Are you a Man or a Mouse?

[Guest alsfirefighter]

Are You a Man or a Mouse?

It's Time to Take Personal Responsibility for Firefighter Health & Wellness

TONY TRICARICO

Firehouse.Com Contributor

I just finished reading Billy Goldfeder's editorial Spinning Wheels?...Nah - I Don't Think So... and I went to Firehouse.com's website and found another article on firefighter deaths talking about what little improvement we have made as far as firefighter deaths are concerned. RUBBISH!

Chief Goldfeder states that we will never eliminate death and injury on this job and he is almost 100 percent right. As long as we continue to be an aggressive interior firefighting force we will never eliminate firefighter deaths. Do we want to stand outside of a building a wait for the fire to come to us? NO. We are soldiers in a war that never ends. Fire Prevention awareness has decreased fires and therefore firefighters are not dying in fires the way they were in the 60's, 70's and 80's. What we can do is NOT continue to blame the Chief Officers that are experienced, qualified, and doing all they can to keep our members alive. We have to look much deeper in to this to find out why our people are still dying.

Let's start with how our chief officers are selected. By using a fair and equitable testing procedure that manages to seek out the most qualified and experienced chief officers we will be giving all of our members the advantage that says: "this guy knows what he's doing". On the other hand, if we continue to elect and appoint members from our ranks that have waited around long enough that someone finally said, "Hey, I think it's his turn now", we will continue to endanger our members day in and day out. No minimum qualifications for elected officers can lead up to a deadly combination of leaders in an organization.

Chief Goldfeder used an example of a firefighter that was killed in New Jersey in April 2006. This man did it all by the book and risked his life so that another may live. He risked his life. When we do something like that, taking a risk, sometimes we lose. Kevin Apuzzio went in to this structure to rescue a woman knowing she was in there, in harms way. He had all of the right equipment and gear, ran the play the way he was taught, and the floor gave way. I do not know what the construction of the flooring was, but he was pitched in to the burning basement below. That's why we call it risk.

I know of more than one man that has perished doing his job to save and preserve life, and it was not the chiefs fault, he did what he was supposed to do, but, unfortunately, he was unsuccessful. We make a lot of successful rescues every year throughout this great nation. Every once in a while, we lose the battle. We are soldiers. Although we do not have an acceptable casualty rate, we must remember what was said earlier: if you're going in, sometimes people get hurt...or killed. It's a dangerous job. If you're doing it and afraid, stop. Why do you think everyone else is running out?!?

Which brings me to the point of, "Well whose fault is it??" It's yours and mine. The majority of the firefighter deaths in this nation are from a poor state of health and wellness. A staggering 54 percent of the firefighter deaths every year are from heart attacks or some kind of heart disease. Is that the chief's fault? I guess, to a degree it is. It is also the medical officer's fault and the commissioner's fault and perhaps the company officer's fault too. But no one is more to blame than the firefighters themselves. I work in a career department, and on my days off I volunteer in another department. In both of these departments there are people that really have no business fighting fire or even getting on an apparatus.

I would like to apologize to all of you that may be offended for what I have said and will be stating in the rest of this article. My intention is not to offend anyone, my intention is to help keep people alive and reduce the number of deaths where we can, RIGHT NOW.

If you know of a member that is 50 pounds overweight, would you let them continue to enter in to burning buildings? Drive apparatus? Hump hose? What if they were 100 pounds overweight? How about 150 or more? We all know who these people are and yet we continue to let them drive, hump hose, and, yes, enter burning buildings. What if they had a previous heart attack, or had a defibrillator inserted in to their chest? Would you still let them drive, hump hose, enter the building? The hard part here is that a lot of these members have been part of the fire service for many, many years and no one, including myself wants to hurt their feelings.

When I was a volunteer fire chief, I had tried to initiate a more stringent physical and have defined parameters that would state what an interior firefighter and an exterior firefighters qualifications were. HOLY SMOKE!! You would have thought I just found the original Pandora's Box and open it up to bring petulance and disease upon all of man kind. The biggest problem I felt I was faced with was I did not want anyone dieing in the fire department I was charged with running. I even took a very dear and close friend and asked him to stop responding in the safety officer's car out of concern for his health. No one else wanted to say a word, but once it was done a lot of people expressed gratitude because they all loved this guy but did not want to hurt his feelings. If you really care, SAY SOMETHING. SAVE THAT LIFE!!!

The Combination

According to the NIOSH report that was published in the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) magazine in the November/December 2006 issue, there was a combination of factors that seemed to be prevalent in over 44 percent of the firefighter's deaths. Of these "clusters" the IAFF printed, there was one that stood out, Cluster #4. Cluster #4 accounted for 44.7 percent of firefighter deaths studied. The analysis was of 644 line-of-duty deaths covering the period of 2000 - 2005, excluding the murders of our brethren in New York City in 2001. Lo and behold the cluster consisted of:

Company staffing

Operating guidelines

Health and wellness

The health and wellness cluster is what we are concentrating on here. It's your fault. Do not attempt to blame anyone else, it's your fault. Whether you are the commissioner that sets the standards, the chief that makes the rules, the company officer that works with this person, or you are the person himself, it's your fault. Take responsibility.

Commissioner, "real" physicals, and while your at it don't stop at drug testing, test for alcohol and tobacco too. Do you think anyone would risk their position to drink the night before a shift, or would continue to smoke tobacco if it would jeopardize their job? Chief, enforce those rules: don't let the extreme overweight, post heart attack, or disabled firefighters on the fireground where they can become a liability. And the company officer, you should know your people better than all of the above, if in doubt, pull him out. The life you save may be his. And last but not least, YOU. No one knows better than you what the real problem is. Don't become a statistic and let the nay Sayers throw blame around at all the others. Don't leave your family behind with all those un-answered questions. When they start going through the grieving process and have anger, a lot of it, and want to blame someone, all of the above named people are going to be in the target sites. Is that where any of you really want to be?

Let's touch on staffing briefly. When one of us die, all the politico's come out and tell the rest of us how great we are and that they are here for us and, well you know, the usual rhetoric. If they are here for us, how come some of you are running on apparatus with a driver and one firefighter? If that safe? Whaddya think Billy? Heck no! Look at what it really takes to extinguish a fire. The politico's said they were here for us, well...where are they now? Let's get more people on those apparatus. THAT will help to reduce firefighter deaths. Let's have more stringent and regularly scheduled physicals, THAT, will help keep firefighters alive. Let's have some kind of a minimum staffing clause for ALL fire departments, big and small, THAT will help keep firefighters alive too.

Have an SOG for all members to follow. This way there are no questions on the fireground about what each assigned apparatus and its members are supposed to do. Once the members become accustomed to operating under an established guideline, you will have a higher degree of accountability and if something goes wrong, you have a place to start because you know where he's supposed to be.

Too many of us die responding from our home to the firehouse. STOP!!! Come on gang. Slow Down. Respond accordingly. Should you be responding hard for an automatic alarm, or an odor of smoke? No, of course not, it's not like someone called in and said the house across the street is burning, or "My house is on fire and my daughter is trapped inside"! Save the hot responses for the hot alarms. Not all alarms require a hot response. Slow down, train, wear your personal protective equipment and watch out for civilians that think we are in the road way to intentionally delay them so it must be OK to run just one or two of us down.

Oh yeah, and speak up and do the right thing! Firefighters are dying less in burning buildings and more from health related issues. This we should be able to fix and cut our death rates in half.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Captain Tony Tricarico has been a member of the fire service since 1977 and was hired by the FDNY in 1981. Tony has served in the South Bronx, Brooklyn and Manhattan. Since 2002 he has been assigned to the Special Operations Command and currently serves as Captain of Squad 252.

Tony is a nationally certified instructor as well as a New York State Certified Fire Instructor, is an adjunct instructor at the FDNY Technical Rescue School, a Deputy Chief Instructor at the Suffolk County Fire Academy, and additionally instructs and lectures throughout the country on a Engine, Truck, RIT and Special Operations tactics and procedures. He has been featured in FETN and American Heat training video's on collapse, elevator operations and SCBA emergencies. He is an active member of the Mount Sinai Volunteer Fire Department on Long Island and a former Chief of Department. You can reach Tony by e-mail at: tonytric@optonline.net

[Guest partyrock]

Thanks ALS for posting this. We have become our own wrost enemy. Nearly three quarters of ff deaths annually are the result of preventable medical conditions and operator error mva's.