Tag Archives: fire service culture

We are all together in recognizing and addressing the significant unmanaged risks posed by Fire & EMS personnel suffering from fatigue. The dots are out there. We just need to start connecting them before, once again, someone else does it for us.

Recently, one of my fire service and LinkedIn colleagues, Chief Cheryl Horvath, wrote about the continuing struggle that women face trying to become a part of the Fire and EMS world in the USA. I would challenge you to read both pieces—keeping in mind that the sexual misconduct and crimes at APG surfaced in 1996—and ask yourself, “How come we’ve not gotten past this kind of behavior?”

I received the following comments in response to my recent piece, The Slow Death of the 24-Hour Tour? The comments, however, were posted by LinkedIn colleagues in response to my posting of the article on the Fire Engineering Group in LinkedIn.

Why do we continue to "hold on to" a fire protection model that is "overloaded" with risk and expensive to operate? There is a better way, but it's a way that requires a fundamental shift in responsibility in our society: the individual is responsible for not having a fire, rather than the locality is responsible for putting out a fire when it occurs. Fire service leaders and local political leaders need to "re-engineer" the fire protection model for their communities using the "Three E's": Engineering, Education, and Enforcement.