Nearly 40 years ago, a 10-year-old boy and his family left the Netherlands for the United States, landing at New York City's Idlewild Airport on Thanksgiving Day. Knowing only his native tongue, he entered the fifth grade in the middle of January and was able to learn enough English to make it through the school year and be promoted to the next.

That boy was Jack Krakeel, chief of the Fayette County (Ga.) Department of Fire and Emergency Services and Fire Chief Magazine's 1999 Career Fire Chief of the Year.

His quick readiness to adopt the lingua franca of each new situation he encounters has served him well during his career, as evidenced by his contributions to the department he now heads. As the former chair of the International Association of Fire Chiefs EMS Section, Krakeel has opened lines of communication within the IAFC; as chief of department, he's facilitated a dialogue among local industry, public safety agencies and the community. He says that anything can happen, "once you get people talking."

Departmental dialogue

Krakeel started his fire service career with the Clayton County (Ga.) Fire Department in 1974, and 10 years later he was tapped by the newly consolidated Fayette County Department of Fire and Emergency Services to establish and head up their fire prevention bureau while assisting with EMS duties. As seven volunteer fire districts, three volunteer EMS programs and a volunteer emergency management agency merged, he saw firsthand the power of people working together to communicate their goals.

"I think the consolidation helped to allow the individuals who had the responsibility for developing this new organization to build it from the ground up," Krakeel says. "To interject their own philosophies with respect to how this organization should be structured. I think that capability allowed us to have the organization that we have today."

As that organization has grown from an essentially rural volunteer department to a suburban organization with 100 career and 60 reserve members, Krakeel's well-known involvement with EMS has been reflected in how the department was run, both when he was assisting with EMS duties and after he became chief in 1994.

At Fayette County, all of the personnel are certified as Firefighter Level ii and are required to earn EMT certification following their probation. Plus, all officers are required to be paramedics. These requirements make a big difference in how the department operates.

"We don't have any permanent assignments to apparatus in my department," Krakeel says. "You're assigned to a station, and the station officer, on a daily basis, makes the determination as to which apparatus you are responsible for. So we truly have a cross-functional capability within our organization, which has helped us tremendously.

"Because everyone is doing the same job, there aren't any divisional lines — you're strictly EMS, you're strictly suppression, that kind of thing — up through the ranks of the organization, and that made a tremendous difference in terms of the effectiveness of our department.

"We don't have an exorbitant kind of volume, we run less than 5,000 calls a year," he explains, "but having that cross-functionality ... is a cost-effective approach and a very efficient way to do business. Our personnel have grown up in the organization with that philosophy, so we don't have some of the typical barriers that may exist in other organizations."

Community communications

In his time with Fayette County, Krakeel has brought his skill at creating dialogues out of the firehouse and into the community. One of his earliest opportunities came as an assistant chief, when he was hired to undertake the monumental task of setting up a fire prevention bureau from scratch.

His first step was networking with other chiefs to see how they had built up their bureaus. Once he had established a benchmark, Krakeel was able to encourage the legislation that established the fire prevention program and adopted a fire code. With a bureau to lead, he functioned as a fire marshal, implementing a fire safety education program, establishing a joint agency arson task force and developing a multifamily sprinkler ordinance that was passed in 1989.

Of course, there was some resistance to that last accomplishment. "It has to be taken within context. We currently don't have any multifamilies in our county," Krakeel notes. "OK. But back in '89 the approach that we took was that we actually met with the building community, sat down with them in a series of meetings and developed this ordinance. It actually is more than just multifamily, it included dormitories and those kinds of things, but after meeting with the building community over a period of about six months we were successful, and we had their support."

That knack for getting people together to hash out their questions and concerns continued to serve Krakeel well once he became chief. Concerned over the lack of hazmat teams in the south metro-Atlanta area to respond to local industries, he developed a non-profit local resource council open to several public and private organizations for an annual fee.

"When you join this local resource council, you commit to making available any resources that you have at your disposal in the event there is a major hazmat incident," Krakeel says. "So what we have effectively done is created a communications vehicle between local industry and local government before the event ever occurs. We think this is the critical factor in respect to controlling hazardous materials: It needs to be done between local public safety officials, local government officials and the private sector."

The annual fees go to support the hazmat team, which includes members from three fire departments. Besides funding the team, the resource council has actually contributed to improving public safety. For example, one of the industries developed a computerized self-assessment program for risk management and hazmat compliance within its plants. In addition, some of the council members' internal response teams work with the department's hazmat team to offer firsthand knowledge of what to expect inside a facility.

"Once you get people talking, I think that is the key where everyone gets to understand what their respective needs are," Krakeel asserts. "Clearly industry has needs, the public safety community has needs, and the general population has needs and rights in respect to hazmat. Engaging in that dialogue before the event doesn't guarantee a successful outcome, but it certainly minimizes a lack of communication."

Nationwide discourse

In addition to his work in Fayette County, Krakeel has been actively involved with the IAFC's EMS Section for the past 10 years. He joined the then-committee when the IAFC was looking for someone with an EMS background to participate in its development of a fire service accreditation program. He stayed with the program up through its official sanctioning several years ago, and he remained active with the EMS Section, serving as secretary, treasurer, vice chair and chair.

In his time with the section, he has greatly increased its visibility and its contributions to the IAFC as a whole. In his two years as chairman, he increased the section's membership from 400 to 1,000. "For the past 10 years, we've just been trying to move the section forward within the organization of the IAFC," he says. "We were successful in getting a position on the board, having a full-time staff person."

Krakeel has also worked to improve the interaction of the fire service with the medical community at large, opening discussions not only with federal and government agencies, but with professional organizations like the National Association of EMS Physicians, the American College of Emergency Physicians and the American Ambulance Association.

"We have to recognize that we are going to have different views and opinions on issues," insists Krakeel, "but we have to have the capacity and capability to communicate with each other, because ultimately it boils down to making sure that patient, that citizen, that son, that daughter, that mother, that father, gets the best possible care.

"Sometimes we tend to lose that focus. Irrespective of anything else, we may have our organizational differences on some issues, but we have to be able to communicate with each other. I think we have been successful at doing that, to open up those gates for communication and to be involved in discussions with these different organizations."

Public safety predictions

Even though he stepped down as chair of the EMS Section in April, Krakeel still has strong opinions about the fire service's role in EMS delivery: "I don't see any diminishing in terms of our ems call volume, quite honestly, although there certainly are new programs being developed to steer people into different networks and different ways of accessing emergency medical care. We tend to forget that, for the last 35 years, we have ingrained within our population's minds the utilization of 911 in the event of an emergency, and I certainly don't want to see anything distract from that."

He also thinks that we will see, "strictly from an economic perspective, ... more and more dialogues between health-care organizations and local providers, whether they're first responders or transport providers," noting that some of those discussions are currently under way. "We're just now beginning to see some of these things come to fruition with how local communities can partner with health care organizations to provide the best possible service to their constituents.

"Clearly, the fire service is in a unique position to be able to respond to the emergency medical needs of its citizens, hit on the same and be able to render effective care, but also to become an advocate for the patient in terms of destination decisions, transport facilities, alternative transporting, those kinds of things," Krakeel says. "I think that is what you're going to see in the future. We're going to have to be more proactive, and we're going to be ... an ombudsman for our community."