3 minutes and 45 seconds.
That’s the time it took from the moment the tones went off at station 10 to the moment the fire truck pulled up to the front of a home in northeast Salem. Another 8 minutes or so later, and the patient had been loaded into the back of an ambulance, and was being transported to a nearby hospital. That’s considered an above-average response time by the Salem Fire Department, who has a target response time of 5 minutes and 30 seconds for 85% of the calls within the city limits.
When you dial 911, a call-taker has recorded your information — address, nature of the emergency, symptoms, age, gender, and any other relevant information — and passed that on to a dispatcher (both of whom work off-site). The dispatcher sends out tones to— or “taps out” — the appropriate apparatus; the lights in the hallways that are otherwise left off suddenly come on, and an automated voice comes over the station loudspeaker, stating the apparatus to respond, the type of emergency, and the location of the emergency. In the case of a medical need, three firefighter-paramedics respond in a well-rehearsed and coordinated way. The captain recounts for the rest of the crew the specifics of the emergency (has the patient been drinking? doing drugs? What is the medical history? How long have symptoms been going on?), the paramedic begins recording information into his tablet that will later form the basis of the incident report. When the truck pulls up in front of the house three minutes and 45 seconds later, each person knows exactly what role they will play on-scene. Each piece of equipment is stored in a precise place on the engine for quick retrieval (it’s pretty clear that clutter has no place on a firetruck; after all, you don’t want to be rummaging around for Narcan while your patient goes into cardiac arrest). Questions are asked of the patient, medical treatment begins, and by the time the paramedics arrive in an ambulance a minute or two later, the patient is ready to be loaded into the back of the ambulance for transport, and further treatment.
The job of a firefighter is almost a misnomer. Most firefighters these days are also trained as paramedics, which is helpful, given that the majority of calls that a fire department responds to are medical calls. Salem Fire Department, for example, responded to just over 30,000 calls in 2021 (that’s over 82 calls per day) and 60% of those calls were medical calls. 925 of those calls were fires (including structure fires, garbage fires, vehicle fires, and vegetation fires), but of those 925 calls, only 16 were upgraded to a second alarm or higher. One of the firefighters sounded just slightly disappointed when he reported to me, “We go to maybe 2 or 3 big fires a year.” The trend in Salem follows national trends. 40 years ago, of the ten million calls that firefighters nationwide were dispatched to, roughly five million calls were medical calls, and three million were for fires. By 2021, firefighters were dispatched to 36.6 million calls, but the number (not just the percentage!) of fires actually declined to 1.3 million, while the number of medical calls increased dramatically to 26.2 million calls.
In other words, the percentage of medical calls has steadily increased from 50% to 72% while the percentage of fires has dropped from 30% to just 3.5%. An aging population, along with greatly improved fire prevention and suppression methods, can account for this change, but a firefighter who joined the fire academy hoping to spend his or her days running into burning buildings will soon find that the job will be different than what they expected. Station 10’s captain confirmed this — in his 20-plus years on the job, a career that began with lots of firefighting had transitioned into medical treatment.
Firefighting as an organized profession began in ancient Rome where slaves (and later, hired citizens) patrolled the city streets to respond to a fire, hopefully before it could spread to neighboring structures. Augustus’ Vigiles (they also served as the city’s police force) would arrive at a building on fire, and negotiate a purchase price for the building. If a price could be agreed upon, the fire would be extinguished; if not, the building would left to burn. Centuries later, European firefighting companies were formed by insurance companies for the sole purpose of protecting the assets of the insurance company. When a fire company arrived on the scene of a fire, they would look for a fire protection plaque indicating that the house was insured by that particular insurance company and then extinguish the blaze. If the home was not insured, or if it was insured by a competitor, the the home was left to burn. In some cases, the fire might be extinguished with the expectation that payment would be forthcoming.
A similar model was used in colonial America (particularly after a devastating fire in the Jamestown colony), and as one might imagine, fierce competition sprang up between competing fire brigades, who were paid by the insurance company. Fire departments were known to pay citizens to place barrels over fire hydrants, preventing the first-in (competing) company from establishing a water supply. The first full-time, publicly-funded fire department in the United States in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1853. Today, there are over one million firefighters in the US working for over 29,000 departments. Approximately two thirds of firefighters serve as volunteers, and one third as career firefighters. 8% of firefighters are female.
But whether in ancient Rome, or modern-day US, volunteer, or career, firefighters matter to our culture because they protect what we prize. Our health and homes may be some of our most valued assets, and we many of us share a deep, if unspoken, fear losing them. Midway through a Thursday morning, the crew at station 10 was called out to an individual having difficulty breathing. Once again, the lights in the station turned on, the automated voice tapped out the crew, and Engine 10 made its way through the busy morning traffic towards the address of the emergency. This time, an elderly male was trying his best to convince the first responders that a trip to the hospital was unnecessary. Based on the comments that he was making to the first responders, it wasn’t that he didn’t think that he was sick; it was that he was afraid. Afraid of hospitals, afraid to be alone, and perhaps afraid of acknowledging that his illness was more serious than he wanted to believe. We are created for life, and deep down, not one of us likes to acknowledge our own mortality.
Fires, too, represent threats to us — not just to our life (though they are that too), but to our sense of safety and security that we seek in our communities. Biblical writers often talk about shalom. More than just “peace”, shalom is a sense of security, well-being, and flourishing that is meant to invigorate communities and individuals. Shalom is what happens when relationships between people, between us and our neighbors, between us and the natural world, all are as they should be, and when life is what it was created to be. But much threatens this Shalom, and firefighters stand on the front lines when the our security and well-being come under attack.
When they heard that I would be joining them for the morning, the crew at Station 10 concluded that it would probably be a slow day. “Nothing ever happens when we get ride-alongs, and certainly not fires,” one of them commented. He was right — but just by a day. The day after I rode with A-shift, a second-alarm fire broke out near downtown Salem, and B-shift from Station Ten was called on to
help extinguish the blaze. It turns out that the fire started when a 16-year-old allegedly threw a lit sparkler into some Halloween decorations on the porch of the home (pictured here). While perhaps intended as an innocent
prank, the fire quickly spread, and did considerable damage to the home. Not only did the fire burn the proch and part of the exterior of the home, but the smoke and water damage inside the home would have been considerable. The effects of this one reckless act will ripple out for months. Likely, the homeowners will be forced to find alternate housing for weeks or months while their home is repaired. Dealing with insurance companies, coordinating professional clean up, and scheduling contractors will consume time and energy for the family as they arrange repairs. The surrounding neighborhood will quite likely feel a sense of unease knowing that “it could have easily been our home”, and most significantly, the homeowners (all of whom escaped physical injury) will carry with them the terrible experience of watching their home burn, and the loss of being able to be safe and protected in their own home.
Sometimes the violation of shalom is an attack from the outside, someone else's recklessness (an arsonist sets fire to a home, or a drunk driver crosses the center line into our lane of traffic), and sometimes, it's the result of living in a fallen world (a severe ulcer causes internal bleeding, a spark from an unknown source ignites a massive brush fire that calls for more a week-long fire department response). But sometimes, this violation of shalom is a result of our own careless or even sinful behavior: a dishcloth left too close to a store might cause your kitchen to go up in flames before you have a chance to react. Or, though we might not like to admit it, a lifetime of poor lifestyle choices leads can be an assault on our own health. An unhealthy diet puts us at a higher risk of a heart attack; drug use might mean that we wake up after a night of using with extreme chest tightness and difficulty breathing.
Perhaps this is why firefighters have long held a vaulted place in our cultural story. Unlike police officers (who also show up in the places of our social and personal brokenness), firefighters don't show up to restore law and order, but rather to soothe and to mitigate the effects of this brokenness. While the crew of station 10 was returning from one particular call, they debriefed their response. The captain noted approvingly that the paramedic on-scene had made the effort to kneel down in front of the patient, so that he was speaking to the patient at eye-level rather than standing above, and talking down. This mattered especially because the patient had already stated that he was afraid -- afraid to go to the hospital, afraid to deal with his illness. And so when a paramedic showed a willingness to get down on level with an anxious person, to speak with a measure of patience and compassion, it helped make a difference. Firefighters walk into the places of our brokenness and they make an effort to bring a measure of healing. They race to prevent the spread of the flames in order to preserve as much of the home as possible. They start CPR, desperately working to keep the heart pumping blood in order to save a life. They launch a boat into the river at lighting speed in order to pull a person from the swift-current before it sweeps them away. We view them as heroes -- not on white horses, but on red trucks, who come to us on our worst day in order to bring what comfort, calm, and peace into the disruption of our world.
There are limits, and there is a cost to this work. A firefighter can inject Narcan into an unconscious patient and bring them back from near death, and she can perform rescue breathing on an infant, allowing that child another chance at life -- but she can't save a person's soul. Firefighters are not Messianic; she is a mythical figure in our cultural lore, but not a supernatural one. Firefighters know all too well their limits. I asked the firefighters what the worst sort of call was -- and I didn't even have to finish asking the question to hear the answer: "Infant CPR." For a fireman with his own young child at home, going to a call where a child is turning blue borders on the outer boundary of hell on earth. Tragically, some of those calls don't have happy endings. Sometimes the house can't be saved, and sometimes the patient codes on the way to the hospital, and is not able to be revived. Sometimes, in this world, sin and sinfulness appear to win the day because human ability -- even when it comes to us as a trained firefighter -- is not infinite.
 |
| Firefighter fatalities by type, 2020 |
Moreover, firefighters bear a personal cost to do their work well. On one level the demands of the job itself; firefighting is a 24-hour-a-day, 365-days-a-year job which means that, in addition to spending every third 24-hour day at the fire station, it also means that when you are sitting down for Thanksgiving Dinner, firefighters are on shift (and,
statistically, they are preparing for the busiest day of the year). Firefighting work requires time away from loved ones, and restless nights sleeping in a dorm, with the expectation that when the alarm goes off, you need to be awake, dressed, in the truck, alert enough to drive, and ready to administer help, all without any notice. Firefighting can be dangerous too.
So far in 2022, 73 firefighters have lost their lives as a result of their work (last year, there were 135 fatalities), most of these due to overexertion. Heart attacks are the most common cause of fatalities for firefighters, and vehicle crashes the second most common cause.
But this is minor, compared to the burden that they carry in their soul as they work to relieve the pain in ours. Watching a parent scream desperately while the firefighters do all they can to revive an infant, or knowing that it's likely too late to save a victim trapped in a second-story apartment. Firefighters carry some of the wounds of this world in their soul. This is the nature of what it means to heal the hurts of our world; those who seek to mitigate the effects of sin will end up carrying them as "wounded healers" (to use a phrase coined by Henri Nouwen). Ultimately, this is because firefighters cannot finally and fully heal this world of its true brokenness. The Christian faith has always held that only one person can do this -- and he too bore in himself the pain and agony of this world in ways that all of us can only begin to imagine. Firefighters cannot heal this world of its true illness, but in their work, we see a work patterned on Jesus himself. Firefighting is an incarnational vocation. Firefighters love this world when they enter into the sorrow, the sickness, the sadness, the suffering of this sin-scarred world. They kneel down to speak with compassion to an anxious person; they administer medical treatment to a drug addict without passing judgment, and they lay down their lives to serve a stranger in need. Firefighters are not saviors, but in their work we can, if we look, see a glimpse of God's own love for us.
I owe a debt of gratitude to the Salem Fire Department, in particular, the crew of Station 10, A-shift. Salem allows riders to observe the work that they do and they were gracious enough to extend a warm welcome to me, and to let me ride along with them in mid-September, 2022. They shared with me about their work, and they were happy to answer many of my questions.
This work is a part of a writing project that will explore the value of human vocation from a Christian vantage point. If you are interested in having me join you at work, please reach out to artoornstra@comcast.net.
Comments
Post a Comment