After 29 years and a broad range of experiences with the Chicago Fire Department, Chief Dennis Gault describes himself as “sort of like MacGyver.” He has worked through the ranks of suppression, training, fire prevention and the department's Advanced Life Support program. Gault most recently served as the assistant of media affairs for two fire commissioners and as executive assistant to former Commissioner Cortez Trotter.

Early this year, Gault was appointed chief of the Chicago Fire Department Third District, responsible for fire and emergency services at O'Hare International and Midway airports. Gault has 16 years of experience in aviation, both as an air-sea rescue helicopter pilot and as a private pilot with his own aircraft.

Being responsible for two airports — one of which is one of the busiest in the world — is quite a change from your job at headquarters.

This position is a really good fit for me and helped me get up to speed much quicker since I had the aviation background and experience. I think what I bring to the table is a wide knowledge of practices and procedures of the fire department, plus an ability to hear what the other agencies are saying. I have an instructional background, having taught at the fire academy and trained all of the new and incumbent fire inspectors, plus I dealt with businesses as far as fire inspectors were concerned.

Compliance is what we naturally seek for fire prevention and dealing with the public. Bringing that into an airport is helpful because we all want the same thing, which is the ability to pass on the importance of compliance to our partners here at O'Hare and at Midway.

Traditionally in the fire department, it's been a strong-arm type of position — “do it because we said so” — and we met a lot of resistance from it. When we come in [now], we assume people want to do it right and we give them the knowledge to make good decisions.

That's why I was placed here, because there are almost 30 different agencies and they are major players: the airlines, the Department of Aviation, the fueling people, new construction, mutual aid from all the suburbs around. You need to have people skills to deal with these situations, and it's been working out really well.

For such a traditional fire department, that's a change isn't it?

Since 9/11 we've all changed a little bit and gotten more stringent with our security, but people are still moving around. It's really a testament to the people who are working security that nothing has happened here since 9/11.

The spirit of Civil Defense has permeated back to the populace here. That spirit has given the police extra eyes, and it has given the different branches of government extra eyes over the years. FEMA has instituted the CERT program that's basically a rebirth of Civil Defense, and that's a good thing. The more aware people are, the better we are.

What is CFD's staffing at the airports?

There are approximately 45 personnel every day at O'Hare and 25 at Midway. The CFD's Third District is suppression and EMS, with four ambulances between both airports. They cover about 7,000 acres at O'Hare and well over a million flights in and out and 8 million passengers.

We provide EMS and other services, including hazmat response, fuel spills, and assistance to passengers and other agencies. We're also the regional training facility for the entire area from Canada to southern Missouri. Fire departments that man the airports within this region come to O'Hare to train.

We have a burn pit that meets the FAA Part 139 requirement, which states that to be considered as a certified airport rescue firefighter you have to fight a live fire once a year. We're fortunate that we have a $3 million burn pit and training facility here, blessed by the FAA. We make it available to airports in the area to help keep their certification up….

We provide all the training and certification required for more than 300 firefighters between Midway and O'Hare, and that's on a constant, day-to-day basis. These guys train from two to six hours a day to maintain their readiness, not only for fire, but for hazardous materials, evacuations, aircraft and airport familiarization.

So there's a lot of cross-training.

All of our new hires are cross-trained firefighters and EMTs. We have many firefighter/paramedics that have cross-trained from the paramedic to the fire side. We don't have ALS companies here because of where we are geographically. Many of our first responder companies are staffed with a paramedic in the first response group, so we basically provide ALS as soon as someone arrives on the scene.

We have structural companies out here beside the ARFF companies.… They respond to things in the terminal, hotels or people-movers. They respond with about six people, whereas the ARFFs are manned by two people per apparatus, and their focus is putting the fire out on an airplane.

In a fire situation, the structural companies' responsibility is to get the people out and provide a corridor so people can egress an aircraft. Generally, if you have a crash there's usually a fire, so they have to help people who are ambulatory — and most will be in shock. Those passengers that are unable to get out, we go in and get them as we would in a crash situation. It's almost like structural firefighting, where they actually go into the burning airplane to rescue people.

Do you oversee the ARFF personnel, too?

I'm over everybody. The people who are on the airport — the structural and ARFF — all receive the same training. In an ARFF crash vehicle, we can take the driver or engineer and the gunner — the person who operates the foam or water — I can take a person off of any of my other companies and put him in the gunner position. The FAA says that person must be certified, so all of my firefighters are certified. I can pull any structural firefighters and move them around within the manpower at the airport.

How do you coordinate training with so many different authorities, such as the Federal Aviation Administration, Transportation Security Administration and the airlines?

The FAA gives us a bible, which is Part 139, and it tells us specifically what we have to do. I have a training staff that consists of an instructor at Midway [and] two instructors and a coordinating instructor here at O'Hare.

I also handle all the fueling problems, so I have a qualified inspector, but his main focus is fueling. He has to inspect all of the fuel trucks quarterly. Let's say there's 300 trucks, he has to do a quarter of those 300 within that quarter. By the end of the year all the fuel trucks have to be inspected and tagged….

We document all training in a computer on a daily basis, so that at any point we can determine what we need to teach next to meet the FAA requirements.

What if you needed to evacuate either airport?

From an evacuation point of view, the airport is broken up in three or four layers. The airport is divided into an airside and landside. Landside is the unsecured area where civilians come in and check in before going through the security gate. Once you go through the security area, you and all the people working at the airport are on the airside.

Evacuation from an aircraft, which is probably what most people see as a worst-case scenario — maybe 350 to 400 people out of a 747 — the airline crew can pretty much dump that airplane in about 90 seconds!

Ninety seconds?

Yes, a 747 — that's popping the emergency slides. They're pushing people out with “go-go-go!” They have to be able to because it's a mandated number they have to meet, and that's without our help.

Another scenario is an immediate escape, but it's not necessary to dump the emergency chute. When people take chutes, invariably they tend to get hurt, so the pilot has to judge whether the emergency is worth the risk of injury to the passengers. If the airplane is not going to burst into flames, the fire department will bring stairs for descent and also assist the physically challenged to get out of the plane.

The next level of evacuation is at the terminal level. It could be anything, but most recently it's been security violations and everyone is evacuated from the terminal. If the building were on fire, there are enough exits that people would come out of everywhere. From the aviation and the aircraft partners' side, we review evacuation plan ideas and planning for the best way to get passengers out, where do they want people to go and on an individual terminal basis.

The deciding factor for evacuation is bomb threat, hazardous materials, fire, smoke and others. Our evacuation plan has different flow charts of what to do. Fire is the highest level and generally entails a direction or rally point to take people, securing or restricting entry into the building or the area we are evacuating. The next level is dumping multiple terminals, maybe one or two. The worst-case scenario would be to evacuate the entire airport. What would it take for us to evacuate an entire airport? It might be a hazardous material situation or a 9/11 situation where we've identified we're a target and stuff is inbound.

You really have to work through all possibilities.

We've always tried to think these things through, but when 9/11 hit, it really made us put a magnifying glass on the things we'd thought of. The plans would not have been as specific as the plans are now. On top of the specificity of the plans, we're now practicing this stuff. We have public safety and other areas all working together on “what if.”

… In discussions I've had with [Chief Emergency Officer Trotter], we've talked about evacuating this entire airport on a holiday, Memorial Day or the day before Thanksgiving. If they're coming, the terrorists know what our schedules are and they know when to hit — they'd hit when it's the busiest. That's what they just did in India — they hit in the rush hour. Now you're talking a couple hundred thousand people that you have to have some kind of plan for.

If we start talking about dumping the entire airport, is it the winter or the summer? What is the threat? We can get the Chicago Transit Authority to bring transportation, but it takes time for that infrastructure to occur. What happens between the time of the incident and the time this stuff gets in place to move people? What we've noticed from other incidents we've seen is that the people start leaving; they self-evacuate and start to walk out. They did it in New York, and we incorporated that into this movement to get people out of here.

If we had to get rid of the entire operation of the airport, we've already started to preplan what we would do with the highways. We know that a means of transportation would be coming in, so we'd have to leave a means of egress for them to get in. We have a rail system running here, so we'd stop inbound trains and empty them [a stop earlier] so we'd receive only empty trains. Trains come in, people fill it up and they go out.

How would these plans change in the winter?

If we had to dump the terminals in winter and just one terminal was involved, we have facilities around the airport that could handle 150,000 people to get them out of the weather: hangars, vehicle facilities. Each of our airport partners involved has a plan to put into practice if this occurs….

Many people think that 9/11 was the first time Chicago was evacuated, but 9/11 was a self-evacuation, and the fire department just augmented what was going on. When downtown Chicago flooded [in 1992], that was an orchestrated evacuation. We made streets one-way and we were able to get the central business district emptied without incident…. Even in the fire department we were in awe because people are unpredictable. It's very difficult to steer people in a panic situation.

I think the fact that we've been drilling, the media has covered us drilling and we've had a massive campaign, people tend to listen now. If we tell them to “go this way” people listen.

Do you talk with fire chiefs of other big airports?

Yes. I belong to a group of fire chiefs … who man this level of airport. At the O'Hare level, we're an Index E, which means we have aircraft at over 200 feet long and over a certain weight. Wherever you see 747s or 757s, big airplanes, that's an Index E airport: Chicago, Boston, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York and Miami. We also have an Internet bulletin board, so if someone types in a question, my computer will ring.

For example, last month when we had the American Airlines plane with the nose gear [problem], the media jumped on the fact that the pilot asked for the runway to be foamed. We don't foam runways. [See “Any Moment,” page 22.]

Why don't you foam the runway?

We don't foam runways because there was a safety alert sent out by the FAA.

Do you know what foam is? It's super-concentrated dish soap. When you put that out on a runway it's like putting oil on the runway. Whatever little bit of steering capability an airplane may have had, once you grease up the runway, there's no telling where it's going to go when the plane lands if you use AFFF.

What was the motivation for foaming the runway? They used to use a bio-protein foam, a biological foam, and they would foam a runway with that, but we don't use that foam anywhere other than military bases.

We were in a safety meeting and I gave the chief pilot for American Airlines the FAA brochure on foam. I asked him why his pilot asked for foam on the runway. He said, “Well, the pilot didn't, but someone else asked, so the pilot asked the question.” The news media listens to the radios and they heard that and they ran with that. None of the other airports in the country foam runways either.

What has been your most important lesson?

According to Commissioner [Ray] Orozco, you need to get into “muscle memory” so that when they say “go” you don't think about what you do next, you know. The only way you get that is through practice and repetition. The airport is a fine example of it because we practice and repeat everything. We practice and repeat fighting the fires. We practice and repeat CPR. We constantly try to keep up our level of readiness and preparedness so if we have to go into action, we're ready.