by Chief Glenn Usdin, former Chief, Lancaster Township, PA

I’m driving through a neighboring area on a warm spring Saturday morning. Just passing through the center of town, I hear the house alert sirens going off. Not having a scanner in the car, I figured that I would never know where the fire company was headed. Just then I looked up to see a column of smoke rising up in the distance. I had no trouble finding the fire in a new townhouse development on the outskirts of town.

A few turns off the main highway, I pulled over to let the rigs go past, and I park my Chiefs car a block away and walk up.

The fire police recognized me and waved me through. I ended up across the street from the fire with the now gathering large crowd of neighbors. This fire was clearly the best show in town.

The fire action was fast and furious. A car had ignited in the first floor attached garage in the end of the row home. There was heavy fire blowing out of the garage, and smoke pushing from most of the upper two levels. In short order one handline was advanced to the main seat of the fire, a second went up the front stoop to the first floor, and the entire building was surrounded with ground ladders and an aerial to the roof. The next line went into the exposure building while water was quickly applied to the well involved ground floor.

Only a few minutes elapsed before the truck crews searched and cleared the first and second floors. The once heavy fire was some reduced to steam, and there wasn’t any exterior extension to the first or second floors. This was about as textbook an operation as one could hope for. I doubt it was more than 10 minutes when the fire went from heavy and active to OUT COLD. A metro career department couldn’t have done it any better. I was impressed.

I see the microwave van from our local TV station arrive. The reporter and photographer walk over to the front of the fire, just in front of me, and ask the fire police officer if they can get into the street and ask the Incident Commander a few questions. The chief looks over at the news crew, waved them off, and the fire policeman listens to his orders and tells them to stand on the sidewalk with the rest of us spectators. They plead their case with him a few more minutes, the chief is now gone and a policeman joins the group. He tells them that if the chief doesn’t want them on the other side of the fire line, that is where they must stay.

The reporter approaches me and ask if I can give them any information or make a statement. “NO NO and NO, not my fire, not my incident, my department is not involved and I’m just watching it as you are.” OK, just asking.

What happened next was pretty predictable. Any time a news camera is present on the street, they gather a lot of attention. PUT ME ON TV!

The crew turns away from the fire and starts asking the bystanders what happened. Nobody should be shocked so far. But what happened next was pretty shocking to me.

“We called the fire department 30 minutes ago and it took them forever to get here!”

“Can you believe the first fire truck to arrive was an SUV with 1 guy in it and he didn’t even have a hose!”

“When they got here, the had no idea what they were doing and a bunch of them went into the building without a hose line and the fire didn’t go out right away!”

“They are so bad they needed 8 trucks to put out one small fire!”

“They broke out all the windows on the first floor, and it wasn’t even on fire.”

Can you guess what the headline for the news story was that night?

“Local fire company has difficulty putting out fire” That was complete crap.

It was a textbook well run incident. Everyone did exactly what they were trained to do, and did it well. My favorite benchmark was accomplished. The fire didn’t extend one inch past where it was when the department arrived.

Look, I’m practical. I know the news media is not very popular these days. We can debate that another day. Today, I am begging you to understand that everything we do doesn’t occur in a vacuum. You can control the story the public sees about your fires.

This past summer we had a major fatal apartment house fire. A man died in the area of origin. The complex has been the scene of many multiple alarm fires over the years, and this fire was the second fatal job that year in our township. Between social media and legacy news, the fire got a ton of attention in our region.

There is a local police/fire and EMS Facebook page operated by a civilian in our county. He gets thousands of eyes on his posts. He gets 100X more views than our own department social media. Within 24 hours, the rumors and conspiracies started showing up on the civilian page. All kinds of stories about how the fire started, why the man died, and how the fire was suspicious and was not correctly extinguished. Again, none of them true.

I went on the page and answered every question and set the readers straight on what happened, why it happened, and the facts of the fire as we knew it. NO editorializing, no attacks on folks, just the truth. A bunch of my fire service buddies were pissed that I went on “that” page.

My answer then, as was my thought when I saw that other fire years ago, is that if We don’t tell our story, someone else will and it generally will not make us look very good.