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Photograph by Paul Myers
Capt. Rob Seuss of the county fire station in Los Gatos sits in the cab of a 1936 Dodge hosewagon, which has been relegated to parade duty.
Smoke Less
Firefighters are putting out fewer fires as the job continues to evolve
By Sandy Sims
The shrill scream of a fire engine barreling through town with brawny men hanging off the back used to mean there was a fire somewhere. Some citizens used to chase those big rigs hoping to get a glimpse of a roaring blaze. Independence Day used to spawn many such fires, but that's rarely the case anymore.
Firefighters are more likely to wind up at the scene of an accident pulling a victim from a car or in someone's home giving emergency medical care to a heart attack victim.
"Putting out fires," says Kendall Pearson, support services captain for the Santa Clara County Fire Department, "is still the only job firefighters do from start to finish." Only 3 to 4 percent, however, of calls coming into a local fire station are about fires. "We used to go on at least one fire a week," says Dennis DeMelloPine, fire captain at the University Avenue fire station in Los Gatos, which is run by Santa Clara County. "Now we get maybe one fire call every couple of months." Fire prevention programs, safety laws, and the advent of 911 have transformed fire departments from an agency that only fought fires into what Pearson calls a kind of referral service. They take care of the crisis and then refer the problem to the appropriate agency.
Today's firefighters are usually first at the scene of almost any crisis--unless it's strictly a police call, Pearson says. For example, if they go to a hazardous material (hazmat) spill, they identify the chemical's general category, get people out if necessary and then refer the problem to relevant agencies, such as the Coast Guard for a marine cleanup. Recently, Iowa firefighters dug for hours searching for a construction worker buried in a deep trench of dirt. They saved him and sent him off to the hospital.
What apparently hasn't changed is the firefighters' desire to help people and the kick they get from a job that promises something different on any given day.
Firefighters are a different breed says Mike Mckenna, newly retired fire science instructor at Mission College and a former firefighter. "We have an IQ of 20 degrees Celsius," Mckenna says laughing. "When everyone else, including the mice, are running away from a fire, we are running into it." He says, during the Loma Prieta earthquake, when everyone hurried home to their families, firefighters--after checking to see if everyone at home was OK--took off for work. Firefighters, Mckenna says, are immediate-action oriented. They like the adrenaline rush they get from their job. "It's a way of life, 180 degrees different than other people think."
Photograph courtesy of the Saratoga Fire District
These Saratoga volunteer firefighters in about 1930 had no uniforms and only one helmet that they took turns wearing. Volunteer firefighters still work in Saratoga--helmet now provided--and are sometimes hired full time.
The roots of this dedication go way back. According to the book Enjine! Enjine!: a story of fire protection by Kenneth Holcomb Dunshee--written in 1939 for the Home Insurance Company--the first New York fire departments demanded that when the alarm sounded, volunteer firefighters stop whatever they were doing, whether work or play, and "hasten to a conflagration." Otherwise, the volunteer would be heavily fined.
Much has changed in firefighting since the beginnings of U.S. fire departments when in 1737 the colony of New York first appointed "42 able, discreet, sober men as [volunteer] firemen," unpaid but exempt from jury and military duty.
Back then firefighting was pretty basic. Residents hung leather buckets (made by shoemakers) on the front of their homes. When the fire bell rang, homeowners threw their buckets into the street so firemen and willing citizens, including women and children, could pick them up and run to fight the fire. "Want-to-be" firemen became bucket carriers and ran alongside the firemen, doing any manner of jobs to help out.
Hose carts and water pumps evolved into fire engines. Fire companies eventually established paid firefighter jobs. Companies became so tight knit that they even joined up for service in the Civil War together. They formed teams and held firefighter competitions called firemen's "musters."
Eighty-something Joe Krumme, a retired fire captain from Gardena, started firefighting in 1942. "We used to work 72 hours a week," Krumme says, "showed up for work every other day for 24 hours."
Most of the men coming into the job were ex-military. The pay was low, so firemen had off-duty jobs. They were plumbers, contractors, retail clerks. "One of our firefighters was an attorney," Krumme says.
Photograph by Paul Myers
Engineer Matt Maxson (left) and Capt. Rob Seuss are firefighters at the Los Gatos fire station on Shannon Road. The mirror reflects a 1936 Dodge hose wagon they use in parades.
In the 1950s, firefighter workdays were lowered to 100 a year (one work day is 24 hours), which amounts to about 56 hours a week. Better pay and fewer hours on duty allows some firefighters to stay home on their days off to care for their children. Firefighters, however, still spend a lot of time away from home, which can brew trouble in a marriage. Even on their days off, Mckenna says, firefighters often take classes and work out. This is one of the reasons firefighters' divorce rate is higher than average, Mckenna says.
But the turnover rate for firefighters is about 1 percent, DeMelloPine says. And once hired, firefighters usually don't leave the department where they started. DeMelloPine has been with the Los Gatos station close to 20 of his 29 years as a firefighter. He's thinking about retirement.
DeMelloPine says, in the 1970s, firefighters began to get a handle on fire prevention. He says, insurance companies used to rate fire companies on how well they fought fires. "We found out we could keep fire ratings down, "DeMelloPine says, "and towns liked that." In the mid-1970s, he says, the state passed a law requiring smoke detectors. Then in the early 1980s fire prevention became part of public school curriculum. "We learned we can get to the parents through the kids," Mckenna says. Fire inspections and preplanning for emergencies have also helped curb fires.
New recruits used to have a mechanical background, DeMelloPine says. "Now," he says, "they seldom know how to drive a standard transmission." Only men were hired, and they had to be at least 5 feet 8 inches tall and weight 150 pounds. Then federal laws said no discrimination. The Santa Clara County Fire Department, DeMelloPine says, now has about 250 firefighters and about a dozen are females.
"We had to figure out how to make this thing work for women and smaller men," DeMelloPine says. For example, the ladders on fire trucks were too high and heavy for smaller people to handle. Now the ladders are lighter and on a hydraulic lift. The old brass nozzles that made hoses extremely heavy have been replaced by lighter metal.
Other improvements have made life better for firefighters.
The biggest improvement says Joe Krumme were the Scott Air Packs that came in the 1950s. "We got two air packs per rig in the 50s," Krumme says, "one for the captain and one for the oldest fireman. Now all the guys have them. Ernie Kraule, fire chief for the Saratoga Fire District, recalls how he used to have to hold his breath and crawl under the smoke, doing what Mckenna calls "leather lunging it."
Photograph courtesy of Bill Wulf
On July 3, 1909, Los Gatos volunteer firefighters fight the devastating El Monte Hotel fire (on the northeast corner of E. Main Street and Pleasant Avenue) with hand-drawn hose carts and a ladder wagon. Los Gatos finally bought a motorized fire engine in 1915.
After fighting fires for 30 years, Krumme had to retire in his 50s on disability because of lung damage.
"It used to be, if you didn't retire on disability, something was wrong," DeMelloPine says.
Kraule says the guys riding on the back of the rig would sometimes fall off when they hit a road bump. Sometimes a car would plow into them. He says the "turn-outs" (firefighting gear) weren't fire retardant. Today, firefighters must ride enclosed in the cab and the turnouts have fire-protective linings. For the first time, DeMelloPine says, we are seeing a generation of firefighters lasting 10 years past retirement.
Firefighting is still a dangerous job. Some 52 firefighters have already died in the United States this year. Fires remain the main cause of sudden, on-the-job deaths for firefighters because of relatively dangerous calls, like controlling a wild fire, DeMelloPine says. Also, firefighters tend to work in teams and sometimes a whole team will perish together. Still, DeMelloPine says, firefighters face day-to-day dangers, such as hepatitis, tuberculosis, meningitis, asbestos and exposure to other hazardous materials. One firefighter was using large tools to pull someone from a car and accidentally deployed an air bag, which, ironically, caused his death.
A few months ago, firefighters from the University Avenue station went up to Black Road to put out a burning trailer. When the fire was extinguished, they went inside the trailer and found a huge pot, part of a drug lab. "We could have been blown up," DeMelloPine says.
Kendall Pearson from the county fire department says the effects of being exposed to hazardous materials can show up years later. Several firefighters who fought a paint store fire in Palo Alto some years ago have all died from the same type of cancer, Pearson says.
To care for work-related medical conditions, presumptive laws have been passed; for example, if a firefighter develops a lung, heart, or hernia problem, it is presumed the problem is a result of his or her work as a firefighter. As the workload is changing, firefighters are picking up other medical problems on the job. In 1983 certain kinds of cancer were deemed presumptive.
Photograph by Paul Myers
Capt. Dennis DeMelloPine has been with the University Avenue fire station almost 20 years. He says firefighters tend to stay with the station that first hires them.
Getting involved in the community's medical problems began during the 1950s, DeMelloPine says, when firefighters began using their first aid kits on the public. When 911 came in, things really changed, Krumme says. "We only had Red Cross training, but we'd go out and do our best." He says CPR training didn't come along until 1972. Saratoga Fire Chief Ernie Kraule, says that's also when the practice of field medicine from the Vietnam War worked its way into firefighting in a big way.
An estimated 80 percent to 90 percent of the calls firefighters answer today are medical. At every fire station one of the firefighters on duty is a certified emergency medical technician. "We can get three or four emergency medical calls a day," DeMelloPine says.
By noon on a recent day at the University Avenue fire station, firefighters had already been out to help a 78-year-old man who'd fallen down and an 86-year-old woman with an emergency medical problem. They'd been out on a call because someone smelled smoke, and they'd been up to a fire station in the Los Gatos mountains to help cover for a broken down fire engine. Right after lunch, they were called out on another medical emergency.
When Joe Krumme started firefighting in the 1940s, he only needed a high school diploma. Training was an in-service thing: how to operate a pump, firefighting tactics and strategy. Firefighting back then, DeMelloPine says, was mostly brute force.
"Training was by exposure and the seat of our pants, trial by fire, so to speak," Mckenna says. "We used to light a fire and tell new recruits to go put it out," he says. "For medical training we'd read a book."
These days firefighters must have at least an associate of arts degree, and firefighting is only part of what they need to know. They must know how to identify or at least categorize some 200,000 hazardous materials and how to deal with them. They need to know medical procedures and how to use technology. They need chemistry and physics and writing skills. The last 10 years, DeMelloPine says, the test for firefighter has changed from a skilled labor test to medical, math and English.
Photograph by Paul Myers
Firefighters' days include testing and stocking their equipment. Today's hoses are made of much lighter material than in the past.
Denise Koscielniak is an apprentice firefighter at the Saratoga department, which means she works full time for part-time pay. Full-time pay for a new firefighter, she says, is about $50,000. Koscielniak agrees that firefighting has come a long way. Medicine, she says, has made firefighting more professional and smarter. Because of improvements in equipment, brute strength isn't as necessary as it once was. New recruits, however, must pass a tough agility test, and women take the same one as the men.
Koscielniak, a former coordinator of facilities and equipment at West Valley College, is making a career change at 36. She's been at the Saratoga Fire District's academy for two years and is now training as a paramedic specialist.
"It's tough to actually get hired ," Koscielniak says. Lots of people are already trained and ready to apply when a job comes up. Many volunteers are hoping for a paid position. She says that when recent positions came up in some small Bay Area towns, hundreds of people applied. Changes in retirement opportunities for firefighters mean there will be a number of openings soon. Koscielniak predicts there will be thousands of applicants and hopes her training as a paramedic will give her a boost in the application process.
Koscielniak is experiencing another modern phenomenon, the high cost of living in Silicon Valley. She bought a house in more affordable Sacramento, which means she gets up at 3:30 a.m. and commutes till 6:30 a.m., works 24 hours and then either commutes back or stays with friends in town. The schedule for firefighters today is 24 hours on, 24 off, three times in a row and then four days off.
Some things haven't changed. The practice of "putting the wet stuff on the red stuff" is still the main method of fighting fires, says Mckenna. There's just not as much of red stuff these days. But the job is still exciting, the days unpredictable and some of the challenges from long ago remain. Those bucket carriers who used to trail after the firefighters in the 18th century worked hard to win a place as a volunteer on the early fire departments. Today's want-to-be firefighters are still working hard to get hired.
"Those days I was on the engine were the best times of my life," Joe Krumme says. "I went to work never knowing what was going to happen. That's what I loved about the job." But fire engines are a lot different today with computers, air conditioning, telephones, hazardous materials directories, medical supplies, hydraulic ladders and more. Even the sirens are different. Because of noise pollution laws, the wail had to be toned down a few decibels. Still, when a fire engine's siren pierces the air, some still wonder if there's a fire somewhere.
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Saratoga, California Since 1955
