By Bill Manning
In 2004, the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation kicked off its Everyone Goes Home® program by assembling 200 fire service leaders and glitterati for an event called the Firefighter Life Safety Summit, with the purpose of developing a national plan for reducing firefighter line-of-duty deaths. I sensed, to my supreme annoyance, another "next big thing." How would this love-in change anything? Didn't we already have all the tools, all the lessons we could ever need? Hadn't we already proven that prescriptive ivory tower strategies are no substitute for what must change at the local level and on the front lines, in hearts and minds? My skeptic meter was pinned in the red zone.The last historic fire service gathering to have an impact on LODD reductions was the 1968 America Burning panel. However, since 1990, 99 firefighters on average have died each year in the line of duty (not including the 343 firefighters murdered on September 11, 2001). With 75 or more firefighter LODDs as of August 2005, sadly, it's likely that this year won't show a turnaround of any sort. Not only are we losing the equivalent of two firefighters a week: The majority of our losses, including heart attacks, are sustained while responding to fires, operating at fires, and returning from fires, which, when placed in the context of our overall declining number of fire incidents, means our death rates as a function of fire incidents are as high as they were in the late 1970s.
We're on an LODD treadmill. Fifteen years of well-intentioned attempts to institutionalize firefighter safety through broad-based prescriptive measures have failed to push us past the 100-a-year threshold. It's not inappropriate to parallel our situation with the aviation industry, whose leadership, several years back, realized that the world's best regulations, standards, research, and technology weren't preventing and, by themselves, couldn't prevent aviation disasters. They came to the conclusion that performance- and attitude-based safety problems demand performance- and attitude-based safety solutions-at the core, it's a people thing.
The first Firefighter Life Safety Summit produced nearly as many recommendations as there were participants. These were distilled into the 16 Life Safety Initiatives. At face value, the Initiatives overall may appear to some as predictable, even banal. The Summit participants didn't (and didn't need to) reinvent the wheel. Moreover, the Initiatives should be subjected one-by-one to healthy discussion and debate; after all, they're a jumping-off point and a guide, not the Word of God, as some might have it. Still, I've come to see the enormous potential of Everyone Goes Home®. It's the most promising nationally based safety program the fire service has rolled out in years, and fire departments and firefighters across America should embrace it and use it in ways that best fit local needs.
Here are 16 reasons why I support the Everyone Goes Home® (EGH) program and, as a whole, the 16 Firefighter Life Safety Initiatives:
- We need to change certain behaviors and attitudes, and arrange our systems to support and evolve with these changes. Is there any doubt about the need?
- The mission is pure and simple. The EGH name says it all.
- The vision is doable. EGH takes its impetus from the United States Fire Administration's goal of reducing LODDs by 25 percent in five years and by 50 percent in 10 years. Given the nature of our fatalities, that goal is not only thinkable but eminently doable.
- The NFFF is the right organization to administer the program and lead the implementation effort. For one thing, it's a natural fit for the NFFF, complementing and completing its mission. For another, NFFF is apolitical and fully representative, without fire service denomination. Its only agenda is to prevent firefighter LODDs, honor our fallen, and support LODD survivors.
- The entire representative and affiliated fire service community is behind EGH. That's powerful. When's the last time the entire fire service got behind anything? If the FIRE Act is your answer, you'd be wrong-it was thirty-five years ago, with America Burning. Inviting representatives from virtually every corner of the fire service to forge the Firefighter Life Safety Summit plan was brilliant, forward-thinking salesmanship.
- It's a campaign with the right message. EGH is a national safety awareness campaign not unlike national public health campaigns such as anti-smoking, anti-drugs, and so forth. They work, so long as they project the right message, they're financially sustainable, their message delivery is creative, and they're supported by government and special interest sectors. EGH meets the four criteria. It's a long-term, sustainable, "in your face" campaign, not a fad, phase, quick fix, or prescription, and that's exciting.
- Its critical message is culture change, which basically is the goal of any behavior-based campaign, the proven thinking being that people modify bad behaviors when the behaviors become culturally unacceptable. Of course, the words "culture change"-or worse, "tradition change," as some would have it or read into it-give the willies to any defender of the proud firefighting tradition. Understandably so. Anyone claiming a need to change fire service tradition either had better bring some intellectual honesty to the process or seriously soul-search as to why they got into this business in the first place. Firefighters dying at emergencies is not a tradition (nor can it be, by definition), but the sad result of continual human failures and bad behaviors before and/or during encounters with danger. Tradition isn't the reason firefighters drive recklessly or don't buckle up. It's not the reason for physical unfitness for the job, or for poor training or under-resourcing or poor fireground management. However, a culture of carelessness and irresponsibility and ignorance is the LODD breeding ground, which leads to the assumption (mistaken for tradition) that the military concept of acceptable losses applies to the fire service, that it's all "just part of the job." It's the culture of irresponsibility, with all its manifestations, that must change to a culture of safety running in parallel with our fine fire traditions.
- Its critical "change tools" are personal responsibility and group accountability. Without them, it's like having no oars to row the safety culture boat to shore. Can we honestly admit there's been an LODD where we didn't fail in our responsibility or accountability, at some level, top to bottom? Our near misses and tragic outcomes are replete with examples. It's time for our leadership to become responsible for and accountable to its membership, and time for the membership to lead by the same values, in return, from the bottom up.
- Line-of-duty injury reduction is inherent to the program. A concerned chief asked, "Why are we spending so much time and effort on 100 dead brothers and sisters when we should be focusing on 10,000 seriously injured brothers and sisters who have to live through the pain of not only the injury, but not being on the job anymore?" Ah, grasshopper! The behaviors or failures that contribute to our LODDs and those that contribute to the vast majority of our line-of-duty injuries are one in the same. Reduce LODDs and we'll reduce our injuries, by extension.
- It doesn't change the rules of engagement. And why should it? Effectiveness equals safety....Know what I mean?
- It doesn't add more rules. At least, that doesn't appear to be the primary intent. We pretty much have all the "rule tools" we could ever need or want. What we need, and what EGH promotes, is to make rule enforcement part of the culture of responsibility and accountability.
- It asks for better risk management systems, education, and training. The fire service must learn to better manage risks before, during, and after the incident. For a long time, the prevailing attitude has been to confine risk management concepts and applications to the offices of "safety geeks" who fail to grasp "the real fire service." Others have equated risk management with rules of engagement, falling far short of the intent and the mark. Still others see risk management as a brass-oriented substitute for a thinking, safety-conscious membership. Frankly, it's downright shameful that, in a business as hazardous as firefighting, so many organizations have failed to embrace and integrate risk management concepts into organizational policies applied as a way of life throughout all aspects of the operation-from prevention to training to return to quarters and everything in between.
- It promotes a zero-tolerance philosophy. Appropriately, EGH steals a page from corporate America's safety book: All injuries and deaths are preventable. And that's the right approach, if we're serious about changing. Ever hear a so-called professional instructor say, "We only had six training injuries (today, this month, this year-insert time period)"? I have. That attitude's unthinkable in the corporate emergency response world and it should be unthinkable in the American fire service. It doesn't mean we won't have injuries, but it means they're unacceptable to our way of thinking and our culture. Resigned acceptance is just as bad as a so-called cowboy mentality, and we just can't stand for it.
- It establishes a platform for interface and dialogue, encouraging a shared approach to the problem. In this way, EGH is a "living, breathing" roadmap to success.
- It takes a holistic approach to the problem. Many or most of our nationally based safety efforts are disjointed or unorganized, and they've been hit-or-miss. EGH combines multilevel solutions into a unified campaign approach. Most important, it promotes a holistic remedy, not just isolated treatments of symptoms.
- It's the right thing to do. Ya gotta believe!
These 16 reasons turned this skeptic around. They're why I support Everyone Goes Home® and why you should, too. Is EGH evolving? Yes. Does it need work? Maybe. Could we debate it? Definitely. But this program represents a long-range vision and a refreshing and promising approach to remedying what ails the fire service at its core, with its bottom line being something everyone can live with.
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