Smoke alarms save lives — after 27 years of sharing information with the public about tragic fires and other emergencies, that is the message Mark Brady wants to end with.
He has been in the fire service for 45 years starting as a volunteer, he said in an interview at his home in Riva Tuesday. He started working as a public information officer in Prince George’s in 1992, after serving as a dispatcher.
“We treat bad news like we treat good news. It’s something that has to be said."
He will not miss the tragedies. Dealing with death is a tough but necessary part of the job.
“We’ve had a lot of big fires, significant fires, tragic fires. But then again, we’ve had a lot of success stories,” he said. “You know, people being rescued, people being saved, people putting on the smoke alarm that prevented their house from burning down.”
He said early in his career he would take loss of life personally when it could have been prevented. The messaging is universal across fire departments and has been consistent for years and years: smoke alarms save lives. Install them, and check the batteries often to make sure it is working.
He said a reporter told him back then that he had to remember it wasn’t his personal tragedy. He said he learned to process grief around the trauma he encounters at work, at work. He said he puts it behind him when he goes home at the end of the day.
When smoke alarms are installed, work and save lives, they create a “believer for life” who will help spread that important message, Brady said.
That message is one thing that unites public information officers across jurisdictions, he said, things can get competitive between departments when it comes to who is doing the best with spreading the word.
“We want to make sure we keep up with the Joneses, so to speak, and make sure we’re doing something the same or better," he said. "There’s always that in the fire service, a little bit of a competitiveness where if somebody does something, we try to do one better than them.”
Brady said mentoring others has been a great joy during his career, including working with journalism students at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland College Park.
As part of the school’s curriculum, students need to interview public figures, and Brady said he was always proud that instructors trusted him to work with the fledgling journalists. It was the same with new reporters covering breaking news in Prince George’s County, whose first assignment might very well be meeting Brady at the scene of a fire.
“I treated them the way I treat everybody else, which is open and honest, but knowing this was their first time I would help them out as much as I could,” he said. “I took great pride in knowing some of our major networks would trust me with their newer people.”
He has been mentored by Pete Piringer, chief spokesman for Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Service, and by Phil Politano of FEMA, who died last week. Brady independently trains other emergency communications professionals through the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The training he will continue; his last day in the office for the PIO position was Dec. 30. Next month he will head to San Francisco to give a talk about transitioning from a traditional PIO, as he began his career before smart phones came out, to a social PIO, using new tools to connect with the public, to a relevant PIO, who is someone that is looked to as a resource within the department, not just a talking head.
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