Importance of Inter-Department” Cooperation
Written by Gordon on August 27th, 2009
Gordon Graham here again, and thanks for taking the time to glance at my little corner of the Credit Union site. There are a lot of great people providing some comments for you to read and perhaps glean a couple of thoughts for your usage – and I am honored to be able to give you my “nickel’s worth” on a monthly basis.
And the focus of my brief piece today is the importance of “inter-department” cooperation. When a major event occurs – and there are a lot of them on the horizon
including a terrorist attack, a technology failure, a transportation tragedy, a mass casualty event, or an Act of God (and I wonder who came up with that description) – will your fire department be able to work with other responders – like police – and will your efforts be complementary and fully integrated – or will it end up in a “clustermess” – and I just invented that word to get it past the editor of this piece.
Over the years, I have seen a lot of good responses to major events – and occasionally I have seen some great responses. Most recently I was very, very impressed with the response (and I will admit that this event did allow some time for preparation) to the
Michael Jackson “celebration of life” following his recent death. The high level of coordination by fire and police personnel at this massive gathering at Staples Center was very impressive – and what was most impressive was the lack of any major problems that are often times associated with such large gatherings.
My hat is off to all the good people at the Los Angeles City Emergency Management
Department in making this work – and not to digress here but I heard the “media outrage” and the “elected official outrage” about the lunches for the firefighters and cops. Sometimes, I just sit back and shake my head. Whoever made the call on “feeding” the cops and the firefighters assigned to this event was obviously a “thinker” and congratulations on having the “guts” to do the right thing here – using a proven supplier with a proven product and a proven track record. But back to my point in this piece…
The “MJ” event did allow for some time to “think” in advance. What happens when there is no such time to “think” – where the response has to be immediate and correct? Back in September, the City lived through the horrific Metrolink tragedy – and I think it ended up with twenty-five deaths and a huge mess. I look forward to the “final report” on this event and will pay particular attention to the coordination between responding agencies – but again this is LA City and over the years you have had many “opportunities” to get together rapidly – and perform in a very coordinated manner reducing the negative consequences that occur during these tragedies.
I think one of the “secrets” to the successful responses in Los Angeles City is “frequency”. You do it often, so you do it well. And there seems to be a pretty good relationship between police and fire personnel in the City, and this “relationship” helps foster success at major events that require response by multiple public safety agencies.
Sadly, other major cities (and New York comes to mind immediately) do not enjoy this type of relationship between fire and police – and in fact the relationship is very poor.
But what about the rest of you who are somehow associated with the Credit Union reading this piece today? Do you regularly get together with your counterparts on the “other side” and practice for the “unthinkable” events that are in our future? Or will you wait for the event to occur and then “take your best shot” at responding correctly? I think the latter approach is prone to exacerbating the given tragedy – and in today’s world of increased public scrutiny and electronic discovery and “everyone has a video camera” mentality – we have to get good (and better) at what we do.
I may have bored you with this in a past piece, but when I was a new Sergeant back in the early 80’s, I recognized that the CHP and the local fire department had a major problem “lying in wait”. And while I was assigned to Central Los Angeles, 100% or the CHP interaction with a fire department was with LA City FD. And I would regularly hear my cops grumbling about working with LAFD on a freeway event – and none of the comments I heard were positive. “They don’t know where to park their rigs”, and “they take up too many lanes”, and “they leave their lights on slowing up traffic on the other side of the freeway” – which is a big deal in the CHP world because when that traffic slows, the resulting queue will have many minor “bumps” that further slow traffic and cause more problems. Frankly, my cops had little use for LAFD personnel.
Fortunately, I was able to hear the other side of the story from LAFD personnel. “Your cops are always in a rush”, and “we have to follow medical protocols prior to transport”, and “we take up a lot of lanes because most of our equipment is on the right side of the truck and we need room to maneuver”, and we leave our lights on “because we love to leave our lights on and screw up traffic for years to come” – (OK, I made that last one up). But I learned that you had good reasons to do most (and I emphasize MOST) of what you were doing.
And I put my “thinking cap” on and came up with an idea. And I announced my idea in afternoon shift briefing one day (and sadly, I had not run this bit of genius past the
Commander of the office) that effectively immediately – each one of you (referring to my cops on “B” shift – and why is it always “B” shift?) will go to the LAFD station
nearest your beat – the people who will be responding to the next brush fire or overturned big rig or other freeway related event) and introduce yourself to the Company Officer on duty – the Captain of the station – and ask if you could “buy in” for dinner that day. I had this “thought” that perhaps if my cops and the LAFD people ate together – that maybe this would facilitate relations on the freeway in a subsequent event.
And you would have thought that I had shot the Pope and Mother Theresa with that one! I got the Union beef, I got the cops angry, and sadly I angered my Commander – which is a big deal on the CHP because we do have over one hundred offices and one of them is named El Centro – and that would not be one of my first one hundred choices on where I would want to work as a highwayman. Anyhow, I had the whole world mad at me.
But apparently, my thoughts were not alone. The Commander had heard from fire people at a Commander’s conference about similar difficulties and the Commander was told by the Chief to find a solution to this problem – and this might be the solution so he backed me up with my “buy into dinner at the local fire station” directive. And there were a lot of cops who thought I was the personification of evil after that.
And talk about “unintended consequences” – two months later I had a different problem.
I could not get my cops out of the fire stations! “They have a constant-on coffee pot” and “they have televisions” (and not to really show my age here, but I went to an LAFD station in the 70’s – long before remote TV “clickers” and they had “rigged” up this complex system of PVC piping above the lounge chairs so that you could twist the pipe and change the channels and I thought that was pretty cool) and “you know, they are nice people” – and I could bore you all day long with this – but subsequent events on the freeway went better, simply because people knew each other.
So why have I chosen this topic for this piece. Last week, I flew to Vancouver, BC, and was the keynote speaker at the World Police and Fire Games pre-conference Congress. There were many thousands of firefighters and cops from around the world getting to know each other better through “sports.” And the neatest thing that I experienced there was that the cops and firefighters did not group into separate “cliques” – but rather were fully integrated and were aligned more by “sport” than “cop vs. firefighter.” And I am confident that should any of these people meet on a future event – things will go better because they “know” each other.
And as I listened to the leaders of the WPFG talking, and a newsperson asked about the genesis of this “brilliant idea to get firefighters and cops working together more efficiently”, I heard the head of the bunch – a guy from Belgium state – “Well, it all started back in the early 80’s when a bunch of CHP officers started eating with a bunch of firefighters on a monthly basis, and that led to them playing sports together and that led to the WPFG with many thousands of people participating here in Canada today.”
Well, I sorta made up that last paragraph, but you get my drift here. For those of you who are still active in the fire service, make it your goal this month to meet the “local cop” who you will be doing business with on some future event. This brief interaction today will enhance future performance at some given event. And ideally, let’s start training together so when that event occurs, we will serve our public well.
Hey, that is it for now. I did have a wonderful time in Canada, and I met a lot of firefighters there from around the world – and once again, thanks for all you do to make us safe.
Take care and I will see you again next month.
Gordon Graham
Co-President, Lexipol
