HARRY R. CARTER, Ph.D., MIFireE

At 1813 hour on Sunday December 3, a solemn ceremony will be held in Worcester, Massachusetts. Homage will be paid to the memory of the six brave men who fell in a pitched battle with the Red Devil last year. Those men were:

• Paul A. Brotherton
• Joseph T. McGuirk
• Timothy P Jackson
• James F. Lyons
• Thomas E. Spencer
• Jeremiah M. Lucey

It is my hope that the sacrifice of these men will never be allowed to leave the consciousness of the American Fire Service. We need to weave their names into the tapestry of our collective fraternal heritage.

As a society, we tend to forget things. This occurs as the passing years draw the veil of time between us, and the sad memories of a tragic event. This is human nature. I would imagine that it comes as a corollary to the age-old quotation that time heals all wounds. In order to be sure that the lessons learned from this fire are not lost as the years race by, this fire tragedy should become a part of each new text on the topic of strategy and tactics.

There is a disturbing propensity among those in the world of fire service publishing to go for the latest and greatest in terms of lessons. I ran headlong into this during the publication of a recent textbook. I kept getting notes that all seemed to say, "… can’t you come up with a newer citation, this quotation you sent us is over ten years old." My response was simple and to the point. I said to them that, "… I guess you wouldn’t accept a quotation from the Bible, as we haven’t had a new one in a couple of millennia". These are the people who would consign these brave men to a forgotten footnote in someone’s dusty old library.

The Worcester Fire and the lessons it has taught us, needs to be tattooed into our consciousness like each of the following major tragedies:

• The Chicago Fire in 1871
• The Triangle Shirtwaist Co. Fire in 1911
• The Coconut Grove Fire in 1942
• The Waldbaum’s Fire in Brooklyn in 1978
• The Hackensack Ford Fire in 1988

Having said this, how we choose to honor the memory of these men will be the measure of our impact upon the fire service. One of the people that has gotten it right, at least to my way of thinking anyway, is Battalion Chief Robert Cobb of the Jersey City, New Jersey Fire Department.

Last year I wrote a commentary that said that we can best honor the memory of the Worcester men by working harder to do our individual jobs in the fire service. Let each of us step up to render the service those brave men can no longer provide. Chief Cobb stands as an exemplary example of this very trait. He was one of the prime movers in the development of the major safety educational seminar held in Worcester back in September.

In a Firehouse.com article shortly after the event, he spoke of the striking impact that the fire had on him. He also spoke of the influence of Lieutenant Andrew White, a member of the Worcester Fire Department, who called upon Bob to share what he could with the troops in Worcester.

Bob will probably tell you that he was just responding to a long-distance mutual aid call for help, but his efforts went far beyond that. He was a spark plug in bringing together the talent to deliver a first class seminar on firefighter safety. This is the type of effort that I am suggesting is necessary to keep the lessons of this tragedy alive.

Back in November, I was privileged to deliver a seminar at the TRADE Conference at the National Fire Academy. I chose a very controversial title, Honor the Dead – Kill the Living. I did this for a specific purpose. I wanted to rivet the attention of the attendees on the fact that the best way to honor a hero is to pass on the lessons learned by that individual’s (or in this case, group of individual’) sacrifice. By doing this, you can hopefully prevent a repetition of the sad event.

To prepare for this program, I conducted a review of the NIOSH report on the Worcester Fire. I outlined the findings of that report and suggested that a great way to honor the deceased was to go home and train their own people in those things that might save their life in the future. And believe me, there were no blinding revelations in that document.

Let us look at the list of NIOSH recommendations that I delivered in Emmitsburg:

• Lack of an incident command system
• Lack of an accountability system
• Lack of standard operating procedures
• Inadequate risk assessment
• Communications problems
• Lack of a safety officer

In order to ram the message home to the students, I took the professorial privilege of adding five reasons of my own as to why bad things might be happening to us in the fire service:

• We are not training on the basics
• We are not training our officers
• We are not training our apparatus drivers
• Training is not a priority in many departments
• There are too many people in positions of authority who feel that they already know everything they need to know, so that they don’t train or read books too much anymore.

While there are those who may dispute my approach, I would suggest that at some point we have to stop repeating our past mistakes. After more than three decades of going to fires in a wide variety of venues, I am of the opinion that we need to deliver our knowledge in a long term, cyclic fashion. It seems that we, as a fire service, rediscover the same things over and over again… history repeats itself.

A quick review of the literature tells me that we have lost people in truss roof collapse tragedies in 1978, 1988, and 1999. And I am sure that there were a lot of other close calls. But I would bet a part of my pension check that there are still Incident Commanders ordering troops up onto truss roofs, possibly as my fingers are tapping on the keys of my computer. And this is just one example.

If we are to create a true, living memorial to the heroes of Worcester, we need address these and a wide range of related training issues. Far too many people that I meet these days can talk the talk, but they do not have a clue on how to walk the walk. It is our duty to create knowledge where ignorance currently exists.

It is my personal intention to honor their memory every time that I step to the podium to deliver a class. I might consciously mention their names, I might mention them as a group, or I might forget to mention them. I am after all a human and subject to fits of forgetfulness. But in my heart, and in my soul, these men will be a part of my psyche for the rest of my days.

It is my suggestion to you that the absolute best way to commemorate the honored dead is to make the Worcester Safety Seminar an annual event. What do you think?

As you pause on Sunday evening at 1813 hours, to mark the sounding of the fateful alarm in Worcester. I would ask you to say a prayer to the six fire service saints who now sit at the right hand of the Lord. Pray hard for guidance. They can then plead our case at the highest levels.

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