HARRY R. CARTER, Ph.D., MIFireE

A chance comment during a recent phone conversation with my great friend in the Fire Service, Harold Richardson of Nova Scotia tickled the think button on the left side of my brain. During the course of our recent discussions on the future course of fire service training in that lovely Canadian province, he asked me to identify a particular quotation. Needless to say, I was initially stumped, and we moved on to the topic of a new and improved training system for the province. But a though kept rumbling around in my brain.

After we had parted telephonic company, his comments kept nagging at me and eventually they led me to reach for one of my favorite books, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. Let me share the question he asked with you. Quite simply he asked if I could tell him who said, "No man is an island"? I could not and told him so. But after a quick journey to the reference world I found that those famous words had been uttered by John Donne in 1624. They came from a work known as Devotions on Emergent Occasions.

As I read through the verse in its entirety, I began to see how these words uttered more three centuries ago have a message for the Fire Service in this, the dawn of the 21st Century. It’s as thought the Lord himself had chosen to speak to me through my buddy north of the border. Let me share the verse in question with you in its entirety.

"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

I want you to take a moment and ponder what Mr. Donne was saying to his audience in 1624. My take on this is quite simple. We are all living together in this thing we call life. Each of us has a part to play and what I do impacts you, as do your actions have an effect upon me.

The same holds true in the fire service. Rare is the organization that is staffed and equipped to handle everything. Even the City of New York called in EMS help from New Jersey during the World Trade Center bombing not so many years ago. So why is it that we have self-proclaimed local Supermen running around telling the world to stay out of the communities, because they can handle everything.

This thought forms the critical basis for my comments on Automatic Aid this week. Many people act as if their individual fire departments were the beginning and the end, of the world of fire protection in its totality. I believe that the Biblical analogy regarding omnipotence as it applies here is quite simple. These people might be heard to shout from the roof of their fire house, "…My fire department is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end of all that there is regarding fire protection in the world."

Or so one might think when it came time to discuss the topic of mutual aid, and its more important modern sidekick, automatic aid. These troops think that there is nothing too difficult, nor too complex for their folks to handle. Of course, these are the same folks that are strangers to any form of fire service education. And they are know as "those people" to their neighboring fire departments. These are the folks who might cause the walls of their local fire training center to fall heavily inward if they showed up for a class. Or they might be the ones who seem to choke on the words, "I need some help…"

I would have to suggest to you that these are the folks who are learning curve disabled. As I said to one of my e-mail correspondents a couple of months back, "… the learning curve of a truly interested, concerned and committed person is infinite. They never lose the urge to learn about the latest developments. But there are also those who learning curve shoots straight up and stops as soon as they know it all." And therein lies the problem.

These are the know-it-all people who take a little bit of knowledge and build it into their own personal island. In their mind, no one exists out there in the world capable of assisting them. They think this way because of the island mentality that they choose to adopt. No one has a canoe that will allow them to paddle to the Island of the Lost.

For that reason, they come to the conclusion that they must acquire one of everything, because in their know-it-all brain no one exists but themselves. These are the fire departments that have zero mutual or automatic aid and a brand new one of every possible fire vehicle or fire trinket. The problems start to develop on the island when it turns out that there are not enough inhabitants to ride on all of the shiny new toys and use all the trinkets.

It is at this point where you and I on the mainland of life start to get panic-stricken calls for help from the island. But these calls never arrive in time, because the chief of that island’s fire department has to ride out and be personally convinced that it is beyond the scope of the insular operation. And then we have to board our boats and hurry to the island.

What has been lost during this selfish journey of personal discovery by the chief? The most precious commodity of all has been peed away: time. That is the element of time. How can anyone ever replace the moments that should have been spent rolling in to help those who were in trouble? Those moments that were instead wasted upon the ego of the island fire chief.

And when things go bad, as they often do on the Island of Ignorance, the offending Fire Chief will cry big crocodile tears of grief for the persecution of the fire gods that befell his island empire. Nonsense! They fell victim to a monster of his making.

For those of you out there who might not be up on current events, the year is 2000. We have radios and we have dispatch centers. We have a lot of fire departments. We have seen a growing number of progressive fire chiefs who realize the value of partnering with their neighbors. These are the same people who realize the critical importance of partnering with their neighbors in the following ways:

• Regional communications centers for dispatch of personnel and equipment
• Pre-designated box alarm systems that have no municipal borders
• A mix of apparatus types and kinds on automatic aid assignments
• Pre-incident planning with your automatic aid partners
• Mutual aid drills to assess skill levels and increase working familiarity

There is absolutely no reason why each individual community has to have their own dispatch center. And there is absolutely no reason for such silly practices as:

• not calling for help until you confirm a working fire
• not having your neighbors respond automatically with you on a first call, 24/7 basis
• not allowing the individual units to call for help until the fire chief arrives from home and sees that help is needed
• sending needed equipment back because, "… we don’t like those people"

Wake up out there gang. By the time you see the fire yourself, you have lost the element of time as an ally. As I have said on far too many occasions, the one critical element you can never replace is the time lost because your help is not responding with you.

Many of you who read this commentary column have been kind enough to send me success stories on the use of automatic aid and regional dispatch and response plans. They usually speak about a very tough period of transition, where the naysayers and the "we’ve always done it this way" brigade have dragged their feet and fought the transition to more effective operations. But they each come to a conclusion regarding the importance of automatic aid, regional dispatch and regional deployment protocols. Each of the success stories speaks volumes about the impact of regional dispatch systems, and inter-community regional automatic aid. I have always found it tough to argue with success. I never said it would be easy, and you have confirmed that in my mind’s eye. But you have also convinced me of the rightness of pursuing this as a long-term fire service goal.

Unfortunately, there have also been too many of you out there like the union official that dropped me a line telling me to quit writing about automatic aid, and regional deployment. He scolded me and stated in writing that his people could do the job just fine with eight people. I am sure that the technical literature in the fire protection field would take strong exception to that opinion. And then there was the fire chief from a nameless mid-western city that actually asked me to stop writing about mutual aid, because I was filling the minds of his troops with silly notions. Better with facts than with feces, I always say.

All of this talk of mutually assured responses is more critical than ever. I keep getting horror story after horror story about the state of fire protection in North America. I cannot make up some of the sad tales told to me by you surf riders of the Internet. The best way to protect an area involves people coming together around the central focus of a regional communications center. They should then structure their responses according to a written box alarm system that allows for the dispatching of people and equipment in a shared and automatic fashion.

The issue here is quite simple. There are less and less of us being asked to do more and more emergency (and non-emergency) work. We learned to play well in school together, but now we must play well together in life. Because as John Donne noted more than 370 years ago, "No man (person, fire department, EMS unit) is an island ..." Let’s put away the boats, forget about the islands and become a full part of the emergency service team in our area. The clock is ticking away until the next serious incident invades your community.

The commentary in this column does not necessarily reflect those of Firehouse.Com, Firehouse Magazine, their employees or parent company Cygnus Business Media. Harry R. Carter, Ph.D., MIFireE, is an internationally known municipal fire protection consultant and contributing editor to Firehouse Magazine. He recently retired as a Battalion Commander with the Newark, New Jersey Fire Department. His commentary appears regularly on Firehouse.Com. For more commentary and information, visit Carter's web site at www.harrycarter.com Harry has published several books available for online ordering, including Firefighting Strategy and Tactics and Management in the Fire Service