Mike Finer, whom I worked with when he was a Ff L-59 and I worked in 43 Engine and when he was a Lt. in L-44, used to say, “We’re the last of the American cowboys.” He didn’t mean range riders, he meant we were among the last of the City’s agencies and one of the last Departments to do things the old way, often operating “mask-free,” along with the Roof and OV often operating alone, even with some members “riding the aerial,” to Alarms.
Needless to say, those days are long gone.
Today, “two in, two out” is a hard and fast rule, not the mere suggestion it once was. Firefighters have faced charges for entering a fire building alone recently.
Fire Departments across the country have been lowering both cognitive and physical standards in the name of diversity, but at the expense of workforce quality.
In New York City we’ve seen this with a sharp increase in fire deaths over the past few years. In 2016 NYC’s fire death toll was 48. In 2018 that number nearly doubled to 88. It did drop to 66 in 2019, but that’s still over 27% higher than 2016’s total.
The future of firefighting increasingly looks robotic.
The Paris Fire Department used Collosus an 1100 pound robot to put out the fire inside the Notre Dame Cathedral (https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/04/18/notre-dame-cathedral-blaze-fought-firefighting-robot-and-drones/3494540002/) and the U.S. Navy has developed SAFFiR a shipboard firefighting robot (https://www.theverge.com/2015/2/5/7986345/firefighting-robot-saffir-prototype-us-navy).
The benefits of a move from human firefighters to robotic A.I. ones are obvious. Robots don’t get injured, don’t lose time to medical leave and don’t get pensions. The savings for Municipalities would be enormous.
It seems like the days of human firefighting is nearly done. There’ll come a time when people won’t believe humans actually did what we did.
That’s why I believe the chronicling of these days is so vital. Those eras deserve to be remembered.
(https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08F7Q75ZQ/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_fab_7jaDFb5PSBFM4)
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