Episode 341: The Best of The Bravest - Nationwide: Chief Dan Jones (Volume 5) - Mic’d In New Haven

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
You're listening to the Bike Did You Even? Podcast hosted
by media personality and consultant Mike Glow. This is the

(01:12):
Best the Brives Nationwide. Edistrict happy to see this mini
series begin to really gain some steam. It's now on
its fifth volume, so we're halfway to ten, and the
goal is to continue to build it up, much like
we're doing with the Beat Profiles of police nationwide. As
I've said before, I sound like broken records. I won't
go through the whole thing again. We really want to

(01:33):
continue to tell stories outside of New York City area,
as you know, in continuance, as well of telling stories
in the New York City area, because everybody from different
parts of the country and even different parts of the
world has a cool story to tell about their time
on the law enforcement side of things and also the
fire service side of things, and tonight's guest is certainly
proof of that. We welcome you back to this episode
three hundred and forty one of the Mike the New

(01:55):
Haven Podcast.

Speaker 2 (01:55):
Best the Bravest Nationwide, Volume five.

Speaker 1 (01:58):
If you haven't checked out the previous sep sort of
another mini series that was tails from the boom Room
Profiles The NYPD's Arson Explosion and Bomb Squad retired Sergeant
Steve Mancini, who really worked everywhere during the course of
his thirty year career between the New York fifty Transit
Police and the NYPD, but finished it off as the
auxiliary commanding officer of the Arson Explosion Squad until he

(02:20):
retired in twenty twenty. So very much enjoyed that chat
with him. I know I'll enjoy tonight's chat with someone
who has an fdn Y connection. That'll tell me about
tonight as we progress. But before we run the ads,
as those of you in the chat, most of you
in the chat, No, there was a significant fire recently
in New York City over Manhattan. And in that fire
which ended up going to six alarms, a rarity for

(02:40):
the fdn Y, especially in today's day and age, where
they have as many resources as they do. Sometimes even
with all those resources, fires can get out of control.
It's quite literally a force in nature. And unfortunately at
this box alarm in Manhattan, a firefighter fell out the
window and fell forty feet into a shaft and was
seriously injured. We don't know who that fire firefighter is.

(03:00):
They have not been identified and it's not our business
to know at this point in time, but it was
a very serious fall. And thankfully after this fall, rescue
medics from the FT and Y's EMS Division were immediately unseen,
along with several other firefighters that rushed over to help
this injured member. And last we heard, this firefighter was
in Harlem Hospital in serious but stable condition, to quote

(03:24):
the New York Post. And I just want to take
a second two. Whoever that member is, send my best
wishes to them and a speedy recovery. As we don't
have to tell you in the chat, and you guys
know and all of us know, the job of a
police officer, the job of a firefighter is very dangerous
and circumstances can change in the blink of an eye
that can cause serious injury, if not death in the
line of duty. And we're thankful if this member will

(03:45):
survive and live to tell a tale about it, especially
after a fall from such a frightening height. And we
just want to send our best wishes and again, speedy
recovery to that member, and thank you to the hard
working men and women of the FT and WY that
responded to that box assignment last week. All right a
couple like I said, we're gonna move away from MC
media editing services in favor of good Folks, Matt City.
Just a reminder for those of you that haven't heard

(04:07):
by now, if you're tuning in for the first time tonight,
this is my book which I released in the summertime.
It's the first book I've written my planner right more,
working on a second one right now. But good Folks,
Matt City, Life on the Edge and the FD and
y NYPD centers on stories that told them this very podcast,
twenty police stories, twenty New York City Fire Department stories,
twenty police stories of courses the title would suggest from
the NYPD side. And it's available on Amazon and you

(04:31):
can get it in hardcover edition. We're working on paperback.
It's also available in ebook version, and we're hoping that
you'll buy that if you'd be so kind. Again, Good folks,
Matt City, Life on the Edge in the FT and
Y and NYPD. We sold over two hundred copies. Very
proud of it and very thankful for your support. And
if you don't have your hands on it, the link
in the description is available to purchase it. And all right,

(04:52):
we will now run our only ad of the night
besides that one. That's Billy Ryan and the Ryan Investigative Group.
The mic Thing You Have in podcast is proudly sponsored
and supported by the Ryan Investigative Group. If you need
an elite PI, look no further than the elite Ryan
Investigative Group, which is run by retired NYP Detective Bill Ryan,
a twenty year veteran of the Department who served a
majority of his career in the detective Bureau, most notably

(05:15):
in the Arson explosion squad. So if you need a
PI to handle anything from fraud, legal services, and anything
else that you might require, contact Bill at three four
seven four one seven sixteen ten. Again three four seven
four one seven sixteen ten reach him at his website
or the email that you see here. Again, if you
need a PI, look no further than Bill Ryan and
the Ryan Investigative Group, a proud supporter and sponsor of

(05:37):
the Mike de Newhaven Podcast. And just a quick colloda
everybody tuning in the chat tonight. I appreciate you guys.
I see you guys. For those of you watching via Facebook,
YouTube and of course LinkedIn. All right, my next guest
is Involvement I should say in the fire service spans
over fifty years, of which you'll talk about with me tonight.
Forty one of them actively involved between Florida and North Carolina.
Sixteen years of Padellas Park, Florida, and then another two

(06:00):
twenty five and Chapel Hill, North Carolina. So he's seen
many a crazy thing. He's operated at different types of
emergencies between those two places, spend an even amount of
time in most almost two decades in Florida and of
course a quarter century in the Carolina. As they'll discuss
with me tonight. He's also an author, which will also
discuss with me tonight, and that for this volume five
of the Best of the Bravest nationwide edition out of

(06:20):
Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Retired Operation Chief Dan Jones, Chief Welcome,
How are you hey, Mike.

Speaker 3 (06:26):
Nice to see this evening, and it's honored to be
a guest on Mike then Newhaven.

Speaker 2 (06:31):
It's a pleasure to have you.

Speaker 1 (06:32):
Of course, our mutual connection, as we'll talk about tonight,
is Mike roy tired FD and Y Lieutenant previously featured
on here for the Best of the Bravest Interviews with
the Ft and wys Elite. So before we get into
anything involving your career, a two part question here A
where did you grow up chief, And b were you
exposed to first responders early on? And did that feed
your inclination rather be through television or family to go

(06:53):
into the field.

Speaker 3 (06:55):
No, actually, there was nobody in my family prior to
me in the fire service or public safety at all.
My involvement. I'll share with you how I got started,
which is kind of a funny story. From about junior
high school on. I wanted to be an attorney. I

(07:18):
read the book The Defense Never Rests by f Lee
Bailey and got hooked on the idea of being in
a trial attorney. But when I started into college my
freshman year at Saint Pete College, I hated. It felt
like Grade thirteen to me, more math, more English, you know.

(07:40):
For some reason, I thought college would be more than that.
So I decided to take some time off and do
something a little bit before I went back to school.
A good friend of mine was on the Saint Petersburg
Fire Department in Florida, and on a Monday night in
the fall of nineteen seventy three, he invited me down

(08:01):
to the station to meet some of his colleagues. So
long story short, I go into Station seven at Saint
Pete and these guys are watching Monday night football and
eat ice cream. And I said, you get paid to
do this and they said, yeah, pretty much unless there's
a call. And the next morning I skipped school and

(08:26):
applied at the four the fire departments in Pennelan's County.
Four largest fire departments in Penellans County went through the
process for Saint Pete, Penellan's Park. Panel's park paid more
at that time. So I took the job there nineteen
years old. And you know, when you're nineteen years old,
you're pretty pretty stupid. You think you know everything. But

(08:48):
it was civil service in those days, so you had
to go before the Civil Service Board as the last step.
And the chairman of the Civil Service Board, big guy
with cigar in his mouth, says to me, so, Sun White,
you want a career in a fire service And I said, oh,
I'm not looking for a career. I just want to
do something for a couple of years. I don't go
back to school and become a lawyer. And they all
laughed and hired me anyway, and then when I went

(09:12):
to the Fire Academy in my first working structure for
how I got hooked and uh never looked back.

Speaker 2 (09:19):
Right.

Speaker 1 (09:20):
It's funny how a lot of guys start off that way.
There are some, you know, they're kind of like the
blue Chippers, if you will, that were in there. You know,
as they themselves will tell you, I should say, saw
it early on, or had a father on the job
or an uncle on the job, and they were hooked.
You know, it was always in them, if you will,
as they explain it, and that's just their destiny from
an early age and they end up in that career.
But there's also those who contribute a lot to the

(09:41):
fire service that it's kind of, for lack of a
better way to word, at a happy accident. And there
you were, you were saying, listen, your intent was to
go into law, not enforcement, but being a lawyer. And
you know what, here you are, all these years later,
having contributed a career to having had an extensive career
I should say, in the fire service that span over
fifty years and contribute a lot to it.

Speaker 3 (10:00):
So and after I got involved with some lawyers as
part of my duties in the Fire Service, I Thank
god I didn't go that way.

Speaker 1 (10:09):
It's a lot of work, you know, a lot of litigation.
And I'm sure as you look back at you took
the words right out of my mouth, I'm sure you're
grateful for that decision.

Speaker 3 (10:16):
Oh, the Fire Service was a blessing to me.

Speaker 2 (10:19):
Absolutely.

Speaker 1 (10:20):
And Mike Roy's in the chat early on and he's
so he's present in a shout out to Garrett Linkren
as well, retire out of FDN Y Rescue. Three quick
shout out to Billy Ryan, Don Gonzalez, Steve Irado. Let's
see here who else we got. We got Joe Maliga
and John Castella. Thanks guys for tuning in, and as
always for those of you in the audience, if you
have a question for our guests tonight, please be sure
to submit it and I'll highlight the appropriate time. So

(10:42):
getting on in nineteen seventy four, you know, this is
a different time for the Fire Service as a whole.
You're still seeing a heavy volume of fire in most places.
In that places New York City, which is burning every night.
This is in the middle of war years, but this
is well before the Fire Service involvement in the MS.
And I got nothing against that. I know, I know

(11:04):
some people feel differently, but just for those that and
I'm interested from a historical context for those that may
not remember what that was like. What was the fire
service in the seventies prior to such a heavy involvement
in the MS.

Speaker 3 (11:17):
We basically responded to fires and fire alarms, did training,
you know, maintain the apparatus and a little bit of
fire education stuff in the schools and stuff. But we

(11:39):
didn't do inspections. We didn't you know, we basically were
just waiting on alarms. And you're right, there was a
lot more structure fire. It was the first ten years
of my career. Fought probably more fire in the first
ten years than I did a whole rest of my career.

Speaker 2 (11:54):
Wow, you know, and codes have changed a lot since then.

Speaker 1 (11:57):
That wasn't so much the case in the seventies and eighties,
and fire awareness was it wasn't around back then, of course,
but again that's what the degree it is today, and technologies
advanced too. When you recall your first working fire on
the paid side in penelas getting that call and going
down there as a rookie, if again, if you recall
it at all, well, can you tell me about it.

Speaker 4 (12:16):
I do.

Speaker 3 (12:17):
Actually, I recall my first house fire. It was at night.
I was a rookie. My assignment was to shadow and
experienced firefighters, so I actually set We only had four
seats on the engine and the jump seats were open,

(12:40):
and so my assignment was to sit on the floor
of the jump seat of the firefighter that I was shadowing.
And this was a single family residence, probably fifteen hundred
square foot, not a big fire, pretty heavily involved in
a foggy night. Inversions of the smoke laid down in

(13:02):
the street added to the fog. Couldn't hardly see the
house from the engine, but it was hooked up and
I followed my experienced firefighter. We made interior attack, knocked
the fire down. That was really thrilling to me to
get to do that. And he was on the nozzle.

(13:25):
I was backing him up, and when we came out,
you know, it was a real rush, you know, sort
of like playing sports or something. It's that rush of
us against them. And this gentleman in the house, family man,

(13:48):
he was standing in the front yard and he hugged
all of us and thanked us for saving his house,
even though it was pretty significant damage because it was
pretty heavily involved, and I was hooked. I was hooked
on the idea of being able to help people at
a bad time. I was hooked on the adrenaline rush
of the fight and just the camaraderie of the fire service,

(14:15):
particularly in the aftermath of you know, a job, of.

Speaker 1 (14:20):
Course, yeah, and even the smoky feeling, the smell all that.
You know, you're looking at your gear and seeing the
sit on it. You just really take in what you
were just involved in. And it's quite the feeling from
those that I've talked to for sure. Now, I mean,
in bigger cities, you're dealing with tenements and cock loss,
and that's not the same that Penell's County wasn't big.
It certainly was, this Mike explained when he was on

(14:40):
some time ago.

Speaker 2 (14:41):
But in that.

Speaker 1 (14:42):
Particular part of the country was it mostly two and
a half woods or other type.

Speaker 3 (14:45):
Of structures, mostly a ranch style, some two and three
story we had. Our most significant were in manufacturing. We
had a lot of manufacturing and warehouses, so those were

(15:05):
our big fires. Residential fires weren't weren't that big. Our
bigger fires were in manufacturing facilities. And warehouses and strip
strip stores. That was before the days of the malls,
so there were strip stores and nothing was sprinkled yet,
so we had a lot of a lot of that

(15:26):
kind of stuff. And you got to remember in the
early seventies there was still a lot of oil heaters,
uh heating homes still had aluminum wiring in some homes
during those days, so that created a lot of frequency
of fires. It Als Park was an old town. It
was it was one hundred years old. So there was

(15:48):
some two and three story wood frame balloon construction homes.
We burned a few of those. Those were those were
pretty have to fight. But our biggest, biggest fires usually
were in commercial structures like manufacturing and warehouses, that sort

(16:11):
of thing.

Speaker 1 (16:12):
Let's stay on that for a second because I feel
like we'll listen. Every fire is dangerous naturally, but depending
on the material in the building, that can really exacerbate conditions.
I don't know if you heard, but we here in
New Haven we had a recent four alarm structure fire
in a factory style building. There was numerous businesses in it,
including an autoshop, food trucks being stored there, and perhaps
that played a role in the fire growing as much

(16:33):
as it did. There was even a partial collapse of
the roof. So dealing with commercial buildings like that where
maybe there's certain equipment that's extra flammable, or you're dealing
with autoparts, how does that.

Speaker 2 (16:44):
Complicate operations for you?

Speaker 1 (16:46):
And how do you feel tactics from your standpoint have
evolved in being able to adequately fight those over the years.

Speaker 3 (16:53):
Well, in those in those years, we didn't do much
pre planning, so we didn't always know what was and instructures.
You know, later on in my career, preplanning became a
you know, a must do thing and we had some idea,
but early on, you know, I can remember going to

(17:15):
a trailer hitch place that was pretty heavily involved and
they did a lot of welding, so they had a
lot of settling bottles and oxygen bottles and those were
going off like rockets when we got there. Stuff like that.
We had a lot of electronics places that had acid dips,

(17:37):
so you have these big vats, open vats of acid
and stuff. They could be burning. And you know, Florida,
everybody's got a swimming pool in Florida, So we would
have warehouses full of chlorine, you know, and if the
first two officers weren't aware or weren't smart enough not

(17:58):
to start flowing a lot of heavy water her into
a chlorine lated warehouse, you had a horrendous hazmad incident
with a chlorine gas cloud and run off and everything else.
So in those days, we didn't you know, we didn't
have the pre plans to know, so you know, everything
was just throw water. We didn't always have the life

(18:22):
safety issue for occupants like they would have in some
of the bigger cities up north with tenement housing and
multi story apartments and stuff. But what we did have
were really significant fires, for example, a junkyard fire, huge

(18:42):
pile of smashed cars burning stuff like that that was
really difficult to get under control. Not necessarily a life hazard,
risky for the firefighters involved, but not to the population.

Speaker 1 (18:59):
In largest city. I want to ask you about this
as well. You'll see firefighters assigned to a given apparatus
and they'll stay there. If you're in the truck, you're
in the truck. If you're in the engine, you're in
the engine. There's really no cross training going on. That
has its benefits and it has it downsides. Where you started,
was there cross training going on or going on, I
should say, or when you got assigned to an apparatus,
that was your apparatus and you did not move off

(19:20):
of it.

Speaker 3 (19:21):
No, you moved all around. You know, smaller departments, medium
sized departments, you know, they're constantly shifting the staffing around
to keep the apparatus staff. So, you know, in a
medium sized department like Donald's Park was, you could find
yourself one day riding the engine, the next day ride

(19:42):
and to rescue, and the third day ride in the
truck company. And so in the beginning of my career,
we didn't even have truck company operations. There wasn't a
staff truck. You know, there was a ladder truck, but
it wasn't staffed every day. And so if you you're
on the engine company, you might you might be doing
engine company operations. You might also be doing ventilation, forceable entry,

(20:08):
the full range of fire ground skills you might be
asked to apply.

Speaker 1 (20:13):
Right, And I think that that's good that way, especially
having seen it up close where I work in West
Haven the last year and change. You got guys that
you know, the way are set up is we have
an engine in our district, two engines, UH, two rescues
ambulances what we call them rescues, and then one ladder truck,
and guys will one day be on the truck, one
day be at the engine in the other station in

(20:35):
our district, one day be on the engine at headquarters.
And you know, they'll also do double duty, which I
find interesting as well, to where your tail guy on
the truck will also be on one of the rescues,
and one of your guys on the engine will also
be on one of the rescues. The DOX comes in,
they jump over, And I think it's good that way
because especially again it's different in larger cities, but the
more cross training you have on given apparatuses, the more

(20:57):
well rounded you are. You know how to operate as
a truck come company, you know how to operate as
part of an engine company, and even you know, even though,
like we said earlier, for all the complaints that there
may be about fire services involved in the MS, the
rescue has its perks too. So I feel like getting
everything makes you all the more experienced and all the
more well rounded a firefighter, something that will not only
help you as your career progresses, generally speaking, but you

(21:18):
can also help someone else and mentor them down the
road as well.

Speaker 3 (21:21):
Oh, I agree, I agree. I think, I think if
you can spend time on the different types of assignments
and different types of apparatus depending upon how your department
structured and how operations are conducted, you know, And it
varies around the country. Different regions have slightly different operations

(21:43):
and different sized departments. I think the smaller the department,
the more difficult it becomes because they just don't have
the resources, and a lot of times you've got you
an incident commander is also on a hose line maybe,

(22:05):
and so it makes it Unfortunately. I've never worked in
a department that small, but you know it, I think
it's really very difficult. I have a lot of respect
for guys that spend their career in really small departments
and work with really limited staffing. You know. I've always

(22:26):
in my early part of my career, we always had
at least four or five on an engine. When I
first got to Chapel Hill, and that's a whole nother story.
They ran some engines with two people in the cross
trained police officer was the third member of your engine company.
Public safety and part of the reason I was hired
in Chapel Hill was to help get do away with

(22:47):
that system. But you know there's still a lot of
the country and you know this Mike, where there were
two people on engine companies, and to me, that's that's
just it's almost criminal. It's dangerous, not all for the firefighters,
but for the public.

Speaker 1 (23:06):
Well in our Darren Phillips who's a firefighter and canasa's
cops live in their dream your point about the third
man of the egine of being cross trained police officer
has been a funny comment there and good to see you, buddy.

Speaker 3 (23:16):
When we talked about Chapel Hill, I'll tell you a
little bit about that system because that was very interesting
to me coming from a career fire an EMS agency
to a dual public safety agency.

Speaker 2 (23:30):
That was the tough Yeah.

Speaker 1 (23:33):
I mean, it's not uncommon from the standpoint that take
the Port Authority police for example in New York and
New Jersey. They're police officers enforcing the law in New
York and New Jersey, but they're also cross trained as firefighters.
That makes sense given the fact that their part of
their beat is the airport. So if a crash god
forbid happens, they're the first responding agency on scenes. Since
that's their jurisdiction, it would make sense to train them

(23:54):
in firefighting capabilities. But outside of that, yeah, we'll definitely
have to talk about that later on in the program,
you know. And to your point, I won't say where,
but in you know, where I work, there's three separate districts,
and one of the districts, I'm not knocking them, I'm
just saying this is how they operate.

Speaker 2 (24:08):
There's mutual laid.

Speaker 1 (24:09):
Agreements, so that offsets any potential problems, but they only
have five people on a shift. So currently the way
they're set up is three people on the truck, including
the captain, and then two people on the engine, and
you know, again mutual laid offsets. But yeah, I can
see the point that you're making there. Again, you know,
if anybody hearing this not criticizing, it's just the staffing budget.

Speaker 3 (24:29):
My heart goes out to you having to do the
job that way.

Speaker 1 (24:32):
Yeah, and then you'll find other districts in the same
city that have four people on an engine, three people
on a truck. The captain has their own shift commander vehicle.
But again it's all in the resources. It's all in
the allocation of budget is as well. That kind of
depends how a department is staffed or even not staffed.

Speaker 2 (24:49):
In line with what we.

Speaker 1 (24:50):
Discussed a little bit earlier on leadership, I wanted to
stay with that because every leader, as they ascend the ranks,
has someone that helped them and molded them rather directly
or into directly. So for you, who were the guys
or even gals that you would credit early on in
Florida for helping mold your style leadership later.

Speaker 3 (25:09):
On, Mike, one of the things that I have truly
been blessed with my entire career was strong mentors. My
first mentor was the engine engineer on the engine I
was assigned to man. My name Ed Bigger and Ed

(25:29):
took me every day after dinner out front of the
station to sit and we talked about everything from what
you do when you first arrive on a scene, how
to get along with the captain, to stay out of trouble,
how to how to do different tasks and stuff and

(25:49):
he and he also talked to me about life relationships
and how to you know, how to conduct your yourself
and that sort of thing. And this is an interesting
twist in my career. But Ed mentored me the whole
time I was a young firefighter and firefighter paramedic. Then

(26:13):
when I made lieutenant, Ed was one of the first
people assigned to drive for me. This was a guy
who was a career engineer. He had no desire to
be an officer, even though he would have made a
good one. That just wasn't his thing. And so he
continued to mentor me when he was my engineer, even
though technically I was his boss. But he was discreet

(26:35):
about it. He never did it in front of the
rest of the crew, and he would drop little hints
to me about stuff. Did you see this, did you
see that? Did you think about this? Or after an
incident he would come back to me and say, hey,
that was a good decision. If you didn't do that,
what else could you have done. He did things like
that to make me think. And years later, when he

(26:58):
was retired and I was fired chief up in North Carolina,
he would come up to Fort Bragg or Fort Liberty
as it's now called, to visit his daughter and who
was a military family. He would always come to Chapel
Hill and check on me. How you doing, how's things going,
what's working, what's not working. But beyond ed, I had

(27:19):
a district chief like a battalion chief, Jim Dobbins, who
was a strong mentor to me. A couple of my
instructors in my rookie fire academy continue to mentor me
after I was on the job, even though they weren't
my department. They were from neighboring departments. And then some

(27:41):
folks like Chief John Lahey, who had been the Pittsburgh
Fire Department, come to Florida, served as a training officer
in a neighboring department, went back to Pittsburgh as fire chief,
then came back to Florida as a fire chief in
some departments in Florida. He became probably the biggest mentor
in my career. And so I've had mentors all through

(28:04):
my career from rookie firefighter all the way through being
far chief. And the one thing I say to our
students now is in I believe there's three elements of learning.
One is education. That's what you get in classrooms. That's
what you get on the drill ground, that's what you
get when you go for a certification. The second one
is experience. That's what you get on the fire ground

(28:27):
or working with people, or in training or listening to
other people's stories. The third element of learning is mentorship,
and I strongly believe everybody needs a mentor because they
fill in the blanks for you between the education and
the experience and tie it together for you.

Speaker 1 (28:47):
Well said a couple more noise before we get to
your transition nineteen ninety to North Carolina. You know, from
a standpoint of just operational matters, and you kind of
touched on it in your previous answer, which I appreciate.
There's always the buyers that mold you, or even just
to large scale incidents. They don't necessarily have to be
structure fires that mold you and say, Okay, next time around,
if we get anything close to that, I'm going to

(29:09):
do this instead of that, or this works really well.
If I have something like this again, let's do that again.
What are some of the fires and or emergencies from
your time in Florida that stick out that you can
call these years later saying, Man, that sticks with me,
and that really helped influence my mindset as a firefighter
and an officer.

Speaker 3 (29:27):
There were several that had that kind of effect on me.
Learning to go big water right away on some fires,
you know, not mess around with pre connects, engine half
inch and three quarters, but go straight to deck guns
and monitors and that kind of stuff for quick knockdowns.

(29:49):
Learning to do that, learning to always have a backup
plan in your head, whether you're the first due officer
that's got to make those initial decisions. And I'm a
person who believes that the first officer on the scene,
that first arriving engine or truck, is going to make

(30:10):
decisions in the first thirty seconds to determine the outcome.
I don't care how many big chiefs arrive, I don't
care how many alarms you call. Those first decisions are
probably gonna determine the outcome eventually. And so you know,
think big picture. Don't get caught into a routine of

(30:33):
of you know, we pull up and pull a pre
connect and we're gonna go at it and knock it
down and it's over with. I think you can get
yourself into some traps doing that. The other thing, a
couple of things I learned when you're doing search. You know,
when you train search, you're training people to look for

(30:55):
a full body type situation. We had a trail or
fire one time where we knew there was an occupant.
We just flat could not find this guy. We searched
and served, We got the fire knocked down. We searched
and searched and searched, single white trailer, not a you know,
not a big deal. Could not find this elderly gentleman.

Speaker 5 (31:17):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (31:18):
And we're in the overhaul phase and we're still searching
everywhere for him, and actually began to smell him and
discovered that some of the debris that had fallen down
had covered him and we were walking over the debris
and he was underneath where we were walking. We just

(31:43):
never realized it. So long story short, learning to think
beyond it's going to be somebody laying on a bed,
or laying on a couch, or laying in the hallway
or laying behind a doorway. No, they can be they
can be hidden somewhere from you. You really got a search,

(32:03):
including under debris. And that was a lesson. A big
fire lesson was a chemical fire. There was a fire
at a place called Jones Chemical in Saint Petersburg and
they attacked it very aggressively with water and created a
huge chloring gas cloud, had to evacuate, A large neighborhood

(32:25):
had to It was rush hour in Saint Petersburg, which
fairly good sized city. We were there on mutual aid
with a HASMA team. They had a huge environmental impact
run off water. The chlorine gas was so thick in
the air that the engineers on the engines the coins
in their pockets turned green. That's how bad it was. Wow.

(32:49):
A couple of years later, I had a fire in
a pool warehouse pool supply warehouse and I was the
incident commander. First thing I did it was asked the
manager do you have chlorine stored in here? And he
told me no, So we started to attack. The interior
officer called out to me and said there are palettes

(33:11):
of chlorine in here. I pulled everybody out, We protected
exposures and what The building burned to the ground. We
rescued their business records out of the office, but we
flowed no water into that building. We protected the warehouses
on two sides of them and let the building burn.
We had no chlorine gas cloud and no runoff, so

(33:32):
there was a direct How I applied something I.

Speaker 1 (33:35):
Learned, and it comes at a cost. I mean, yeah,
you don't want to see the building burned down. But
I mean it's kind of interesting you mentioned that because
look at all the electrical vehicle fires we're seeing now.
And I mean it's primarily been a problem in New
York City with the lithium ion batteries, and that's a
different story, but when you look at electric vehicles, I
mean the point is sometimes when they were flowing water,
initially thinking it's your run of the mill car fire,

(33:58):
all of a sudden they're seeing that cloud and they're like,
wait a minute. It got to the point and several
guys have talked about this, they're letting it burn. So
you were kind of out of your time there because
back then it was chlorine. Now it's eves.

Speaker 3 (34:09):
Yeah, I just read here recently. You may have seen
the report too, where they had an electric vehicle fire
on the Interstate in California that burn for nineteen hours.
They had the interstate shut down for nineteen hours. I mean,
you think about the impact on the community of shutting
down a major interstate in a high population area for

(34:32):
nineteen hours. I mean, that's a significant impact on the community.
I think we've rushed electric vehicles to the market before
we really knew all the implications and the safety issues.
I'm concerned about electric fire trucks that are now starting
to show up in the market. How's that going to
play out? What happens when you get one of those

(34:55):
fires that lasts a long time, We're going to have
to bring a diesel power generator of the scene and
look it up to the electric fire trucks to keep
them going. I'm just not sure we've thought through all
of this yet before some of this technology goes to market.

Speaker 1 (35:10):
And I agree with you there and just in line
with that, before we move on, what do you make now?
Because lithium ion batteries are everywhere. I mean, look cell
phones for example, have lithium ion batteries, scooters. It's not
just you know, something that you may think of, Ah,
we don't need that day to day. They're virtually in
everything that we use day to day. So as far

(35:31):
as combating that, and it's not just a big city issue,
it's a country wide issue and a societal issue impacting
the fire service as a whole, especially in high tech,
modernized countries. What are your feelings on that, how to
properly combat that from your vantage point.

Speaker 3 (35:43):
I wish I had an answer for you. I think,
you know, I've seen some crazy stuff. I've seen the
idea that we're gonna haul dumpster sized loads of water
around and put these things, submerge them in water and
things like that. That's not practical. I'm not sure how

(36:07):
we're going to deal with that, and what it may
require is some research into new extinguishing agents, something that
can deal with the you know, lithium ion batteries, something
we're not even using right now. We're not even aware
of some new technology of some sort. I know there's

(36:28):
research going on about using sound waves to interrupt flame propagation.
You know, I honestly believe that from an extinguishing standpoint,
we're gonna have to come up with something new because
what we have now is not working.

Speaker 1 (36:45):
Yeah, yeah, unfortunately, and modern problems do bring modern solutions,
So I don't think it's a lost cause. But I
did want to get your thoughts on that, because it's
become a major issue to the point where she's now
the former AFT and HITE commissioner. But she was testifying
on Capitol Hill at some point about the severity of
these issues because you know, it's spread and the more
technological advances that we have in society, I think the

(37:08):
bigger problem to present. But I think with time, as
has been the case with other challenges in years past,
the Fire Service always adjusted, and I think you know
from the optimus point of view that this will be
no different.

Speaker 3 (37:20):
I agree with you will adapt and overcome.

Speaker 1 (37:23):
Absolutely, at least that's the hope. So before I get
to you leave it in nineteen ninety the Mike Roy story.
Mike Roy and I were texting about it earlier. I
know you have it. Now, let's hear it before he
left the FD and to y.

Speaker 3 (37:34):
Well, when I was an engine company lieutenant, Mike was
sent to my engine company as a rookie firefighter, and
so his first assignment in the Fire Service was on
my engine company and he rode behind me. Mike is

(37:56):
I think third or fourth generation firefighters. So he's I mean,
he's got it in his DNA and his father and
grandfather were New York City firefighters. His father retired while
Mike was still in school and they moved to Florida.
Mike ended up on the Penel's Park Fire Department with

(38:17):
us great firefighter had a mind like a sponge, just
constantly trying to learn stuff and learning everything he could
from the rest of us. I got promoted and left
that engine company. Mike continued to be in the companies.
I got promoted to training chief and then he MS chief.

(38:41):
But Mike and I stayed friends, and I tried to
support his career and getting opportunities to go to training
and stuff, because I just saw tremendous potential in him
and I loved his enthusiasm. Well, Mike had talked to
me a number of times about that he might eventually
go to the New York City Fire Department, and I

(39:02):
was always trying to talk him out of it. But
I think there was some family pressure there, legacy issues
and things like that for him to go. And so
he started applying, and it took a couple of years,
and each year he would come and say, I'm number
whatever on the list. I don't think I'm getting hired

(39:23):
this year, And then then the following year he'd say
I'm number seve, and so I've moved down. I still
don't think it's going to be this year. And then
one night I'm home and it was after dinner, and
there's a knock on the door and I opened the
door and there stands Mike Roy and he's got a
six pack of beer. A couple of them are already gone.

(39:46):
He's holding the plastic rings and he said, I got
to talk to you. So we went out in the
driveway and we sat on the hood of my car
and he said, I got my call. And at that time,
Mike was on the lieutenant's promotion list. He was up
for promotion probably within the year in Penell's Park to

(40:07):
be a lieutenant on Jine Company or in the truck.
And so we had a long talk that night. There
were tears. He probably don't want to admit that, but
there were tears. He was torn. It wasn't as easy
a decision as he might say it is today. But
I remember that night there was a long discussion in
the dark, sitting on the hood of a car and

(40:28):
killing the rest of his six pack with him, and
he went. He left. I think if Mike had stayed
in Penell's Park he would have he would have been
a chief officer for sure, because he just he just
had that inning, uh, and he had this desire for

(40:49):
training that was just way beyond what most people have,
and so he got to be pretty specialized in a
number of things. And I'm sure when he went to
the out of me in New York City. I heard
him on your program talk about how he kind of
tried to keep all that on the downside so that
people wouldn't think he was trying to be a big shot.

(41:11):
But he had a tremendous skill set before he ever
got to New York City from all the different roles
he played in our department and what he did training wise.
So that was the funny story was that night sitting
on the hood of a car talking about should he go,
shouldn't he go? I was trying to hang on to him.

(41:33):
He was feeling a lot of pressure to go and
turned out to be a successful career for him. I
hate the way his career ended with an injury that
seemed really unfair to me. I remember the morning of
nine to eleven. I was scared to death that Mike
was on duty, and it took me a couple of

(41:56):
days to find him and reach out to him and
find out that he responded. He was off duty that morning.
He did respond as part.

Speaker 5 (42:06):
Of the the Rescue Division or whatever they call it,
and ended up you know, a logistics guy for or
the rescueing squad companies.

Speaker 3 (42:16):
But I had working in the pile. But I was
very thankful Mike was not one of the ones caught
in that tragedy.

Speaker 2 (42:25):
Yeah, it was.

Speaker 1 (42:26):
As you said, it was a great career for him,
especially considering the fact he ended up in the Special
Operations Command.

Speaker 2 (42:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (42:32):
But he was in Squad sixty one on nine to eleven,
which was in the Bronx, one of two squads in
the Bronx. And it's just it's I don't want to
use the word amazing, because it's nothing amazing about that
day except for the heroism. But it's interesting how things
work out. And that Squad forty one went to the
initial alarm at the Trade Center, not a single guy.
There's a video of that Rick going to the Trade
Center that morning. Yeah, I think that Rick came back.

(42:53):
Squad sixty one. The other squad in the Bronx went
later because they needed a squad, one of the squads
to stay back and protect the rest of the He
didn't lose a single guy. Same thing in Queen Squad
two seventy, same scenario. Squad two eighty eight went lost.
Everybody So it's just I mean, sometimes just look at
the draw. It's look at the draw.

Speaker 3 (43:09):
It is with us, it is and uh, Mike, Mike
would If Mike had been able to play out the
rest of his career, I believe he probably would have
retired in New York City as a battalion chief or
maybe even above that. Yeah, but uh, he had a
great career, had some amazing rescues that he was involved with,

(43:35):
and I'm just proud of the heck of it. He's Yeah,
this might sound a little weird to you, but he's
one of my kids. Okay. He always thought the guys
that worked directly for me, I always saw them as family,
and and he was family.

Speaker 1 (43:49):
Yeah, listen, nothing nothing weird about that.

Speaker 2 (43:51):
You know, it's a brotherhood.

Speaker 1 (43:52):
And sometimes the guys you know that you're older than,
or that your mentor yeah, they're like kids. They're like kids.
I've heard that analogy before. So it's it's definitely well
put and in line with difficult transitions. I wanted to
ask you about a transition of your own. Now we'll
talk about nineteen ninety from the sound of it, and
we've been talking for just over forty minutes about it.
You loved Florida, you loved where you were. It sounded

(44:14):
like a great department, It sounded like you were working
with a great group of guys. But you don't leave
unless it's a really good opportunity, which, clearly, considering the
amount of time you spent down there, Chapel Hill was
so tell me about how that came to be and
ultimately making that decision after I'm sure a lot of
hemming and haulleing. Okay, should I stay here and continue
this career in this town that I love, or should

(44:35):
I go and pursue this to see what's what?

Speaker 3 (44:37):
Well, if you were to ask my parents, they would
tell you that from the time I was a small child,
I was interested in moving to the Carolinas or Tennessee.
That's where we've a vacation from Florida. I loved the mountains.
I loved that area, and to be honest with you,

(45:02):
by the time I was an adult, I was no
longer enthralled with Florida. Too hot, too humid, that sort
of thing I was at the time I started to
think about transition. I was deputy chief Operations, the fire chief,
I was second command of department, the chief over me.

(45:24):
Wasn't that much older than I was. He wasn't going
to go anywhere, and so my career moves there were
probably pretty limited. And I started applying to positions in
the Carolinas, Tennessee, Virginia, that whole area. I had some

(45:46):
parameters I was looking for, and I was starting to
teach leadership at that point, and my wife said to me,
at one point, you know you're teaching people how to
run a fire department. When are you going to run
the fire department? And so yeah, I applied. It was

(46:09):
came real close to being hired a couple places Hickory,
North Carolina, and a couple other float places, but Chapel
Hill came about. I had met the chief in Durham,
North Carolina, older gentlemen I taught a class at the
fire department instructors conference. He was sitting in the front

(46:32):
row and came up and introduced himself after class, and
we kind of became friends. And when Chapel Hill terminated
their fire chief, he called me and said send me
your resume and I'll give it to somebody over in
Chapel Hill. And six months later I was hired, and

(46:55):
real culture change Mike very much. Because Pennell's Park was
a blue collar a lot of industry, a lot of
working class people. Public safety was a high priority. The

(47:15):
fire department was very advanced when compared to other departments
across the country. We were full service, full blown, advanced
life support EMS, well staffed, pretty advanced technologically, real strong
mutual aid system. In Pennells County, Florida, a lot of

(47:39):
departments operated almost like one big department. And I go
to Chapel Hill. It's a university town, University North Carolina.
The culture is entirely different. It's upper middle class to
upper class college town, pretty liberal compared to Pennel's Park,

(48:01):
which was pretty conservative. Public safety, police and fire are
not the priority. Things like the library, parks and w
reck the Arts Commission are the priorities politically, So police
and fire has to scratch and fight for everything they
can get. Just a total different culture and so that

(48:26):
was a real learning curve for me. But for a
small town, the opportunities that that presented from a leadership
standpoint were tremendous. With the university there, and Chapel is
a very high profile community. It's pretty well known all
over the country. Because of the university, the tar heels

(48:49):
of basketball, tar heels, and and so there's lots of
opportunities there that you wouldn't get in most communities of
that size. So that's that's what that's what attracted me there,
and I was going to use it as a stepping stone.
My ultimate goal was to be chief of a department
of about ten or eleven stations, three hundred and fifty people,

(49:10):
because I felt like that's big enough to have the
resources to do really advance things, but small enough you
still know all the people in the department. You still
can make changes. It doesn't it's not a bureaucracy unto
itself like some metro departments are, where you can't affect
change because it's just going to be fought at every level.

(49:33):
And I had the opportunity to make that move, but
that's a whole another story. Later on in Chapel Hill,
I had a chance to go to a bigger department,
but I just really liked the folks I worked with
and had a great boss, which and nowadays, if you

(49:55):
can say you've got a great boss, that's a you
don't hear a lot of people say that. He was
very supportive, and we were able to separate police and
fire out of the public safety system and build a
multi hazard fire department. And so we grew. We added staffing,

(50:16):
we added capabilities and services, and actually went through three
three and a half command staffs while I was there
because they either were retire or and this is something
I'm pretty proud of, we spun off nine other fire

(50:37):
chiefs out of the Chapel Hill Fire Department during my
tenure there, Guys that worked with us there and then
went on to become fire chiefs other places. I was
pretty proud of that, as.

Speaker 1 (50:49):
He should be, you know, from an operationals and logistics standpoint.
And we'll get into the specifics of it now. When
you got there in nineteen ninety and as if twenty twenty,
Chapel Hill has a population of just under sixty two thousand,
so definitely not a small place at all. As you
were saying, what were the specific things besides what you
mentioned earlier of separating fire and police where you said, Okay,

(51:10):
I have got to fix this. Let me start developing
game plans as to how to fix this.

Speaker 3 (51:18):
When I first went in there, the first three months,
I treated it almost like you would as a consultant.
I spent the first three months studying everything about the
department and asking a lot of questions, and I prepared
a report for the city managers, and I basically told
them that Chapel Hill was about twenty years behind in
technology and methodology, and we had a lot of work

(51:42):
to do and needed to spend money. I thought it
could be done in three to five years. Five years later,
I'm still working on that original list, mostly because the
resources were slow coming and we spent the first two
and a half years out of the public safety system.

(52:04):
They had a system set up where the patrol zones
were the same as the first do in first two
station fire station areas. So there was an officer in
each patrol zone that was assigned as the third person
on that engine company. When you go to a call,
they would meet you there. They had their bunker gear

(52:25):
in their breathing apparatus in the trunk of their patrol car.
They would change on the street and then join the
engine The two people in the engine company didn't work.
Didn't work with the flip And I will tell you
this about public safety play and there are places still
doing it around the country. Believe it or not. You've

(52:46):
got some of the workforce that are great firefighters and
lousy cops. You got some of the workforce that are
great cops and lousy firefighters, and you've got maybe five
to ten percent of the workforce that are good at both.
It's a very small percentage. And as both disciplines became
more advanced, more technologically advanced, more advanced from a training

(53:11):
and credentialing side, it got harder and harder. And so
when we changed out, the crime rate was going up
in Chapelill, and the city manager convinced the city council
it was time to get out of it, and so
we gave everybody in the workforce. All the supervisors in

(53:32):
both departments were unique to that department, but it was
the firefighters and driver engineers that went back and forth.
And so he convinced the city council that we in
order to fight the crime rate, we had to separate
public safety, and in order to do so, we had
to hire more firefighters. Which is kind of funny, We're
going to reduce the crime rate by hiring more firefighters,

(53:52):
but that's what it took, and so that's what we did,
and we got out of it, and then we got
we got into first responder service and we just went
great guns after that.

Speaker 1 (54:07):
Let's look at the first ten years from when you
got there in nineteen ninety to where things were in
the year two thousand, When you looked back at that
particular time after a decade of having been in Chapel Hill,
where did you feel, Okay, we have come a long
way besides what you just mentioned with this, but we
still have to improve with that.

Speaker 3 (54:28):
There were areas that we were still working on training.
It took us a long time to get a full
time training officer. Each shift had their own training officer.
It took us a long time to convince the city
we needed a training officer. We needed to increase the

(54:48):
fire Prevention Bureau, the fire inspectors. You know, being in
college town, we had a lot of bars, a lot
of restaurants, a lot of overcrowding issues, a lot of
things like fraternity houses that were just fire hazards, a
lot of issues like that. So we you know, we
were trying to build up the staffing on the engines

(55:11):
and the truck company. We were trying to build the
staffing in the fire prevention Bureau trying to increase training,
and so were all of that was going on at
the same time. By two thousand, we'd made a lot
of progress and we were building the fifth station. We

(55:33):
used federal grants to hire a dozen more personnel. So
it was a building process. It just like you know,
like anything, you build a piece at a time.

Speaker 1 (55:47):
When you look at specific incidents and that ten year stretch,
I mean, you have the background, of course in Florida,
but being in command of an entirely new location is
difficult at first because you're still trying to learn what's
where and what resources you have to especially as you're
trying to change the public safety system.

Speaker 2 (56:03):
So for you, who were the guys.

Speaker 1 (56:05):
You leaned on early on or what are the incidents
that you would label early on in Chapel Hill as
major positive turning points for you?

Speaker 3 (56:12):
Well, we had there were some officers in the Chapel
Fire Department that had pursued education and training on their
own outside of the department. Department didn't send anybody to
training anywhere, and so there were guys that had pursued it.
So there was talent there, but it just wasn't allowed
to be used or to apply. And so one of

(56:36):
the things early on that I was able to do
is identify where the talent was and give those guys
some free reign to start making changes and do things
that helped improve the department. I didn't do it by myself.
Fire service is a team sport at every level, whether
it's engine company, operations, or administration and everything in between.

(56:58):
It's a team sport. And so we were able to
put together a pretty aggressive team some of the old
dead wood. The manager said, you can you can dump
some of those guys if you want to. I said,
we won't have to. We just speed up the merry
go around. They'll jump off. And that's exactly what happened.

(57:18):
As we as we raise the standards and raise the expectations,
some of those guys just said I'm done. I'm retiring. Hey,
thank you for your service. We'll give you a party goodbye.
Some people make an organization better when they arrive. Some
make it better when they leave. And we were in

(57:40):
that mode.

Speaker 1 (57:41):
Right Listen, part of me is they take a swig
of water. You know Howard saved for the late great
New York City Fire Commissioner and Police commission He's one
of the only guys I've ever done both. There only
two guys in New York City history to have done both,
and he's one of them. He had a simple mantra,
like it or hate it, and it's it's true to
this day. Get on the train or get under it.

(58:02):
And it sounds harsh, But when you have a mission
driven organization, which most police departments, if they're worth their weight,
and fire departments are, you know, let's say, listen, you
signed up to do a very hard job. Either you're
with it or you're not. And you saw very very
early on. I should say who was with it and
who wasn't. Now the two thousands presents interesting change. You

(58:24):
have a larger city now, in addition to already worrying
about mass population and mass casualty incidents. Nine to eleven
change the game in terms of larger cities and how
mass incidents are managed. So dealing with that and game
planning now for MCIs from the standpoint of potential terrorism,
any kind of terrorism, especially with the Ambrax attacks that

(58:45):
would follow aslong with modernizing equipment. Tell me about that
little pocket in the two thousands where you can sense,
even without the tragedy of nine to eleven. The Fire
Service is moving in another direction and just trying to
make sure you're kept up with the times.

Speaker 3 (58:59):
Yeah, I mean when I started the Fire Service, the
idea of being trained in anti terrorism stuff would have
would have sounded like something from a science fiction book.
And even EMS, as you mentioned before, when you know,
EMS really took off in the mid seventies, fire based EMS,
which we were part of that, you know, it's it's

(59:23):
a process, you know, Hasmat came along, and only the
biggest cities had hazmat teams, even though everybody had hazardous
materials in their communities, you know, And so eventually hazards
materials teams started to be formed. And then after Oklahoma City,
the bombing in Oklahoma City, a lot of places began

(59:46):
to realize that there was specialty requirements of us ARE
that would be necessary. And the only USAR teams at
the time were the federal USAR teams hosted by the
biggest cities, and there were only handful of them across
the country, And so we got busy here in the
Triangulear area during that time frame, Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill

(01:00:11):
and Kerry formed a partnership of those four largest departments
here in central North Carolina and developed a Level one
USAR team. Charlotte helped us with the training. We used
state and federal grants to buy the equipment. And then
an interesting thing happened, Mike, which doesn't happen very often

(01:00:31):
in municipal government, but the four city managers said to
the four fire chiefs, so you've got this Level one
team and we're protecting an airport and a lot of
industry and the state capitol and all of this. What
happens when that team gets deployed to the coast for
a hurricane. What are we going to have here for us?

(01:00:52):
And we said, well, you'd have what we have now,
which is the normal response in mutual aid. And they said,
we put a lot into this use our team. We
want to have enough to have here, and they said
double it, and so we between the four departments, we
doubled the staffing, we doubled the equipment, catch we doubled
the training, and we built a us OUR team that

(01:01:15):
is double the size of required so that one half
of the team can be deployed as a full Level
one USAR team and we still have a full Level
one us our team here in the triangle.

Speaker 2 (01:01:29):
It works.

Speaker 1 (01:01:29):
That's a good allocation of resources because you don't want
to be bereft. I mean, it's it's even something as
simple as station coverage. Once again, to go back to
the recent four alarm fire, do you have a Connecticut
had While those guys were at that particular box alarm,
companies from surrounding towns and cities went and covered the station.

Speaker 2 (01:01:45):
It's a simple concept.

Speaker 1 (01:01:46):
But what happens if it doesn't even have to be
another structure fire breaking out somewhere else, a medical call
and accellent call. Even just resetting the fire alarm, knowing
that you got somebody to take care of that in
case God forbid something else happens is a huge because
then you could just focus on your incident.

Speaker 3 (01:02:02):
Yeah, I mean, you know, you might have a major fire,
the one major fire you have a year in a
community that ties up your entire fire department and most
of your police department and most of your EMS response.
Anna Edna across town is still going to decide to
have a stroke that day, and somebody's going to do

(01:02:24):
something stupid barbecuing in their backyard and set fire to
their patio and you're going to have, you know, a
box alarm on campus in one of the dormitories. Somebody's
got to go. You can't just say to the community, hey,
we're busy with the big fire. Y'all are on your own.
That doesn't work right, and public expectations are is that

(01:02:46):
somebody's coming to help me. They don't care what color
the truck is. They don't care what the patch says
on the arm, they don't care what color the fire
helmets are. They want competent help show up. And so
in place is where they don't have strong mutual aid.
Shame on them, strong mutual aid. I mean, even New

(01:03:06):
York City Fire Department, one of the largest fire departments
in the world, on nine to eleven, had to have
mutual aid to help. So, you know, size notwithstanding, anybody
and everybody can at one point in there in the
history of their organization have to have outside help. And
most organizations have to have it on somewhat of a

(01:03:27):
regular basis. And so you've got to put those systems
in place ahead of time, because you can't put them
in place when crap's happening. If there's a smoke column
in the air, it's too late to ask for help.
You gotta have set up ahead of time.

Speaker 1 (01:03:43):
Yeah, and like you said, shame on anybody that doesn't.
I mean, you even see on law enforcement sides of
the coin. Remember a story that was being told by
a friend of the show, a previous guest that was
a member of the NYPD Emergency Service Unit, And they
can recall a few times where ESU was summoned as
mutual aid out of Staten Island.

Speaker 2 (01:04:01):
To New Jersey.

Speaker 1 (01:04:02):
You know, so even in law enforcement it can happen.
But the point is have it in place, you know,
it's better. As we've said many times in the show,
thanks to the information the guests have given us over
the years to be proactive and reactive because when it
hits the fan, and it always will, you just don't
know when it's going to but it's always a matter
of when not if you don't want to be caught lacking.

Speaker 3 (01:04:22):
We had we had an advantage in Chapel Hill on
that level with all with fire ems and law enforcement,
and that being a university town. We had big events
all the time, you know, football games. We'd have almost
as many people at a football game is the population
of the town. On a normal day and a work day,

(01:04:43):
the population in Chapel doubles because all the staff for
the university come into town, and so we had to
have strong mutual aid. Well, what happened was we hit
like we would have these national championship celebrations where you'd
have sixty to eighty thousand kids in the street downtown
set and fire to stuff. You got to have help

(01:05:06):
for stuff like that, law enforcement, fire and ems, and
so we began to build a really robust mutual aid
system in Chapel Hill and we used it for everything.
We used it for football games, we used it for
national championship celebrations, We used it for Halloween celebrations, which
got to be a really big deal in Chapel Hill,

(01:05:28):
and we would have law enforcement and fire and ems
from all the surrounding communities come in work together. And
in order to do that, we had to train ahead
of time, and by doing it at football game, we
used an incident command system for a football game and
taught our local law enforcement agencies the incident command system,

(01:05:51):
and so we had those opportunities to practice that which
a lot of communities probably don't have those they're only
going to use that system on a big incident, emergency incident,
but we were able to use it routinely, which then
when we did have big incidents, Wow, it worked great.

Speaker 1 (01:06:12):
It comes second nature after a while, and you wanted
to If you can fall back on it as instinct,
as opposed to oh my god, what do I do,
it'll help the incident go a lot smoother. Before we continue,
a couple comments to highlight in the chat. One's a question.
It's from Mike Roy. He wants to know did you
put poach rather any guys. We'll highlight John's comment in
the second vick. We'll go back to Mike Roy's.

Speaker 6 (01:06:31):
Question, did we approach you guys from Nellis Park up
to Chapel Hill. I did not poach them, but we
did have some Florida guys follow me up there, one
in particular Pete Snurch, which ended up being a tragic story.

Speaker 3 (01:06:52):
But yeah, there were two or three guys from Chapel
Hill Verron take Pete Sner, who in the years after
I'd left Florida, they came up and came to Chapelil
and I didn't make the hiring decisions because I didn't
want there to be any thought of favoritism, So I

(01:07:15):
let one of the assistant chiefs decide who got hired
and who didn't get hired, and.

Speaker 5 (01:07:20):
That way they made that decision, not me.

Speaker 1 (01:07:23):
Right now, it makes sense of aiding any conflict of interest,
if you don't mind me asking, was Pete a line
of duty?

Speaker 3 (01:07:29):
No. Pete and his daughter and his son and wife
were on vacation back in Florida to visit family during
the holidays, and they were hit in Orlando by a
drunk driver rolled their van over killed Pete. His daughter
died a late day later. His wife was severely injured.

(01:07:50):
His son was not injured. I just happened to be
in Florida at the time for an NFPA meeting in
Daytona Beach. This is weird. I was in my hotel
room getting dressed for the meeting and watching the morning news,
and they were talking about this big wreck in Orlando,

(01:08:10):
fatality wreck, and I did not know. I was looking
at my own firefighters wreck. And then I got a
call an hour or so later from my deputy chief
saying there was a wreck in Orlando and Pete s
Nurch was killed. Can you go over there to check
on Kathy and stuff. This is Brotherhood of the Fire Service.

(01:08:32):
The Daytona Beach Fire Department, who were at the NFPA meeting,
gathered me up, loaded me in one of their vehicles,
and we ran hot to Orlando. I was met at
the emergency room door by the vice president of the
Orange County Florida Firefighters Association and one of their chaplains.

(01:08:52):
They said, whatever you need, we'll support you. We've got
a hotel room reserved for you while you're here. They
handed me three hundred dollars cash. They said, if the
family needs anything, here's some cash to get you started.
And they stayed with us the whole time. I had
to come back to North Carolina to do some insurance
stuff for cath. They kept somebody at the hospital with

(01:09:16):
her the whole time, that fire department, that union did
And then when the drunk driver came up for trial
in Orlando, they made sure there were uniform firefighters in
the courtroom for her trial. That's how they supported us, Brotherhood.

Speaker 1 (01:09:34):
Of Fire Service absolutely, even in tragedy. I'm sorry to
hear about that. That's a terrible thing. I don't even
get me started on trunk drivers. That'll be a different show.
I could say a lot of things, none of them
nice same here.

Speaker 2 (01:09:46):
Yeah, yeah, that's for sure.

Speaker 1 (01:09:48):
And we'll highlight John Costello's comment nap VIC and he says,
North Carolina has always had a longtime strength and technical
rescue that has evolved into the USAR format initially developed
by the State Insurance Division and rally I received a
lot of training from North Carolina. He was a hostess,
negotiator and longtime police sargeant Pennsylvania. He retired after forty
five years of service, did John, So that's why he

(01:10:08):
comments that, thank you Jehan for the inside.

Speaker 2 (01:10:10):
As always, they had a.

Speaker 3 (01:10:11):
Strong technical rescue program in North Carolina before we started
into the USAR programs. A lot of it was volunteer
rescue squads, but the career department's also benefited from it.

Speaker 1 (01:10:25):
Absolutely. I think if you again, it's another component that
you see, even if it's not deployed outside of the state,
just in the state, and you saw that recently with
the storm.

Speaker 2 (01:10:35):
It's good to have on standby.

Speaker 1 (01:10:36):
Yeah, and obviously if you have strong mutual aid from
surrounding counties and states, as you also saw with this
recent storm, it goes.

Speaker 2 (01:10:43):
A long way.

Speaker 1 (01:10:43):
As well one fire. I did want to ask you
about five Gamma Delta fraternity house. You know a lot
of different frat houses in these different universities, and there's
a lot of problems that can arise with that. People
think of rowdy parties, which is a fire hazard. You
got too many people for law enforcement. The issue is
always going to be drugs and alcohol, but there is
the fire risk too, and there was this. So for

(01:11:04):
those not familiar with this incident, what happened.

Speaker 3 (01:11:09):
Mother's Day and graduation day. It was a Sunday morning,
May twelfth, nineteen ninety six. There had been a graduation
party at the fi gam house the night before. Not
a rowty fraternity house party. It was a you know,
graduating party seeing friends off for the last time. There

(01:11:30):
were parents there, food, drink, a DJ. It was pretty
mellow party. A group of fathers and sons were enjoying
some cigars in the basement and they got discarded into
a plastic waste basket. The party wound down and there

(01:11:56):
was eight kids that spent the night in in the
house and sometime in the early morning that fire took
off in the basement. It had a central staircase and
went from the basement all the way to the third floor,
and that was a chimney effect, and the fire raced
up that and it was first noticed by people across

(01:12:21):
the street at the Carolina Inn. The kitchen staff taking
a break out back saw the fire, called it in engined.
One was only a few blocks from there. They reported
heavy smoke shown when they pulled out the door. Three
kids escaped. Two of them jumped from the third floor,
one was very seriously injured, the young lady. Five of

(01:12:44):
them perished in the fire. We tried to make an
interior attack. We were told there were twenty kids in
ounce when first got there, and so the first cruise
tried to go in on both the basement level from
the rear and the first floor. The floor and the
first floor was already collapsing into the basement and the

(01:13:07):
fire was up through the roof at that point. On arrival,
we had to forcibly pull the crews out from the inside.
They were not going to give up, but the building
was coming in on them, and so we actually had
sector officers chief officers have to pull the hose lines
back and order them out of the building. Five kids

(01:13:31):
lost their life that day, Joanna Howe and Smith, Ben Woodruff,
Bob Weaver, and Mark Strickland, and they all died in
the fire, almost all well, all of them from smoke inhalation.
And it was a weird scene, Mike, because it was

(01:13:55):
graduation day and the smoke was drifting towards the stadium
where the graduation ceremony were going on. So as they're
graduating the class of ninety six, they can smell the
smoke from the fire in the stadium. When the graduation
ceremonies were over, the street in front of the fire
filled up with people in blue graduation gowns. Very surreal

(01:14:17):
scene as we were removing the bodies. And that it's
a fire that changed my career because up to that
point I was an ops guy. I was to kick
the front door and watch the furniture out the back
door kind of guy. And that's that fire taught me
that it's not my job to put the fires out,

(01:14:38):
it's my job to keep it from ever happening in
the first place. I'd had fatality fires before that, a
number of them in Florida and in North Carolina, but
that one really got to me. And all of the
parents lived close and so that afternoon they all came
to the scene and we met with him across the
street in the Carolina Inn in a in an empty ballroom,

(01:15:02):
and I don't know why, but I said to those parents,
we will make sure your daughters and sons did not
die in vain. And so I had to keep that promise.
And that promise was to get fraternity houses and sorority
houses in Chapel Hill sprinkland, which we'd tried to do
several years before and the city council wouldn't do it.

(01:15:27):
We pushed that through the state legislature and through the
city council within a matter of months got them all sprinkled,
and started a nationwide campaign for sprinklers in student housing.
And it changed my career. It changed my whole philosophy
of what my job was supposed to be as a

(01:15:47):
fire service leader. And so from that point on, I
was an advocate for fire sprinklers and for fire prevention.

Speaker 2 (01:15:57):
Thank you for opening up about that.

Speaker 1 (01:15:59):
Definitely incredible, be tragic, but at least the silver lining,
like you said, is there's an advocacy for safety to
make sure that it does not happen again, and fire
codes across the country have gotten a lot more stringent
in incidents like that are a big component as to why.
And you did touch on something there where you said
it sticks with you, and I imagine that in negotiations

(01:16:20):
with the city or just in different trainings. Even if
you didn't mention it directly, an incident like that so
fresh in your mind was one of the impetuses or kickstarters,
if you will, as to why certain codes had to
be put into place, and you know when it came
to just even with civilians, of course, obviously you want
to rescue them. There's also the component of member safety.

(01:16:40):
How do you feel like these changes impacted member safety
on the fire ground, because A you don't want to
fire like this to ever happen again, but if it does,
you also want to You didn't lose members in ninety six,
you don't want to lose members in the next one.

Speaker 3 (01:16:53):
Though. No. You know fire sprinkler systems and there are
people in the front. Our services said, well, if everything
is sprinkled, will be out of business. Not true, that
will never happen, and not everything will be sprinkled. But
I think anywhere where people sleep, whether it's a dormitory,

(01:17:17):
a hotel, hospital, a nursing home, apartment complex, single family residents.
Anywhere people sleep ought to be sprinkled, you know. We
over the years, the codes have sprinkled a lot of
industries and commercial buildings, but that's not where people die.

(01:17:40):
People die where they sleep. That's where the fire fatalities occur.
And if you look at firefighter deaths and injuries, you
look at that data, most firefighter deaths and injuries occur
in residential settings. Part of that's our fault because because

(01:18:01):
we consider those to be routine fires, and that's where
we make mistakes. We become complacent. Everybody's guard is up
on a big commercial fire, but a lot of people
go into residential fires without their guard up because it's routine.
We've done this before, no problem, We're going to knock
it down, and that's when mistakes get made. So to me,

(01:18:24):
fire sprinklers are life safety issues not only for citizens
but for firefighters, and it's also environmental protection. But the
home Builders Association opposes it because they want the rebuilds.
That's revenue for them. They'll oppose you everywhere you go

(01:18:45):
on fire sprinklers. Some realtors will oppose you on fire
sprinklers because they say it makes properties cost more, but
it really is not that expensive when you do it
on the initial build. And so I've been part of
an organization. One of the parents, one of the moms

(01:19:06):
of one of the kids that died at our game fire,
Ben Wood, of his mom, Bonnie, I asked her to
go with me to the state legislature after that fire,
and I said, you don't have to say anything, just
sit there and let me refer to you as a
parent who lost a child, because politicians have a hard
time saying no to grieving parents. And she found her

(01:19:29):
voice and she started going with me to advocate for
safer student housing and universities and stuff. And we worked
together for years and also became part of an organization
called Common Voices, which is an organization proposing sprinklers in
fire safety, not only in student housing, but in any

(01:19:53):
kind of residential or housing. And the organization's mostly made
up of parents we have lost kids in fires, and
they have a very powerful message. And so I've been
part of that group and we've advocated all over the
country for increased fire protection through sprinkler systems.

Speaker 2 (01:20:19):
And thank you for that.

Speaker 1 (01:20:20):
Yeah, it's a slippery slope for sure. In terms of
the opposition that you mentioned, I think it's another conversation
for another day. But it's one of those things where
it just makes you want to pull your hair out,
Like forget the rebuild. It's about safety. It's about safety,
and you know, I've seen some demonstrations over the years.
Over in West Haven, Connecticut. Every year we have a

(01:20:41):
tried District expo where all three of our fire districts
will get together, usually in the late summer early fall
when the weather's still nice, and we'll have a fire
sprinkler demonstration where one room a fire will start where
there is no sprinkler, and there's another room where you
do have sprinklers. You're still going to get a fire departments,
but most of the fire has been knocked down to

(01:21:02):
where the operation is a lot easier.

Speaker 2 (01:21:04):
There's not that much spread.

Speaker 1 (01:21:06):
And here's the kicker. And I'm not trying to be
funny when I say this, but it's common sense. Guess
what people and pats too, for the most part, don't die.
That's the goal. You don't want people to die, you know.
So that's what it boils down to. It's a simple
safety component. As we're talking with the Chief Dan Jones
here volume five Best the Bravest Nationwide Edition.

Speaker 2 (01:21:27):
I did want to ask you about this too.

Speaker 1 (01:21:28):
I want to touch on a few more things, and
I did not forget about your book. Who'll have to
ask you about that as well, okay. And that instructors
are very critical in the fire service, even if they're
not officers per se. He wants someone that has been
on the job a while, has some knowledge and has
certifications to teach you as well. It's a huge component
and that's how the tradition is safeguarded and you breed

(01:21:49):
knowledgeable and you know, capable firefighters for the next generation
as well. There was a crisis at some point with
the International Society of Fire Service Instructors. Was that crisis financial?
And if not, regardless of what it was, what was
your role in being able to help mitigate it.

Speaker 3 (01:22:07):
The International Society of Fire Service Instructors was a very
large professional association made up of fire instructors all across
the country. We were around fourteen to fifteen thousand members.
They owned the Fire Department Instructors Conference. I was on
the board of directors from about nineteen eighty two to

(01:22:28):
nineteen ninety eight ninety nine. In nineteen ninety six, we
learned that the executive director had embezzled a lot of money.
We were at FDIC in Indianapolis in nineteen ninety six.
The bills had not been paid yet. From ninety five

(01:22:51):
he had been showing the board of directors of a
mock up set of books, not the real books, and
we discovered that we were in deep financial crisis. We
were under ninety day lockdown order from the IRS that
were going to seize all the assets because he hadn't

(01:23:12):
paid taxes in a couple of years. Most of the
employees had not been paid. And in the middle of
all of this crisis, associate professor from the fire programs
at Eastern Kentucky University was the president. I was the
first vice and in the middle of this crisis we

(01:23:35):
had to change of leadership and I became president and
so I had to navigate us through all of this.
We ended up selling FDIC in order to pay off
the back taxes. We tried to sell to the International
Associations of Fire Chiefs. They didn't have enough cash. That's
how it got sold to Penwell and Fire Engineering magazine

(01:23:56):
that was used to pay off the back taxes and
to pay employees who hadn't been paid. We took the
organization into Chapter seven bankruptcy and negotiated our way out
of that. It took over a year in federal bankruptcy court.
We closed down the Massachusetts office and moved the whole

(01:24:17):
operation of Virginia. Had to lay off a lot of
employees because we couldn't pay them, and the organization suffered dramatically.
But we were able to walk it back from the
precipice and save the organization. And then subsequent presidents following me,

(01:24:37):
people like Doug Kline and Eddie Buchanan and Shane and
some other people, rebuilt the organization. Today it's a very viable,
healthy organization that participates in a lot of research and
support certification of fire instructors. It was a terrible It

(01:25:01):
was the worst three years of my career trying to
get through all of that. But I had strong supporting
city manager who said, do not walk away from it.
You see it through, help them get back on their feet.
We'll cover you on this end. You got a strong
staff at the fire department, so you go and do
what you have to do and will take care of

(01:25:22):
business on this end. And we got through it, but
it was a terrible time. Anybody who serves on the
board of directors of a major nonprofit professional association or anything,
you have to have your guard up all the time,
and no matter what the career staff may tell you,

(01:25:43):
ask a lot of questions. Demand to see all of
the books, not just some of the books. Don't assume
anything's okay. Always always look look close. Because the gentleman
who was our executive director had been the executive director
since the ORGANIZA was formed in the early seventies, had
done a lot of great things. He was one of

(01:26:05):
the key fire service leaders that got the National Fire
Academy established, and so we all trusted him, we all
believed in him. But somewhere along in his life he'd
gone gone wrong. And the money was not in a
secret bank account or in a Swiss bank account or
anything like that. It was gone. It was blown. And

(01:26:27):
I'm not gonna go into details here about where that
money ended up, but it got blown, it was gone,
and so but we were able to get through it,
and the organization's healthy today, thank goodness.

Speaker 1 (01:26:43):
You know, another for different reasons, difficult situation that had
a happy ending. At least you were able to reset things,
and you know, at least it was better than what
it was when you found it, because it's a heck
of a thing to find out. It's an unfortunate thing
to find out, but at least it got turned around somewhat,
although we wish it didn't happen to be in with.

Speaker 3 (01:27:00):
Oh, I had to learn things over the course of
that three year presidency that no far chief should ever
have to know, or understand or have to learn.

Speaker 2 (01:27:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:27:12):
I spent a lot of time in Federal Bankruptcy Court
negotiating settlements in Richmond, and well, I would have never
thought I had to play that role.

Speaker 1 (01:27:24):
Sorry, I had to go through that. A couple more
things before we reach the end of the program. I'll
touch on your LLC as well momentarily. But being an author,
as someone that recently wrote their first book, I can
finally understand the process.

Speaker 2 (01:27:36):
It's difficult.

Speaker 1 (01:27:37):
You have a lot of great ideas, Yeah, I mean,
you have a lot of great ideas meeting generally as
an author, but it's difficult to condense it into one
concise book to make sure it translates well with the
written word, and you want to make sure it's viable
to sell too. So and that's just some of the
components you have to worry about as an author facing
the fires right behind you. So I'll ask you first

(01:27:58):
about the process and of course the goal in writing
that book and the joys ultimately of being able to
release that book.

Speaker 3 (01:28:05):
Well, the book is based on our Brave Fire Leader
Academy that my partner Kelly Walsh, and I created when
I retired from the fire department, and the concept that
we started off with is the fire departments, the Fire
Service in general, does allowsy job of preparing people to
run their organizations. We do a great job of preparing

(01:28:28):
people to run fire grounds and to execute rescue operations
and to handle disaster response. We do a lousy job
of teaching people things like human relations skills, communication skills,
how to deal with elected officials, how to deal with
the news media, how to prepare budgets, how to prepare

(01:28:50):
strategic plans, how to deal with a human resource crisis
in your department, like sexual harassment or violence or those
types of things. And so my partner, Kelly, who has
a background in HR, she was actually the embedded HR
person in the Mesa, Arizona Fire Department for ten years

(01:29:14):
and then went into the private sector. She and I
met Dennis Compton, who was a fire chief in and
Mace Arizona, arranged for us to be introduced when I retired,
and we started putting together a program to address all
those issues. Our programs are not the sexy, smoking flames training.

(01:29:39):
It's the down and dirty. How do you run your organization?
How do you keep your organization out of a court,
How do you keep your organization out of bad news coverage?
How do you recruit and keep your employees motivated and
dedicated to the to the mission. And so that's our program,

(01:30:00):
and so our COVID. When we weren't traveling and teaching
during COVID, when things slowed down, Facing the Fire was
our project. We took a lot of what we had
been teaching and we condensed it into a book. It's
not all of the very Fire Leader Academy, but it's
some of the key parts that we thought were really important,

(01:30:21):
and that's how we did it. You're right, Mike, Sitting
down to write a book is really really hard, and
you try to coalesce your thoughts and stuff. But we
found a local person here, an editor who had a
lot of experience with putting books together. And the way
we did it was we did a zoom call once

(01:30:44):
a week and we would do one, one chapter at
a time, and we would just talk it through and
it was recorded, and then that recording was transcribed and
sent back to us, and so then we were able
to we had something to start with based on our conversations,

(01:31:05):
and so we took those transcribed conversations then and started
working on filling in the blanks and pulling it together,
making it cohesive, and and so it tied together, and
then got a publisher here locally who cleaned it up

(01:31:26):
for us and put it together and put a package
together and and it's it's distributed through Amazon.

Speaker 2 (01:31:36):
Nice to hear Nice here as his mind. So you
know that's that.

Speaker 1 (01:31:39):
There's some especially if you're working on other projects and
other books in the ensuing years, there's growing pains. Like
with anything new, you realize there's some things I should
have done, there's some things I shouldn't have done, But
ultimately it's good to have the book out. It's kind
of like your first child. You learn as you go.
That way, if you have the next child, you know,
you're a little bit better prepared.

Speaker 3 (01:31:57):
So I had been a co author on a on
a Fire Service book many years ago through the ISFSI,
but that was a very different process being a co
author than sitting down with your partner and trying to
put a whole book together.

Speaker 1 (01:32:13):
Oh yeah, I can test to that. It took me
about five months. But ultimately you know, when it's done,
you know it's something to be very.

Speaker 2 (01:32:19):
Very proud of. I know I feel the way. I'm
sure you feel that way too.

Speaker 3 (01:32:22):
Absolutely absolutely.

Speaker 1 (01:32:25):
Volume five tonight Best of the Bravest Nationwide edition, Chief
Dan Jones, our guest. One more thing before the rapid Fire.
Actually a couple more things There is your LLC leadership.
You've been teaching for a while and you're busier with
that now. In retirement in twenty fifteen is when you say,
after twenty five years, okay, time to go. It's never
easy to walk away forty one years on the career side,

(01:32:48):
between of course Florida and those years in Chapel Hill.
What was it or were there a combination of things
that made you say, all right, I've had a good
run here, but it's time to move on to the
next chapter.

Speaker 3 (01:32:59):
I'll be completely honest with you, I was not getting
along with the city manager. We had a fairly new
city manager who the first few years he was there
was great. I worked well with him. I'm not sure
what happened, but he changed and he began doing some
things ethically that I couldn't support. And I knew that

(01:33:26):
I could outlast him because I had a more solid
relationship with the elected officials than he did. But I
also knew he could make it very hard on the
fire department. And to be honest with you, you reach a
point where you realize you've done what you can do.
It's time to let somebody else step in and take

(01:33:48):
it to the next level. And I had reached that point.
And so the combination of those things. I was sixty
years old and it was just time. I wanted to
have more time with family. I was a new grandfather.

(01:34:09):
I wanted to have time for that. I didn't see
a lot of my daughters growing up because I was
so career oriented, and I didn't want to make that
same mistake with my grandson. I wanted to be part
of his life, and so all of those elements come
together kind of at the same time, and I made
the decision.

Speaker 1 (01:34:28):
It was time well done, well done and understandable, and
unfortunately a lot of chiefs deal with that on both
the police side and the fireside.

Speaker 2 (01:34:36):
But you left with your head held high. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:34:39):
I didn't want to be one of those guys where
people say, you know, Jones did a good job for
a long time, but he stayed too long. Yeah, it's
better to leave when things are good than to be
forced out because things started to turn south.

Speaker 1 (01:34:53):
Right, Leave them wanting more, Yes, it's the best approach.
Leave them wanting more, you know, And I ultimately you
definitely did leave them wanting more. And the last thing,
of course, before the rapid fire is you got the LLC.
So you've kept active in teaching. What do you enjoy
most about it? And where do you feel This is
a wide ranging question. You can give any answer that
you want. That the fire Service is right now in

(01:35:16):
twenty twenty four, what do you like about where things
are well?

Speaker 3 (01:35:19):
I'll be honestly, I was skeptical about the future of
the Fire Service when I retired for a lot of reasons,
the highs we experience politically, resource wise, public opinion wise.
After nine to eleven that dissipated. The fire service frequently

(01:35:43):
was suffering politically from budget cuts. Two thousand and eight
was a terrible time budgetary wise in public safety, both
police and fire, and it just it just was it
didn't look good for the future. But then when we

(01:36:06):
started teaching this program and we had officers from all
over the country and we've been coast to coast with
this program and big departments, little departments. If you go
on our website and look at the list of departments
we've trained officers in, it impresses me. And I was
there and I look at that list and I think, wow,

(01:36:28):
we really did that many officers from that many departments.
But what has impressed me, Mike, is that the upcoming
group of young officers, the captain's battalion chiefs and some
assistant chief level, they're impressive, at least the ones we've

(01:36:48):
had in our classes. They're smarter than we were. They
have new ideas about how to provide service. They are
not so much. I don't know how to say this
about out offending some people, but some of us were
the old school, like I said before, kicked the door

(01:37:10):
and washed the furniture around guys. They're not about that.
They're about serving the public more and they're about they're
more open to EMS services, they're more open to environmental
protection work. They have fresh ideas, and so I think
what the last nine years has taught me, as we've

(01:37:32):
taught them, is that the future of the fire service
leadership looks much brighter than I thought it was. I
think there's some really really talented, dedicated, intelligent people that
are rising through the ranks that are going to be
the next generation of leaders in the fire service, and

(01:37:54):
I think that can only be a good thing.

Speaker 2 (01:37:57):
Well said, and I see it.

Speaker 1 (01:37:58):
I work with some of them, I definitely can't concur
and that's I think the fire Service is in a
good spot for sure, and I'm excited to see where
it goes. I'm excited to hopefully be a part of
it pretty soon. And that brings us to the rapid fire.
Five hit and run questions for me, Five hit run
answers from you. You could say pass if you'll want,
and we'll start with the first one, either between Florida
or North Carolina. Funniest call you ever responded to.

Speaker 3 (01:38:23):
Late night accident and I think you saw this on
the list of things I've provided to you. But a
band member was driving a station wagon full of band instruments.
They'd been playing at some bar somewhere and he was,
I guess, on his way home and was in the

(01:38:46):
process of pleasuring himself as he drove lost control of
the car. It went into the ditch and rolled over,
threw him out. He was unconscious and dislocated shoulder and exposed,
and a police told us evidence in the car indicated

(01:39:09):
what had happened, So I'll let your imagination figure that
one out, and we covered him with the sheet we
immobilized as a dislocated shoulder, and when the ambulance arrived,
we let the sheet go with the ambulance. We never
told the ambulance crew that he was exposed, loaded him

(01:39:32):
into the back of the ambulance, and off they went
to the hospital with him. And that was probably the
funniest He wasn't spuriously injured. He was just knocked out
and dislocated shoulder.

Speaker 1 (01:39:44):
I would say at least he lived to tell a tale,
although he's probably living with a lot of embarrassment from it,
but at least he's alive. And at the second question,
the rapid fire. Most uplifted call he ever responded to
in your career.

Speaker 3 (01:39:57):
That was a hard one. That's a hard one. Been
on a lot of tragedies, Probably the most uplifting call
in a way, and I hope this is not misunderstood,
is the Phigamma Delta fire. Because at the end of

(01:40:22):
that day when I got home, the tragedy hit me
when I got home, and I was almost overwhelmed by it,
and I'll admit there were tears, But at the same time,
I was incredibly proud of my department for how we
handled it. And then, as I said earlier, it changed

(01:40:44):
my career. It changed my whole philosophy at what my
job was supposed to be. And then when Miss Bonnie
Woodrof and I started to work together and I saw
her strength as a mom who had lost a son
and a fire, and how how strong she became, I
realized that that's a level of courage that we don't

(01:41:05):
even have in the fire service. You know, we have
the courage to crawl down to Burnham Hallway, but to
lose your child in a tragic way. And then on
Mother's Day, which means every Mother's Day, she's reminded of that,
and then for her to travel around the country and
stand before city councils, state legislators, university administrators and tell

(01:41:32):
her story over and over and over. That's a level
of courage that just knocks me back. I could not
do what she's done. I could not do it.

Speaker 2 (01:41:48):
I can't even imagine.

Speaker 1 (01:41:49):
But kudos to her a position no parents, especially a mother,
should ever have to be put in.

Speaker 3 (01:41:54):
But in fact, I'll tell you, Mike, if you want
to have a show some night that would be really gripping.
Get in touch with Common Voices and have two or
three of those parents come on and talk to you
about their experiences with fire and losing children and stuff.
And their stories are gripped every time I hear them,

(01:42:17):
and I've heard them many times because I travel with
them to give the fire department perspective. It's it's mind blowing.

Speaker 2 (01:42:28):
Yeah, I have no doubt about that.

Speaker 1 (01:42:29):
And shout out to Common Voices as well. This one
it comes from Joe Maliga. It's a running joke. Since
you've seen the show before, you know what the running
joke is. The third one of the Rabid Fire. Did
you ever deliver a baby?

Speaker 3 (01:42:41):
Yes, a couple times, all right, there you go. Once
in the front seat of a Chevy pickup truck on
in the middle of the night on a curb. I
knew it was going to be close because as we
came down the street and the rescue truck, the police
officer was standing in the street waving his arms at
us like an idiot. And when we got to the

(01:43:01):
open door of the pickup truck, the baby was presenting,
and oh did that mess up the inside of that
pickup truck. But it was a successful delivery.

Speaker 2 (01:43:14):
Well, there you go.

Speaker 1 (01:43:15):
You know, that's that's something to hang over the kid's
head for the next eighteen years. I'm glad you're here.

Speaker 2 (01:43:20):
You cost me a pickup truck. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:43:23):
One of my captains, and chop Will, delivered his own
baby in the front seat of his car. Delivered his wife.
They didn't make it to the hospital. He had to
pull over and deliver his own baby.

Speaker 1 (01:43:36):
I hope I never have to do that, but I'm
probably going to if I get on the job, I'm
probably going to. So I just hope I'm prepared for that.
All right, ma'am, how you do it?

Speaker 2 (01:43:46):
All right?

Speaker 1 (01:43:46):
You handle that, you know, But shout out to all
the moms out there because that does not sound fun.

Speaker 2 (01:43:52):
But hey, listen, they get through it.

Speaker 1 (01:43:54):
And that's why, that's why it's important to be a
good child, because they can always hold that over your
head as they should. Pain and suffering you caused me
to push you out. Shout out to all the moms
out there.

Speaker 3 (01:44:04):
Here you go.

Speaker 1 (01:44:05):
Fourth question of rapid fire. Favorite firehouse meal? If you
had to pick one, smoke brisket, m M make me hungry?

Speaker 2 (01:44:11):
Sounds good.

Speaker 3 (01:44:14):
Had a guy at headquarters station in Chapel Hill that
liked to smoke brisket, and he knew how much I
enjoyed it. And my office was on the second floor,
and that son of a gun would put the smoker
on that side of the building, underneath my office windows,
so that I spent all day smelling that brisket.

Speaker 2 (01:44:32):
Smoking sounds good.

Speaker 1 (01:44:35):
Might have to go half some one of these days,
especially at the firehouse. And the last question of the
rapid fire fifth and final advice you give firefighters, especially
newer fire officers entering the profession.

Speaker 3 (01:44:46):
Well, I used to give my newly promoted fire officers
a challenge coin, and on one side of it was
a department logo and on the other side of it,
it said this, are you doing the right thing at
the right time, in the right way and for the
right reasons. That's something you have to ask yourself pretty frequently,

(01:45:10):
I think, no matter what profession you're in, but particularly
in our profession. And now I have it made into
a challenge coin, or not a challenge coin, but a
poker chip. I don't know if you can see that,
but it says right on there, are you doing the
right thing at the right time and the right way

(01:45:31):
for the right reasons.

Speaker 2 (01:45:33):
I have that coin. Thank you for that.

Speaker 3 (01:45:36):
By the way, I think that's a question all of
us need to ask ourselves frequently. If you can answer
yes to those four questions, you're doing great, my friend.

Speaker 2 (01:45:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:45:51):
That applies to not just the fire service, but life
as a whole.

Speaker 2 (01:45:55):
Cheef.

Speaker 1 (01:45:55):
This has been fantastic stick around. We'll talk off here,
but before I say goodbye to the audience, any shout
out to anyone or anything you want to.

Speaker 3 (01:46:01):
Give back to the issue of mentors, just real quick.
I want to relate something that I did when I retired.
I sought out as many of my mentors for my
career as I could. Some of them had passed away,
most of them were retired, but I wanted to thank
them and let them know how my career ended up

(01:46:22):
and the successes that I had. And I would say
to any of your listeners, if you've had important mentors
in your career or in your life, go tell them
thank you. Mike Burton, one of my teaching partners, says,
you know, we go to funerals, firefighter funerals, and we

(01:46:42):
hear not just lying of duty but retired firefighter funerals,
and we hear all these wonderful things about their career
and their service. And it's good for the families to
hear that. But why didn't we tell them that when
they were alive? And so, if any of your listeners
have important mentors in their life, go tell them thank you.

(01:47:04):
Go tell them what they meant to you and your career.
Tell them now, don't save it for the funeral, Tell
him now, well they're still alive. Nothing makes you feel
better about your contributions than to have somebody come back
to you and say, you know what, you made a
difference in my career. You helped me. That's the greatest

(01:47:25):
reward anybody can get. And so to your listeners, I
would say, go tell your mentors thank you, pick up
the phone, go see them whatever, but.

Speaker 1 (01:47:35):
Let them know good advice. Once again, Thank you very much.
She fantastic job. We'll talk off here. I want to
thank everyone that tuned in tonight via YouTube, LinkedIn and Facebook,
and those of you who will listen later on the
audio side once this gets ended down. Of course, thanks
to producer Vic has always for the great job that
he does on the ones and twos behind the scenes.

(01:47:55):
Wouldn't have been able to run this show without him
and all his efforts. Coming up next to the Mine
the New Even podcast, we're working on a guest for
this Friday. We don't have one at the moment, but
next week is a full week. He was an aviation
pilot for the NYPD. He out of their Special Operations
Division and has many a great story to tell from that.
And that's Mike Sileo, who will join us next Monday
six pm and next Friday for another volume of the

(01:48:18):
Best of the Bravest interviews with the Ft and Wives
Elite retire out of Rescue One in Manhattan. Prior to
that was a fireman and Alexandria Virginia been trying to
get him for a while. We'll finally have him Next Friday,
Joel Kanaski for another volume of the Best of the
Bravest interviews with the Ft and Wives Elite. We'll let
you know if we're able to get somebody for this Friday.
In the meantime, we'll continue to work on that. For

(01:48:39):
those of you listening on the audio side tonight, Tonight's
outro song comes to you from his nineteen eighty nine
album Transverse City. It's the late Great warren Zevon with
splendid Isolation. In the meantime on behalf of producer Victor
and Chief Dan Jones. This has been volume five for
the Best of the Bravest nationwide edition on Mike Cologne.
We will see you next time. Everyone scream thank you Bike.

Speaker 7 (01:49:17):
I'm one of the if all alone in the desert,
I'm one of the Like Georgia Keith, I'm one of
the on the yuppery side.

Speaker 4 (01:49:28):
And never go down in the street. Splendid I saw then.

Speaker 8 (01:49:36):
I don't need no one.

Speaker 4 (01:49:40):
Splendid I selevate.

Speaker 8 (01:49:56):
Michael Jackson and Disney d don't have to share it
with nobody else.

Speaker 4 (01:50:04):
Lock the gate spoofy, take my head and lead me through.

Speaker 8 (01:50:09):
You will do self splendid iowation.

Speaker 4 (01:50:16):
I don't need no one splendid I saw. Don't want
to wake up with no one beside me. Don't want
to take up with nobody.

Speaker 7 (01:50:34):
Doo, don't want nobody coming by with our car holding first,
don't hold nothing to.

Speaker 4 (01:50:41):
Do with you. Whoooo.

Speaker 8 (01:51:15):
I'm putting to the corner upon the windows, lying down
in the dark to dream.

Speaker 4 (01:51:23):
I don't wanna see their faces. I don't want want
to hear the n scream. Splendid I saw theytion.

Speaker 3 (01:51:34):
I don't need no one.

Speaker 4 (01:51:38):
Splendid isoalatetion.

Speaker 8 (01:51:46):
Splendid iowytion, I don't need no one.

Speaker 4 (01:51:54):
Splendid isoatetion

Speaker 3 (01:53:32):
Never

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Episode 341: The Best of The Bravest - Nationwide: Chief Dan Jones (Volume 5)

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Episode 341: The Best of The Bravest - Nationwide: Chief Dan Jones (Volume 5)