One of the difficulties that firefighters in large, old FD’s face is a near-paralytic bureaucracy running the organization. After decades of political empire-building and S.O.P.’s designed to keep entrenched desk jockeys in power, sometimes the results sift down to the field where they make the worker bees look foolish and on occasion harm the citizen as well.
I’m wondering if that’s what happened in Philadelphia the other day when they had a fatal fire while the first-due engine was pulled out of service to help transfer a medic unit. FossilMedic REPORTED HERE that when the evening shift at Engine 57 reported for duty at 1800 hrs. on Saturday, they were ordered to go out of service and travel to the maintenance shop to help Medic 9′s crew transfer their equipment to a reserve ambulance. When I read that, my first thought was “What??” Why wasn’t that done at the station instead of at the shop?
I know that an ambulance change-over is an all-hands task. When I was on the job it was something that had to be done every now and then because the ambulances pile up the miles and need maintenance and repairs fairly regularly. But we did it in the station. The reserve ambulance would be brought over to the ambulance bay and we would all turn out to help the medic crew switch their supplies and equipment over to the reserve unit as quickly as possible to get it into service. And the engine stayed in service the whole time. The operation could take as long as an hour, and it was not a popular chore at the best of times, let alone at 2 am when I’d have to roust out the crew from valuable sleep time. But bitchin’ is a well-earned privilege and after the first couple of minutes of venting, they’d pitch in and get the job done. But I’m straying a bit.
The question keeps coming back…. why the transfer was made off-site? It would be expected that perhaps this was an exceptional situation that couldn’t be avoided, but not normal procedure. But we get the impression that in Philadelphia this is standard practice. In fact, watching this tv interview with the Fire Commissioner at the fire scene who is apparently very adamant that not only is this accepted practice, but he claims that it happens regularly “all over the city.” This particular incident was complicated by the fact that prior to the shift change the engine had already been out of service all day as part of their firehouse roulette scheme of rolling “brownouts.” The house fire became a 3-houses fire and a 12-yr.-old boy perished.
Now I know that I don’t have all the facts and it might not be quite what it seems on the surface. But just the same, you can’t help but wonder about this “routine, every day practice” of putting still another engine out of service for a couple of hours so they can travel across town to switch equipment from one ambulance to another. But you know what it’s like when you try to change something when “we’ve always done it this way.”
Can’t point fingers, I guess. We’ve always checked out the equipment this way, and we’re about to do it again. So let’s get started and I’ll get another pot of coffee going.
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