Thought Leadership

Hearing loss for firefighters is a real risk of the job, so does your helmet provide hearing protection just by putting it on? Eye injuries are another risk of firefighting and other emergency service delivery tasks (e.g., auto extrication). Does your helmet have built-in full-face protection that’s protected from heat and physical damage until you need it?

Interesting data from the USFA (United States Fire Administration). The number of fires [in the U.S.] is down over 6 percent in 10 years, but fire related deaths [in the U.S.] are up over 10 percent in that same time. Any thoughts on why this is?

So, if a strong and articulate and bright woman can feel like this over the course of her career (Remember, she rose through the ranks and retired as a captain), how are other women dealing with these issues and anxieties?

These three steps are more than just individual or group tasks. Collectively, they constitute leadership and mentoring on your part. By doing so, you’d also be creating expectations for attendance at future conferences by you and members of your department.

Firefighters need to have PPE options that more closely align with the tactical operations that they do beside just structural firefighting. No longer can structural PPE be the “one size fits all” option.

Your efforts to recruit and retain women for your department are doomed to fail if you don't have those policies and procedures in place now. If every one of your male officers and firefighters aren't informed and educated about how a female colleague will be treated when she finds out she's pregnant, your efforts are doomed to fail.

Chief Avsec highlights the importance for scholarship and research in the fire service with this post that features a new research paper from Firefighter Lydia Wilcox on the topic of women entering the fire service in Ontario, Canada.

You lost your “bully pulpit” because you weren’t out in front of the ACLU’s action. But more importantly, where was your support and advocacy for fire service women, especially those women in the Fairfax County Fire Rescue Department?

Firefighters and officers behaving badly. There are probably hundreds of causative factors at work, and while I'm not a trained sociologist by trade, I'm going to discuss a couple that really stand out in my mind: the use of social media and "helicopter parenting".

I’ve said it before in this space, and I’m saying it again, white males have created this culture in the fire service and only white males can fix it. And this is not a problem to be fixed with training and education.