Posted on 11/03/2003 3:01:57 PM PST by churchillbuff
Stop calling firefighters "heroes." By Douglas Gantenbein Posted Friday, October 31, 2003, at 12:05 PM PT
A cush job, most of the time
When California Gov.-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger toured the state's catastrophic wildfires a few days ago, he uttered the phrase that now accompanies any blaze as surely as smoke: "The firefighters are the true heroes."
It's understandable why he said that. As fires go, the California blazes are scary. They are moving incredibly quickly through dried brush and chaparral that practically explode when they ignite, threatening the life of any firefighter nearby. Steven L. Rucker, a 38-year-old firefighter and paramedic for the town of Novato, was killed working to save houses. Elsewhere, thousands of firefighters have worked for hours on end in 95-degree heat, dressed in multiple layers of fire-resistant clothing, sometimes without enough food or water because of the long and shifting supply lines.
Given all that, it may seem churlish to suggest that firefighters might not deserve the lofty pedestal we so insistently place them on. We lionize them, regard them as unsullied by base motivations, see them as paragons of manliness (and very tough womanliness). They're easily our most-admired public servants, and in the public's eye probably outrank just about anyone except the most highly publicized war veterans. But the "hero" label is tossed around a little too often when the subject is firefighting. Here's why:
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Firefighting is a cushy job. Firefighters may have the best work schedule in the United States—24 hours on, 48 hours off. And those 24 hours are usually not terribly onerous. While a few big-city fire stations may have four, five, six calls, or more during a shift, most aren't nearly that busy, giving firefighters time to give tours to school kids, barbecue hamburgers, wash fire engines, sleep, and pose for "The Firefighters of [Your City Here], 2004" calendars. Indeed, fire officials devote much of their time to figuring out how to cover up the fact they're not getting the hoses out very often. So we have firefighters doing ambulance work, firefighters doing search-and-rescue work, anything but Job No. 1. Meanwhile, the long days off give many firefighters a chance to start second careers. That makes it easy for them to retire after 20 years, take a pension, and start another profession. I've known firefighters who moonlighted as builders, photographers, and attorneys.
Firefighting isn't that dangerous. Of course there are hazards, and about 100 firefighters die each year. But firefighting doesn't make the Department of Labor's 2002 list of the 10 most dangerous jobs in America. Loggers top that one, followed by commercial fishermen in the No. 2 spot, and general-aviation commercial pilots (crop dusters and the like) at No. 3. Firefighting trails truck-driving (No. 10) in its risks. Pizza delivery drivers (No. 5) have more dangerous jobs than firefighters, statistically speaking. And fatalities, when they occur in firefighting, often are due to heart attacks and other lack-of-fitness problems, not fire. In those cases where firefighters die in a blaze, it's almost always because of some unbelievable screw-up in the command chain. It's been well-documented, for instance, that lousy communication was a huge reason why so many firefighters still were in the burning World Trade Center when it imploded, and well after city police and port authority police had been warned by their own commanders of an imminent collapse and cleared out.
Firefighters are adrenalin junkies. I did mountain rescue work for several years and more than once was praised as a "hero." Oh, give me a break. It was fun and exciting. Firefighting is even more of a rush. Sharon Waxman, in an excellent article in the Washington Post, interviewed firefighters in California. Every one was in a complete lather to get to the next hot spot. "It's almost a slugfest to get in there," one told Waxman. This urge to reach the fire is not entirely altruistic. It sure beats washing that damned fire truck again, for one thing. Plus a big fire is thrilling, plain and simple.
Firefighters have excellent propaganda skills. Firefighters play the hero card to its limit. Any time a big-city firefighter is killed on duty, that city will all but shut down a few days later while thousands of firefighters line the streets for a procession. In July 2001, I witnessed the tasteless spectacle of Washington state firefighters staging a massive public display to "honor" four young people killed in a forest fire (one absurd touch: hook-and-ladder rigs extended to form a huge arch over the entrance to the funeral hall). For the families of the four dead firefighters—three of whom were teens trying to make a few bucks for college—the parade, the solemn speeches, and the quasi-military trappings all were agony. "It's just the firefighters doing their thing," one bystander said to me later with a shrug.
Firefighters are just another interest group. Firefighters use their heroic trappings to play special interest politics brilliantly. It is a heavily unionized occupation. Nothing's wrong with that, but let's not assume they're always acting in anything but their own best interests. In Seattle not long ago a squabble broke out between police and firefighters when both were called to the scene of a capsized dinghy in a lake. The firefighters put a diver in the water, a police officer on the scene ordered him out to make way for a police team, and all hell broke loose (yes, the cops were at fault, too). The dispute wasn't over public safety, it was over who got the glory. New York firefighters, admittedly deep in grief over lost co-workers, exacerbated the challenge of body recovery operations after 9/11 by insisting on elaborate removal procedures for each firefighter uncovered, an insult to others who died there. Not long before that, in Boston, a special commission released a scathing report that detailed a 1,600-member fire department up to its bunker gear in racism, sexism, and homophobia. Since then the department has bitterly resisted reform efforts.
None of this is meant to dispute that firefighters aren't valuable to the communities in which they work. They are. But our society is packed with unheralded heroes—small-town physicians, teachers in poverty-stricken neighborhoods, people who work in dirty, dangerous jobs like coal-mining to support a family. A firefighter plunging into a burning house to retrieve a frightened, smoke-blinded child is a hero. But let's save the encomiums for when they are truly deserved, not when they just show up to do their job.
I once worked with someone who was a firefighter two days a week. He slept and ate in the firehouse on those days and was paid for a forty hours, leaving him time to simultaneously pursue a second career.
Why do fire engines always show up on calls requiring only paramedics and/or an ambulance? As far as I can tell this is largely a matter of justifying the fire department budget at the end of the year, when the department can point to the numbers of times the fire truck was called out.
On a number of occasions I have observed the spectacle of thousands of firefighters converging from out of town to commemorate fallen comrades. It's good that the heroism of the dead firefighters is respected, but who pays for the travel and salaries of all these firefighters who are away from their home districts?
These measures will not only be bad for trees; Gantenbein says they will also be bad for business. First, there's no need for more timber in the timber market. In fact, there's a glut of timber right now. Prices are down, exports are down, demand is down.
Second, Gantenberg points out that the economy in the West actually picked up when logging was curtailed a decade or so ago. That's because standing trees are worth more than cut trees -- to tourists. "Thomas Power, an economist with the University of Montana, says that by the late 90s, eight of 10 national forests in Montana generated three times as much income from tourism and recreation as they did from cutting down trees." [Gantenberg, ibid.]
Why is it so all-fired important to the Bush Regime to cut down trees? Gantenberg suggests that to the Bushies, ideology trumps common sense: "In conservative circles logging is a bellwether issue, a club with which to beat Bill Clinton, the Sierra Club, and the heavy hand of government in general. Logging is a kind of religious issue: Conservatives take it on faith that cutting down trees is good for business." Except that, in fact, it isn't.
He's not a friend of the regular guy and his Ironic Detachment button is pushed full on just to poke a stick in your side.
This article is gross.
This article is gross.
THIS IS A LIE, the houses are thrown up using trusses, houses and buildings easily collapse, do not use nails but gang-nails that pop out of the wood as the temperature increases, and the metal used in construction is often not treated to resist heat. At 1,000 degrees steel increases by 10% increasing the likeliness of buildings using steel to collapse.
Also, materials used in furniture have BTU much 3-4 times higher than organic materials of the past meaning that the houses burn hotter, faster.
Also, houses are built to retain heat and insulate the heat, that means that flashover and back draft are more likely... 1200-2000 degrees... hot enough to cook you through your PPE and leave a spot. Cotton and traditional materials burn much cooler and much longer, in houses with better ventilation.
I could go on and on and on about the dangers of the current houses and buildings. It is more dangerous then ever. The only reason there are less deaths of fire fighters is because of the Incident Command System or basic planning use in a para military fashion.
For assholes like this author, I think the mods will allow the line to extend past "sh!t for brains."
Wasn't that the plot of the movie 'Backdraft?'
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