I have loved the fire service for as long as I can remember. It started when I was around 4 years old, and a family friend had rubber pull-up boots, a black leather helmet, and a canvas duck coat in the back of his woody station wagon. He explained that in addition to being a home improvement contractor, he was also a firefighter. That was the first moment I gave much thought to the existence of firehouses, beyond my own neighborhood.
As I grew and learned about various fire departments, I concluded that: “If you’ve seen one fire department, you’ve ONLY seen one fire department.” While communities may look the same, there can be a wide and diverse range of fire department types protecting our communities – career, volunteer, combination, military, industrial, rural, contract, municipal, and beyond.
I became fascinated by the fact that fire departments had the same mission but did their jobs in many different ways. I also became perplexed that many of them were unaware of how, for example, a fire department providing service to a community just like theirs had no idea how others were providing that service. Sometimes communities right next door to one another rarely communicated, if ever, creating these “fire islands” with nothing going on among them to better their members and the public.
As time went on, I certainly enjoyed watching as some departments started to discover their neighbors, collaborating and talking about mutual problems and potential solutions. Too often we spend our time working to solve a problem without looking past our fire district borders (not to mention our traditions or egos) where we might find that some other department already solved the problem years ago.
We are absolutely making progress in the sharing of ideas and the solving of mutual problems. Some of that is as simple as doing a Google search. Sometimes it’s reaching out to our associations. Or it may be going to a neighboring fire department to have lunch.
World Fire Congress: “Let’s have lunch” on an international level
