pentagon. Plaugher, who is Fire Chief magazine's 2004 Career Chief of the Year, not only had envisioned it, he had planned for it, preparing his department and rallying the entire capital region to establish a coordinated and equipped response.

Plaugher had connected the dots long before the hijacked American Airlines jet plowed into the Pentagon. He hadn't predicted terrorists would use that particular weapon, but he knew they would come.

“I thought it would be a truck bomb,” he recalls. “What I actually said to an audience of 2,000 people years earlier was that on that day, when I stand on that hill looking down at a smoking Pentagon — as fire chief responsible for responding to incidents at the Pentagon — I want the very best experts there to advise me and help me through this incident.”

Seeing the prediction come true was horrible, but he was comforted knowing that Arlington County had the systems and people in place to effectively manage it. “I was fortunate to have a group of people around me who bought into it and made it real. They actually put all those pieces together,” says Plaugher.

Under Plaugher's direction, Arlington County Fire Department established a unified command organization for 10 days that blended and organized response not only from Arlington County, but from all fire departments in the surrounding region; federal, state and local government agencies, including the FBI and military personnel; and volunteers from the Red Cross and Salvation Army.

Three years later after extensive study of the incident management by many, from the 9/11 Commission to Harvard University, the Pentagon response has been applauded as a model for local governments across the nation to follow in preparing for terrorist attacks and other major incidents.

“While no emergency response is flawless,” the 9/11 Commission concluded in its final report, “the response to the 9/11 terrorist attack on the Pentagon was mainly a success for three reasons: First, the strong professional relationships and trust established among emergency responders; second, the adoption of the Incident Command System; and third, the pursuit of a regional approach to response. Many fire and police agencies that responded had extensive prior experience working together on regional events and training exercises.”

Plaugher had been reaching out to build the capital region's response capability for terrorism since 1996. Shortly after the 1995 sarin gas attacks in the Tokyo subway system that killed 12 people, he and other chiefs in the Washington, D.C., area analyzed what would happen if a similar attack were launched in the city's extensive subway system. The projected results were bleak.

Plaugher took those concerns to the Washington Metro Council of Governments and convinced them to send a letter to President Bill Clinton that said local emergency services in and around the nation's capital were neither equipped nor trained to respond to weapons of mass destruction — and in fact few communities were. “That was probably the most powerful 29-cent stamp ever mailed,” says Plaugher with a grin, “because we ended up getting $400,000 in federal resources.”

The letter shook things up enough to convince the Office of Emergency Preparedness under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to fund Arlington County's effort to develop an integrated regional response for weapons of mass destruction. As executive director of the project, Plaugher put two of his best officers, Capt. Mike Moultry and Bttn. Chief John White, to work on the project full time.

At Clinton's second inauguration in January 1997, Arlington County hosted a dry run of the nation's first Metropolitan Medical Strike Team. The MMST brought together a specialized WMD team of 129 members from jurisdictions throughout the Washington, D.C., region, including fire service and EMS staff who had paramedic and hazmat training, physicians, nurses, and law enforcement officers. It became the forerunner of the Metropolitan Medical Response System, the federally funded program now providing regional response to acts of terrorism in more than 100 U.S. cities.

Strategic priorities

After leading the Arlington County Fire Department since 1993, Plaugher retired on June 25. But with his former assistant chief Jim Schwartz at the helm, the department continues “leaning forward” under a 1996 strategic plan designed to guide the department through 2020. The MMST was one of many innovative programs implemented under what Plaugher calls the “Big Four,” strategic priorities to guide change and leadership decisions in the department: service to community, improvement of facilities, improvement of apparatus and equipment, and service to its people.

“Community — it's not a little ‘c,’ it's a big ‘C’ — embraces every piece of the community,” Plaugher says. “It's not just geographic; it's the people who visit, our citizenry, our school system…. It embraces diversity, it embraces pieces of the community that the fire department is not traditionally involved in.”

Plaugher was a strong advocate for serving the community in nontraditional ways. For example, the department built “safe havens” in its fire stations. If someone is being pursued or in danger, they can go to any fire station, where there's a room open 24 hours a day. Once inside, the push of a button locks down the room and automatically dials dispatch for help. Equipped with desks, phones, computers and bathroom facilities, the rooms were offered to police officers, who often stop in to take care of business and hold meetings there.

His staff says he also paid more than lip service to firefighter health and safety and ensured they had good equipment. While many fire departments keep apparatus for 15 years or longer, Arlington County now has a program to replace all apparatus every five years. It actually saves the county big money while providing a gleaming, state-of-the-art fleet. Plaugher says the department studied the issue and found that if it got rid of apparatus after five years, it virtually eliminated apparatus maintenance costs. The department plowed those savings into buying new apparatus for better, safer fire trucks.

Under Plaugher's administration, Arlington County implemented annual physical exams for all members, and “No matter what our budget looked like from year to year, we didn't waiver from that commitment to the members,” says Schwartz. “Those physicals are delivered regardless of our budget picture.”

All in the family

Plaugher, 56, grew up in a fire service family. Born in Arlington, Va., he was raised in Dunn Loring, once a rural Virginia farm community just to the west of Washington, D.C. His father established Dunn Loring's volunteer fire department in 1945 and was its fire chief for 17 years, later becoming president of the fire company and county fire commissioner.

After the Beltway was built around Washington, D.C., Dunn Loring's department — still volunteer — became part of the rapidly developed capital region and the Fairfax County Fire Department, now a combination system with 40 stations and 1,200 firefighters. Plaugher's brother, Carl, is the fire chief in Orange County, Fla.

Plaugher began as a volunteer firefighter in Fairfax County in 1966 while still in high school. At 21, he became a paid firefighter for the department, working in an engine company for the first three years. “We did engine work; we did truck work; we did what's called squad work today,” says Plaugher. “We also provided care on the ambulance. We were the provider of ambulance service in those days.”

The first 24 years of his career were spent in Fairfax County, where he worked his way up the ranks, serving as an arson investigator, training officer, fire apparatus officer and fire marshal. His early assignments as company officer took him from all-volunteer stations to all-career, multi-function stations with response areas that included residential, industrial and high-rise districts. Plaugher cherishes the experience of working in so many different fire service environments.

But the main focus of his career at Fairfax County — about 12 of his 24 years there — was in arson investigation. From 1973 to 1978, he was arson investigator in the fire marshal's office. He served as deputy chief and fire marshal for the rapidly growing community (population 800,000) from 1985 until 1993.

The lifelong relationships formed while working with law enforcement in arson investigation convinced him of the benefits of reaching out and partnering with others, often in nontraditional ways. As an arson investigator, he worked with the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to create a federal, state and local resource tool for solving arson and bombing cases. In 1976, Plaugher applied for and received the first federal arson grant awarded to a fire department. It funded Fairfax County's mobile arson laboratory, the first in the nation.

Move to Arlington County

Like Fairfax County, Arlington County is a part of the dense, rapidly growing region surrounding the District of Columbia. It protects a 26-square-mile urban community populated by about 198,000 residents, swelling up to about 280,000 during the day with commuters, 25,000 of whom work at the Pentagon. It provides fire, EMS, hazmat and other community services with 10 fire stations staffed by 305 uniformed personnel.

Schwartz says what always stood out about Plaugher from the beginning was his quiet, hands-off management style. “He was somebody who was very thoughtful, who dug deep into issues others might view in a more superficial way,” he says. When Plaugher did speak up, however, he often astounded his staff. “When he would raise a perspective, your first reaction was often ‘Where is he coming from?’ But as you got pulled into his thinking, and you looked at it the way he was looking at it, you realized in many instances, he had struck a new vein for an issue the organization had been laboring with or that until then had no successful solution.”

Visionary is a word that gets tossed around a lot, Schwartz says, but in Plaugher's case, it really fits. Plaugher was never really focused so much on the present, Schwartz says. “He was always focused on the big picture, on where we had to be next. He built a good team around him and he let the team run the organization, and that enabled him to look forward. As it relates to 9/11, so much of what he was doing in that forward-thinking, even back to 1995, is what contributed to our success.”

On the morning of Sept. 11, says Schwartz, “the people who were showing up at the Pentagon knew each other; they knew how to operate under a command-and-control system; our communications systems were interoperable, save for a couple of jurisdictions. That was in large part the result of his focus not just on terrorism, not just on what departments had to do to prepare for the future, but an acknowledgment that those kinds of responses were really going to require a regional effort. You really couldn't put a wall up around your department and say, ‘We don't need any help.’”

The Sept. 11 response

Plaugher's management style didn't change when he arrived on the scene of the Pentagon attack. He stayed focused on the big picture.

Schwartz had arrived ahead of him and set up incident command over the chaotic and horrific scene. When his boss arrived, he offered to transfer command, but Plaugher declined it. Instead, Plaugher asked Schwartz what he could do to help. Schwartz was worried about further collapse; he wasn't sure of the extent of the fire. Plaugher offered to find that out.

“I went and commandeered a helicopter,” Plaugher says. “I went over to the park police. I was wearing my gear. I went up to a landing coordinator for the park police helicopter and I pointed to my helmet and said, ‘I'm the fire chief. Is that helicopter engaged in a medevac?’ He said no. I said, ‘OK, it's mine. I need to know how much of the Pentagon is involved so I can advise the operations chief or the incident commander of what's necessary.’”

At the time, Plaugher also was Arlington County's emergency coordinator, so he was maintaining dialogue with the deputy emergency coordinator. In the first hours, he visited the county's office to make sure that emergency management piece was operating the way it needed to.

Plaugher describes his role in the Pentagon response as “senior adviser to all the parts” with the job of “connecting the dots.… I was making sure that all the parts were flowing the way they needed to flow. Someone has to make sure that all the parts work, and that responsibility is the fire chief. It's where the buck stops.”

And, as always, Plaugher was thinking about the future and the even bigger picture ahead. He realized soon into the effort that what was unfolding was a tremendous learning opportunity. According to Arlington County Manager Ron Carlee, at Plaugher's suggestion, the county decided on the third day of operations at the Pentagon to bring in an independent third-party to conduct a comprehensive review of the ongoing response, providing unlimited access to personnel and all information. More than 2,000 printed copies of the resulting after-action report have been distributed free of charge to jurisdictions across the nation. In the first 90 days after it was posted on the department's Web site at www.co.arlington.va.us/Departments/Fire/FireMain.aspx, 5,645 copies were downloaded electronically. Downloads are continuing every day.

In addition to a detailed analysis of the Pentagon response, the report offers 235 recommendations for other local jurisdictions to follow, broken down into sections addressing fire, EMS, emergency management and law enforcement. Plaugher is extraordinarily proud of the work that was done by his department and all those who took part in responding to the Pentagon tragedy, but he is most proud of this “cookbook for preparedness for local governments.” It remains as a legacy of the terrorist attack that jurisdictions can refer to for years come.

Arlington County also hosted a national conference, cosponsored by DHS and the FBI, to share their lessons learned in detail with other local response communities. The conference drew 1,000 attendees, representing local jurisdictions from throughout the country, as well as state and federal officials involved in homeland security and emergency planning.

Active retirement

In retirement, Plaugher is spending more time with his wife, Melody, and their four children and two grandchildren. He's enjoying traveling, likes to camp and is working on a log home he built in 1986 in Round Hill, Va.

But his committee work and projects to improve preparedness in Washington, D.C., and across the nation continue. Solving the problem of interoperable public safety communications is his focus now. He is adviser to SAFECOM, the federal initiative to advance interoperable public safety communications, but he talks most passionately about his work with the Capital Wireless Integration Network, an Internet-based wireless communication network to integrate transportation and public safety communications in the capital area.

With support from the states of Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia and a $20 million grant from the Department of Justice, a pilot system is already live and operating out of the University of Maryland.

“I think you're going to see and hear a lot about it in the future,” says Plaugher. “We're alive and we're operational. Fire, EMS and police can share data and information back and forth. We haven't quite gotten it to the level we want it, but we expect to over the next couple of years.”

It's a matter of operability, not interoperability, Plaugher says, and he believes the Internet, not radio spectrum, will answer the challenge: “Radio frequencies are finite; you only can have a certain number of them and there's only a certain amount of airtime.… The Internet and its capabilities are unlimited. Operability means having infinite capability at your fingertips.”

The Capwin network will enable instantaneous voice, data, picture and video communications between individuals or certain groups in the network. You can't get that capability over a land-based radio system, he says.

Changing chief's role

Plaugher believes his recognition as the 2004 Career Chief of the Year is a sign that the fire chief's job today has changed. As he is fond of saying, “This is not my father's fire service.”

He predicts: “The fire chief's role has changed immensely and will continue to change. I wasn't recognized for having a good fire department — although I had a great fire department; I wasn't recognized for having shiny fire trucks — although I did have shiny fire trucks. I was recognized because I had gone outside my department and built a regional resource.

“This [award] is just a symbol of where fire chiefing is going,” Plaugher says. “And that it's all about building partnerships and building networks. You will have to be masters of that.” In other words, connect the dots and look hard for the dots outside — in nontraditional places — as well as inside your fire departments.

International Leadership

Very few fire chiefs have had the kind of regional, state, national and international impact that Plaugher has had in his 38-year fire service career. Plaugher is on the Department of Homeland Security's Emergency Response Senior Advisory Committee; the International Association of Fire Chiefs' Homeland Security and Terrorism Committee; the National Fire Protection Association's Fire Code Development Committee; and NFPA 1031, Professional Qualifications for Fire Inspector, Committee.

A former president of the Virginia State Fire Chiefs Association, his published works include chapters on preplanning for industrial emergencies in the NFPA's Fire Protection Handbook (1991) and Industrial Fire Hazards Handbook (1990). One of the first graduates of the NFA's Executive Fire Officer Program (1993), he helped develop curricula for the EFO program. He's also developed NFA coursework and lectured in fire prevention and fire inspection courses.

Plaugher received an associate's degree in fire science from Northern Virginia Community College, where he has been a frequent instructor in the fire science program. He has a bachelor's degree in fire administration and technology from George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.