John T. McNeece, RIP

One of my heroes died this week. I don’t throw the h-word around freely, but this man qualified. John T. McNeece was a truckie’s truckie, the best truck officer I ever rode with. I only had the opportunity to ride with him for a few years, but it was the education of a lifetime.

The memories of one particular fire will never fade. It was an early morning house fire in March of 1982. The second floor popped while we were searching a bedroom, trapping us. I learned how to do the head first ladder slide that morning as John “helped” me out the window. I’ll tell you a secret boys and girls—it doesn’t take much training for that evolution if you need it to stay alive. Comes real natural.

Stories about John have and will be told for years to come. Sitting around the kitchen table in the station or on the back step, they will be passed along. You can’t leave a better legacy than that.

"Living The Dream"

The experience of being a live-in firefighter is one that most who have ever done it would not trade for anything.  “Living the dream,” it is called by many, particularly those who never had the opportunity, and they are not wrong. 

A few things do change, arguably for the better, after you move out and on.  Language is one.  Fire stations are not kind to the vocabulary.  The F-word is not only a noun, verb, and adjective, but in skilled firehouse hands, can be used as punctuation.  I remember having to consciously restrict myself when outside the station in “normal” company to avoid saying things like “pass the f@^*ing potatoes.”   As time passes, so does the propensity to use the F-word in every sentence.  Once or twice a paragraph suffices. 

Sleep improves as well.  When living in the station, I think I slept eight straight hours once a week, maybe.  Between calls, staying up late bullshitting, and calls, three to five hours was a normal night’s sleep.  This experience is excellent practice for the period following the birth of your first and subsequent children.  That amount of sleep would now leave me on a continuous coffee intravenous. 

The live-in opportunity is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Thankfully, it is one you only get to do when you’re young. 

A New Magazine Article

Here's a link to my new article in Connections Magazine on smoke detectors. 
Hear the Beep Where You Sleep

My Top Ten

Lists of the top ten this or that have been the rage for years, and fodder for great fun and debate.   I decided to add to the noise with a selection of my Top Ten Fire Service reads.  This is totally subjective and personal, and is my list today.  It could change tomorrow.  Everyone out there can and probably would come up with a different list.   

My list is hopelessly prejudiced because of two selections I would automatically make.  The books below are not in any particular order. 

·         Report From Engine Company 82—Dennis Smith

·         Fireground Tactics—Emanuel Fried

·         Firefight:  Inside the Battle to Save the Pentagon on 9/11—Patrick Creed and Rick Newman

·         D.C. Fire—Dennis Rubin

·         Last Men Out:  Life on the Edge at Rescue 2 Firehouse—Tom Downey

·         Population 485-Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time—Michael Perry

·         Thirty Years on the Line—Leo Stapleton

·         B-Shifter:  A Firefighter’s Memoir—Nick Brunacini 

·         Mayday! Firefighter Down—Gary Ryman

·         Fire Men:  Stories From Three Generations of a Firefighting Family—Gary Ryman

This is an eclectic list and includes some works that many may have never heard of, much less read.  Some haven’t been in print for a while (but may be available on the used market).  Only one is a true “tactics and strategy” book—introduced to me by my Dad over 30 years ago.  It was good then and is still relevant now.  There’s not a book on this list I haven’t read multiple times.   

I hope to see other lists and hopefully at least one of mine will make it! 

 

Here are some links to a few of the above. 

 

Mayday! Firefighter Down

 

Fire Men: Stories From Three Generations of a Firefighting Family

 

D.C. Fire

 

Report From Engine Company 82

 

Firefight: Inside the Battle to Save the Pentagon on 9/11

 

 

 

 

 

A Writing Update

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything here but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been writing.  To the contrary, in the last few months I’ve completed the first draft of Fire In His Bones, which is the working title for the sequel to Mayday! Firefighter Down.  Editing and a second draft is well underway on this manuscript and I’m jotting down ideas for the third and final book in the series.  In Fire In His Bones, Dave Michaels fans can follow him with his promotion to Captain and assignment as the company commander of the elite Squad 1.  It will be an exciting ride…

At the same time, I’ve finished the first draft of another novel on a non-fire topic, which allowed me to creatively stretch a bit.  This book, entitled The Education of Stuart McGrath, is political satire set in the satirical gold mine which is Scranton, Pennsylvania.  Stuart is a young grad school political junkie who by the force of sheer competence, an unusual commodity in Scranton electoral politics, and a cheap salary, rises to the illustrious if deceiving position of Chief of Staff to the mayor.  This manuscript is fermenting in the bottom drawer of my desk for another few weeks before I begin the revision process, but I’m excited to take a fresh pass at what I hope will be a fun book. 

Time to fire up the coffee and get back to work….

It Won’t Happen to us…Our Treasurer is Honest Harry

Treasurer arrested, fire company president accused, chief steals funds; the newspaper headlines scream and the citizens of multiple communities sadly shake their heads on a daily basis.  Why do these otherwise civic minded individuals do this?  The answer, unfortunately, is easy.  They’re dishonest; it’s as simple as that.  Maybe they had personal financial problems, gambling issues, or thought they could just get away with it.  Those rationalizations are excuses but don’t change the central fact that those who steal from fire departments are criminals.  Unfortunately, there’s no surefire method to keep them out, at least completely.   Think about the CIA and FBI agents who are vetted more carefully than any firefighter; go through regular polygraphs, and we still end up with the occasional bad apple which we hear about on the 6:30 PM national news.   

There are ways, though you can reduce the chances of your department being on the front page of the newspaper with a photo of your company president doing a perp walk in hand cuffs.  With some basic business controls, procedures, and processes, you can make it harder for these individuals, less tempting, and hopefully discover nefarious activities before they become bank account busting.   

This isn’t about trusting good old Harry who’s as honest as the day is long.  Honest Harry and others like him will welcome financial controls because it removes trust from the equation and the opportunity for questionable activities.  If the opportunity exists, somebody, eventually, will take it.  Maybe not Harry, but who knows about the gambling problem his brother-in-law, the company president has.   

The basics have a lot of common sense components.  You don’t need an MBA to put these in place. 

·         Establish rules.  They need to apply to everyone—no exceptions. 

·         If it involves cash, more than one person needs to be involved.  This can’t be repeated too often, and as the teacher said before the test, you will see this material again. 

·         Have a line item budget.  The treasurer should monitor receipts and revenue versus that projected.  Likewise, the expenditures for each line item should be noted.  A monthly report with this data provides a transparent picture to the organization and helps the leadership with their management responsibilities. 

·         Reconcile bank accounts on a monthly basis.  Another job for the treasurer, right?  Wrong.  Someone other than the treasurer or anyone else handling funds or writing checks should have this job.  This provides an independent verification and removes one obvious opportunity for someone to cook the books. 

·         Periodic audits.  Annual is best, but at least every couple of years, an audit should be completed.  When treasurers change is also another good time to ensure a clean bill of financial health.  Accountants are expensive, you say, and you’re right.  If the funds are hard to come by to pay for an audit, consider asking a local CPA who lives or works in your first due if they would consider doing it as a donation.  Wait until after tax season, though.  Ask if they see any opportunities to improve financial management, procedures or record keeping.  Use their expertise to your advantage. 

·         The two (or more) person rule.  Multiple signatures on checks, counting cash, opening mail, are all times to have more than one person involved.  Cash is not your friend when it comes to financial safeguards.  Minimize it where possible and always, always have more than one person involved. 

This isn’t a comprehensive list but just these few items will go a long way in limiting the opportunity for financial funny business.   

So it’s all about the money, right?  Wrong; the money is important but the main issue is trust.   Not Honest Harry, the long term treasurer.  The trust of the citizens we’ve sworn to protect is what we need to ensure.  It is easily damaged and difficult to repair.  We’re the stewards of that trust, measured by how we take care of their money—whether raised by taxes or chicken barbecues and pancake breakfasts.  These folks have the right to know that it’s being spent carefully and honestly. 

Arson: It ain't like it used to be....

Arson is considered by most, and particularly firefighters, to be a serious crime. Pennsylvania treats it as a first degree felony.  Federal sentencing guidelines call for as little as five years in prison.  States vary, but things were a bit different in the old days.   

Here in my area, just a generation ago, but long enough for the statute of limitations to expire, a local fire chief was reliably rumored to have taken a fire setter back behind the station and administered an “attitude adjustment” to the offender which was probably more painful than what the judge ultimately meted out.  If our current crop of politicians believe laws and punishment for arson are stringent today, they are not students of history.  The first such law in Pennsylvania was passed in 1700, and stated “Whosover shall be convicted of willfully firing another man’s house, warehouse, outhouse, barn, or stable, shall forfeit his or her own estate to the party suffering, and be imprisoned all their lives in the House of Correction at hard labor to the behoof of the said party suffering.”  Apparently life with hard labor wasn’t a sufficient punishment as in 1718, the penalty was increased to death, and in 1767, they took away the condemned’s access to a clergyman before execution.  

As tough as the old Pennsylvanians were, they had nothing on the Babylonians in the days of Hammurabi, around 2000 BC.  “If in a man’s house, a fire has been kindled, and a man who has come to extinguish the fire has lifted up his eyes to the property of the house, and has taken the property of the owner of the house, that man shall be thrown into that fire.”  In both Japan and early Edwardian England, the older Babylonian concepts were continued; the penalty for incendiarism being death by fire, a rather poetic form of justice. 

While societal norms and our jurisprudence have evolved over time, most can probably think of a few incidents where we wouldn’t have minded taking a fire setter on a Marty McFly time travel journey back to meet one the judges from these time periods.  So if anyone knows where to find an old DeLorean….

 

Dispatching Hazards

Smoking in the work place is now mostly just a distant memory for most.  Its elimination in some environments had benefits beyond personal health, though.  

My friend Joey was the 11-7 dispatcher for police fire, and ambulance in a small municipality.  These were the days of police call boxes, a real Ruth Buzzi switchboard, and fire alarm boxes reporting on paper tape.  Logs and records were all paper as well, and the only computer in the room connected to the state for checking wants, warrants, and driver’s license information.   The call volume was such that a single dispatcher per shift was sufficient, so they worked alone.  Joey was, at that time, also a chain smoker, a lit cigarette his constant companion.  

We talked periodically on the phone—the non-recorded public line, a good thing considering some of the conversations.  Occasionally he would have to drop off the line if a fire or significant incident came in.  Routine calls, license checks for the cops, and the like he could handle and continue his conversation with me; multi-tasking long before the term was born.  

One night was a little different.  The subject we were discussing is long forgotten.  What happened next is not.  Joey’s normally calm voice exploded on the phone.  

“Oh my god, I’ve gotta go,” he yelled.

“What’s the matter? What’s coming in?”  I anticipated a huge fire or other major incident, not his actual answer.

“I just set all my fucking papers on fire; I’ve gotta go,” and the phone went dead.   

It was probably a good thing as my pronounced laughter would not have been well received at the moment.  Just another reason smoking can be hazardous to….your health.

 

 

Fire Archaeology: Still Salvaging After All These Years

The stories of most major fires concentrate on the immediate impact; the deaths and injuries which resulted.  Just over 40 years ago, a fire occurred which caused no deaths or serious injuries, the impact from which is still being felt.  Just after midnight on July 12, 1973, fire broke out on the sixth floor of the National Personnel Records Center in Overland, Missouri.   

Construction work on this building to hold military service records was completed in 1956.  When the original studies were conducted during the design phase, conflicting advice was received from archivists and personnel at other government records retention facilities.  Some strongly recommended the inclusion of automatic sprinklers and others argued against.  Not surprisingly, since we are talking about this fire forty years later, the anti-sprinkler forces won.  Storage of paper records in folders and boxes packed on metal shelves and file cabinets filled the building—a massive fire load.   

The fire response exceeded 6 alarms.  The interior attack was abandoned at 3:15 AM that morning due to deteriorating conditions, but the exterior attack continued for days.  On the 14^th, firefighters re-entered the building to begin final extinguishment and overhaul on the sixth floor; a task complicated by partial structural collapse of the roof.  By the 16^th of July, a single company remained on scene.  

 

Following fire extinguishment began a salvage operation which continues even today.  Computer tapes and microfilm records were among the early transfers to an off-site facility.  All six floors of the building experienced substantial water damage, and the recovery of water soaked records was a massive operation.  Wet records were re-boxed and the escalator railings used as a slide to move them to the ground floor for transport.  Setting up a temporary facility at the nearby Civilian Personnel Records Center, plastic milk crates, eventually 30,000 of them, were used for open shelf drying, but a better solution was on the horizon. 

A vacuum drying chamber was located at the McDonnell Douglas Aircraft plant in St. Louis.  The chamber was originally constructed for space simulation as part of the Apollo moon program.  Once archivists confirmed the technology worked, two additional chambers at the Sandusky, Ohio NASA facility were located and used as well.  Wet records were placed in the plastic milk crates, which were stacked nine high on wood pallets, and the records loaded into the chamber, which was sealed.  Air was evacuated from the chamber and the temperature lowered to freezing.  Hot dry air was then introduced until the wetted materials reach 50 degrees F.  Depending upon how wet the material was, multiple cycles could be needed to dry the records.  With a single chamber capable of holding 2,000 milk crates, nearly eight tons or 2000 gallons of water could be removed during a run.   

The charred and burned materials recoverable from the sixth floor created another challenge.  Luckily, this material was not disposed of following the fire, but stored as “B” files, as improvements in technology have made the information from some of these materials usable again.  Today a team of thirty uses the latest restoration techniques to recover information from these documents. Working in latex gloves, this group represents an archival CSI for documents; cleaning mold and debris and utilizing digital technology, scanners, and specialized software, some information from burned sections can be revealed and recovered.  

 

This information remains important.  Requests are received from veteran’s families for information needed to obtain various programmatic government benefits along with on-going work by genealogists and historians.  The meticulous work the recovery team does, like archaeologists unearthing an ancient village filled with information, is critical in helping these servicemen.   

Sprinkler protection became an important component for all such government facilities following this fire; a lesson learned like many others, through disaster.  While we will likely never know how many records were lost in the fire, the cause of which remains undetermined, that recovery and restoration continues forty years later is nothing short of miraculous. 

 

James Bond—Nope, More Like Maxwell Smart: The Jet Axe

The side compartment of the vehicle was opened and the rectangular package removed and carried to the ladder located in front of the smoking building.  The action hero briskly climbed to the roof and brought his burden to near the ridge line, carefully laying it with the long axis perpendicular to the peak.   

He punched a hole in the cover, pulling a hidden control box connected to the package by a wire harness from the interior.  Retreating to the safety of the ladder, he climbed below the eave to shield himself, tempted to yell out “fire in the hole.”   Pushing the button on the control in his hand was thrilling.  The noise from the explosion caught the attention of all those nearby.  Smoke poured from the opening in the roof, a perfectly cut rectangle in the shape of the package, not from the explosion, but from the fire below.

Ventilation without a saw; what a concept.  This isn’t Bond, Schwarzenegger, Stallone, or Bruce Willis, nor is it a USFA development project for 2017.  This is technology from the middle of the last century; the Jet Axe.  

 

The Jet-Axe wasn’t just for ventilation; it could be used for forcible entry as well.  Developed using military style explosives, and designed to focus the blast in a narrow area, it came into use primarily in the late 1960s, and out shortly thereafter.  The manufacturer apparently did not account for the explosive contents becoming unstable over time and bouncing about in ladder truck compartments. 

 

Legend has it that the problem first reared its head in San Francisco when an unsuspecting truck company had a new hole where a compartment door previously resided--a Jet-Axe “operated” while the ladder truck was underway.  Word spread quickly, and most were removed from service promptly.   

For those of an inventive nature, research shows that the trade-mark on the name expired in 2001 (making it available again) and was last owned by Explosive Technology, Inc. in Fairfield, California.  Lots of things in the fire service are cyclical in nature; maybe this will be another... 

 

The Firefighter Trampoline

Jumping from a burning building has long been, and remains, the last resort of a desperate victim, usually with less than optimum results.   But on November 10, 1904, two girls jumped from an overcrowded fire escape platform, and this time things were different.  They were caught by New York City firefighters using an unusual circular fabric device, a safety net.  Now more recognized in comedic videos and seen in museums, the Browder Safety Net was at one time a common piece of equipment for ladder companies.  Developed by a Civil War veteran by the name of Thomas F. Browder in 1887; he continued to evolve and improve the design, adding additional patents in 1900. 

There were other successes, including one in 1901 in New York City in which twenty people reportedly leaped to safety.  Failures, though, were common as well.  In Newark in 1910, four women jumped simultaneously from an upper floor of a factory and tore through the net.  Although two deployed nets saved a few, a similar situation occurred at the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire and many more jumpers were missed. Additional stories on other fires abound of individual victims who jumped, but missed the net or hit the edge, sometimes injuring firefighters. 

Ladder trucks carried the net folded and typically mounted vertically on the side of the apparatus.  It could be deployed in seconds, but required at least ten or more firefighters holding it at shoulder height, in the right place and time.  With the fabric center and springs connecting it to the circular frame, it was a portable man held version of the circus trampoline, but with less bounce.

The ideal way in which to jump was with the legs straight out in a seated-like position, and arms crossed in front of the torso with the objective being to land on the small of the back or buttocks.  While a firefighter could easily be taught this during a routine training session, a victim at a fourth floor window with smoke pouring from around them or flames nipping at their heels would not be a receptive student.  The firefighters on the ground would catch them, or try to, in any orientation in which they jumped. 

As time passed and the length of aerial ladders increased, the need for the Browder net decreased.  Concerns over its safety and effectiveness grew and in the 1950s departments began to phase out their use.  These nets are now little more than a curiosity, displayed in museums, fire stations, and at least one firefighter’s home bar.  If keeping a fire scene from being a “circus” is a good thing, no longer bringing our own trampoline probably helps.