Recently, FIRE CHIEF Editor Glenn Bischoff chatted with Jack Parow, immediate past president of the International Association of Fire Chiefs, and the retired chief of the Chelmsford (Mass.) Fire Department, about his year in office.

What were your goals and aspirations when you began your term as IAFC president?
One of my goals was to continue the work that has been done to change the IAFC from a five-bugle chief’s organization to more of a leadership organization. Two years ago, the IAFC’s membership categories were realigned in large measure to bring company officers into the organization, to give them a place to go. We now have a category now for company officers, at a reduced rate because a lot of departments won’t pay for the membership, so it’s going to be on their own dime. Today we have more than 400 company officers as members, and it’s our fastest-growing category. We also commissioned a task force to identify the true needs of company officers, so that we can better develop the future leaders of the fire service.


What did the task force recommend?
One was to form a section for company officers so that they would have input into the IAFC throughout the year. Another was to provide some sort of leadership or mentoring program for company officers at division conferences. They also recommended that company officers be allowed to join the various task forces and committees, so that they would have input into how the IAFC moved forward. The idea is that including company officers in this way not only will help the IAFC to grow, but also will help to develop the chief officers of the future — and the fire service as a whole will be much stronger.


What do you mean?
In the fire service, we tend to do things backwards. We hire firefighters and then we send them to recruit school to train them. We promote officers and then we send them to officer training school. So we’re trying to flip the scales by developing and training these officers prior to them taking on the true leadership role of chief of the department or battalion chief. The fire service is notoriously behind in that.


What else was on your to-do list?
We’ve really been focused on solving the problem of needless alarms. They typically involve commercial buildings and occur when alarms malfunction or are so sensitive that they go off when someone cooks popcorn. We found that they account for about 10% of our runs. We’re working with NFPA on this. In my department, when a commercial alarm comes in, I send three engines, a ladder and a chief officer, every single time. That’s a lot of apparatus and manpower. This is a big waste of resources, especially in a dire economic time.


What’s being done about this?
For starters, we’re trying to implement alarm verification. When a residential alarm goes off, the alarm company has 90 seconds to call the home and try to find out what’s going on. If they’re told that the problem is that someone forgot to open the damper on the chimney, let’s say, then the fire department never gets the call. Commercial properties don’t afford that same opportunity for verification. So, we’re trying to establish the same 90-second verification window for commercial buildings. We’re also trying to get adjustments to pressure on the water-flow switches. A lot of times they’ll connect a street sweeper to a fire hydrant to fill it with water. When they shut the hydrant down, it creates a water hammer that runs back to the commercial building and shuts off the clapper valve on the sprinkler system, and here we are responding with three engines, a ladder and a chief officer to a needless alarm.


What other problems exist in this regard?
Duct smoke detectors are another big culprit, because there’s dust flying though the detectors all the time. We want them to be taken off alarm activation. Looking to the future, we’d also like to see a method of identifying every device on the system. That way, when a call comes into the alarm company, they would know whether it’s a water-flow device or a smoke detector. More importantly, they would know if it’s multiple devices. If there are three different devices going off, you can be pretty sure that it’s something of consequence. It’s also important to know where the device is, because we sometimes have to deal with huge commercial buildings.


Where do things stand with all of these corrective measures?
We’re still negotiating with the NFPA. Initially, most of our proposals were voted down. It wasn’t disappointing as much as it was a learning experience. We’ve since had the opportunity to talk with the technical committee chairs and afterwards felt a lot more confident. Last May we held an alarm summit that brought in all of the stakeholders, and came up with several proposals that were submitted during the NFPA’s comment phase. I don’t think the alarm industry really understood the problem that we have, but after getting them together with fire chiefs, I think they now have a true understanding of the waste of resources that occurs when we respond to these needless alarms. We’re pretty encouraged. They’re working very hard with us to solve this problem, and I think we’re going to be much more successful. I also think they NFPA committees now will realize that the IAFC is going to be a big player in the evolution of the codes. Previously, we would try to have a person on each committee, but we didn’t submit a lot of code changes. So I think that in the future you’ll see the IAFC be much more active in the NFPA hearings.