When things started shutting down for the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, I found myself, like many others, restless and anxious. It turns out that my fire department schedule - 24 hours on and 48 hours off can provide for quite a bit of free time if that’s the only job you are doing. I had never really experienced it before because I always had another job - a business to run, or a child to raise, or often all three.
Firefighting as a profession stands apart from many other modern-day pursuits with its distinct culture and strong sense of history. “Two hundred years of tradition, unimpeded by progress” as the old saying goes. I’m not much of a nostalgist and I don’t spend a lot of time pining for the days gone by, but neither am I much of a capitalist, so I find many of the fire service’s antiquated methods and institutional inefficiencies to be kind of endearing – when I’m not busy finding them infuriating. As so many other jobs have gone the way of automation and privatization - focusing on worker efficiency and maximum return to the shareholders - firefighters have been able to stave off many of the changes that have doomed so many other formerly noble professions. Some of these victories have come from solid strategic thinking on the part of firefighters past, and some have come from sheer obstinance and refusal to change. I think it is partially the peculiarities of the job and its history that make it so fascinating to outsiders. So many of the customs and traditions of the fire house are second nature to me at this point, but many of them are not commonly known, or they are commonly misunderstood, so I’ll try to address some of the most frequent questions and misunderstandings.
What I find particularly elegant about the structure of the typical fire company can be seen most easily in two places – the shift schedule, and the seat assignments on the truck. Part of the beauty of both is that their structures are circular, and the responsibilities are clearly delineated. I can calculate my shift schedule for years in advance, and I know my job for the day just based on where I’m sitting on the truck.
In terms of the schedule, the beauty is that it’s the same for everyone. Twenty-four hours on and forty-eight hours off. Monday, Thursday, Sunday, Wednesday, Saturday, Tuesday, Friday. From the lowliest rookie firefighter to the most senior Battalion Chief, if you are covered by the union contract (ie you’re not management), you have the same schedule as everyone else. In the early morning and in the middle of the night. Weekends. Holidays. Anniversaries. Graduations. It's not about seniority, or who’s the most popular. Everyone is up for grabs. But alongside this shared hardship, we have been given a gift - the ability to swap shifts. With some creative scheduling – a few shift exchanges, and a vacation day or two - I can be off for quite a bit of time without a whole lot of trouble. As firefighters, we are considered to be essentially interchangeable, so as long as someone similarly qualified is sitting in my seat, nobody really cares who it is.
The seat assignments on the truck provide a way of understanding the different positions and the ways in which they work together. Most of our trucks have four seats in them, and ideally, we ride with a crew of four firefighters, but on most days, we have three people assigned to an engine company. Truck companies usually have at least four. Let’s start at the front passenger’s seat and call that Position 1. This is not your typical family car arrangement - the person driving is not the one in charge. In the fire service, the power resides in the passenger’s seat – what we refer to as the captain’s seat. Sides of the truck are referred to as either driver’s side or captain’s side. The captain’s seat is occupied by the officer or acting officer in charge of the fire company. The captain is responsible for navigating to the call, operating the sirens, making decisions about vehicle positioning, access, and route finding, as well as the tactical decisions made on the fireground and the management of the personnel within the company and station (including their training, evaluations, and discipline). The captain is responsible for the safety of the entire crew, and perhaps most important for our purposes, the captain goes into the fire with the least senior person on the truck – the firefighter who is sitting directly behind them.
Let’s take a short break to go over some basic vocabulary. What is typically known to the public as a fire truck is known in the fire service as an “engine” or “pumper” due to its on-board fire pump, however, when speaking about the apparatus itself, we may still refer to it generically as a truck. A fire engine with a ladder on top is known as a “truck” or “ladder”, and the truck company has duties on a structure fire that are distinct from engine company duties. So, when you’re talking about the truck itself (as in “the truck has a flat tire”) it could be any truck (a truck, an engine, a ladder, a pumper, etc.), but when you are talking about a truck company (a group of people assigned to a truck – which is a ladder), you may say something like “Send the Truck to the Charlie side of the structure” which would mean send the people from the truck company to the right side of the building. Simple, right? The truck company provides rescue and elevated master stream capabilities with their ladder (which we call a stick because a ladder is a truck). The Truck is also responsible for interior search and rescue operations, securing of power, roof access, ground ladders, and ventilation. Truck companies often carry other specialized equipment to facilitate rope rescues, complex vehicle extrications, and other heavy rescue-type incidents. So, rescue is a truck company duty. But a “Rescue” is a type of truck. Not a capital “T” Truck. Just a truck. Specifically, an ambulance. So, an ambulance is a Rescue. Sometimes. Usually, we just call the ambulance “the box”. So, you could say “Send the Truck to ladder the Charlie side for a rescue from the third-floor balcony.” - which would mean, send the truck company personnel to place a ground ladder to the third-floor balcony on the right side of the structure where somebody is in need of rescue. Or you could say “Send a truck to the Ladder on the Charlie side for Rescue on the third-floor balcony” – which would mean, send an engine to the ladder truck parked on the right side of the building to assist a crew from the box who are on the third floor balcony. It’s important to be clear and concise in and emergency.
The seat directly behind the captain, which we will call Position 2, is referred to as the Firefighter’s seat. Until very recently, these seats always faced the rear of the truck, and to this day, we often refer to the firefighter’s position as “riding backwards” even though most of the newer trucks have forward-facing rear seats. The rear-facing seats were a holdover from the old open cab fire engines which allowed the crew members a quick exit to the rear of the truck to deploy hose lines, etc. The open cabs also exposed the crews to rain, sleet, snow, and heat, and while they were a step up from riding the tailboard of the truck, they still left something to be desired in terms of modern-day comforts and safety. In the early days, it was assumed that anyone on the truck was already wearing full bunker gear because fire trucks only responded to fire calls. In today’s fire service, 80% of our calls are medical (more on that later), and the workman’s comp providers would rather have us in the safety of an enclosed cab than wearing our bunker gear strapped to the tailboard in the rain. The NFPA, however, did not forbid riding the tailboard until 1992, and many of the older chiefs and captains who were still on the job when I started had stories of their days riding tailboards and sliding down fire poles.
Workman’s Comp insurance providers and modern building codes have probably done more to change the traditions of the fire service than any other internal or external forces. We no longer build multi-story fire stations since it has been determined that fire poles are particularly unsafe (especially in the middle of the night when personnel may be waking from a deep sleep to slide down a multi-story pole). There are still a few fire poles around though, and I got the chance to slide down a few of them while doing my paramedic ride time with neighboring departments. We now have ADA accessible fire stations which makes things nice for the public when visiting, but I’m still not sure why we need wheelchair-accessible showers and Braille signage on the room where we store our bunker gear.
The firefighter in position 2 fills the role that the public sees as the archetypical firefighter. They are the one on the nozzle charging headfirst into the burning building. What the public doesn’t see is that they are typically the least experienced member of the crew. What they need for the job is not so much experience as the hard-charging youthful energy that comes from being in your first fire at twenty years old. And they always have a captain right behind them, providing encouragement, pulling hose, directing their actions, and looking out for their safety.
Taken together, the captain and the firefighter are often the oldest and youngest members of the crew, and it is this combination that provides for the strength and development of great fire companies. The combination of experience and technique with energy and enthusiasm. The old aphorism that says those who can’t do, teach, does not apply here. If you want to show the new person how it’s done, you’re going to have to go into the fire with them, and it is this arrangement that, to me, makes being a company fire captain one of the best jobs in the world. In so many other professions, the point at which you become a supervisor of others is the point at which you stop actually doing the work yourself. And it is your love for the work, presumably, that drew you to the profession in the first place, not the opportunity to supervise others doing the work that you love. I still love to fight fires. I also love to teach and mentor and guide the younger members of our team, but the terrible beauty of a house on fire has never lost its draw for me.
Moving back to the front of the truck brings us to Position 3, the driver, generally the second-most senior person on the crew. The driver, or more formally, the Driver Engineer is responsible for everything having to do with the truck – from driving the apparatus to and from the scene, to maintaining all its equipment and hoses, operating the pump, and ensuring adequate water supply to the firefighters during fireground operations. These days, the driver is often also the senior paramedic in charge of patient care on medical calls. And much of the time, the driver is also the cook.
A good driver functions as the liaison between the captain and the crew, dispensing tips, advice, and the insights that come from experience without having to involve the captain in all of the mistakes and learning experiences of the newer crew members. A den mother of sorts. And when the captain is out, the Driver Engineer moves over to be the Acting Captain and everyone else moves up one position. Drivers are truly the backbone of the fire department, and they often have the most work to do - from checking out the truck, keeping medical supplies stocked, shopping for groceries, and preparing meals, to treating patients, writing medical reports, and generally keeping the crew in line.
The last position on the truck would be the rear seat behind the driver. Position 4. This seat, when staffed, is occupied by the second firefighter (or “Can Man”). The Can Man’s name comes from the position they fill on a typical truck company, where they traditionally would carry a 2 ½ gallon water can into the fire to effect search and rescue operations in the absence of a hoseline. On an engine company, the Can Man is charged with making the hydrant connection and ensuring that we have an adequate water supply. This position is generally filled by the more senior of the two firefighters in order to give the rookie in position 2 more time on the nozzle.
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I work 24-hour shifts every third day on a perpetual rotation (most fire departments break things up into A, B, and C shifts.) Working every third day, with seven days in a week, creates a twenty-one day (three week) cycle. Monday, Thursday, Sunday, Wednesday, Saturday, Tuesday, Friday. After almost twenty years, ordering the days of my week in this fashion is just as natural to me as any other sequence. Even my family has come to understand the schedule, although with my son, I think the understanding is on a more intuitive level - he just knows that when I’ve been home for two days, he’s probably not going to see me the next day. Additionally, in my department, we get an extra day off every three weeks. For me, that day is Thursday. When my shift falls on a Thursday, I don’t work. We call this extra day off an “R” day, or “Kelly day” - named after Chicago Mayor Edward J. Kelly, who gave firefighters an extra day off for every seven days worked in 1936 – reducing the firefighter’s workweek to 72 hours at the time. For us, the extra day off gives us five days off in a row and results in a 48-hour work week when we average out the three-week cycle. Federal overtime laws are different for firefighters, so employers are not required to pay time-and-a-half until firefighters work more than 53 hours in a week - the tradeoff, I guess, is that sometimes we get paid to sleep. Sometimes.
When I was hired in early 2004, our department ran approximately 65,000 calls a year from 40 fire stations in a county about the size of Rhode Island (1,266 square miles). In 2022, we are on track to run 135,000 calls out of just 45 stations. That’s an increased call volume of more than 100 percent, with only about a 12 percent increase in the number of stations. We have added some extra apparatus, and the total number of field personnel has gone up some, but most stations are running twice as many calls today as they were when I started. I ran five calls after midnight on each of my last two shifts and I’m not at a particularly busy station. That’s not the norm for us, but it happens, and nights where we don’t get up at all are rare these days.
The 24-hour workday is a prime example of one of the seemingly antiquated traditions that have persisted in the fire service despite all odds, but make no mistake, it still exists because it saves money - not because we like it. Staffing a fire station 24/7 in 8-hour shifts for 7 days a week would require staffing a fourth shift - the unthinkable “D Shift”. A thirty-three percent increase in the size of the workforce is nothing to sneeze at - better just to buy us some cheap mattresses and let us get whatever sleep we can while saving the county 30 or 40 million dollars a year.
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Firefighting as a job happens in discreet units known to us as “calls” (in my department), “runs” (in other departments), or “jobs” (in the Northeast). A typical call lasts and hour or two at most, with structure fires taking sometimes from three to twelve hours, but it’s extremely rare that we would go home while still in the middle of a job. We finish every job before we go home, and every day is a clean slate. This is an essential distinction between firefighting and almost any other profession. You don’t take anything home with you. Except for all the stuff you take home with you.
Perhaps we could separate damages done to our psyche as coming from two forms of negative stimulus – stress and trauma. Stress being worry about the future, and trauma being worry about the past. I think, when given the choice, most people would choose stress over trauma. This is a smart choice since stress is not always harmful while trauma almost always is. And stress is often simply worry about potential trauma that never actually materializes. The choice is somehow different for firefighters. It’s the not knowing that we can’t handle. Every portion of our day is focused on eliminating stress about the future. We train. We prepare. We work out. We oil the tools. We wash the truck. Most of the job is simply getting prepared and waiting around for something to happen.
This willingness to endure trauma is, I think, often misinterpreted as bravery when it’s really just a different type of avoidance. Firefighters are as fear driven as anyone else, perhaps even more so, we just tend to focus our energies on preparedness rather than anxiety. This is a good strategy when things are probably going to go poorly. Houses are going to burn down. Patients are going to die. But if we can tell ourselves that we did everything in our power to prevent the worst from happening, we can view the outcome as being at least endurable if not an unqualified success. True success in our business is rare. Chokings, overdoses, hypoglycemia, and pediatric drownings. That’s about it for the list of things we can actually fix if we get there fast enough, but even those come with a fair share of absolute tragedies.
For some more insight into the mind of the firefighter, I would have you look at some other choices that firefighters commonly make. First, the job itself, with its pension and promise of security is a tradeoff for trauma over stress. We don’t stress about where our career is going, or how we are going to retire, or whether our company is going to survive. We simply accept the trauma of relatively low pay along with hazardous working conditions and the concurrent damages to our physical and mental health. But we’ll take the known over the unknown.
It's not unusual for a firefighter to drive a $60k pickup truck that they never use to haul anything other than, occasionally, a boat or lawn trailer. I think the logic is that they might need to haul something at some point, so a pickup truck is the best option. Not to mention that it’s more macho than a minivan. As gas prices have steadily risen, I’ve noticed a new phenomenon amongst the drivers of the biggest gas-guzzling pickups – the “station car”. The station car is a small car that gets good mileage, purchased to drive back and forth to the station to save money on gas and to reduce wear and tear on the $60k truck. When I first started seeing these, they were $2k beater cars with a lot of deferred maintenance, but now that cheap used cars are no longer readily available, people are spending $15-20k on their station cars (for a total of $80k invested in transportation) to save a few dollars on gas. I’ve been driving the same $18k van for the last seven years. The gas mileage is not great, but I’d have to drive it a hell of a lot to save $62k on gas. This is the same belt-and-suspenders, fear-based logic at work. By having a truck and a car, and a lot of guns, and living in a gated community with lots of insurance policies, etc, etc, you are prepared for every possible eventuality. If something goes wrong, at least you can tell yourself that you did everything you could do.
At some point, this sort of fear-based over preparation begins to get in the way of true safety in the hazardous environments that are common to firefighting. One of the most important lessons I’ve learned from mountain climbing is that there are certain situations that are inherently risky, and beyond taking the most basic precautions to ensure your own safety, the best strategy is simply to reduce the amount of time spent in the hazardous environment. In mountain climbing, this has led to a programmatic change from the siege tactics of the 1950’s (involving hundreds of people with teams of porters, pack animals, and the multiple large camps needed to support such an operation), to fast and light two or three person teams who can move quickly up and down the mountain, thus exposing themselves to much less risk in the inherently dangerous environments of the high mountains.
Applying this logic to firefighting has made me a bit of a Luddite when it comes to firefighting’s latest and greatest advancements. When I evaluate a new piece of equipment to determine its usefulness to us on the fireground, one of the first things I ask is “How many of my tools is this going to replace?” If the answer is anything less than two, I probably don’t want it. I don’t need any more stuff. I don’t need the truck to get any bigger. I don’t need to be any slower. If our truck is fast, light, and maneuverable, and the firefighters on it are similarly agile, the time between us getting the call and us putting water on the fire can be greatly reduced. And the simplest way to reduce hazards in our profession is to put water on the fire (whether literal or figurative) as fast as possible. Early intervention in critical situations improves the outcome greatly, and it exposes you and your crew to the least amount of risk. Ironically, bravery is what it takes to ensure your safety.