As Firehouse Sees It: Answering the Wake-Up Call

After an exchange of emails one weekend night, my phone rang, and so began an hour-long conversation with a firefighter who was involved in a blaze that claimed the lives of several firefighters. It had been years since the fire, and something stirred his memory to take him back to that time. The initial email to me was reflecting on a story that we published, and he shared that he hadn’t forgotten about the firefighters or the citizens who died in the tragic blaze, or the fireground. The conversations in the days and weeks following the fire and the reports that were disseminated after the blaze still are fresh in his mind. 

This gentleman handed off equipment to one of the firefighters as he walked into the burning structure where a few residents were known to be inside. He was the last person to see that firefighter alive, and that image haunts him years later. He shared a few “what ifs” with me.

• “What if I had gone in, too?”
• “What if I gave him the wrong equipment, and he was delayed a few moments?” His feeling was that those additional seconds would have allowed the member to be a chief today.
• “What if we communicated better,” he asked. Someone outside observed fire conditions changing, but it never was shared with those who were inside the structure.
• “What if we spent more time training?” He said they trained often but rarely went beyond a few basic evolutions, because that’s where the level of comfort for this close-knit crew was. They did not want to embarrass anyone who might not be able to successfully complete a skill.

After the NIOSH LODD report was published, the department took the recommendations to heart and changed the way that they operated and trained. New policies were established, equipment was upgraded, and everyone was on the same page, because the motivation was there to remember the fallen firefighters.

As the years went by, many of the members—who still were suffering from the trauma of the lost firefighters and the changes to their department—reverted to the days before the tragic fire or the findings from the NIOSH report. Training slowed down, and less time was spent honing their skills. It didn’t seem like they had forgotten about the fallen firefighters, but their focus on preventing a similar instance was fading away.

Days after I had the conversation with the firefighter, I spoke with Brian Crandell, who is a former assistant fire chief and longtime educator, about the conversation. He reminded me that Chief Alan Brunacini used to ask, “What do you do when you get the wake-up call?”

In his travels around, Crandell has encountered departments who answered that call early, avoiding injuries and deaths, and those who got it late, after tragedy occurred. Brunacini’s goal in asking that question, Crandell said, was to allow whomever he was addressing to reflect on what was really occurring and whether that call would come to the department. If you are honest with yourself and with the situation at hand, that call could be avoided.

Although this department had their wake-up call, and they reacted to it appropriately by improving their operations and using best practices that were learned from other incidents with similar conditions, complacency was creeping in. The amount of time and effort to make the improvement was now an afterthought. Would there be another wake-up call for this department, and would they receive it before another tragedy struck?

These scenarios aren’t just the big incidents. If you spend some time thinking about it, the scenarios could be related to training or to your own mental and physical health. They could involve communications with one member of your crew or communications within the entire department.

As you turn the pages in the magazine, go about your next drill or converse with your crew, take the time to consider what your wake-up calls would be. Those calls are for you personally and for your department. Are you going to hit the snooze button on that wake-up call and drift back to a comfortable place, or will you get out of bed and face the challenge head-on?