The mayor and city council established the City of Baltimore Fire Department in 1858. By 1970, the city had 905,787 residents and the department staffed:

• 58 Engine companies
• 5 Hose companies
• 20 Truck companies
• 2 Tower companies
• 12 ambulances (Frederick, 2009)

The 1992 Harvard Kennedy School case study on Baltimore fire station closings under Mayor Schmoke describes the budget impact of having too many fire stations, with about 10 blocks between some stations (Simon, 1992). This reflected 19th-century fire station deployment. The fire horses could sustain a full gallop for about a mile – 10 to 20 city blocks (Merwin, 1890; Horse Tales, 2015).

Fire Station Consolidations During Downtown Redevelopment

Fire companies moved from 19th-century fire stations into new facilities, moves linked with other urban development. For example, both Paca Street houses (Truck 2 / Water Tower 1, and Rescue 1 / Engine 1), the Gay Street house (Engine 32, Truck 1), and the Saratoga Street house (Engine 23) all closed in 1973 (Legeros, 2013).

The Steadman “Super Station” opened in 1973 and housed Engine Companies 15, 23 & 27; Truck Company 2; Water Tower Company 1; Rescue Company 1; Airflex 1; Battalion Chief 5; Box 414 Coffee Wagon; and Ambulance 1 (bcfdl734, 2020).

The Steadman fire station was built as the downtown waterfront area was moving from an industrial seaport into the Inner Harbor complex that included a convention center (1979), stadiums, hotels, offices, restaurants, retail, entertainment, and upscale residences. I was a Sackroom live-in at the College Park fire station in the 1970s while a fire protection engineering student at the University of Maryland. We would buff multiple-alarm overnight warehouse fires at the Inner Harbor.¹

Today, Steadman staffs Engine 23, Rescue 1, Medic 1, Ambulance 23, EMS 6, Battalion 6, Airflex 1, HazMat 1, and special operations support vehicles (Fendon, 2026).

There has been a steady erosion of city residents since 1950, with the 2025 population estimated at 569,997, or 60% of the 1950 census. This U.S. Census Bureau Resident Population in Baltimore City, MD, chart documents the decline; the gray bars identify recessions:

Incomplete roster of Baltimore fire company closures 1981 – 2026

It is difficult to produce an accurate and complete account of changes in municipal fire department staffing. Local news reports are incomplete. Published annual budget documents are obscure by design.

This is what I have assembled for Baltimore City:

1981: Engine 38

1980s: Engine 22

1986: Aerial Tower Consolidations: Combining an engine and truck company crew onto a Sutphen aerial tower quint. Staffing went from 8 to 6, eliminating a fire officer and chauffeur position. Net loss of five engine companies.

1988: Engine 37

1990: Engine company staffing reduced from four to three (Justia, 1992). The city could not hire 137 additional firefighters to reduce the workweek from 47 hours per week to 44.4/44.8 hours per week. Instead, they reduced engine company staffing. City claimed overtime costs were approaching $1 million.

1991: Engine 7 and Marine Service: Fireboat 1, Engine 49, Engine 48 (Harvard case study)

1995: Engine 32, Engine 34, Engine 38, Truck 4

1997: Engine 10, Truck 28, Aerial Tower 111 (Baltimore Fire Officers IAFF Local 964, 2023)

2000: Mayor Martin O’Malley’s first city budget includes a proposal to close 7 fire companies. The Greater Baltimore Committee and the President’s Roundtable developed the plan for the mayor.

The fire company EMS assist runs identified in the 1999 study were mostly as the EMS first responder because an ambulance was farther away or no ambulances were immediately available (staff, 2000a).

On May 10, 2000, the city started the process to close seven fire companies. Of the 140 firefighter positions affected, 100 will be moved to other fire companies to save $4 to $5 million in overtime, and 40 will staff 4 to 6 additional ambulances.

2000: Engine 33, Engine 9, Engine 19, Engine 24, Truck 5, Aerial Tower 114

2001: Engine 3, Engine 19, Engine 24, Truck 9, Truck 13

2002: Aerial Tower 124, Aerial Tower 128, Battalion 7, Battalion 8. Aerial Tower 102, after a steady reduction of assigned staffing from 6 to 4, restored to Truck 2. Engine 28 is not restaffed.

2005: After lengthy labor and legal negotiations – interrupted by a July 2001 CSX chemical train derailment/fire and major water main break in the Howard Street tunnel that closed downtown for three days and dumped 60 million gallons of water (Scott, 2004) – the O’Malley reconfigured Baltimore Fire Department in 2005 was comprised of:

• 32 Engine Companies – closed 4 companies
• 4 Squad Companies – existing engine companies upgraded to “rescue engines”
• 19 Truck companies – closed 2 companies
• 22 Paramedic ambulances – added 4 ambulances
• 1 Rescue Company
• 6 Battalion Chiefs – lost 1 battalion

2009: Truck 2 (former Aerial Tower 102) is closed.

2012: Truck 15, Squad 11, Truck 10

2020: Proposed closing Engine 4 and Engine 55 to reduce FY2021 budget by $3.6B. Postponed pending results of FACETS Operational and Management Assessment. Defunded seven vacant staff positions. The FACETS workload analysis showed an increase in engine company and medic unit time-on-task for the 2018-2019 response data compared with the 1999 data from the Greater Baltimore Committee and the President’s Roundtable (2021, FACETS, p. 48).

The current configuration of the fire department is:

• 32 Engine companies
• 17 Truck companies
• 1 Heavy Rescue Company
• 3 Squad companies (rescue engines)
• 2 Fireboats
• 21 full-time paramedic ambulances
• 8 full-time EMT ambulances
• 6 battalion chiefs

Unrelenting EMS Workload Outpaces Medic/Ambulance Expansion

In 2000, Baltimore City had the second busiest fire-based ambulances in the United States. As an Assistant Professor at The George Washington University, I followed the efforts by Los Angeles and Baltimore City fire departments to address their overwhelmed ambulance service (2000 – 2007) and created a workload comparison of fire-based 24-hour ambulances.²

No Relief for Baltimore EMS Units

The history of Baltimore fire company closures was to reduce firefighter overtime and respond to shrinking fire department budget allocations by the mayor and city council. The O’Malley restructuring in 2000 did not improve 9-1-1 ambulance service, as the time-on-task increasd after adding 4 ambulances:

• 1999: Ambulances spent 14.25 hours in every 24 hours engaged in work
• 2007 (after O’Malley restructure): Ambulances spent 14.4 hours engaged in work [UHU of 0.61]
• 2018-2019 (FACETS report): Ambulances spent 14.54 hours engaged in work

“Red Alert” Fire Company Staffed Ambulances

In the 2000s, there were four “Red Alert” ambulances that were placed into service when the city got down to 3 ambulances. This was accomplished by placing fire companies out of service to staff the Red Alert ambulances. The Red Alert ambulances were activated almost every afternoon.

By 2006 two of the Red Alert ambulances, Medic 41 and Medic 44, were staffed 9 am to 9 pm every day with overtime or detailed firefighters. Each 12-hour unit averaged 7.5 runs every day. Using the Los Angeles City EMS workload metrics, Baltimore needed to add 9 additional paramedic ambulances to meet their 2007 workload.

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¹Which is one of the reasons I did not earn an engineering degree.

²In the original 2007 – 2008 presentations, “transport” was used to distinguish ambulances from fire companies.

References

Baltimore Fire Officers IAFF Local 964 (2023 April 19) “On this date in 1986, Aerial Tower 111 was placed in service. Engine Co No 1 and Truck Co No 11 were disbanded and combined to place the tower in service, at their station at 401 W. North Avenue. The unit ran as both an engine and a truck company on fire boxes, and was staffed with 6 personnel. The tower lasted a little over 10 years, being disbanded on 4/9/1997, and the firehouse closed.” FaceBook https://www.facebook.com/BFO964/posts/693953376068826

bcfdl734. (2020, August 20) On this day in 1973, the John F. Steadman station opened at the corner of S Eutaw St & W Lombard St. It was Baltimore’s first “superstation”, [Instagram] https://www.instagram.com/p/CEH-bD6hY29/

FACETS Consulting LLP. (2021, November) Operational & Management Assessment: Baltimore City Fire Department – Final Report.

Fandom. (2026) Firefighting Wiki: Baltimore City Fire Department. https://fire.fandom.com/wiki/Baltimore_City_Fire_Department

Frederick, G. E. (2009). 150th Anniversary of Baltimore City Fire Department. Firehouse. https://www.firehouse.com/home/article/10470198/in-1858-the-mayor-and-city-council-of-baltimore-city-after-much-deliberation-passed-an-ordinance-creating-the-fire-department-of-baltimore-city-five-commissioners-were-appointed-to-oversee-the-organization-the-size-of-the-original-department-was-set

Horse Tales.(2015, January 24). 1922: Waterboy, Danny Beg, and the Last Fire Horses of the New York Fire Department. The Hatching Cat of Gotham. https://hatchingcatnyc.com/2015/01/24/last-fire-horses-new-york-fire-department/

Justia. (1992) Mayor and City Council of Baltimore v. Baltimore Fire Fighters. 613 A.2d 1023, 93 Md. App. 604. https://law.justia.com/cases/maryland/court-of-special-appeals/1992/1953-september-term-1991-0.html

Legeros, Mike (2013, September 16). Historic Baltimore Firehouses. https://legeros.com/history/baltimore/stations.shtml

Merwin, H. C. (1890, July). Fire Horses. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1890/07/fire-horses/633654/

Scott, E. (2004, September 1) “Almost A Worst Case Scenario”: The Baltimore Tunnel Fire of 2001. A, B & C. Case C16-04-1768.0. Harvard Kennedy School. https://case.hks.harvard.edu/almost-a-worst-case-scenario-the-baltimore-tunnel-fire-of-2001-c/

Simon, H. (1992, January 1) How to Bite the Bullet: Baltimore Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke and Fire Station Closings (A), Case #1129.0. Harvard Kennedy School. https://case.hks.harvard.edu/how-to-bite-the-bullet-baltimore-mayor-kurt-l-schmoke-and-fire-station-closings-a/

staff. (2000a, May 10). 7 firehouses to close; O’Malley to present plan as part of his first budget today; ‘Dangerous stuff’; Mayor says proposal could save Baltimore up to $5 million. The Baltimore Sun. https://www.baltimoresun.com/2000/05/10/7-firehouses-to-close-omalley-to-present-plan-as-part-of-his-first-budget-today-dangerous-stuff-mayor-says-proposal-could-save-baltimore-up-to-5-million/

staff. (2000b May 24). The debate: city fire coverage. The Baltimore Sun. https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-2000-05-24-0005240127-story.html

U.S. Census Bureau, Resident Population in Baltimore City, MD [MDBALT5POP], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MDBALT5POP, August 3, 2026.

The eighth annual index report from ESO Solutions provides information from 10.2 million fire company responses from their clients that use the electronic data entry from both the computer aided dispatch system and the last year of National Fire Incident Reporting System (NFIRS) incident run reports in 2025.

The call volume breaks down to:

• 66% are EMS related
• 12% are Good Intent
• 8% are Service Calls
• 7% are False Alarm or False Call
• 3% are Hazardous Condition (No Fire)
• 3% are Fire (Series 100 coded incidents)

Breaking down the 341,381 Series 100 incidents:

• 37% are structure fires
• 23% are natural vegetation fires
• 19% are rubbish fires
• 13% are mobile property, i.e. vehicle fires

ESO Solutions identifies that 61% of the 12,721 structure fires in 2025 were classified as Working Fires. Most of those 7,760 Working Fires were in residences.

Among residential structure fires, one- or two-family dwellings account for 77%, followed by multifamily dwellings at 16%. … single-family homes remain the primary concern. (Crowe et al., 2026, p. 8).”

A Structure Fire Requiring Rescue Every 4 hours

Midwest City (OK) Training Chief Brian Brush repeated the 2021 research he did while working on a master’s degree at Oklahoma State University. His original study was profound, showing that, on average, firefighters in the United States rescued 9.8 civilians from fires every day. This placed Chief Brush as a keynote speaker at the Fire Department Instructors Conference. Chief Brush revisited this issue in 2026 and shared his results in a Fire Engineering article.

Residential structure fires are where the rescues occur. In 2026, only 10 of the 1,033 victims were rescued from commercial structures.

A working apartment fire with exposures has a significant resource demand on its own. If you are dispatched to one with reports of trapped occupants, ensure you are also starting the units and staff to also potentially establish a medical group ready for triage treatment and transport of multiple victims. (Brush, 2026)

Chief Brush points out that the average number of civilians rescued from a single-family dwelling was more than one, and from a multi-family dwelling was 3.2. For January to March of 2026, an average of 11.5 civilians were rescued every day. While fire departments are responding to fewer structure fires in 2026 compared to 2021, we are encountering more fires requiring civilian rescues.

Imperatives for the Fire Officer

This means firefighters need to be competent and confident in their search, victim removal, and interior fire suppression skills. Fire officers need to be effective as fire company unit supervisors and initial incident commanders to supervise time-critical structure fires with trapped civilians. The fire department should have a deployment plan that includes paramedic or EMT caregivers focused on prompt civilian care and ambulances that arrive quickly as part of a working fire incident.

War Story: I could use some help here!

A firefighter who works in a department that operates four-firefighter engine companies that include one paramedic/firefighter, and ambulances staffed with one paramedic/firefighter and one EMT/firefighter, shared this experience:

We were the first arriving engine company at a working fire in an end-of-row townhouse. Fire was showing from Side C; we entered through the front door. We found an unconscious man while advancing the attack line. The paramedic/firefighter and I removed him to the sidewalk. I thought the medic was going to get the ALS gear from the engine, but the medic went back inside to operate the attack line. I grabbed the oxygen kit and ambulance aide bag from the engine.

The second and third arriving engine company crews passed by me before getting into the townhouse; no one stopped to help. Finally, the paramedic ambulance that was dispatched on the second alarm showed up to help. I was alone with an unconscious patient for 16 minutes.

Each edition of Fire Officer: Principles and Practice includes a section describing the current challenges facing the fire officer. This article on structure fires is a work in progress as part of my preparation for the 6th edition, which will be released after NFPA Standard 1020 is updated in 2030.

___________________________

References

Brush, B. (2026, September 7) Counting Rescues: The Mission Metric, Five Years Later. Fire Engineering. https://www.fireengineering.com/firefighter-training/search-operations/counting-rescues-the-missing-metric-five-years-later

Crowe, R. P., Fernandez, A. R., Treichel, A., Gardner, B., & Myers, B. (2026) 2026 Fire Service Index: Incidents and Best Practices For Fire Departments. ESO Solutions.

Featured photo: Brady, M. (2013, April 26) Townhouse Fire in Largo – Harry S. Truman Drive. Prince George’s County Fire/EMS. https://pgfdpio.blogspot.com/2013/04/townhouse-fire-in-largo-harry-s-truman.html [The feature image is not related to the war story.]

Original Brickers

I was a fire cadet¹ when the community college celebrated its 10th anniversary. Staff, administrators, and faculty who opened the college – using industrial park warehouses for classrooms and construction trailers for administration offices – were recognized as “Original Brickers.”

Some of the most dedicated and enthusiastic teachers I met at the college were Original Brickers. They were happy to focus on teaching five classes each semester, the focus of a community college, instead of the research, publishing, and service work expected at a university.

Community college faculty land in the sweet spot where the focus is on teaching and assistance to students, and have the responsibility to develop and propose solutions for curriculum, degree requirements, and other aspects of student learning rather than have those solutions come down from top administrators. 

Smith, B. (2013 September) In the Beginning: The Role of Community College Faculty. Academic Senate for California Community Colleges

An Unexpected Assignment

Around the 20th anniversary, I started as an adjunct (part-time) faculty member with a freshly earned Bachelor’s degree. The full-time Fire Science faculty had shrunk from two to one. Just before the semester began, the Fire Science program director unexpectedly left for an industrial loss management job in a different time zone.

I was a shift-work Fire Lieutenant. The assistant dean asked the fire chief to let me cover the program director position until the college could hire a replacement.

I sought advice from Original Brickers. Like senior firefighters, they had institutional knowledge that mattered but was never written down. They shared their frustrations and disappointments as they watched resources shrink while enrollment skyrocketed.

Almost all of them complained about the new health sciences building. It took “forever” for the committee to complete the specifications. Then it took two years for the state to authorize funding. A recession after construction started required the building to shrink by 20%. This disappointed the paramedic program, which had advocated so hard for their new space.

I met my first wife while teaching a summer EMT refresher course in the construction trailer that was used as the paramedic classroom during the Fall and Spring semesters. Dating started after the last night of the course.

A Planned But Chilly Assignment

When the 40th anniversary came around, I was retired from the fire department, divorced, had a master’s degree, and was completing a four year run as the full-time Fire Science program head. One of my office mates was an Original Bricker. Professor H (Social Sciences) and I taught one online class and four face-to-face classes, including Tuesday and Thursday nights, so we could take Fridays off.

We worked in one of the original campus buildings. It was a 1965 two-story, unsprinklered cinder block building with an overloaded electrical system and worn-out HVAC. In the first year using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone service, our phones stopped working during registration week. We didn’t have enough bandwidth to support both activities.

I bought a personal Blackboard learning management system license because the community college learning management system could not handle the audiovisual and document-heavy online courses I developed for a fire officer career development initiative.

Late 1960s construction view (NVCC archives)

We worked in a cluster of five faculty offices that opened into the program administrative assistant’s workspace, across the hallway from the classrooms. Professor H’s approach to work reminded me of firefighters who have “retired on duty.” His online introduction/overview class met the college requirements but was poorly constructed and glitchy. Professor H was “one-and-done” and did not address any issues with the online course, stating, “the Information Technology staff should handle these issues.” Smoking was prohibited in the building, but after the assistant dean left for the day, the Marlboros came out.

Power To The … Administrators

I could see my breath in the faculty office in the mornings and late evenings when the outside temperature was below 40 degrees. Portable space heaters overloaded the already strained electrical service and tripped the breaker immediately.

Only the maintenance crew had the key to the electrical room. Much shame followed if you plugged in a portable heater and shut the office down. It could be a while before the electricity returned, since the short-handed maintenance crew covered seven buildings on campus. Shutting down our offices also shut off power to the buildings’ only industrial-grade copier. I learned that during my rookie semester as full-time faculty … shame on me.

Every year I submitted a budget item for a temporary heating solution. Every year I was denied. I was told that the building had been identified for renovation. My research found that while state inmates must be in buildings within a specified temperature range, state employees are not.

A Sad Original Bricker Retirement

Professor H, who was in his 70’s, took an old school approach to staying warm on winter nights. He went over to the steak restaurant and drank enough alcohol to get a warm buzz before his 7 pm lecture. It was 9:55 pm, and I was getting the end-of-week paperwork done after a Thursday night lecture. I noticed the distinct odor of Class A smoke.

It was coming from Professor H’s office. I opened his office door and encountered a cloud of smoke. Professor H was slumped in his chair, and flames were coming from the trash can. I wheeled him out to the hallway, dumped my Diet Coke into the burning trash can, closed his office door, and called 9-1-1.

It was a small fire contained to the trash can. Some smoke damage in the office. Professor H was now wide awake and refusing to let the firefighter/paramedics touch him.

The next Tuesday night, I could hear the assistant dean shouting at Professor H through my closed office door. Professor H retired at the end of the Spring semester.

Original Building Scheduled for Replacement By 2032

This spring, the state announced federal funding to replace the existing underground utility and HVAC system on campus. The new utility/HVAC system will be in the basement of the building that will replace the two story 1965 classroom and science labs facility I spent so much time in. The assistant dean was right in 2004, the building was scheduled for renovation.

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¹Fire cadets were part-time student firefighters who worked 21 hours a week on day work, rotating through fire stations and the 911 dispatch center. The rest of the time we took fire science classes at the community college. I worked at Dunn Loring 13, Great Falls 12, the 911 center, and Fairfax City 3. Because I already had an EMT card, I almost always rode the ambulance.

Elements, identifiers, and sequence of events may be altered in “war stories” to protect the innocent or work better as an example.

Featured image: Students on campus in 1978; the building I worked in is at the top of the picture. NVCC archives.

By 2010, Tysons Corner had 46 million square feet of office and retail space, including two regional shopping malls. Weekday population was 105,000 office and retail workers, 55,000 shoppers, and about 17,000 residents (Fairfax County, 2014). The Emerald City uses 1% of the county land and generates 7% of tax revenue. In 2024 that resulted in a net tax surplus of $154M to the county (Woolsey, 2024). The Tysons business district houses 25% of available county office space and 12.5% of county retail space.

Protecting the Emerald City

These war stories look at Tysons Corner Fire Station 29, which anchors the west end of the Emerald City. Prior to late 2021, Dunn Lorning 13 covered the east end, Vienna 2 covered the south end, and McLean 1 covered the north end. Four engine companies, a truck company, a tower company, and a heavy rescue company. As a teenaged McLean volunteer firefighter, I was hanging on to the backstep of Engine 1’s 1970 Pirsch as we raced down Chain Bridge Road to an overnight alarm activation at Tysons Corner Mall.

Scotts Run 44 opened in September 2021, staffing a paramedic engine company, paramedic ambulance, and the reassigned heavy rescue company from the McLean fire station. McLean Rescue Squad 1 eventually became Rescue Company 2 and operates out of 44 as part of the reorganized special operations division.

Modified from 2024 map of the Tysons Corner planning district. The author added the fire stations.

Fire Station 29 opened in December 1978 as one of seven new county fire stations built to support the county’s rapid growth from a rural and agricultural community to an urban one. Back-to-back recruit schools trained firefighters to staff the new fire stations. Tysons Corner 29 opened with an engine company, 100′ tiller ladder truck, EMT ambulance, and a battalion chief’s office.

When the station opened, I was working on Vienna Medic 2 as an EMS Firefighter II (paramedic). About 40% of Medic 2’s responses were in Tysons Corner. McLean Medic 1 covered the other side of the Emerald City. Dunn Loring Ambulance 13, one of the county’s busiest EMT ambulances, and Tysons Ambulance 29 completed primary EMS transport coverage in Tysons.

Picture from Tysons Reporter (2020) https://www.tysonsreporter.com/2020/12/02/fairfax-county-moves-forward-with-planned-tysons-fire-station-upgrade/

New Tysons Fire Station Runs 14 to 20 Activated Fire Alarm Calls Every Day

The original dispatch for an activated fire alarm in a commercial or multi-family occupancy with no report of smoke or fire was two engines and a truck company. Some new commercial occupancies in Tysons Corner announced themselves by having two to three activated fire alarms every 24 hours during their first weeks of operation. At some point, the department reduced alarm-activation response to one fire company.

Looking From The Code Enforcement Office

It took years for the county to pass a faulty fire alarm ordinance. This ordinance reduced, but did not eliminate, the Emerald City’s faulty fire alarm activations. If the fire official determines that faulty equipment caused the alarm activation and it was the third faulty activation in 90 days:

• The owner or occupant is required to run a witnessed test of the faulty fire alarm system
• Follow-up inspections from non compliance or reinspection:
  • $216 per hour per inspector
  • $432 per hour per inspector for after hours or overtime inspections (Fairfax County, 2026)

Risk Management Near Miss and an “Adaptive” Rescue Squad 1 Response.

Within 29’s response area is a high-rise retirement home for residents aged 62 and older, with 274 apartments. It opened in 1976 and generates one or more activated alarm calls a day for shower steam, burnt toast, and other cooking misadventures. Under the single-company dispatch protocol to an activated fire alarm with no report of smoke or fire, Engine 29 arrived solo and reported smoke showing and a resident needing an aerial rescue from a balcony … during a heavy snowstorm.

The after-action analysis of this multiple-alarm incident reclassified this high-rise retirement home as a high life-safety hazard. This required a commercial box alarm assignment for every activated alarm report: 3 engines, 1 truck, 1 heavy rescue, and a battalion chief. In the mid-1980s, I was a career Fire Sergeant with HazMat Rescue Squad 1 in McLean.

Photo from the McLean Volunteer Fire Department. 1980 GMC Brigadier/Salisbury 250/200.

I was troubled by the leisurely response when Squad 1 was dispatched to the high-rise retirement home for alarm bells. The chauffeur explained that he would not start hauling ass until Engine 29 marked on scene or there was a report of a working incident. When Engine 29 marked on scene, the officer would immediately cancel the rest of the box alarm response, “… holding Engine and Truck 29.”

The chauffeur pointed out that if Squad 1 hauled ass immediately, Engine 29 would cancel the response after the squad passed the McLean business district and went into the suburbs. That would require a long drive back to the station. By driving slower, the squad could turn right at the end of the shopping center and return to quarters easily. With the Squad getting immediately canceled on almost every run to the high-rise retirement home, the station commander was fine with this adaptive response.

Commanding Engine 29: The Alarm Activations Never Stop

After three great years as the boss of Engine 9 on “The Highway,” I was encouraged to accept a transfer to Tysons to prepare for my next promotional exam. It worked, but that’s another story. When I arrived in the 1990s, Tysons 29 had a paramedic engine, a 135′ rear-mount aerial, a paramedic ambulance, and Battalion 2’s office.

1984 E-One Hurricane 135′ rearmount. Picture from Sanders Apparatus Photography. https://sandersap.smugmug.com/

While Engine 9 and Engine 29 had a similar number of runs each day, the work differed significantly. Engine 9, C-shift, operated at a room-and-contents or larger structure fire about every three weeks, including a couple of fires a year that escalated to greater alarms. I was four months into my assignment at Engine 29 when we handled a well-involved auto fire in a parking lot. It was the first fire we used a 1.75″ attack line since my arrival.

Engine 29 did go to a couple of structure fires in a year. It was the only time I was first arriving and laid dual supply lines into a well-involved two-story vacant commercial building that required an elevated master stream. Another shift caught a greater alarm fire in the service bay of a luxury car dealership.

Engine 29 (1986 E-One Hurricane 1250/500) at a Battalion 2 multiple-company drill. The officer’s west coast style door mirror is different because the original one was pulverized while responding through a Dulles Toll Road toll booth. The officer’s window was down. It took a while to get the mirror shards out of the cab, gear, and my hair.

Checking the Mobile Data Terminal At 2:30 AM

Before the department decided to send a fire company to every EMS call, few suppression rigs were on the air in the middle of the night. It was the second week at Engine 29 when I checked who else was up as we cleared another faulty commercial fire alarm. It was my buddy JC, commanding Engine 11, “The Pride of the Highway.” JC was responding as an EMS first responder because the three normally nearest EMT or paramedic ambulances were on other calls.

Engine 29 was still handling 6 to 10 activated fire alarms every 24 hours. Most were from faulty systems, a few were accidental, and rare cases involved a sprinkler head ripped out by a mechanical mishap. In the winter, Fire Prevention mobilized the Tysons “frozen pipes” task force. They handled hundreds of frozen/broken fire protection system incidents every winter. An older, sprawling 1988-era garden apartment community experienced broken pipes in almost every building every winter. Cheap construction with inadequate insulation. The rental apartments were converted to condominiums in the 2000s.

A Thanksgiving Surprise

Hilton Hotels gifted us a fantastic Thanksgiving Day buffet. In the months before, they struggled with a malfunctioning fire alarm system at their flagship hotel next to their headquarters building. We responded to the hotel about a dozen times while the system was being repaired. Then the hotel had a major middle-of-the-night water leak, which I may have documented as 30 minutes of salvage (squeegee) skill training on the monthly report.

Evacuating the original America Online (AOL) headquarters

America Online’s original headquarters and operational center was at the end of Westwood Center Drive, 0.7 miles from the fire station. One Sunday morning, we stood by as a locomotive-sized back-up electric generator was helicoptered behind the building. A few months later, we started responding almost every week for an activated fire alarm in the middle of the night. The building was staffed 24 hours a day, and the overnight security staff wouldn’t let us in to locate the alarm. They waited for us to arrive, reported they found nothing, then reset the alarm panel, and told us to scram.

I spent two years as a supervising assistant fire marshal in code enforcement. Under the statewide fire prevention code, the fire marshal can order an emergency evacuation or fire watch when buildings face severe hazards, active fires, or compromised fire protection systems. Each shift had a duty assistant fire marshal to perform initial fire investigations and handle significant life safety code problems on evenings and weekends.

The AOL alarms were irritating but hadn’t become a significant problem. The building was sprinklered and the faulty alarm pattern pointed to dirty detectors. We submitted the faulty alarm paperwork to Code Enforcement. A couple of weeks later, the duty assistant fire marshal showed up at the fire station Saturday with the signed paperwork. The fire marshal was to hand-deliver it on Monday. Later that night, when we got an activated fire alarm call to AOL, the duty fire marshal added to the response.

It was epic. The security force tried to tell us to scram. The assistant fire marshal pointed out that the building clearly had a compromised fire protection system and ordered a complete evacuation. There was pushback until the fire marshal pointed out that he would arrest them if they obstructed the evacuation or interfered with the firefighters.

We located the defective detector – it was filthy. The workspace smelled like a guy’s college dorm room. The AOL manager on duty received the fire marshal’s order to correct the faulty alarm and perform a witnessed system test. Within a couple of weeks, the faulty alarm calls stopped.

Months later, Engine 29 responded to a 1 am EMS call at AOL. I noticed that a different security force was working in the building.

Scotts Run Fire Station 44

The county’s comprehensive plan for the Tysons Corner urban center creates eight neighborhoods. Four of the neighborhoods center on the Silver Line Metro Transit stations, creating intense, mixed-use (about 65% office and 20% residential), walkable downtowns. The Tysons Tracker reports 59.8 million square feet of developed space within 328 buildings in 2024. Almost all the spaces have central station monitored smoke detectors, and about 85% have automatic fire sprinklers.

Scotts Run, opened in September 2021, is in the neighborhood around the McLean Metro station, Tysons East. The current Tysons Corner fire station is within the neighborhood around the Spring Hill Metro station, the Tysons West neighborhood.

Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department picture

Recessionary Budget Revision Eliminates 24 hour service in Tysons East, July 11, 2025

A reduction in tax revenues led the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors to require all agencies to reduce their Fiscal Year 2026 expenditures. The Fire and Rescue Department had to cut $2.9 million dollars. While there were no layoffs, two rescue companies were permanently closed, and an engine company, tower company, and rescue company shifted from 24/7 staffing to 14-hour staffing, Monday through Saturday, from 5 am to 7 pm.

Franconia Tower Ladder 5, Scotts Run Engine 44, and Scotts Run Rescue 2 are now called Peak Time units. In a Fiscal Year 2024 EMS reorganization, Scotts Run Medic 44 became EMT staffed Ambulance 44. Ambulance 44 remains staffed 24/7.

A New Tysons Corner Fire Station in 2029

The Tysons Corner fire station is three minute walk to the Spring Hill Silver Line Metro station, making this parcel highly desirable for developers. By Summer 2029, a new five-bay fire station will be co-located with a five-bay bus transit facility at the intersection of the Dulles Toll Road, Jones Branch Road, and Spring Hill Road. This moves the fire station into the North Central neighborhood.

Fairfax County. https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/publicworks/capital-projects/tysons-fire-station-29-and-bus-transit-facility

Grimm + Parker Architects. https://www.grimmandparker.com/projects/tysons-fire-station-bus-transit

_____________________________________________

Elements, identifiers, and sequence of events may be altered in “war stories” to protect the innocent or work better as an example.

Fairfax County (2014, April 29) Fairfax County Comprehensive Plan, 2013 Edition: Tysons Corner Urban Center. https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/planning-development/sites/planning-development/files/assets/documents/comprehensiveplan/planhistoric/2013/area2/tysons/4-29-2014%20areawide%20recommendations.pdf

Fairfax County (2024, October 22) Tysons Tracker: Monitoring Comprehensive Plan Implementation. https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/tysons/sites/tysons/files/Assets/Documents/pdf/annual_reports/2024-Tysons-Tracker.pdf

Garreau, J. (1992). Edge City: Life on the New Frontier. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Office of the Fire Marshal. (2026). Billable Services & Fees. Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department. https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/fire-ems/fire-marshal/billable-services-fees

Woolsey, A. (2024, December 13). Tysons makes more tax revenue for Fairfax County than it receives, study finds. FFX Now. https://www.ffxnow.com/2024/12/13/tysons-makes-more-tax-revenue-for-fairfax-county-than-it-receives-study-finds/

Featured photo. The McLean Metro station and part of the Tysons East neighborhood. 2020, Duane Lempke Photography, CC BY-SA 4.0.

At that moment, no formal mobilization orders had been issued. Every metropolitan Washington, D.C., fire department had plans in place to respond to a major emergency. The second plane crash mobilized hundreds of responders before orders were issued. Members of Fairfax County’s Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) Team began mobilizing in anticipation of deployment to New York City.

I was about a mile away from the airport when I heard WTOP News Radio reporting smoke coming from the Pentagon. I have posted a link to Dave Statter’s (STATter911) description of reporting on the Pentagon attack. https://statter911.com/2025/09/11/september-11-2001-7/

Setting Up The Fire and Rescue Academy for a USAR Deployment

For an 80-person Heavy USAR team deployment, Virginia Task Force 1 needed to head to Andrews Air Force Base in Prince George’s County, Maryland, within four hours of a State Department notification. That required an equal number of folks to support USAR team deployments for both international and national missions. In 2001, the Fire and Rescue Academy served as the team’s staging area and assembly point.

This picture shows a recent USAR deployment from the facility that replaced the academy as a staging and assembly point.

When I was assigned to the academy as a uniformed officer, my “… and related duties” included setting the facility up for USAR deployments on evenings, holidays, or weekends. That meant driving the academy rigs out of the high-bay building, converting the four multi-purpose classrooms into a single room, and opening the USAR communications cache. I retired 14 months before 9/11 and, for the only time, regretted that decision.

I still worked at the academy as a part-time civilian instructor. I listened to the chaos on news radio while driving to the academy. Responding to a major USAR event in our front yard disrupted normal protocols, as some of the on-duty USAR team leaders were heading to the Pentagon or into Arlington County as first responders.

When I got to the academy, the uniformed staff was deployed. The recently hired civilian specialist who remained at the academy had not been trained to set up the facility for USAR staging. While explaining what I was going to do, we watched the first tower collapse on live television. I set the academy up for USAR staging and assembly. It was neither heroic nor lifesaving, but it left me with a small feeling of accomplishment on a terrible day.

Telling The First Responder’s Story

Picture of Fort Myers Fire and Rescue Foam 161 at the heliport fire station.

Northern Virginia uses a multiple-jurisdiction automatic aid system using a single radio system. The initial response to the Pentagon included Fort Myers Fire and Rescue, the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority at Reagan National Airport, and the Arlington County Fire Department. Technically, Fort Myers Foam 161 was the first unit on the scene, but the rig, the heliport fire station, and the three civilian firefighters were impacted by the crash.

For the tenth anniversary of the attack, Journal of Emergency Medical Services editor A. J. Heightman interviewed the fire-rescue leaders who responded to the Pentagon and described the planning Arlington County Fire Chief Ed Plaugher did before the attack. Part III of Out Of Darkness covers the Pentagon. https://www.jems.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/911-0911.pdf

A Six-Part Video Record of Pentagon Operations

A three-person team from the Fire Emergency Training Network (FETN)¹ was filming at the Baltimore Fire Department. They got to the Pentagon around noon. This 25th anniversary remembrance includes their recordings.

https://youtu.be/1JiJg06Yh6k

The Family Left Behind

Sally Jenkins wrote a moving feature article about Rescue 4 Lieutenant Kevin Dowdell, what happened on 9/11, and what has happened to his wife and two sons since 2001. It is worth your time to read the Atlantic article. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/09/fallen-september-11-firefighter-family/687964/

James holds his father’s Halligan bar. Haruka Sakaguchi for The Atlantic.

John Feal (2026) I Will Follow You Anywhere: The True Story of the 9/11 Responders Who Took On Congress

Published this month, it describes the 15-year effort by 9/11 responders to fully fund the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act of 2010, a federal 9/11 victim compensation fund. It provides a rogue approach to the ground game of representative government, empowering readers in all walks of life to take on the system and win.

I hope this book gives the reader some insight and nuance into the man who has taken me on an invaluable fifteen-year odyssey of frustration, tenacity, resilience, camaraderie, and into the lessons in selflessness and compassion he has graciously bestowed. I would follow him anywhere … although as I mentioned earlier, it is sometimes not easy given how short he is. (Forward by Jon Stewart, 2025.)

__________________

¹Fire Emergency Training Network (FETN) closed in 2008.

Feal, J., & Daly, C. (2026). I Will Follow You Anywhere. BenBella Books, Inc. ISBN 9781637748756. https://benbellabooks.com/shop/i-will-follow-you-anywhere/

Heightman, A. J. (2011, September). Out of Darkness, Volume III: Strike on the Pentagon. Journal of Emergency Medical Services. https://www.jems.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/911-0911.pdf

Jenkins, S. (2026, September). The Man Who Refused To Sit On The Sidelines: Kevin Dowdell, a lieutenant in an elite FDNY rescue unit, taught his sons to take action. When he disappeared on 9/11, they went to Ground Zero to search for him. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/09/fallen-september-11-firefighter-family/687964/

Statter, D. (2025, September 11). September 11, 2001: The Attack at the Pentagon, STATer911. https://statter911.com/2025/09/11/september-11-2001-7/

The 9/11 Legacy Foundation (2001/2026) The Pentagon Response: A Series of Rememberance [YouTube] https://youtu.be/1JiJg06Yh6k

Ward. M. J. (2002, April). Attack on the Pentagon: the initial fire & EMS response. Journal of Emergency Medical Services 27(4). 22-30,

Featured Image: Gralund, D. (2016, September 7). 9/11 Fading. Portsmouth Herald. https://www.seacoastonline.com/story/opinion/cartoons/2016/09/07/granlund-cartoon-9-11-fading/25498344007/

Consultants are used to provide experienced analysis using specialized skills. We are also hired to do the unpleasant and difficult tasks when implementing change. The ambulance agency covered a portion of a county and had 9-1-1 ambulance contracts with seven towns. Another private ambulance service covered the rest of the county. Our client’s ambulance agency was in a financial crisis.

Unsustainable Town “Exclusive Ambulance” Contracts

In this state, the towns function as EMS gatekeepers. They can designate the town’s permitted EMT-level ambulance provider. The previous owner signed “exclusive ambulance” contracts with seven towns in the county that were covered by the other ambulance service. These contracts were restrictive. The exclusive ambulance could respond only to emergencies within town borders. The exclusive ambulance had to respond to every fire department call within the town.

The process to pull town ambulances for a mass casualty incident, or to help with the Friday afternoon surge of interfacility transports from the hospital, was difficult – we would not get a timely response from the town. The rent we paid to house the town’s exclusive ambulance in some volunteer fire department buildings was above the fair market rate I could get for space in an industrial park.

About half of the exclusive-town ambulances had a transport Unit Hour Utilization of 0.08, responding to 1 or 2 calls a day.¹ The combined UHU for the town ambulances was 0.125. The only revenue was from billing for transports. Servicing the seven exclusive town 9-1-1 contracts was creating a multi-million-dollar loss for the ambulance agency. Towns refused to amend the contracts, so the client authorized us to give notice that the contracts would be terminated in 120 days.

Working The Change Process

The first step was to meet with leadership in each town, explain the situation, and propose a solution. For the town described in the opening paragraph, we offered to continue using the town fire station as a post for the rudimentary system status management we were implementing for ambulance deployment.

For all seven towns, there would be no exclusive town ambulance contract. If they stayed with us, they could not select which crew would respond to their town. The towns have three choices: they could continue to allow our ambulance agency to respond to 9-1-1 calls; they could select the ambulance service covering their side of the county; or they could do something else.

Ambulances would no longer respond to every fire company dispatch, including activated fire alarms with no report of smoke or fire. An ambulance would respond to:

• Possible working fires with trapped occupants
• Confirmed working structure fires
• Transportation accidents with injuries
• Greater alarm events
• Any situation where the on-scene fire or police incident commander requested an ambulance.

The ambulance agency will track all EMS calls into the town and provide town leadership with a monthly report on ambulance response times. The ambulance agency will identify responses that exceeded the agreed-upon response time requirement and notify town leadership the next business day. We offered to provide town hall meetings to explain the changes.

A Very Angry Fire Chief

The chief who responded to that activated fire alarm at the start of this article was the angriest. He used reverse 9-1-1 to gather a town hall meeting in the high school basketball court. That town has a few assisted living and over-55 facilities. Those residents were in the front row. Behind them were the volunteer firefighters. John Smith and Mary Doe, senior ambulance agency employees who worked the day shift on the town’s dedicated ambulance, sat behind the firefighters.

I could not understand why the fire chief was so angry. The fire department is not the town’s EMS first responder. The fire company does not have an AED. The town police respond with lights and siren to every EMS 9-1-1 call. Patrol vehicles have an AED. They arrive within two to three minutes. In the past five years, all but one of the cardiac arrest resuscitations in the seven towns included a police-operated AED.

Diving Deeper

I later learned that the angry volunteer fire chief documented fire company/fire chief response to fire incidents using the town ambulance response time. The two- to 10-minute fire company/fire chief response times reported to the mayor and town council were based on ambulance response times; the actual fire company/fire chief response time was much longer. This had been going on for a while.

The most senior ambulance agency employee, Joe Smith, retired when the exclusive ambulance contract ended. Smith started a dozen years ago with the ambulance agency assigned to this town. He did not work at any other ambulance assignment. A few years into this assignment, Smith joined the volunteer fire department. The fire chief justified using the ambulance response time to the mayor because Smith was a VFD member.

Mary Doe, his partner, started on the town ambulance seven years ago. She moved to a weekday surge unit but left the agency within three months. The surge ambulance did 4 to 8 transports in 12 hours, while the town ambulance averaged 0.7 transports in 24 hours.

Six towns stayed with our ambulance agency. Moving from many slow, exclusive town ambulances to regional coverage for the towns with a basic system status management deployment raised Unit Hour Utilization from 0.125 to 0.30. The ambulance response times to the towns increased by an average of 2.2 minutes. The previous owner was “planting his flag” with these ambulance contracts in towns on the other side of the county, hoping to push out the other ambulance service. The town contract with the angry fire chief was losing almost half a million dollars a year.

____________________________________

¹ Unit Hour Utilization is a High-Performance EMS metric calculating the time-on-task workload of a staffed ambulance per hour.

Elements, identifiers, and sequence of events may be altered in “war stories” to protect the innocent or work better as an example.

Featured picture: Action Ambulance. (2026, February 10). Our Ossipee Valley crew has been busy at work. Thank you to everyone who has helped out! [Instagram] https://www.instagram.com/p/DUmw9cFjqUt/

P.S.: Here is a different view on the issue of EMS-only staff doing firefighting tasks

Davis, J. (2026, August 21). Somerset EMS, fire chiefs revive plan to cooperate on fire calls: ‘We don’t want to start nothing else,’ commission president says. The Baltimore Sun. https://www.baltimoresun.com/2026/08/21/somerset-county-ems-volunteer-fire-calls-policy/

Fire officials say the county’s volunteer firefighters are aging, and new members have been harder to find. County EMS crews are often first to fire scenes, yet current policy can leave them standing by while shorthanded fire companies get to work.

Somerset took over county EMS late last year, while volunteer fire companies remained independent. Some fear the county eventually wants to absorb them, despite repeated denials by commissioners.

County officials said no one is asking an ambulance crew to put on a mask and charge into a burning building. The request is simpler: If a hose needs pulling, a hydrant needs connecting or tools need carrying, don’t make trained hands stand by and watch.

With that, Somerset County officials and volunteer fire chiefs are developing a policy allowing county EMS crews to provide that kind of assistance, reviving a plan that collapsed amid fears of a county-run fire department.

The EMS Systems course has been taught at three universities. I have been through four textbooks, five learning management systems, and many initiatives to better engage students. The Fall 2026 version of the course for Idaho State University barely resembles the original course I developed for The George Washington University.

No Textbook

When the National Fire Academy issued the Fire and Emergency Services Higher Education (FESHE) EMS Model curriculum, textbook publishers responded as they did with the earlier Fire Science curricula, providing one or two textbooks for every course. There were 16 textbooks covering the FESHE EMS curriculum. Unfortunately, the market for EMS textbooks is tiny. By Spring 2023, there were three FESHE EMS textbooks with 2015 to 2017 copyright dates. About 50% of their content was obsolete. The publishers said that they were not planning to update or replace these textbooks. EMS 3300 went textbook-free in Fall 2024.

Working Backward To Develop Content

Rewriting the course without a textbook required looking backward. What content would satisfy the course objectives (measurable outcomes of the student competency) and stay within the course description and the curriculum goals? Peer-reviewed research, industry or special interest group white papers, trade journal articles, and webinars provide current information in place of the textbook. Linking them together for an online course meant that the lectures became longer and many of the slides became wordier. Last summer, I crowdsourced EMS 3300 on LinkedIn to update course content.

Using Simulation To Demonstrate Student Competencies

EMS 3300 provides the “big picture” of EMS by creating a commercial 9-1-1 and interfacility ambulance service to demonstrate course competencies, including staff scheduling and fleet replacement. We start by evaluating a Request for Proposal to replace a hospital-based ambulance service supplemented by community volunteer ambulances with a single ambulance service system serving a two-county suburban-rural jurisdiction. Each week, the students apply the concepts or processes covered in the lecture to the fictional River County EMS through an individual assignment, small group exercise, or a graded problem-solving assessment.

The Only Constant is Change

I thought that last summer’s crowdsourcing provided a nice bolus of updated content for the textbook-free course. This summer I planned to coast with a few course tweaks, like finding a new state contract showing the cost of purchasing or remounting an ambulance.

Yikes, I was wrong. Five of the 14 lectures needed major rewrites. The introduction to the 2026 AIMHI High Performance / High Value EMS Benchmark Survey describes the current EMS industry environment:

Emergency Medical Services is undergoing one of the most significant periods of transformation in its history. Workforce shortages, rising operating costs, reimbursement challenges, increasing clinical complexity, and growing expectations for patient-centered care are fundamentally changing how EMS systems are designed, managed, and evaluated. At the same time, EMS has expanded well beyond its traditional role as a transportation service, becoming an essential component of the healthcare continuum, public health infrastructure, and community resilience. (AIMHI, 2026, p. 1)

AIMHI’s benchmark report release inspired this post. On July 10th, I completed my course update for EMS 3300 and loaded the lectures, PowerPoints, and the peer-reviewed journal articles, industry white papers, trade journal articles, and links to webinars onto the ISU learning management system. The AIMHI benchmark was issued July 30th. Had to update two lectures, one assignment, one mid-term exam problem, and add the AIMHI 2026 benchmark survey document as required reading.

Oh, and while doing the final edit of this article, I watched a great interview of Hilary Gates and Bob Davis, 6 Minutes to Live: Why Your ZIP Code Can Determine Cardiac Arrest Survival on Derek Hanley’s The DOHP Signal. https://youtu.be/C4e4edSN5t0

We are living in interesting times.

AIMHI (2026) 2026 AIMHI High Performance / High Value EMS Benchmark Survey: Organizational, Operational, Clinical and Financial Benchmarks from North America’s Leading EMS Systems. Academy of International Mobile Healthcare Integration. https://aimhi.mobi/benchmarking-resources/

It was quarter to one a.m., and I was wide awake in the shift leader’s office. I was the boss of Engine 28 and responsible for the safety of my crew.

The fire suppression books I memorized for the promotion exam were authored by big city chiefs who worked with fire companies staffed with four to six firefighters and supported by a rapid arrival of command officers. There was no way a two-person truck company could perform the initial fireground tasks that a heavily staffed Fire Department of New York (FDNY) truck company could accomplish.

The county was evolving from a coalition of rural/suburban volunteer fire companies to an urban county fire department, which would be accomplished years later.

When I was sleepless in Seven Corners, we had daywork career battalion chiefs, three or two-person fire crews, rudimentary SOPs, and the beginnings of an incident management system. It was a very different environment than FDNY.

As a fire officer candidate, you would respond to an assessment center scenario with everything you remembered. The sequence of factoids was not as important as it was to get every item ticked-off in the assessor’s checklist to get the highest score.

I struggled as a paramedic student. The “nice to know” trivia factoids interfered with what I needed to know to get credentialed, and I was having the same problem now.

As the boss of Engine 28, I needed to do the right things first when arriving at a structure fire with our three-person engine company. Ironically, I recalled something from a retired FDNY Chief of Department that provided focus.

Edward P. McAniff’s book Leadership in the Fire Service, was on our promotional exam reading list. The IAFF local hired McAniff and Associates to deliver a preparation class, as this was our first exam to use an assessment center.

Chief McAniff said: “The goal of the first arriving engine is to advance an attack line and gain control of the interior stairs.”

That worked for me. A couple of weeks later, I applied this concept.

At 8 p.m., we were dispatched to an “Across from …” structure fire. We arrived at a single-level home four blocks south of the fire station. Fire was showing from the roof. A car was in the driveway, and lights were on in the house. After no response to our banging on the door, we forced the door open and advanced the 1.5” attack line.

There was no smoke or heat in the house. The second arriving engine company got to the rear and reported a fire coming from the natural gas regulator that spread to the soffit. When we opened the attic stairs, we found the fire.

The attic was finished with a hardwood floor and jammed with a lifetime of items from international travel. Overhauling the attic took a couple of hours using two engines and a truck company. The occupants were having dinner at a restaurant.

Returning at 1 a.m. for a fire watch check, we watered down the pile of steaming international debris in the front yard. I slept well that night.

Featured image: Shutterstock

“IT IS CHEAPER TO PAY OVERTIME THAN CREATE MORE POSITIONS”

There has been a long dance over what staffing a fire department needs to meet its operational requirements. Jurisdictions are resistant to creating new full-time positions, as they require 137% funding to cover salary, worker compensation, annual/sick leave, training, personal protective gear, and other human resource expenditures.

From my professional experience, the jurisdictional administrators and elected leaders struggle with the concept of having a workforce where there are more full-time equivalents (FTEs) on duty than the minimum required seats to fill.

As Steven Knight points out:

Using my old department as an example, the staffing was determined on a legacy basis and that legacy pre-dated most, if not all, of the institutional knowledge. For example, the department staffed five personnel for every seat on an engine, four for every seat on a truck company, and two for every seat on a rescue. While the daily minimum staffing was consistently applied, it had to overcome the inconsistency in staffing for each position. In fairness, these legacy-staffing strategies may have been compromises over the years and budget cycles, but to clearly articulate the strategy at a future moment in time proves difficult.

Knight, S. (2019 March 12) Full time, part time, overtime: How to fill fire department vacancies. firerescue1.com

LOOKING AT LOS ANGELES

In 1987 a Los Angeles County firefighter/paramedic made more money than the fire chief. That firefighter/paramedic got $59,673 in overtime pay along with his $38,811 annual salary. Firefighter/paramedic Wilson worked five consecutive 24-hour shifts a week, every week. That made the Los Angeles Times.

In the late 1990s, a single-role Los Angeles City Fire Department paramedic made significantly more money than the fire chief, working five to seven consecutive 24-hour shifts a week. At that time, Los Angeles City was losing paramedics quicker than they could hire them.

One reason was the “force hire” that ordered paramedics back to work during their scheduled time off. In 1999 there were 60 unfilled LAFD single-role paramedic positions, representing a 14% vacancy rate in the paramedic workforce. If you wanted to make sure that you could get off to take a vacation, enjoy a holiday, or attend a family event, you needed to work 96 hours of voluntary “assigned hire” overtime the previous month.

When I was looking at other fire departments pre-pandemic, the number of firefighters and paramedics willing to work overtime decreases when the number of authorized but unfilled positions exceeds 12%. This is usually when forced, or mandatory, overtime starts in earnest. After a few months of forced overtime, some departments see an increase in injuries, sick leave, retirements/resignations, and a decrease in the number of employees voluntarily signing up for overtime.

A 2015 audit of overtime resulted in the Los Angeles City Council approving the hiring of 48 additional firefighters. At that time, “420 LAFD employees earned more than $100,000 in overtime, and 19 earned more than $200,000. One Fire Captain made $311,316 in overtime on top of a $120,829 salary, for a staggering total of $448,594 in overtime pay. … a Commander at the LAFD informed the Controller’s office that the employee with $311,316 in overtime did obey all policies and procedures regarding overtime.”

Those 48 additional firefighter positions in 2015 did not end the overtime issue.

An audit of the Fiscal Year 2019 expenditures (July 2018 – June 2019) showed that “Eighteen employees of the Los Angeles Fire Department earned more than $200,000 in overtime pay last fiscal year, with one firefighter making $360,010 in overtime.”

The 2019 audit also observed that “More than 90% of sworn police and fire employees last fiscal year received overtime, earning an average of $27,737, while 40% of the city’s general employees, defined as other sworn and civilian workers, received such pay. That group earned an average of $7,528.”

Last week Company Commander posted an article that reported “A captain in the department made $434,394 in overtime in 2021, pushing their gross pay to $598,532 to become the highest-paid employee in the city that year. Another fire captain made $420,055 in overtime, pushing that person’s gross pay to $593,314 in 2021. That person was the second-highest paid employee in the city, according to city payroll records. A firefighter with a base salary of $129,638 made $411,606 in overtime, making that firefighter’s total compensation $554,056.

There were 86 employees in the fire department who made $400,000 or more in 2021. However, the highest ranking employee was not among those. The fire chief made $338,624, or nearly $250,000 less than the fire captain.”

AN ANNUAL DANCE OF MEDIA FUELED OUTRAGE

In many jurisdictions, this dance of overtime outrage occurs every year. Most of the media articles blame or shame the individuals that worked overtime, ignoring the elected officials and public safety leadership that developed and implemented policies that generate overtime. 

Company Commander posts these articles not to pile on blame or shame, but to share examples of the staffing and budgeting issues that every jurisdiction faces. The ICMA and Center for Public Safety Excellence white paper on 21st Century Fire and Emergency Services identified two themes:

• First, the past strategies of deferring conclusive action on critical issues with short-term solutions and leaving them for the next set of leadership is not a sustainable strategy for the future. To continue to do so will worsen the eventual correction(s) that will have to be made.
• Second, we must begin recruiting talent with the mindset, skill sets, and resolve to help build a core organizational culture that can adapt and respond to rapid changes and that are not vested in a 20th century fire service paradigm or antiquated local government bureaucracy.

This white paper may serve as a starting point to change the conversation with jurisdictional leaders and elected officials. We need to develop a new narrative promoting appropriate organizational staffing to meet the expanded and complex role that a fire/rescue department performs in 2022.

AN OBSERVATION ABOUT THE FREQUENCY OF OVERTIME POSTS

Company Commander also posts articles that describe closed fire companies and reduced staffing that some jurisdictions are forced to do to stay within their authorized overtime budget. In terms of number of posts, there are about four times as many posts about closed fire companies, reduced staffing, or “browned-out” fire companies as there are about overtime earnings.

Featured picture: “Firefighters Defend Neighborhood Structures as Hollywood Theater Goes Up in Flames.” LAFD.org. 7/13/2022

Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest Research

Dr. Peter Safar conducted a number of experiments at John Hopkins University using expired-air ventilation with closed chest massage on human volunteers in the late 1950’s. “Closed-chest massage should be preceded and accompanied by pulmonary ventilation,” noting that the Baltimore City Hospital’s technique involved one operator inflating the lungs every five seconds, followed by a second operator providing four sternal compressions at one second intervals.

Closed chest massage was endorsed as in the United States as a:

• medical procedure in 1962
• reclassified as an emergency procedure in 1965
• Committee of Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation emphasized the A-B-C-D formula for resuscitation in 1966.

Baltimore City Fire Department Battalion Chief Martin McMahon encouraged his “ambulance men” to volunteer to be sedated so lung air exchange volumes could be determined when looking at different artificial ventilation techniques at John Hopkins University – including expired-air ventilation.

Out-of-hospital cardiac arrest research + The Great Society + federal response to traffic trauma = United States Emergency Medical Services

City “emergency” hospitals often included ambulance service at the start of the 20th century. (Burgess) Public safety organizations – police/fire/ambulance – got more involved in ambulance service after World War II. There was uneven coverage and levels of service.

Vince Robbins writes in Management of Ambulance Services that Miami was the first “nonphysician, mobile, advanced medical treatment service in America.” This determination is based, in part, on articles published in medical scientific journals describing out-of-hospital cardiac arrest research results.

Doctor Eugene Nagel developed a 54-pound defibrillator in Miami that was as effective as John Hopkin’s original 1959, 200-pound, portable defibrillator. The first out-of-hospital resuscitation from ventricular fibrillation occurred in Miami in June 1969.

United States EMS is a child of the Great Society

The Great Society was an ambitious series of policy initiatives, legislation and programs spearheaded by President Lyndon B. Johnson (D) with the main goals of ending poverty, reducing crime, abolishing inequality and improving the environment.

The first federal funding for EMS was $16M from the newly formed Division of Emergency Medical Services within the Department of Health Education and Welfare (DHEW) in 1972 to create demonstration projects in five states.

Congress passes the 1973 EMS Systems Act that provided a 5-year $454M Great Society grant program that funded the creation of more than 300 regional EMS systems. Funding was also provided for EMS feasibility studies, planning, operations, expansion and improvement, and research. In 1974 there was also a $15M Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant that supported development of 44 EMS systems. (Shah)

Traffic Trauma

The 1966 National Academy of Sciences report on “Accidental Death and Disability” results in federal funding to establish Emergency Medical Services (EMS) as a component of the National Highway Safety Act of 1966.

A component of the National Highway Safety Act of 1966 was the improvement of emergency ambulance and rescue service to traffic collisions. This was assigned to the mission of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) within the Department of Transportation. This component included the development of a national EMS education curriculum. (Institute of Medicine)

Pittsburgh’s Hill District

The Hill District is a Pittsburgh neighborhood that often would not get the police ambulance to respond to emergency calls.

• Freedom House Enterprises was a community non-profit using grants to create African-American owned businesses
• Reached out to create a commercial ambulance service to cover the Hill and Oakland Districts
• Partnered with Presbyterian-University Hospital

Dr. Peter Safar, now working at Presbyterian-University Hospital in Pittsburgh, accepted 44 residents of the Hill district through Freedom House Enterprises in 1967. They took a 9-month training program at Presbyterian-University Hospital that included classroom and clinical rotations.

Twenty six students completed the paramedic-level training (EMT II). Paramedic ambulance service started June 16, 1968. Miami and Los Angeles County Fire Department paramedics started responding to emergencies one year later. Seattle two years later

There is a different focus between the Freedom House paramedics and the Seattle, Miami and Los Angeles programs. As a grant-funded community development project, the Freedom House paramedics started running calls as the primary caregiver from the very first day. The paramedics in Seattle, Miami and Los Angeles, because they were in a clinical research project, responded to emergencies with a nurse or physician on the unit during the first year or so. All of the paramedic programs included physician review of calls, with feedback on their clinical performance and case management.

Freedom House is the source of the National Standard Curriculum for Paramedics

The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) developed the National Standard Curricula outline using University of Pittsburgh/Freedom House 300 hour “EMT II” training program as template. I recall pages of concept and practice bullet-point lists for each of the 15 modules.

University of Pittsburgh Presbyterian-University Hospital contracted with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in 1975 to write a paramedic textbook based on the outline. Nancy Caroline, M.D., was the primary author and Walt Stoy, Ph.D./paramedic, was the principal investigator.

NHTSA projected that a textbook to be available by late August 1977. Something happened. Instead of getting 25 textbooks I was buying a “blue line” pre-publication manuscript from the Government Printing Office. I needed the manuscript to develop study guides for a paramedic course. Emergency Care In The Streets was eventually published in 1979 by Little Brown.

Freedom House Ambulance 1967-1975

Freedom House Ambulance staffed five ambulances to serve the Hill and Oakland Districts, averaging 6,000 responses a year. A 1971 University Hospital study compared “inappropriate care” delivered by the two ambulance services. The police ambulances, staffed with Advanced First Aid credentialed caregivers, delivered inappropriate care 62% of the time, Freedom House ambulances, staffed with University Hospital trained EMT and EMT II’s, delivered inappropriate care 11% of the time. (Edwards)

Matthew Edwards is a physician who researches the intersection of medical history, ethics and public policy. His look into the history of Freedom House includes identifying the situations that lead to its demise:

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In 1975 the Freedom House caregivers were paid at a much lower rate than the police, firefighters and “superambulance” personnel. Few of the Freedom House caregivers were able to thrive as employees in the city-operated EMS system. They were required to be “retrained” as city ambulance attendants.

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Safar P, Brown TC, Holtey WJ, Wilder RJ. (1961) Ventilation and circulation with closed-chest cardiac massage in man. Journal of the American Medical Association. 176:574-576.

Safar P, Escarraga LA, Elam JO. (1958) A comparison of the mouth-to-mouth and mouth-to-airway methods of artificial respiration with the chest pressure arm-lift methods. New England Journal of Medicine. 258:671–7

Rasmussen, FN. (2005 February 13) Chief Martin McMahon, 94, first-aid pioneer. The Baltimore Sun. Accessed September 8, 2020: https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-2005-02-13-0502130054-story.html

Burgess, G. (2018, April 30) Early Days of the San Francisco Emergency Service: From the Police Infirmary to Mission Emergency. Brought to Light, UCSF Archives and Special Collections. Accessed January 30, 2021: https://blogs.library.ucsf.edu/broughttolight/2018/04/30/early-days-of-the-san-francisco-emergency-service/

Robbins, V. (2015) “The History of Ambulance Services and Medical Transportation Systems in the United States” in Kirkwood, S., ed. Management of Ambulance Services. Boston: Pearson/Brady. ISBN 978-0-13-503829-2

Zeitz, J. (2018) Building the Great Society: Inside Lyndon Johnson’s White House. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 9780698191594

Committee on Trauma and Committee on Shock (1966) Accidental Death and Disability: The Neglected Disease of Modern Society. Washington DC: National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council.

Shah M. N. (2006). The formation of the emergency medical services system. American Journal of Public Health, 96(3), 414-23.

Committee of the Future of Emergency Care in the United States Health System, Board on Health Care Services (2007) Emergency Medical Services at the Crossroads. Washington DC: Institute of Medicine of the National Academies Press. ISBN 978-0-309-10174-5

Staresinic, C. (2004 February) Send Freedom House! Nobody has seen ambulance attendants like these before. PITTMED Vol 6, No 1. pp 32-34 Accessed September 14, 2020: https://www.pittmed.health.pitt.edu/Feb_2004/PittMed.pdf

Edwards, M. L. (2019) Pittsburgh’s Freedom House Ambulance Service: The Origins of Emergency Medical Services and the Politics of Race and Health. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 74(4) pp. 440-466. doe: 10.1093jhmas/jrz041