S.C. Anger on Target

Let me stand up and applaud your “Target Your Anger” editorial [August 2007 available at www.firechief.com]. You are so spot on and I wanted to say I am 100% with you. I have blogged on Charleston.net and wrote what I saw was an affront to the modern-day fire service. It amazed me how many Charleston firefighters have come forward in their ire with Chief Thomas and their unsuccessful push for national standards only to face consequences from Chief Thomas and his shift chief officers. Needless to say, I was lambasted by the Charleston and North Charleston chief officers since they were there and I wasn't, so [it's] for me to shut up! From the first pictures I saw, I was incensed at what the common-sense fire-service community witnessed. Suffice it to say, we also opened our ICS to make sure we followed NIMS to a tee.

The City of Ormond Beach (Fla.) Fire Department, led by a great and well-known Fire Chief Barry Baker, responded to a furniture store fire on June 19 with different results. First, the 30,000-square-foot store was equipped with automatic sprinklers and two heads held the fire in check. The ICS was implemented and TIC were deployed for a safe operation. I was amazed that we as professionals still had metropolitan chiefs practicing time-honored traditions rather than cutting-edge safety procedures.

I thank you for the article and once again support you 100%.
— Christopher J. Weir, EFO, Division Chief/Fire Marshal
Port Orange (Fla.) Department of Fire & Rescue

Keep the Slate Clean

Your August editorial really resonated with me, and I share your anger. One of my props when teaching wildland firefighting safety is a printout of all the wildland firefighter memorials in the U.S. The printout reaches from floor to ceiling, and you have to stand on a chair to unfurl the entire list. What's more, while some of those memorials are decades old, the dirt is still fresh on many of them, and new memorials are dedicated each year.

And in once case, a memorial was made out of two large pieces of granite, much of which is still blank, because they wanted to leave room for more fallen firefighters in the future. The duty-to-die syndrome reaches throughout all our firefighter ranks, and it shows no real signs of abating.

You also shine a light on something that every firefighter has encountered at one point or another, the close call. I think the Naval Safety Center said it best when they wrote, “Near-misses have been called the hidden seeds of the next disaster.”

Naval aviators are duly respectful of the fact that their Naval Air Training and Operating Procedures are written in blood. Sadly, many of the fire service's bad habits are etched in stone.
— Doug Young
Wildland firefighting instructor and chief emeritus
Sunshine Fire Protection District, Boulder, Colo.