Commentary

Maybe, just maybe, we'll all start taking a much different view of claims of sexual harassment--and all other forms of harassment in the workplace for that matter—and especially those brought forth by women in the fire service.

IFRM does not function as a disaster-relief agency. Rather, it’s goal is to solve chronically inadequate fire protection by working with local and federal officials to use the donation as a foundation for building a sustainable fire service. This often means it can take months, sometimes years, for a community to get the necessary pieces in place to be approved for IFRM donations.

If we thought the high-jacking of airliners and flying them into buildings was “low tech” terrorism, I doubt we’ve seen nothing yet. We can rest assured that those terrorist elements that would do harm on U.S. soil are “taking notes” about the devastation being created by these intentionally set forest fires, the chaos being created in the local populations, and the stress on firefighting resources and other emergency response assets in those communities.

But the problem of acceptance in the fire service goes beyond that experienced by women. People of color (men and women), those who are gay or transsexual or just somehow just “different” are not as readily accepted—if they ever are—by the white male majority.

By: Robert Avsec, Executive Fire Officer Frightening photos from wildfires burning in North Carolina. Now before any of our firefighter brothers and sisters out west say, “That’s not a real wildfire,” please keep in mind that here in the eastern USA we don’t combat fires on the scale and magnitude that you do out west. That’s a fact, and you ...

Tanya Bettridge, a fire and life safety educator and essayist, offers a unique perspective on how lessons she derived from the recent U.S. Presidential Election can be used by fire and EMS departments to communicate better with their stakeholders.

Fire departments, large and small, continue to devote the large majority of their resources to big equipment, e.g., today’s engines and aerial apparatus, without a closer examination of the fire risk in their communities. And they’re doing so with less available staffing than ever before.

I am absolutely not diminishing the work of the exceptional leaders that are out there today, from men and women, visible minorities and the LGBTQ communities, and anyone I may have missed only by my pure ignorance. It is the ground swell of work they are doing that will realign the direction of the “freighter” we call the fire service.

We can change the culture in the fire service, but not through solutions like policy or procedure or training or lawsuits. The change must come from the “majority stakeholders” in the fire service: Men. Men must take responsibility and ownership for the problems we face in the fire service. And right now, they must also take responsibility for seeking and implementing the solutions.

I, for one, am growing very tired of words like, "wrestling, grappling, struggling, etc.", being used to describe the misogynist attitudes that still exist in too many fire departments four decades after some of the first female firefighters came on the job.