Fighting Fires w/ Asst. Chief Dolphin – WI History, Culture, + Fire Procedure

Front-End Lean vs. On-Scene Reality

Chad: Firefighting — now the front
end, we'll talk through this, but once you get to the fire scene, everything
goes out the window. We don't care about water leaking, right? It's all the
biggest problems as quickly as possible. There's a bunch of it. So I mean, it'd
be worth talking through.

History of Firefighting in the USA

Adam: How much do you know about the
history of firefighting in the USA? I remember this chapter at some point in
grade school — how it got started, Benjamin Franklin.

Chad: So that is part of — yes, that
is a part of the state fire program that everybody goes through. Everybody has
to take the same thing whether you're career or volunteer. You get a history
lesson, and it comes back to — insurance companies started it. Each house on
the East Coast had different insurance placards on them, and each insurance
company would race — they would want people on their payroll, and that's who
they would send.

Adam: So your fire number — that's a
different number per insurance company?

Chad: Correct. That's where it all
started. Really it came down to — a lot of it is stopping the bleed from one
house. One house would burn, but they want to stop the whole city from burning
down. There's a lot of — even in tactics today — if we show up on scene and
that house, if it's a house fully engulfed, there's a strong chance we put
water on the next house first. The first water to go is on the next house. It
stops, because it'll just jump and keep going. You see that in forest fires and
stuff, you know, the big wildfires where it just jumps from house to house to
house. So it's loss prevention, which is the third tactical priority in all of
firefighting. But that is the history. I mean, obviously the history goes way
back.

Adam: So the insurance companies were
outsourcing a portion of their cost structure to the government?

Chad: Yeah. Well, they were private
companies, so the fire companies were for-profit companies. Remember Gangs of
New York? You ever see that movie?

Adam: Yeah.

Chad: Remember when they got there and
they had the fistfight, because the first one to the scene gets paid? So they
would race to the scene and then they'd have fistfights while the house was
burning and people were ransacking. Yes, that's the movie. The history of all
of it is pretty interesting — that is how it developed. And then you get very
steep traditions based on where you live. The East Coast operates different
than the West Coast. In the Midwest, we operate different in the rural areas
than the East Coast and West Coast do, just because of traditions — the type of
buildings, the type of how people live, how tight things are.

Adam: For the fire truck designs,
right?

Chad: That's some history — how
apparatus were designed for each area of the country. A lot of rear-driven
tillers, the tractor-drawn aerials that have the guy in the back that steers —
we don't have those in the Midwest, because you don't need them in Fond du Lac,
you can get around everywhere. But tight city streets, East Coast, you need
them because the truck is the only way to get a ladder truck around.

Volunteer vs. Career Departments

Adam: You said the culture changes
state to state, area to area. What about volunteer? In certain areas — I would
imagine the larger the city, the fewer volunteer departments there are. But
like around here, you have cities and towns that are very small and they're 15,
20 miles apart, and every single one has a volunteer fire department. Is that a
Wisconsin thing or is that a national thing?

Chad: About 75% of departments across
the country are volunteer.

Adam: Wow.

Chad: So it gets real — there's like
all kinds of layers. You've got full career, and usually the size of the city
dictates the services and the tax roll, and that's how you get — like Fond du
Lac has a full-time fire department, North Fond du Lac has a combo department —
so their staff during the day, they supplement with volunteers if they get a
major call, they'll also have mutual aid. You've got three fire departments in
Fond du Lac alone: the city is full-time, North Fond du Lac is a combo, and the
Town of Fond du Lac is all volunteer. So that's just Fond du Lac, and then you
get Eden mixed in there, Mount Calvary right — all volunteer — then surrounding
that.

Adam: So the larger the city, it's
actually fewer firefighters per capita typically. Does it scale?

Chad: It does. Yep, because they're
staffed. For me, a good instance in the City of Neenah — I live in the city, I
volunteer for the township. The city, it's Neenah-Menasha now, it's a combo
department. They have 21 people on a shift, four engine companies, one ladder
company, and a battalion chief. During their eight-to-five during the week,
their administrative staff, their chiefs of the department and some of the
assistant chiefs and their inspectors are there during the day, so they can
supplement. But in general they have 21 people on staff. You need 19 minimum
for a structure fire per NFPA. NFPA says thou shalt have 19 people at a fire
scene to safely operate on any structure fire. Typically you need more than
that, but that's the minimum staffing. There's minimum staffing per engine —
each engine has at least three: a driver, an officer, firefighter. A ladder
will typically have a minimum three, possibly four, and each jurisdiction can
change that. So we operate at a 30-person department, with about 30 to 35
depending on people coming and going. Typically we get about half of those to
respond to any fire — so we get a 15-person turnout. That's the volunteer
world: you get about half your department, typically the same 15 people. Those
people show up, and then we supplement with mutual aid — other departments. We
will never fight, if it's a true structure fire, the initial page that comes
out when we get called, we will get dispatched, and our neighboring department
will get dispatched immediately with us, and they'll come to us. So we've got
all these mutual aid agreements.

Lean Principles in the Fire Service

Chad: This is like the lean piece of
this where it's set up — it's all pre-arranged. We've got everything
pre-thought-out. The fire service is 100% — we spend hours packing hose so it
comes off the truck 10 seconds faster. We spend hours putting equipment in places
where it's quick to grab. I back into my garage every night, I have clothes
ready and accessible — I mean, you laugh, but seconds matter. It's a complete
lean — it's all this training and front-end stuff and pre-planning. We don't
have to make the call to dispatch our neighboring department. When you call
9-1-1 and they ask the six questions they're going to ask you, and they
determine your house is on fire and it's in our jurisdiction, they will
dispatch us plus our first mutual aid department. It's auto-aid — right away,
same page, it'll be our tones, their tones: hey, you guys are both getting
dispatched, structure fire in the Town of Neenah, alright Fox Crossing, you're
coming with you for an engine. So that's typically how we get to our 19 — we
get about 15, and you get about 4 from another. That's our minimum staffing.
From there we have preset box cards where we can just upgrade fires. It's
preset engines from surrounding departments and ladders and companies and any
resources we need.

Adam: It's like a big matrix.

Chad: It is. It's a card I flipped. I
go, okay, we're here, it's all — again, from a lean standpoint.

Adam: Are those centralized standards
from a sanctioning organization?

Chad: Our pre-planning is MABAS — it
started in Chicago, Illinois, this MABAS system. We've expanded into MABAS,
Mutual Aid Box Alarm System. Not everyone's subscribed to it; you're part of
this organization. They have templates and the way they operate. It's the SOG
of — this is how MABAS works, this is how you set up. It's complete
interoperability. So we talk about lean and interoperability. If I ask for an
engine company — the State of Wisconsin has standards for Firefighter 1. If you
want to be a firefighter, this is the class everybody has to take, whether
you're full-time, volunteer, part-time. You have to take this class. You're all
trained to the same. From Fire 1, there are different class levels you can
take, but that's the minimum, whether you're full-time or volunteer. So when I
ask for an engine company — I need three additional engine companies — I don't
care where they come from. When they show up, I can tell them, I need — okay,
Engine 28, you're on scene right. That's Winneconne, if they're coming to one
of our fires — go vent the roof. I know they're already trained, I know they
have minimum staffing of at least four people on that engine because that's
what's required for them to respond, I know they're all Firefighter 1
certified, I know they're all trained how to do this. I say, go vent the roof.
They go, they pull the ladder, they can do it safely, efficiently, effectively.
That is already preset — all this upfront training.

Ranks & Authority

Adam: If there's an issue with an
individual on site — like if they're supposed to have a certain rank and you
ask them to do something — because you're assistant chief at this point — so if
you ask somebody to do something and they don't know how to do it based on
their rank, is there a reporting process?

Chad: There is. So the way — there are
visual keys. Everybody — I have a white helmet. Chiefs and assistant chiefs
have white helmets. Officers have red helmets. Line firefighters have black
helmets. That changes by department — white is typically chief, the red and the
officer changes — but typically for Winnebago County that's the same in all
Winnebago County.

Adam: Do the different Wisconsin
counties have to subscribe to the same sanctions?

Chad: Most of them do. Not all of them
do.

Adam: Where does that come from? Like
who's the top fire person? Is there a board?

Chad: There's a board. It comes from
the state — there's a state governing board for the training, and then there's
the state chiefs associations. But really the chief in each jurisdiction has an
extreme amount of power. It comes down to the ordinances within the township or
jurisdiction, but the fire chief is the ultimate fire authority within that
jurisdiction. And then it's chief and then acting chief. So if my chief's gone
and he's out of town and I'm the highest ranking on scene, I am essentially the
acting chief, and I have that ultimate authority as a person. There are laws —
we don't get into laws — but if it's, hey, you have a campfire going and the
ordinance says you can't burn above 7-mile-an-hour winds and it's
20-mile-an-hour winds and you've got a bonfire the size of this room going, we
have every right to put it out. And we will, especially if you lip off to the
chief and you've had a few cocktails and it's 10 at night and you say, hey, I
can have this fire — guess what, your fire's getting put out with a lot of
water. Even on private property, even on a private random farm out in the
middle of nowhere, we have — it's an extreme amount of access. If a structure
fire happens, we take control. We have every right — if we believe that, by law
we're protected.

Adam: So no warrant required?

Chad: No. The police department needs
a warrant. If we show up, if we feel that the building's on fire — smoke — we
have every right to break in. Forcible entry, right. And go fight the fire. We
are protected by law with that life-safety mindset.

The Three Tactical Priorities

Chad: We have main priorities from a
lean standpoint — it's three things, super simple: life safety, incident
stabilization, property conservation. Those three are the guiding principles
for every call we go on. Life safety is number one — that's for anybody we're
trying to save, or ourselves. Incident stabilization — control the incident.
Property conservation, a distant third. That is the tactical priorities we use
on every call.

Adam: So number one and two are both
life safety. One is for the individual at hand, correct? And then the other
number two is downstream.

Chad: Correct. Incident stabilization
— yeah, but if that means, let's say a train derails, life safety is get
everybody out of there and let the train burn. We'll let the train burn.
Evacuate to a safe area. There are different ways to achieve those goals, but
those are always the three guiding principles. We're always training.
Firefighters hurry up and wait. We train constantly. We train the same. We do
12 trainings a year — the same 12 trainings every year. The basic tasks. We
don't do anything — we do extrication training, we always cut cars at least
once a year for car accidents to, you know, if we're going to use the jaws. We
don't do anything elaborate. We don't take the car and put it on the roof of a
building like, okay, let's do this crazy scenario. It's, okay, here's the car,
let's practice cutting the doors off. It's proficient — it's the 80%
proficient. It's over and over. There's always variations on scene, but
firefighting is like a box of tools and you're problem-solving. The tools are
set, the trucks are set.

Pre-Planned Apparatus & Roles

Chad: From a lean standpoint, our
engines — we have two front-line engines. The main engine operates as the
first-out engine for any call. Not every department operates this way, but from
a budget standpoint, we're not a huge department. It's, you know, structure
fire, car accident, CO check — first-out engine every time. That, from a lean
standpoint, when the team — the guys and girls — show up to the station, they
don't have to think about what truck to get on. This truck goes first. After
that, it's determined on what the incident is — the second, third, and fourth
truck will be different order, but the first one is always the same. There's no
thinking at two in the morning when you're dead asleep and the pager goes off.
You don't want to have to think. Hence why my truck's backed in, that's why my
clothes are out. They're usually not laid out, but I know where my shoes are. I
hate running around at night. If I don't know where my shoes are to get out the
door, it matters. For me that has changed now — like my job, I'm in my truck,
and when I'm opening the garage door and starting my truck, I'm also turning
the radio on, so I go from pager to radio, and I'm acknowledging the scene. I
then become com — com center's communication is back to me, even though we
haven't responded. We'll make decisions — who's going to the scene, who's going
to the station. We're communicating again across the radio. It is very
controlled chaos. But again, most of the line firefighters, all the black
helmets, go to the station, get your gear on, get in the truck. It's that
simple. Based on who's sitting where — there's assigned seats in the truck. If
you're in a six-man engine, the driver drives, he's the pump operator. The guy
or girl in the passenger seat is the officer, whether or not they're an
officer, or a ranking firefighter. There is pseudo — you know, if you're a
senior firefighter you can fill that position if nobody's there. Don't wait for
an officer, get the truck rolling type thing. And then the back seat — if you're
in seat one, two, three, four, you may be the nozzle man, you may be the tool
guy, but you have assigned. It's all pre-planned. We pre-plan buildings as a
firefighter. We don't pre-plan residential, but for an industrial building, we
show up, we have a map book, we open it up, here's the pre-plan for this
building, here's where the fire hydrant is, here's where the connections are,
the gas, the electric, the shutoffs, here's the fire load in that building,
here's the amount of water we need if it's fully involved, 50% involved. Again,
all this pre-planned lean. Just to get there — again, you have to make tactical
decisions once you're there, but it's all upfront pre-plan analysis. Seconds
matter — shave it off on the front end and we'll figure it out when we get
there.

Chad: You don't have to think, right?
You get there, and there's a lot of times you don't want to have to think.
There's a lot going on in the first five minutes of a scene for us, especially
volunteer. We have to get to the station, driving on the radio, driving my
truck, trying to get through traffic, trying to assess what's going on. Do we
have somebody on scene yet? Do we not? What time of day is it? Who's
responding? Is it the middle of the day, am I going to get half of the people I
usually do? Is it the middle of the night? Is it snowing? Is it 80 degrees out?
You start thinking through all these things and how you're going to have to
escalate this. What do we see when we get on scene? There's all these
decisions, but again, then it's a very easy — okay, get on scene, this fire is
burning, it's two in the morning. Hey, I need more resources — it's upgrade
this to a working still. By that, if I ask for that from the comm center,
upgrade to a working still, I automatically get three more engines, two more
tenders, another chief from another department. They just dispatch it, and they
show up. I don't have to think — I know I'm going to get this much more
resources coming to the scene.

Call Mix: What Firefighters Actually Respond To

Adam: You mentioned structure fires a
few times. I think when people think firefighters, there's two things in their
mind — one is a structure fire, and then one is the pop culture reference of a
cat in the tree. I've lived in probably a dozen different apartments over the
last 15, 20 years, and there have been fire calls to the apartment at least
once or twice a year, and there has never been a structure fire. So what
percentage of fire calls actually end up being structure fires? And if you
break down other things that you guys do — there's an overlap with first
responders and hospital staff — what does the call breakdown look like?

Chad: A big part of firefighting is
fire prevention. We don't want fires. Firefighters want fires, but in general,
fires are bad. It's less than 1% of our actual true — I mean, we haven't been
to, we haven't had in our jurisdiction a true house burning in like three
years. Now, the mutual aid, the way we run with our neighboring departments, we
usually see — we see flames. How many calls per year? We do about 200 calls
between medical and fire. The last time I was in one, I'm trying to think —
three years — that'd be one in 600. I was in one earlier, late spring — a
neighboring department, neighboring jurisdiction — we were the third-due
engine. We were in that one. But we see flames. There are different ways to see
— fires get put out, there are close calls, lightning strikes, the carpet's
charred. A structure fire dispatch is if it's believed to be burning,
dispatches a structure. It's always better to have more resources than we back
them off — not a lean thing, right? That is not lean. You dispatch more and
then you back them off. But again, the tools, equipment, the people — that's
the part of the lean.

Chad: When you get on scene, like I
said earlier, if we get on scene and it's a true burning — each hose is
connected by hand. You actually don't tighten them, because you can break them
— a lean thing. You need tools to break a hose, but if you don't tighten them
fully, you can break them by hand if I need to shorten the length. You don't
have to go to the truck and get a tool to save time. If that hose is leaking on
a scene and I'm connected to a hydrant, it's dripping water out — we don't
care. We're not worried about that.

Adam: It's interesting — you keep
bringing up the lean side of it, which is a really interesting perspective. At
Wisconsin Lighting Lab, we've been talking a lot more about that, but there are
actually a lot of elements of non-lean practice in that as well, where you have
inventory, you have work-in-progress — the fire trucks are ready to go even if
there's not a fire. But in this environment, since everything's so
mission-critical, you really want to front-load as much time so that when it
counts you don't have to think, it's just on autopilot.

Chad: That's why we train. You just go
through — I won't say going through the motions, but you can't at two in the
morning in this blizzard think about what you're going to do, you just have to
do it. The first 10 minutes of any scene are critical. Today's fires — they
burn hotter, they burn faster. But to go back — we do probably less than 1%
structure fires. We do a lot of car accidents, a lot of medical calls, a lot of
CO checks, a lot of good-faith calls, a lot of fire alarms. Every industrial
building has a fire alarm, and if the power trips, the alarm goes off. The
alarm company's procedure is they call the county, they dispatch the fire
department, and then they try to call the key holder. So what will happen is
we're already en route, and a lot of times we get canceled en route because,
okay, key holder's on site, they've got the proper code, it's not a fire, it
was a false alarm. Perfect. We'll usually hold the truck, we'll send somebody
directly to the scene to verify, get paperwork done, charge the alarm company
so there's no — it's part of the tax roll.

Paid-On-Call & Funding

Chad: We are technically — we're a
paid-on-call department. We're not a true volunteer; we get paid for our time.
More or less per call, we get a payment. That's what a lot of departments go to
to get staffing. Nobody does it for the money, because you never know — it
could be eight calls, it could be no calls in a week. But that's how — there's
a little bit of incentive. It is part of the tax base. I'm a Town of Neenah
employee. If you look on there — no benefits or anything with that — but that
is where I fall and how they manage it. The taxes get covered. The township
for, as a volunteer, like our yearly budget outside of trucks, that's separate.
Our budget is about — if I do the math right here — about 3% of the City of
Neenah-Menasha's fire budget. So when you look at the taxes, I live in the
city, I pay city taxes. The response is much, much quicker to my house, because
they respond from a staffed station. But I actually have to drive by the
station that would come to my house if my house was on fire — I would have to
go to the station, get the truck, and come back. That's why taxes are less than
the rural volunteer. There are risks — you're probably going to lose some
property. It's all tax-based. You're not getting charged — the transports,
ambulance side of things gets into charging, but the fire is not, because you
want people to call. You don't want them to have to think about it. A good
instance of this for us is, like, ThedaStar — helicopter transport, bad car
accident. They only charge if they transport. As a fire department, they've
taken the risk off of the fire departments of, well, we don't — questioning,
should or shouldn't we call them if we think we need them? We call them. It's
up to them whether or not they transport. If they come and land and decide not
to transport and go home, no charges met. That gets rolled across everybody
else, those expenses, but it takes — you don't have to second-guess as a
firefighter, like, oh, am I going to cost Johnny 10 grand here in a lot of
small towns, and he doesn't need it, he can go by ground transport rather than
the helicopter. It's like insurance.

Parallels: Fire Trucks & Sports Lighting

Adam: You mentioned that 75% of
departments outside Wisconsin, just in general, are volunteer. You've drawn a
lot of parallels to your previous career at Pierce — there are a lot of
parallels in terms of fire truck investments for communities, and then sports lighting
investments. We do a lot of sports lighting projects with smaller communities,
and there's a lot of volunteers involved, people donating labor. A fire truck
is a big investment, kind of a spotlight for the community, and a baseball
field or a soccer field is as well. Are there any other parallels you draw from
the Pierce world versus Wisconsin Lighting Lab in terms of how the community
views these investments?

Chad: Yeah, I think — fire trucks are
always at the front of the parade. They're a shiny piece. They are all —
they've been in this — they're over-engineered, they're over-designed, but
that's a tradition thing. If you go to Europe, the fire trucks are not as flashy
and shiny — they still function the same. That's a tradition thing. In the US,
they're always at the front of the parade. There's a lot of pride. Look at
Eden's new truck. There's a lot of pride in that. That's why you get a lot of
people to volunteer — you get more volunteers if you have good equipment, good
leadership. The community aspect — fire parks, fire station, it's all a
community involvement. So you get this parallel — it is the community piece
that's volunteer. Whether it's volunteer labor to help get the lights up or
fundraise, it's the same. It's the same people fundraising the money for the
ball fields as it is for the trucks. You're going to have pros and cons each
way — one's for the community, one's a lot for the kids. They both have really
good — oh, polls — and really good stories behind them. Besides that, a fire
truck is a giant light driving around in my opinion. There's more scene
lighting on a truck than — it pretty much is light similar to what we build,
mounted all around the truck, you light up areas. There's a similar community
rallying point. People — especially in the last — fire trucks have always been
that way. I think in the sports world, even the pandemic, people are staying
closer to home, they're seeing those investments going into home. Obviously we
know our neighbors here to the north — what they've been able to do with
playground equipment — those investments are coming back, because people just
aren't going the places they've been going.

Chad: But you know the fire equipment
— you want to have good equipment. If you take care of stuff and have pride in
it, you can make it last a long time. Our engine that's from 1995 has 34,000
miles on it. Goes out for yearly maintenance every — you don't put them out,
they sit, they sit, they sit, they sit, and then they drive really hard and
fast for five miles, and then they sit. We're not driving across the state. Our
area is pretty close — we can go to the surrounding areas, we're not going that
far away.

First Responders & Ambulance Overlap

Adam: Is it pretty common in various
areas to have that overlap between the fire department and first responders? Is
that a newer development? In Eden — a lot of my uncles are volunteer
firefighters in Eden, a lot of people that work at Wisconsin Lighting Lab as
well — they didn't always do the first responder side of it. That's probably
within the last 15 years.

Chad: Yeah, that's a fairly new thing,
and some departments have taken ownership of it, others, it's been a separate
entity. It really comes down to the jurisdiction — how the funding came and how
they decided to operate it. Some first responder and ambulance services will do
rescues, they'll do extrication. A lot of fire departments, especially to the
north, the ambulance crews will actually — if there's a car accident, the fire
department won't even get called necessarily, it'll be the ambulance crew who's
doing the extrication and the patient care and the transport. It really comes
down to jurisdiction. You do a lot of what your surrounding areas do, because
you have to operate with them all day long on different incidents. You want to
be very similar to how they operate. For us it's different — Eden's different,
they have the first responders. I believe the ambulance comes out of
Campbellsport. For us, like Gold Cross in the Valley, they cover — it's like 15
fire jurisdictions that the private ambulance company covers. We're first
responders, we have fire, and then there's the ambulance. The true paramedics
come from them. First responders are — it's a lot of eyes and ears. I don't
want to downplay it, but there's not a lot they can do. They can't administer
medication — they can do Narcan for overdoses, and they have AEDs and CPR. It's
a lot of getting information faster and making decisions quicker on what needs
to be done. Because if you wait for the ambulance, it takes an ambulance 15
minutes to get there, and then they decide they need to air-transport. The
helicopter could have been there if someone had been on scene and made that
decision. So a lot of the rural areas go to the first responders to get that.
For us, we're so close — typically probably half the time the ambulance beats
us to the scene. In Eden, the ambulance probably never beats us to the scene.
There are some weird things on that — the urban versus true rural.

Forest Fires in Wisconsin

Adam: Do we see many forest fires in
Wisconsin? I remember going up north as a kid and seeing Smokey the Bear.

Chad: So the largest forest fire in
history was in Northern Wisconsin.

Adam: Interesting. A logging —?

Chad: No. It was just dry conditions
and windy. It was actually the day of the Great Chicago Fire, so it didn't get
any press. It killed — it was like 2,200 deaths. It swept across. So the forest
management in Wisconsin has been much better, but we do — there are probably
500 fires in the springtime. I've been on multiple — a couple hundred-acre
burns, swamp. For us around this area, what gets burned into is cattails, and
it's hard to fight. The true forest stuff that's managed by the DNR — the DNR
handles the first response, and there are fire departments that'll assist, but
the DNR handles the front end. They play point guard, except in our area, we're
point guard, and the DNR will come if it's still their jurisdiction when they
get here. They give us grants — our UTV is a grant. Our gear and our equipment,
we're set up to handle frontline defense of forest firefighting. Again, we
don't have forest — it's a lot of grass fires that you get into. Up north,
there's great risk for that stuff. It's a lot of the forest management. There's
a lot we could talk about. We're not nearly as bad as California, obviously —
we're not as dry. We still get some nice rain which helps. Our climate hasn't
been as bad. But there's definitely risk, and they get big. There are air
tankers in Wisconsin, there are bulldozers, full forest firefighting equipment
managed by the DNR. So we all pay for that — that's state-driven.

Adam: Seems like a good thing to pay
for.

Chad: It is, yes.

Why Firefighting?

Adam: Just kind of closing — if you
had to summarize what draws you to, or drew you and continues to draw you to
firefighting? You went into that industry for a while, you're assistant chief
now. What led you to that?

Chad: Good question. I've been
thinking about this one for 10 years, ever since I joined. It really comes back
to — it actually is part of the reason where I became an engineer. I love
problem-solving, and firefighting is a problem-solving. The fire truck is a
toolbox, this is the tools we have, this is the problem in front of us — how do
we solve it? That's the core of it. I like to help people, that's part of it.
Honestly, Adam, you and I — we were old enough, 9/11, that had an impact on it.
This is like a duty, a country-duty thing. That factor — it was years after
that happened that I joined, but it was always a thought. I grew up in a small
town that had a volunteer fire department, understand the importance of it. But
ultimately it's the problem-solving. My brain is wired — I like to solve
problems. That's why I wanted to be an engineer, and it's very hands-on too.
Every guy and gal in our department — you really have to have a mix of skills.
You have to be handy. You have to be willing, for one, and that's tough in
today's day. You have to find people with the time — it's an extreme time
commitment. It comes in waves, but there's a lot to it. So you have to be
willing, able — there's a lot of people that just can't, for various reasons.
You need a wide variety. Right now besides — I do a ton of administrative stuff
because that's what has to happen. There's leadership and we have layers. You
go down the rankings, and people can handle personnel problems up through the
chain, just like a business. There's an org chart with it. But it's the
problem-solving. I would be lying if I didn't say — there is no better
adrenaline hit at two in the morning when you're dead asleep and the pager goes
off and there's something on fire. I'm a little better now, but there's a lot
of times I'm in the back of the truck smiling when we're splitting traffic on
Highway 41, driving down with lights and sirens. The problem is you're always
going to somebody's worst day. You have to be careful — you have to get excited
about it, but you have to be cognizant that this is people's lives and
property. They don't call 911 when they're having a good day. So that's always
in the back of your head. But on that fact, you have to have excitement — where
people don't want to do it, there's a lot of problems for sure. Departments
that don't get enough calls, people lose interest. They get too many, they get
burnt out. We're in this weird good balance where we have just enough to keep
people interested, but we're also not good at anything because we don't do it
enough. When we get a structure fire, it's chaos — it's controlled chaos, but
everybody's amped up, like, you just haven't done it. You've got to remember a
lot of the training and fall back on it.

Recruiting & Hiring

Adam: Us being in manufacturing, you
understand some of the challenges right now with hiring people, finding truck
drivers, finding parts. Are you seeing similar things in firefighting in terms
of being able to draw people?

Chad: That is a huge problem across
the country. For us, we're particularly lucky — we live in an urban area, so
not only do I have the 7,000 people that live in my jurisdiction, there's
another hundred thousand people close enough that can join. There are a lot of
departments. So there are other avenues too.

Adam: Do you have open enrollment?
You'll take as many people —?

Chad: We're allowed up to 35 on our
own, but we've always got people. There's people moving and coming in and out.
There's a budget and things that we can only — that's part of the city or the
township ordinance — the fire department can be X amount of people big. We also
have the pull because of Fox Valley Tech — we get a lot of students that come
to school there that live close by. They'll live either in Neenah and
apartments, and we will pull a lot of them. We may get like two to three years
out of them while they're enrolled in the program. That's good for us — they're
trained, we can utilize them quickly. We turn them through. They're not going
to be the leadership, but as a line firefighter we get a lot of people that
way. But it's a constant — I'm in charge as assistant chief, one of my things
is personnel, so I'm constantly interviewing and hiring. We always have a pool.

Adam: Always keeping up. What's the
entry-level helmet — black?

Chad: Black, yep. There's a
probationary period first. You get a helmet, but it may be an older black one.
It's about a year before you can actually go into a burning building. A lot of
hours, and then we have to be comfortable as well. We do our own — there's a
ton of back end to get people comfortable, and we make sure we're comfortable,
they're comfortable. But it's a constant hire. We're lucky, but departments
across the country — it's a full-time, you know, they're a career, but it's
becoming very demanding. A lot of the rural — there are departments shutting
down because they don't have staffing, they're consolidating. That is a big,
big problem right now. And not only that, community people are driving — I
think more city-driven — it's shifting a little bit now away from that based on
the current pandemic, but beyond that, young people's time — it's hard to find
time. People are busy. There's a ton of stuff going on, kids involved and
stuff. I just think people are less hands-on. You require a certain amount of
mechanical and electrical hands-on skill set to do this. 100%. Some of our best
— I've learned a lot — they're starting to retire — the guys that have been in
the department 40 years. They're a bunch of farmers, these guys. They will
still fix that, they will hook connecting lines and make stuff pump and
operate. There's a lot of pump theory, there's a lot of math, and those guys
just knock it out. That's a skill you have to build with a lot of the younger
people — the confidence — and you work up to that stuff. Running a hose line on
the end of it is way different than driving a truck and pumping water onto a
fire. There are steps and different classes.

Chad: But it is very rewarding. There
are good things — you know, there are things that stick with you, those things
you see. But again, someone has to do it. Somebody's got to run into the fire.
Everybody has their reasons for doing it. Overall, it's a good give-back to the
community. But it is tough — it's a time commitment, there's a ton of
administrative stuff. They try to make it easier from the state level, but they
also have an obligation that — we need to have minimum requirements, because
they're liable if someone gets injured or hurt. So there's a lot of stuff, and
it is a risk. This is not — volunteering to coach youth baseball is different
than volunteering to run into a burning building. It's a different breed of
people. You've got to be wired a little bit differently to do it, and you've
got to have a strong stomach. You've got to be able to forget stuff. There's a
whole weird skill set of what makes a good firefighter. But we have a good
group, and obviously this area, we're very fortunate. I think we have really
good staffing in Wisconsin in general. Up north it gets into some problems,
some of the seasonal stuff. But around here, good departments, good second-,
third-generation type people in there. Overall it's good.

Adam: Cool man. Well, thanks for doing
it. Appreciate you. Thanks for coming on.

Chad: Thank you.