Staffing, 1969: “One Man Cannot Be Called a Fire Company”
By GLENN CORBETT
Fire company staffing has been under constant change and crutiny since the mid-19th century. One reason volunteers opposed steam fire engines in our cities is clear: “Steamers” required fewer personnel to operate than a hand engine. The motorized triple combination pumper (including hoselines, pump, and water tank) eliminated the need for the hose wagon and its crew that followed the steamer to each fire.
By the 1960s, economic challenges and efficiency management studies pressed cities not only to reduce individual fire company staffing but to eliminate entire companies. It’s unlikely we will ever see the staffing levels we experienced immediately after World War II.
Despite the technological firefighting advances made in the past few decades, the physical task of fire suppression still needs firefighters to stretch hose and throw ladders.
The Fire Engineering article by editor James M. Casey in the October 1969 issue hits the staffing issue head on. Despite national standards like National Fire Protection Association 1710, Standard for the Organization and Deployment of Fire Suppression Operations, Emergency Medical Operations, and Special Operations to the Public by Career Fire Departments, which set minimum staffing, the needle has not moved in our favor since this article was first published.
To download a PDF of the original article, access it online at http://www.fireengineering.com/archives.html.
Fire Engineering, October 1969
Manpower – How Much Do You Need?
BY JAMES F. CASEY, Editor
One of the loneliest spots in this world is the spot in front of a blazing building that a fire chief stands on. It provides him with his moment of truth. On his decisions, lives may be lost or saved, buildings and businesses destroyed, the economy of his town jeopardized.
And yet his decisions are often based on decisions made previously by other officials; decisions in the making of which he was frequently ignored and occasionally overruled. These decisions have to do with equipment, water and manpower – the three tools of fire fighting ….
One man cannot be called a fire company, no matter how many men are available after he has made a sizeup and hollered for help. Neither can two or three men be considered a fire company. (These are not enough to handle a fair-sized grass fire.) ….
… Perhaps the chief who is reading this and who is faced by a reduction in manpower can point to New York City as an example of what can happen (fortunately it didn’t) when outside consultants are hired by economy-minded officials to survey a department. The year was 1953 and for that year the fire department had responded to 78,031 alarms. (Remember this figure.)
The committee of consultants, as they were called, ignored the fire chief and his staff completely while making its survey and after some weeks came up with its report. Among other items they recommended the elimination of 52 companies – 14 percent of the city’s fire fighting force.
Fortunately, in New York, the fire chief – and only the fire chief – is legally responsible for the prevention and extinction of fire. Not the mayor or the city council or the fire commissioner – but the fire chief. Fortunately, too, the city had a strong fire chief who with his staff made a strong, point-by-point, 34-page rebuttal to the committee’s report. In the introduction to the rebuttal the chief stated that: “We are alarmed at such a drastic recommendation and refuse to accept the responsibility for any catastrophe that we are unable to control because our fire fighting resources have been thus weakened.”
This was enough for the city fathers and the survey was quietly shelved. But what if the survey recommendations had prevailed? Remember that alarms received for the year 1953 totaled 78,031. In 1968, just 15 years later, the New York fire department responded to 228,296 alarms and the projection for 1969 is 300,000 or more.
Every one of the 52 companies that was recommended to be disbanded has at least doubled its runs since 1953. Some have done more than this. Engine 45, for instance, which was slated to be wiped out, had 868 runs in 1953, 7,098 runs for 1968. New York City would certainly be scrambling today to replace those 52 companies if an economy-minded administration and its hired consultants had their way. (It could conceivably be in ruins, too.)
This city is of course unique when you think of 8,000,000 people and its 14,000-man fire department. But scaled down, the situation that applied in New York in 1953 could have applied to any city or village in the country. The point is that the chief stood his ground and won by refusing to accept the responsibility for other persons’ decisions. Time of course has proven that the chief was right and the experts badly off base.
Perhaps the reason they were so wrong can be found in the words of Les Eggleston:1
When the actions, reactions, capabilitities and attitudes of humans affect any system, the resultant sociopolitical systems become complex and far from ordered in their functioning. The mathematical laws of chance and probability influence system performance and, while this effect may be estimated, the certainty thereof leaves much to be desired. Metropolitan fires defenses are systems that involve these complications.
… What economy-minded city officials forget (or perhaps just don’t realize) is that the fire service is an emergency service. An emergency service that is like no other …. [A] man who has a fire in his house can’t wait even a minute before seeking assistance. And that assistance must be prompt and adequate, or it’s useless.
National Board of Fire Underwriters Special Bulletin 231, for instance, also states that reducing the total number of companies to increase the manning of the remaining companies is not the proper way to provide adequate fire protection in all sections of the city. This could result in some areas within the city being too far from the nearest company to get the prompt response necessary to extinguish fires in their incipient state, and reduces chances of saving life.
A citizen who pays $9.00 an hour to a plumber must be made to realize that a fire fighter (who is also a skilled mechanic) can be much more important to his welfare. “The conservation of human lives and material resources is a duty and responsibility of all the people.” This statement appears in the American Insurance Association’s Special Interest Bulletin No. 230, which also states, “A destruction by fire each day of over two and a half million dollars, much of which occurs in individual fires of large magnitude, is cause enough to justify the expenditure of sufficient money to provide the manpower necessary for reasonably adequate manning of individual fire companies.”
Volunteer manpower
No matter where it occurs, every building fire requires the same fire fighting technique, equipment and manpower. There is no difference, therefore, in the requirements for fireground manpower in the volunteer service as opposed to the paid. However, manpower shortages can occur even in volunteer departments, particularly on weekdays during working hours. Thus, a volunteer fire chief planning a new fire station must be sure of his available manpower. Where a shortage exists, full-time drivers must be hired.
As to the other personnel, the Standard Schedule for Grading Cities and Towns in the United States has this to say: “In departments having call or volunteer members, with tappers in homes and places of business, or with sufficient outside sounding devices, four call or volunteer members, on the basis of the average number responding to alarms, may be considered as equivalent to one full paid member …. If fully satisfactory records of response are not kept (Editor’s note: The italics are ours.), such credit may be limited to one paid man for each eight claimed to respond.”
In conclusion, we reiterate that manpower is the key to successful fire fighting. The figures mentioned above from Special Interest Bulletin No. 230 were collected in 1959. The figures for 1969 are much higher. We wonder how much of the increase is caused by an ever-shrinking force of fire fighters attempting to protect an ever-expanding population and built-up areas.
EndNote
1. Fire Defense Systems Analysis by Lester A. Eggleston, Southwest Research Institute for Office of Civil Defense, Office of the Secretary of the Army, Washington D.C., through U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Lab, San Francisco, Calif.
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