Do We Need More Firefighters?
LEHRER, ELI
Do We Need More Firefighters? Why John Kerry lights their fire. BY ELI LEHRER FIREFIGHTERS love John Kerry, and the Massachusetts senator loves them back. The International Association of...
...While the U.S...
...Kerry's proposal to hire 100,000 firefighters at federal expense and provide them with boatloads of new equipment borrows from Bill Clinton's politically successful proposal to hire 100,000 police officers...
...Fire Administration no longer keeps statistics on them...
...Because they may work as few as 4 days out of 14, profesEli Lehrer is associate editor o/The American Enterprise...
...Less than 2 percent of funds go for planning efforts to mitigate attacks, the most effective homeland security action a fire department can take...
...On balance, however, fire does not rank among America's major problems, and firefighters—local workers whose activities by and large are locally funded—don't need more federal largess...
...sional firefighters have ample time to canvass, hand out literature, and man the polls...
...it's no coincidence that Kerry appeared before the firefighters' annual convention in mid-March to deliver his first major address on homeland security...
...Clinton, however, proposed a 15 percent increase in police staffing at a time when crime rates sat near historic highs...
...Were it not for a sizable increase in wildfire damage—resulting from timber management practices—the statistics would look even better...
...New building practices, technology, professional emergency management, and exigencies of homeland security are sending firefighters the way of blacksmiths and slide-rule manufacturers...
...Localities as substantial as Rockville, Maryland, Ithaca, New York, and Pasadena, Texas (population 125,000), do just fine with fire-fighting Kerry's proposal to hire 100,000 firefighters at federal expense borrows from Clinton's proposal to hire 100,000 police officers...
...The federal government might even examine ways it could help the majority of fire departments that have volunteer or pay-per-call staffs, and fund more research on Emergency Medical Services...
...While nobody keeps national statistics on calls for Emergency Medical Services, New York, Chicago, and Houston report that three out of four emergency calls to fire departments involve EMS rather than fire, a pattern that appears to hold for professional fire departments across the country...
...Better understanding of the physics of fire—a notoriously complex field—has made it easier to stop fires from spreading out of control...
...Highly flammable apartment buildings with wooden siding, the single most common form of urban housing as recently as 1940, have vanished in most of the country...
...Only about 40 percent of Americans live in areas with all-professional fire departments...
...Perhaps because of their lack of professional identity, firefighters have retained attitudes appropriate to a nation with a much larger fire problem: While the last decade has seen the growth of civilian emergency managers who help communities plan for evacuations and mitigate disasters, firefighters still focus on increasingly rare major structural fires...
...Inflation-adjusted fire-related damage fell about a quarter even though real-estate values increased more than overall inflation, population rose 20 percent, and real GDP more than doubled...
...Nearly every major city has reduced its firefighting ranks in the last three years, and, while federal grants to fire departments will remain at nearly double the levels of 2002, the Bush administration has proposed a fiscal 2005 budget that would give firefighters less federal aid than they got in 2004...
...According to the World Fire Statistics Center, the United States actually has the second smallest fire problem (measured in relation to GDP) among G-8 nations...
...Smoke detectors (installed in over 90 percent of homes), better building codes, and sprinkler systems make the most difference...
...Fires in hotels and motels, which killed over 100 people a year as recently as the late 1960s, have become so rare the U.S...
...Looking for new tasks, fire departments have branched out to running citywide call centers (Los Angeles) or bicycle safety programs (Phoenix), and even handing out advice on babysitting (Downers Grove, Illinois...
...The senator, long a supporter of increased federal funding for fire services, promises iAFF and its comrades-inarms a federal bonanza if he wins the election: grants to hire 100,000 more professional firefighters across the country, more funding for equipment and training, regulations that would make it easier for firefighters to qualify for disability, and extra money for local emergency planning...
...The International Association of Firefighters endorsed the presumptive Democratic nominee in September 2003, when other unions had flocked to Howard Dean's banner...
...most major cities require that firefighters gain paramedic certification...
...The lack of fires stems from a confluence of felicitous trends...
...When the Bush campaign aired commercials featuring glimpses of 9/11 firefighters, IAFF president Harold Schaitberger declared that his organization would go after Bush "loudly and aggressively" for this "exploitation...
...The "structural blazes"—buildings on fire—that most firefighters train to deal with no longer constitute a major problem in much of the United States...
...Despite its success, firefighting never emerged as a discrete profession...
...Firefighters complain about "understaffing" and failure to meet standards (created by firefighters themselves), but America has shown enormous success in fighting fire...
...Kerry, by contrast, proposes an increase of about 35 percent in the ranks of America's professional firefighters at a time when fire appears to have entered a welcome permanent decline...
...Over 90 percent of federal Assistance to Firefighters grants pay for "operations and firefighter safety" and "fire vehicles"— essentially, the purchase of new fire apparatus and protective gear...
...A few of Kerry's proposals, most prominently his desire to spend a larger percentage of grant money on local emergency planning (something Bush also seeks to do), would help homeland security...
...However crime rates at the time were near historic highs...
...dominated by volunteers...
...A growing wildfire problem that stems mostly from federal land management policies also deserves more federal attention...
...The way fire departments spend Bush administration grants gives a good sense of how Kerry's proposal would turn out...
...Sprinkler systems, which have about the same installation cost as wall-to-wall carpet, also save thousands of lives: It has been at least 20 years since more than one person has died in any ordinary fire in a building with a sprinkler system...
...Planning works: A major reason 99 percent of civilians at Ground Zero lived is that the World Trade Center had an effective evacuation plan...
...Between 1977 and 2002 (the period for which comparable data are available), the National Fire Protection Association reports that the number of fires declined from 3.2 million a year to 1.6 million a year, while fire-related deaths fell from 7,400 to 3,400...
...Firefighting cuts at the local and federal levels make good sense because professional firefighting has become almost boring...
...Despite having less to do, professional firefighting ranks have grown slightly faster than the population...
...While firefighters' financial resources can't come close to matching those of industrial unions or larger government unions, they provide an important source of campaign labor...
...About 70 percent of America's firefighters are volunteers or part-time workers...
...Although it historically was near the high end (while lower than countries like Japan, Denmark, and Ireland), America's fire death rate has dropped to levels squarely in the middle of the major developed countries...
...Fire Administration claims that America has one of the highest fire rates in the industrialized world, the claim is simply false...
...Plenty of researchers, in any case, have raised questions about the effectiveness of Clinton's COPS program...
...Nearly all fire departments, indeed, respond to car accidents with expensive, lumbering equipment designed to fight structural fires...
...Fire departments, indeed, now exist mostly as ambulance agencies...
...Even at Ground Zero, the fires were under control within 24 hours of the first airplane impact...
...Better navigation and communication systems along with E-911 services (which transmit callers' locations to emergency operators) have let fire departments respond faster when fire breaks out...
...They played a key role in allowing Kerry's more modestly funded campaign to match Dean's iowa operation...
...Schaitberger and his members have every reason to support Kerry...
...Arson, a major problem in many inner-city neighborhoods during the 1970s, nearly vanished as a major social issue...
...Fair-sized cities like Irvine, California (population 145,000), have gone months without a single "working fire" that required firefighters to hook up a hydrant...
...If America's 291,650 professional firefighters want to keep their jobs, indeed, they will need all the help they can get: Despite the heroic image firefighters earned on 9/11, the profession is currently staring into the abyss of obsolescence...
...If one wanted to put to better use the dollars Kerry proposes spending, the money would almost certainly save more lives and property in the form of grants and tax credits for sprinkler systems and smoke alarms...
Vol. 9 • April 2004 • No. 30
