FHExpo18: The Fire Service Identity Crisis

The fire service has an identity crisis – at least that’s what retired Battalion Chief Robert Avsec believes. After 30 years of fire service, most recently with Chesterfield County, VA, Fire and EMS, he knows firefighters have one role and chief officers have another – hence the identity crisis.

“If you ask any firefighter what his job is, he’s probably going to tell you to put out fires and save lives,” Avsec said. “It’s what they do.”

Conversely, if one asked a chief what his job is, the questioner would most likely get a completely different answer, he said.

“Chief’s will say to protect lives and property from fires,” Avsec said.

For firefighters, their job is reactive, he said. There’s a fire, they go put it out. But for the officer, his job is to prevent fires, a proactive role in the fire service. Avsec said both are as equally important as they are different.

“A fire chief has a whole different set of bosses,” Avsec said. “Their bosses believe that a fire that displaces a family or shutters a business, no matter how good the save was, is a failure in the community.” The fact there was a fire in the first place was a failure of the system, in the municipal leaders’ eyes, he said.

So, the goal for fire departments is to wed the two side of the fire service, the firefighting with the fire prevention aspect, Avsec said.

“There has to be a balance between a suppression-centric focus and a prevention-centric focus,” he said.

On one hand, firefighters learn about fire streams, ventilation, search and rescue and overhaul. Officers and chiefs have to focus on code enforcement, prevention, building loads, school inspections and a myriad of other items firefighters barely know anything about, he said.

“When a firefighter becomes a company officer, they begin to learn about the dark side of the moon,” Avsec said, adding that proactive code enforcement and prevention barely get mentioned at the firefighter entry level. “That’s when they begin to have an appreciation for the chief’s job as preventing fires.”

That’s why Avsec is an advocate for “bilingual” firefighters and officers—ones that can focus on suppression and prevention. That, in Avsec’s mind, makes sense.

From the point of view of community risk reduction, suppression is purely reactionary as well as costly, he said. Considering the costs of personnel—which is the biggest expense in fire suppression efforts at 80 to 90 percent of the budget—added to equipment, suppression is far more expensive than prevention, he said.

And the risk is extraordinary, lasting from the moment the bells ring until the very expensive equipment is parked in the station after the call, Avsec said, noting that firefighters are now taking on even more risks as roads and bridges are not well-maintained. That increases the risk of wrecks.

“If we look at just putting out fires after they happen, it is, always has been and always will be a losing end game,” Avsec said. Contractors “don’t give a darn about firefighters,” he said.  “Just follow the money. They want to build homes that go up faster and cheaper and the faster they go up, the faster they come down.”

That's a problem for the 77 million baby boomers in the nation who are all aging with the vast majority at 65 years or older, Avsec said. Baby boomers living in residential homes have decreased mobility, they may have heart disease or diabetes and are “easy marks for preventable fires.”

If they happen to live in lightweight construction homes that have a less than 3.5 minutes to flashover rating, “they’ll be dead before you get out the door,” Avsec said, building on the case for prevention over suppression. “Even if you get to the call in three to six minutes, you’re not going to make it.”

Avsec talked about staffing as well and how that can be a losing battle in a firefight. A basic house fire in a 1,400 square foot structure takes 10 people to fight, he said, asking how many departments can come up with that immediately, especially volunteers in rural areas.

The National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) says a 2,000-square-foot house fire with no basement and no exposures should have 14 people on the scene to be effective.

“Those people don’t come out of thin air,” Avsec said.

That’s why Avsec advocates fire and accident prevention with the “Three Es” of Education, Engineering and Enforcement.

Regarding education, he said the fire service has to do better than spending less than one percent of its budget on fire prevention.

“We have got to do better than that,” he said. “Preventing accidental fires before firefighters arrive on the scene has much less danger to the firefighters and the public.”

When it comes to engineering, the fire service needs to demand sprinklers and perhaps more non-combustible construction using brick and concrete like that found across Europe. He said there are some fire companies abroad who haven’t had big fires in 200 to 300 years.

“How do we make this shift happen in our communities,” Avsec said, noting that it should be a goal of all firefighters to have fire calls be abnormal rather than the norm.

The third factor, enforcement, should be strictly followed, he said. Sending firefighters out into the community to assess risks and educate the public would go a long way toward fire prevention.

“If you see something, do something,” Avsec said, adding that it could be a brother or sister firefighter being pulled out of the rubble just because a code was not enforced and a violation was overlooked.

“There’s a better, more fundamental way of putting out fires before they even start and people get hurt,” Avsec said. “We have to get better at this stuff.”