Fulfilling his duties as a volunteer fire chief who's also served his community as the elected mayor while working as a career firefighter, Shane Ray has observed and participated in the fire service from many sides of the prism. The chief of the Pleasant View (Tenn.) Volunteer Fire Department has a disarming ultra-Southern accent, a colorful wit and wisdom far greater than his 33 years.

The 2005 Volunteer Fire Chief of the Year, Ray is one of the youngest fire chiefs to win the honor, but his accomplishments wouldn't suggest his age.

Urban growth

Pleasant View, as Ray describes it, is a “rural community transitioning into a suburban community” bordering north Nashville. Like many communities on the outskirts of major cities, his has been experiencing suburban sprawl. The population has grown 62% in the last 10 years. Today, the fire department serves 180 square miles with 52 volunteers and one paid member (the assistant chief of life safety, or fire marshal) in four stations. The department runs 1,250 to 1,500 calls a year.

The district includes two towns, Pleasant View and Coopertown, and serves rural areas in Cheatham and Robertson counties. “That's one of the challenges of my job is dealing with four governments…. We have four sets of laws to deal with, if you will, and two separate codes,” says Ray, who is president of the Cheatham County Firefighters Association.

Ray also works as a lieutenant for an engine company with the Brentwood Fire Department, also on the north side of Nashville. “Being able to be a company officer, which is one of the best jobs in the fire department, helps keep me grounded because of the direct involvement you have with the personnel and the leadership you get to exercise to them and display,” he says. “That's such a positive, because I'm right there with them, whether it's in fires or in training or in daily station duties.”

Outside the department, Ray persuaded his community to pass an ordinance requiring automatic fire sprinklers in all new construction — residential and commercial, single- and multiple-family dwellings.

Ray convinced the Pleasant View town council of the need for that ordinance when a company was planning to build a big warehouse in his district. The warehouse would have driven up the district's ISO rating because of the increased need for fire suppression. Ray saw it coming and told the citizens and council they had a decision to make.

“In a few years that probably would have caused the community to have to buy a new fire engine to increase our pump capacity. Well, the citizens who lived in town — me being one of them — while we welcomed that company with open arms, we didn't owe them a fire engine. Shane Ray who lived on Pleasant View Road didn't need another fire engine. I had all I needed, so why should I let this company come into town and force us to buy another fire engine?”

Many fire chiefs relish the thought of buying new fire trucks and leading departments with more firefighters. Not Ray. “I guess that's not what drives me. What drives me is providing quality service with a vision to the future and the most responsiveness to the citizen,” he says. “It may be controversial, but I just hate as a citizen that we keep buying these fire apparatus that cost more and more money…. It's a good thing; fire chiefs like to have toys, but I also think we have to be responsible to the citizens, and if they're not all driving Cadillacs, then maybe we shouldn't.”

Educational explorations

Ray was born and raised in Pleasant View and currently lives there with his wife, Stacy, and 5-year-old daughter, Analee. He began volunteering as a Fire Explorer for the fire department at the age of 12 in 1984. His family was in the grocery business and had no fire service background, but a farmer who was then Pleasant View's assistant chief influenced him. Another influence on him was a Nashville fire captain who held training for local firefighters once a month and encouraged Ray to get involved. “He told me that if I'd stick with this, he'd get me a job someday,” recalls Ray, “so from the time I was 12 until I went off to college, I never missed a training session.”

He received his bachelor of science in fire protection administration with a minor in political science from Eastern Kentucky University in 1993 and interned with the Phoenix Fire Department that summer.

With about half of his master's degree in public administration complete at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Ray also counts among his “educational blessings” the opportunity to attend the National Fire Academy's Executive Fire Officer Program. He recently was finishing up his fourth applied research paper under the program.

His first EFO applied research project examined how to develop agreements with developers so that they help with the increasing costs of fire suppression they bring with new construction. At the time he wrote it, a developer was planning to build 14 3-story buildings in his fire district, which would have eventually raised the need to buy a ladder truck to maintain the district's ISO ratings.

“We shouldn't burden the citizens of the community with having to purchase that. They already had a service company and didn't need a ladder truck,” said Ray. The developer agreed to contribute to the purchase of a ladder truck.

Today, neighboring communities in Tennessee are turning to his EFO research paper as a guide to develop the same kind of agreements.

“I see so many communities out there that can't keep up with the growth,” says Ray, “and the fire department is usually one of the agencies of government that suffers the most because they continue a totally reactive stand, that as the community grows we build fire stations and buy apparatus and hire people.”

Ray prefers to proactively plan fire suppression in the front end of the building and development process and to concentrate on fire prevention education. With today's population growth and new construction explosion, he says, if your community is not getting new construction sprinklered, “our fire problem in America is going to be worse 50 years from now than it's probably ever been.”

Ray's second EFO applied research paper — about how to expand incident command in a firefighter mayday event — won the National Society of Executive Fire Officers' A. Don Manno Award of Excellence in 2003. He was inspired by a mock mayday training event held by Pleasant View firefighters in an acquired structure in 1997. “It took us 26 people to rescue one firefighter,” recalls Ray. “I was command of that event…. We deployed all of our resources at one time, and I said we can't do that anymore.”

Practical applications

Applied research project number three was titled “Why Fire Chiefs Don't Promote Fire Sprinklers.” Given the explosive rate of new construction in this country, Ray wondered why more fire chiefs weren't pushing sprinklers. Most are not getting bigger budgets and can't meet national safe staffing standards, so Ray wondered, “Why don't we look at alternatives?”

After his research, he concluded that the number-one reason more fire chiefs weren't taking up the cause was because “it's not worth the political battle.” The fire chiefs in his survey had been in the business for an average of 18 years, and they weren't willing to take on the controversial issue.

Realizing that fire chiefs needed to reach out to other community leaders on the issue, Ray helped his state win a $500,000 grant to create Fire Team Tennessee, a partnership between the National Fire Sprinkler Association, the Tennessee Fire Inspectors Association, the Tennessee Fire Chiefs Association and the state firefighters association. Fire Team Tennessee is holding six workshops across the state to bring a team of individuals from each community — typically, the fire chief, fire marshal, an elected official, a planning commission member, a building code official, and the like — to the table to learn the benefits of improving public fire protection policy.

At Fire Team Tennessee's Web site (www.fireteamtennessee.com), news stories about lives saved by sprinklers are posted, as are resources fire chiefs can download to see how sprinkler ordinances have been implemented in other communities.

Ray's latest applied research paper will take a more long-range look at fire sprinklers as part of the standard of response cover in Cheatham County. “As our county has grown, it's growing beyond the capacity of the fire service. We need to get the other parts of the county to put in fire sprinklers and to look at the future,” he says. “… For example, where I have fire station No. 3, it's a rural part of the county and that fire station will have less than 100 calls in its primary response area. Because it's all farmland, the taxpayers can't afford to put four people out there on a fire engine. How about [if] we put two people out there? We've sprinklered all the houses, so [the firefighters'] job then is life safety — that's to save you from cardiac arrest or a car wreck.”

That's part of Ray's “big-picture view” of the future of the fire service. It needs to transition from being reactive — which stems in part from its evolution with the insurance industry — to a more proactive approach, he says. “We didn't want the whole town to burn down in colonial America — that was the origins of the fire service for us here.” The apathy of the American citizen toward fire issues is often drawn from the attitude that “it's just property; it's covered by insurance,” he says.

Beyond fire

The fire sprinkler ordinance was his first achievement to improve public safety in his area but far from the last, according to Cheatham County Mayor William R. Orange. “He works tirelessly to improve the complete fire prevention message, which now includes a live-fire sprinkler demonstration trailer and fire safety house. Yes, both of those resources were [thanks to] FIRE Act grant awards. Again, other examples of the many ways Chief Ray's leadership makes a difference to this community,” says Orange.

But Ray has a realistic view of what Pleasant View firefighters can actually save when they respond to a fire. With an average response time of eight minutes and two firefighters on an engine, “we're not saving much, and we're surely not saving a lot of lives,” he says. In his 20 years as a firefighter, he's pulled only one person alive from a house fire and 18 victims who were “burnt up.” The one man rescued later died from his injuries in the fire.

On the other hand, his firefighters save lives every day in responding to vehicle accidents and other rescue calls, which can be handled with two people and smaller apparatus. “That's where they're making a difference, and if 94% of our calls can be handled with two people on a company, then maybe that's all we're ever going to have here. Maybe that's all the taxpayer ought to burden,” he says.

He agrees with NFPA 1710 and 1720, which call for a minimum of four people on a fire engine to initiate safe interior fire attack, but he's developing a strategic plan for Cheatham County that calls for the four-person company to come from centrally located hubs. The other stations in the county will be equipped with smaller apparatus and staffed by two people whose primary mission is life safety.

Ray is also a strong advocate for new construction residential inspection. In Pleasant View, both a building inspector and fire inspector have to sign off on all new construction. While he realizes that privacy prevents fire inspections once a family has moved in, he believes the fire department should inspect while homes are under construction. Ray argues, “Who is looking for drafts and fire stops? Who is looking out for the elderly? Do you know that more people are killed in this country from falls than there are from fires? Why aren't we looking at the slope of the sidewalk?

“People say, well that's the building commissioner's job. Well, you're right. Maybe it is, but I say the fire department is looking at life-safety systems, so if we know where the problem of the community is, why aren't we involved in it?”

This year, Ray helped Pleasant View apply for and win an Assistance to Firefighters Program grant to implement a special fire prevention program aimed at the elderly, one of the highest-risk populations. “Anybody in our fire district who is over the age of 65 gets a 10-year lithium [battery — powered] smoke alarm and address sign so that we can locate them in the ambulance service that runs out of our fire station that's funded by the county.”

Other accomplishments

The first vice president of the International Society of Fire Instructors and writer of many articles for ISFSI's publications for trainers, Ray also has taught classes in executive planning as an adjunct instructor at the National Fire Academy.

Ray is a graduate of Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government's Local & Elected Officials Program. After his application to attend the program on the fellowship through the U.S. Fire Administration was passed up, Harvard sent a fax to Pleasant View City Hall saying it wanted Ray in the class because he represented a career firefighter, a volunteer fire chief and an elected official. A member of the fire department's board of directors organized a fund-raiser so that he could attend the program.

The Harvard program opened his eyes to diversity issues. A member of the IAFC's Human Relations Committee since 2003, Ray has a new view of how departments can create diversity and manage such issues as pregnancy on the job and firefighters with diabetes and other special conditions.

Ray also is very involved with the Volunteer and Combination Chief Officers Section. He credits leading members of the section as mentors, especially past chairs Chief Fred Windisch and Chief John Buckman. Ray has worked with them and other fire service leaders to draft two IAFC-VCOS “ribbon” reports set for release later this year.

Windisch, chief of the Ponderosa (Texas) Volunteer Fire Department and 2000 Volunteer Chief of the Year, nominated Ray for Chief of the Year and calls him “a great man and a great friend.

“His humor is only a cover-up, because when he speaks we all listen,” says Windisch. “He knows how to capture his audience and is always focused on the issue or subject.”

That gift would make for a good career in politics, but Ray says he's “too honest” to have a real career there. He's no longer mayor in Pleasant View because of his opponent's steady stream of newspaper attacks, to which Ray decided not to respond. One false accusation held that he did not have automatic fire sprinklers in his own home.

But after hearing his save-taxes-and-save-lives approach, people tend to ask him if he's ever thought about running for president. “Yeah,” he answers with a chuckle, “I joke with them at the National Fire Academy. I say I'm going to run for president in 2020. See? Ray. Vision. 2020. It all lines up!”