Fire Department Manages Emergencies Like

¶ … Fire Department Manages Emergencies Like 911 and Katrina

The abstract provides a general overview of what the paper will be discussing.

The section will introduce the topic of the paper and dealing initially with the history of fire and the fire service.

The Evolution of the Fire Service

The section will provide more details on the history of the fir e service particularly in the United States. The challenges faced by the modern fire service will also be introduced and how these challenges are managed.

Extraordinary Challenges of the Modern Fire Service

The general challenges of the fire service have been discussed in the previous section but in this section, extraordinary challenges are the main focus particularly of the magnitude of the 9-11 and Hurricane Katrina events.

E. Findings of the House and the Senate on the 9-11 and Hurricane Katrina

In this section, the findings of the House and the Senate regarding the two events will be discussed and how these can help the fire service improve their management and response capabilities.

F. Lessons Learned and Implementation of the Plan Thereafter

The lessons learnt during the two events are discussed and how they can be used to develop better management of disasters by the fire service. Of particular importance is having augmentation personnel to the fire service whenever disasters strike.

G. Management of the Firefighters

This section provides how to support firefighters before, during and after incidents. PTSD will be discussed in detail because this particular ailment can take a major toll in the performance of firefighter duties.

H. Leadership in the Fire Service

Without proper leadership, the fire service can never fully be successful in managing and disasters. In this section, the importance of leadership in the fire service will be emphasized.

I. Conclusion

The section will provide closing remarks on the importance of how the lessons learnt during disasters can be utilized to improve the management of the fire service. Reiteration will be done as to the importance of society's support to enable the fire service to fulfill their mandate.

Table of Contents

Abstract

2A.

Introduction

2B.

The Evolution of the Fire Service

4C.

Extraordinary Challenges of the Modern Fire Service

7D.

Findings of the House and the Senate on the 9-11 and Hurricane Katrina

9E.

Lessons Learned and Implementation of the Plan Thereafter

11F.

Management of the Firefighters

13G.

Leadership in the Fire Service

14H.

Conclusion

Abstract

The paper deals with how the fire department can manage disasters such as the 9-11 and Katrina events with regards to reengineering how things are done thereby being able to better manage extraordinary situations. The history of fire and the fire service is presented primarily then dealt directly with the lessons learned during the two disasters -- 9-11 and Hurricane Katrina. From there, the lessons are taken and evaluated as to how they can help retool and redevelop the fire service to meet with the changing challenges of time. Aside from these, there is also an emphasis on the conditions of firefighters and the kind of support they require following tumultuous events. The paper concludes with the importance of leadership in the fire service to realize the implementation of the plans developed to face contemporary challenges including the better management when faced with disasters in the magnitude of the 9-11 and Hurricane Katrina events.

How the Fire Department Manages Emergencies Like 9-11 and Katrina

A. Introduction

Fire was discovered by early humankind and with the discovery came the various positive uses thereof from cooking food, providing heat, and as a source of illumination. From the beneficial uses of fire, fire has also become a destructive force especially when people get hurt or die, properties burn, and other disasters that occur due to its devastating effects. As a weapon of warfare, fire caused the subjugation of others and mass destruction of societies and even nations. Thus, "since prehistoric times, controlled fire has been a source of comfort and warmth, but uncontrolled fire has brought death and destruction (National Fire Protection Association [NFPA], 2004, p. 3)." The very first recorded and organized fire service in the United States were in Boston and Philadelphia, established in 1679 and 1735, respectively. Chicago followed suit as a result two major fires that occurred in the city in the late 1800s. The fires significantly affected the development of both fire service and fire codes (NFPA, 2004, p.3) that improved the way fires are handled and managed across the United States. But despite all the improvements, there are events that prove overwhelming and inundated the capabilities of the fire service. Of particular, the 9-11 and Hurricane Katrina events tested the abilities of the fire service and despite all efforts, the results were grim and there is a requirement to reengineer the systems and processes in order to manage similar disasters the that nature.

B. The Evolution of the Fire Service

The United States indeed has a colorful history of its fire service albeit the lessons learned were from bitter experiences thereto. But all these served to continually improve the capabilities of the fire service. In today's fire service, most fire departments have expanded their role to reflect a so-called, 'full-service fire department,' which includes all of those new services from Emergency Medical Service to Customer and Community Service (McGrail, 2007, p. 6). Hence, the functions and duties of the fire service changed to keep up not only with the demands of times but with the realities in the fire scenes firefighters actually faced such as the need to provide first aid to victims or even contain hazardous materials during fires. The contemporary challenges are numerous and these include: building construction/fire behavior changes; tactics and training on new construction; communications; staffing; personal protective equipment (PPE); and the effects of the economy (Kirby & Lakamp, 2010). Despite the contemporary challenges though, the fire service was vastly different several decades back especially in the overall management of the functions thereof. Unlike at present wherein fire services across the United States can boast of having an integrated system that when a fire or other related incidents occur, fire departments along with police and other emergency services can coordinate with each other and provide assistance where needed. Prior to the 1970s, each individual fire department had its own method for commanding and managing incidents. Often, the organization established to direct operations at the scene depended on the style of the chief on duty. (NFPA, 2004, p. 103)

Major changes have changes since the 1960s and the 1970s in hoe the fire service is managed by fire departments across the United States. Several standards have been developed and fire codes implemented. These standards and regulations are strictly adhered to by the fire departments and have been fully incorporated in the management and operational functions of the fire service. Further, the roles and functions of the fire service in the United States have expanded that firefighting is not anymore the only concern but other incidents as well. The fire service then took on not only the general roles of firefighting and emergency medical services it has historically been doing but specialized ones also. The specialized roles and functions may involve managing incidents at airports (i.e. fire, explosion, spillage), containment of hazardous materials and ensuring further damage will be abated, and even doing underwater operations such as salvaging and rescue at waterways. No doubt the fire service has become a multi-faceted and highly capable organization trained to meet the whatever incidents that occur. Unfortunately, all the training and experience in the world proved futile when faced with tumultuous events. This became evident during the terrorist attacks in September 11, 2001 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The situations were so overwhelming that the fire services that managed these events became so inundated and bitter lessons were learned especially the ones that pointed out to the lack of preparedness and major breakdown of communications.

C. Extraordinary Challenges of the Modern Fire Service

The modern fire service now deals with modern menaces such as weapons of mass destruction, chemical fires, fires in high-rise buildings and other incidents that warrant specialized skills and training. In Rick Lasky's Pride and Ownership: A Firefighter's Love of the Job, he writes about one incident he experienced (2006, p. 4), "Next, we entered the specialized rescue fields, confined-space rescue (we were already one up on this one because of our background in hazardous materials and trench rescue." More particularly rapid intervention has been an important capability learnt by the modern fire service. More particularly, the establishment of Rapid Intervention Team (RIT) Operations and rapid intervention standard operating procedures made it possible for the modern fire service to handle different situations in any incident. For instance, a fire department may be called upon to handle a fire in a high-rise building. Upon arriving on site, the fire may not be the only challenge for the fire fighters. The firefighters may have to perform search and rescue, containment of hazardous materials, provision of emergency medical services and even crowd control. These have all been possible as a result of the rapid intervention procedures in place and the specialized training each firefighter has undergone.

Indeed, rapid intervention team operations have become the norm and have proven invaluable in almost all situations the fire service handles. But RIT operations have only been institutionalized in the fire service during the last few decades. As McGrail writes in his book Firefighter Operations in High-Rise and Standpipe-Equipped Buildings McGrail (2007, p. 59):

During the decade of the '90s, and into the beginning of the 21st century, the whole concept of rapid intervention was developed and has evolved into what it is today. From a time when even the term RIT was foreign to most fire departments, to today when RIT is not only common term to most, it is now the topic of countless articles...most fire departments operate with some form of RIT in a standby position at all fireground operations.

Although RIT has become standard in the fire service, during the 9-11 and Katrina disasters, it was found that either there were not enough RIT teams or none at all in some fire departments in Louisiana. For the RIT teams that were deployed, their training could not have prepared ten for with of these two events. The 9-11 attacks for example, when the firefighters arrived on scene, they did not have the capabilities to reach the floors that were on fire due to the height. In addition, rescuing people became difficult not only because there were a lot of them trapped in the higher floors and there was no way to reach them. Thos firefighters who were able to enter the buildings had to contend with falling debris, smoke, panicking people and even toxic materials and fumes.

During Hurricane Katrina, the fire service's major role of firefighting took to the sidelines because majority of the tasks involved search, rescue, retrieval and evacuation of trapped people. The event also proved tremendously difficult because there were not enough firefighters to serve the numerous victims of Hurricane Katrina. A new reality was also faced by the fire service during Hurricane Katrina and this was more on the personal aspects of the firefighters involved. Since those who responded during Hurricane Katrina, particularly those belonging to the different fire departments in Louisiana, were residents of the state or cities/municipalities struck by the disaster, these firefighters have families that were victims also. Thus, there have been reports that some firefighters left their duties in order to attend to their families needed rescuing. This did not happen though immediately but occurred one some of the firefighters realized that they are facing an impossible situation and the next prudent thing to do was to ensure the safety of their families.

Aside from having to face impossible situations and lack of available personnel to manage events of the magnitude that the 9-11 and Hurricane Katrina events demonstrated, other major problems faced by the fire service in dealing with these two disasters included "flawed policies, [lack of] leadership, and organization at both the national and local levels of government (Weitz, 2005). These findings were clearly documented in both the House and the Senate during the hearings done after the two events. Details of the outcome of the hearings are discussed in the succeeding section.

D. Findings of the House and the Senate on the 9-11 and Hurricane Katrina

During the House and Senate hearings held after the 9-11 and Hurricane Katrina events, findings pointed out to several things that went wrong. One glaring finding regarding both events is the lack of communications amongst the responding agencies. For instance, on the morning of September 11, New York police officers were able to hear the radio warnings from helicopters that the North Tower of the World Trade Center was glowing red and most of the police officers exited the building safely, while dozens of firefighters who could not hear those same warnings, tragically perished when the tower collapsed (U.S. House of Representatives, 2005). In the Senate, communications figured also as an area lacking during Hurricane Katrina. More particularly, the findings were, "Destruction of communications towers and equipment in particular limited the ability of crews to communicate with one another, undermining coordination and efficiency. Rescuers also had to contend with weapons fire, debris, and polluted water. (Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, 2006)" Consequently, both cases showed that the fie service will have to revisit their communications system and how this can be integrated with other agencies in order for the problems faced during the 9-11 and Hurricane Katrina events will not happen again. Without an integrated communication system, the fire service cannot properly manage disasters along the lines of these two events.

Although communications have been the general problem in both events. There are subtle differences through and Donald Moynihan provided two different outcomes of how communications were used during the two events. For the 9-11 terrorist attacks, Moynihan states (2007), "The response to this event has been described as a success by the 9/11 Commission, which recommended the widespread use of the Incident Command System." In the case of Hurricane Katrina, "The response to Katrina featured neither an effective network nor an effective hierarchy. It lacked a clear command and positive working relationships among key actors (Moynihan, 2007)." Consequently it is clear that the latter have provided enough communications support on the strategic level to ensure that emergency services would have deployed properly. Nonetheless, there was still a problem with communications though at the ground level because the various emergency response services have no unified communications systems on the ground. The same goes through with Katrina but it was more disastrous because of the lack of strategic coordinating efforts. What happened then in both cases is that the fire departments involved had to act on their own and often had conflicts with other services due to the lack of unified communications. The reason for this state of affairs is that public safety agencies traditionally have made individualized decisions about information and communications technology, generally failing to purchase state-of-the-art technology that operates effectively and interoperates with others involved in emergency response (Weiser, 2007, p. 548).

With the problems of communications faced by the fire departments, what they did was respond to calls from various entities and deploy personnel as needed or based on triage. Often it became a first-come-first-served matter until the fire department personnel reached its limit or there was already a lack of personnel to be deployed in problem areas. Specifically, "Hurricane Katrina was the largest natural disaster in the United States in living memory, affecting 92,000 square miles and destroying much of a major city (Moynihan, 2010);" with these figures in mind, imagine the area of responsibility the fire departments and the gravity of the situation they had to faced. Unlike the 9-11 terrorist incidents whereby the area of deployment was confined and static, for Katrina, it is everywhere and anywhere. Thus, fire departments in the area had no way of truly providing the response needed to those that faced the disaster. Indeed, from the various reports of the two Houses of Congress, it is clear that fire departments should have additional support when faced with similar or worst disasters like the 9-11 and Katrina events. As recommended during the House hearings, "To best equip our Nation's first responders to do their job, they must be able to communicate with one another, not just between fire, police, EMS in one jurisdiction, but also on the local, State, and Federal jurisdictions (U.S. House of Representatives, 2005)."

E. Lessons Learned and Implementation of the Plan Thereafter

The lessons of the 9-11 and Katrina disasters are clear, no fire department at present can manage such disasters of those magnitudes without establishing major paradigm shifts in the make-up of the contemporary fire service. One of the changes that has to be made in order for the fire departments to handle future events such these two is to look at the fire service as a service that not only operates on land but may have operational requirements also in the air and water. In the case of the New Orleans Fire Department, one of the Senate findings stated (Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, 2006):

The Office of Emergency Preparedness for New Orleans, long known to be among the nation's cities most vulnerable to a catastrophic hurricane, had a staff of only three. Its police and fire departments, responsible for search and rescue activities, had five and no boats, respectively. In 2004, the city turned down a request by the New Orleans Fire Department to fund the purchase of six additional boats.

It may be perplexing to note how the city of New Orleans never thought about the importance for the New Orleans Fire Department to have their own boats especially since the city has various waterways traversing and surrounding it. Had the city provided the boats to the New Orleans Fire Department, they would have been able to save more lives and do more when Hurricane Katrina struck.

The above is but one example of the change that needs to be done to the fire service in terms of redefining the area or operations. The boats are part of the needed changes and once these have been provided, the fire departments will need to incorporate the RIT capabilities to enable them to operate in a water environment. This is already a clear picture of how fire departments can mage future emergencies such as the two disasters being discussed herein considering the message is already clear that change in the way fire departments are managed needed major changing. there has first to be an "initial identification of issues in non-critical incident police and fire service delivery that can serve as 'building blocks' leading to more expansive planning and service delivery models (Nickerson & Straub, 2006)." In doing so, the fire department will be "singing from the same music sheet" as the police and other emergency services units.

Another important consideration the fire service must take to be able to manage major disasters is having "sort of" an augmentation force to the various fire departments whenever disasters in the magnitude of 9-11 and Katrina occur again. This may be viewed with how the state government can call on the National Guard to assist the police and local authorities in various disasters. The National Guard may provide the augmentation force to the fire departments but this would mean that those that will be involved will be trained in fire and emergency services procedures. Thus, part of the National Guard that will be called out during disasters will be under the control and supervision of the fire departments they have been identified to support. With this kind of scenario, the fire departments will be able to readily manage disasters because they already know that they will have the manpower to support them when the time comes. One of the better solutions of course is to hire additional fire department personnel to be able to better manage disaster situations. But the economy will come into the picture especially during these hard economic times; thus, having an augmentation force from the National Guard will be one of the better solutions thereto.

With all the findings evident, "it is clear that better coordination among the network of responders, a greater sense of urgency, and more successful management of related risk factors would have minimized some of the losses caused by Katrina (Moynihan, 2010) and the 9-11 terrorist attacks for that matter. Fortunately, headways have been done in the fire service that should similar disasters occur, the results will be far better than what occurred during the 9-11 and Hurricane Katrina events.

F. Management of the Firefighters

The fire department may be able to come up with and implement plans following the lessons learned from the 9-11 and Katrina disasters, but of more important concern is the management of the firefighters themselves in facing thus kinds of situations and the effects that they have on them. Hence, part of the plan involves not only the new trainings the firefighters will undergo but the benefits they will get when they get injured or die in the course of their duties. For those who survived the disasters, there has to be post-disaster evaluations to determine if the event did not posed any psychological or emotional problems on the firefighters. This is similar to soldiers that may suffer from post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that if left without diagnosis or intervention could cause grave damage not only on their person but others as well.

Fire fighters who are first-responders are prone to PTSD since they are "those rescuers that are first to arrive at any catastrophic event - whether 'natural' (such as a flood or earthquake) or man-made (such as a terrorist attack). The knowledge obtained by studying enduring psychological reactions among rescuers has far-reaching public health implications. (Trappler, 2011)" Various lessons could already be learnt from the 9-11 and Katrina disasters especially fire department personnel who suffered not only emotional and psychological problems but got sick years after the events happened. Specifically with regards to the 9-11 incidents, Trappler provided some of the findings on what happened top some of the firefighters (Trappler, 2011):

One of the most poignant issues was to deal with the loss of so many colleagues on a single day

The loss of so many colleagues on one day felt like a complete fracture of their social support system

Many firefighters continue to feel a deep sense of loss

One rescuer conceded that he had endured the experience completely unsupported, and had become progressively socially isolated

The psychological and emotional problems are but part of the after effects since there have been various reports of firefighters contracting various physical problems (i.e. heart and lung problems, skin cancer, etc.) due to their exposure from various hazardous materials when they went into the collapsed Twin Towers. The same goes true for firefighters who were involved during Hurricane Katrina and their numbers are still rising with regards to contracting of various diseases. Knowing these eventualities, the fire service will have to establish plans and protocols in taking care of the firefighters following tumultuous events. This would translate to having comprehensive psychological, emotional, and physical evaluation to prevent any problems from affecting the firefighters. Showing the firefighters that there is a major concern towards them will also help boost morale and enable them to better do their jobs because they know that they have the overwhelming support of the organization as well as their colleagues.