W. Craig Fugate served as a volunteer firefighter, emergency paramedic and lieutenant with the Alachua County Fire Rescue in Gainesville, Fla., before he spent 10 years as an emergency manager for the county. In May 1997, he became bureau chief for preparedness and response for the Florida Department of Emergency Management, which coordinates responses for 67 counties and local governments. Then last year, President Obama appointed Fugate to FEMA administrator.

Today, FEMA’s top positions — including Fugate’s — are filled with experienced fire-service veterans. Fugate joined FIRE CHIEF Associate Editor Mary Rose Roberts to talk about FEMA’s leadership and how they will shape the agency’s future based on their lifelong training as first responders He also discussed early fire training, mutual aid, and fire service–based search-and-rescue teams for disaster response.

What makes you uniquely suited, based on your fire service background, to serve as FEMA administrator?
I got started in the business as a volunteer firefighter and as an EMT, and later as a lieutenant of the fire rescue in my home of Alachua County, before I went into emergency management. What’s different about having a response background is that you tend to be a more pragmatic. When you are discussing issues at a policy level, you don’t talk about the incidents and first responders in the abstract. [But first responders] know what it is like to go into some of these calls. You’ve been on calls where there’s been a tornado or a major fire or a bad car crash. You know how to deal and sort with chaotic environments. Having myself, as well as the other folks who serve in leadership positions from fire backgrounds, gives us a perspective that tries to root these things in the reality of what people experience every day.

What do you bring from your volunteer as well as your career experiences into emergency management?
You tend to look at things less as an individual and more like a team. With firefighting, you cannot be a person who operates all by yourself and be successful. You have to work as a team. For you to be successful, everyone else on the team has to be successful — and be safe. Everybody else has to come back from the fire or you fail. Being a volunteer and later a career [firefighter], you learned how to work it as a team, in very fast-paced, adverse situations. As a paramedic, you learn to make decisions quickly, oftentimes under stressful situations with little information. You focus on achieving certain outcomes based on a protocol. [First responders] are trusted with quite a bit of responsibility without a lot of supervision, so you learn how to work in that environment and deal with those issues.

It’s an interesting background when you come into emergency management, to have come out of that and really focus on building a strong team. You are at your best when you’ve trained and practiced. You’re always training. And hopefully, you are learning at training and not when you’re out on fires — because that’s the worst time to learn. That’s how people get hurt or killed. It’s that idea that you exercise, practice and train, and that’s how you build a better team and more importantly learn how to keep the team safe.

Are their certain lessons you’ve learned from the field that you bring into your FEMA leadership?
One of the things you learn relatively quickly when you’re a paramedic and a firefighter is that you almost have to detach yourself to do your job and not be caught up in it. … You have a tendency to stand back and not allow yourself to lose sight of what you are doing. So it is the discipline to say, “Hey. I know what to do. Everything is crazy and getting spun up. I need to step back, take a deep breath, do my job and remind myself that I am not the disaster nor should I add to the chaos going on.”

Sometimes, it’s just getting people to understand to recognize bad disasters and take it step by step to work through it. Work the issue, not allow it to work us. Make sure we stay ahead of it. You must respond to disasters like trauma patients. It’s the ABCs: airway, breathing and circulation. If you don’t do it in the right order, you don’t save the patient. Disaster response isn’t much different. In a bad disaster, you have to get to the people who need help, you have to make it safe and secure and rescue the injured. These things have to be done quickly and rapidly and it requires a team effort. … We really need to be thinking the next 12 to 24 hours: What are they going to need to be successful? Are they going to need more resources? Are they going to need relief? What are the next things happening? When there’s a disaster, people are so focused on what is happening right now. We need to look at what they need today, tomorrow and the day after so they don’t get to the point where they have done their job, but they don’t have the tools to move forward.

What would you say to fire chiefs concerned about coordinated responses and how will your background as a firefighter help you lobby for the cause on a federal level?
I want fire chiefs to do what we are doing here: Reach out beyond our comfort zone to build out this team. Day-to-day responses and the tendency to build cohesive teams sometimes leaves us with tunnel vision; there are a lot more resources out there, particularly outside the government structures we tend to work within. Part of that — and this goes back to what we know in the fire service — is that the best tool we have in preventing fires is people. Everything from teaching children fire safety and helping people make sure their homes are safe … looking at the installation of smoke detectors and changing batteries, for example.

In a large-scale incident, we may have to look outside of that. That’s what I am learning here at FEMA and have learned in the state of Florida. We have to build bigger teams. We’ve got to really reach out to other parts of government and other parts of the private sector in a large-scale disaster. The fire service has a key role in the life-safety aspects of those responses. But there are other folks out there who can help with the response. We need to continue to build that team.

What message are you trying to get out to fire chiefs about emergency management?
One of the things we are trying to emphasize is in the urban-search-and-rescue environment. We have to really look at the role of expanding out search and rescue beyond just the urban-search-and-rescue teams, because those that FEMA sponsors and those that are funded have finite capabilities. I think it’s one the areas we have to leverage more and more from the fire service — we need to build those skill sets.

[Sic] The overall trend for structural firefighting is not increasing, but other services are. The fire service has embraced EMS, hazmat response, and search and rescue. You can no longer define the fire service by structural firefighting. Fire departments are doing multiple hazards. FEMA is recognizing that the fire service is far more than just house fires. It’s far more than just structural fires and the day-to-day response. It is a tremendous capability in this country to have a service that can respond to a wide range of disasters. And there’s an understanding that it’s a capability local communities have, and we can build upon, using mutual aid as a force multiplier when we respond to disasters.

Sidebar: FY 2010 FEMA Grant Allocations