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338 of Behind the Shield podcast with their CEO Francisco Morales.
Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast as always. My name is James Gearing.
And this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on the show,
veteran firefighter, rope rescue guru and the man behind Ronin Rescue, Mark Pfeiffer.
Now in this conversation, we discuss a host of topics from Mark's journey into the fire service,
firefighter fitness, cancer, sleep, advances in technology, redundancy and rope rescue, training,
learning from international teams and so much more.
Now, before we get to this incredible conversation, as I say every week,
please just take a moment, go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the show,
leave feedback and leave a rating.
Every single five star rating truly does elevate this podcast,
therefore making it easier for others to find.
And this is a free library of well over 900 episodes of the show.
So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women stories
so I can get them to every single person on planet Earth who needs to hear them.
So with that being said, I introduce to you Mark Pfeiffer. Enjoy.
Well, Mark, I want to start by saying two things.
Firstly, thank you so much to Ryan Allen for connecting us and we'll get to how you guys know each other in a minute.
And secondly, I want to welcome you to the Behind the Shield podcast today.
Well, thanks a lot for having me. It's great to be on the podcast.
I mean, we talked about Ryan in a minute, but when he had mentioned it and I looked you up,
are you on like 908 or something right now?
Like it was an incredible number.
Yeah, now it's amazing what happens if you just don't stop.
The number gets bigger and bigger.
Yeah. So congratulations to you for keeping with it.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
So where on planet Earth we finding you this afternoon?
I am in Penticton, British Columbia. That's where I live.
It's kind of a weird thing for people internationally.
Not quite north of Spokane, but if you went north of Spokane, kind of, you would be a little bit east of me.
Most people know where Spokane, Washington is.
If I started mentioning some of the smaller areas in Washington that I'm north of,
I'd probably just say I'm in Penticton, BC.
Yeah, so about 450 kilometers east of Vancouver.
So 300 miles, sort of thing, 280 miles east of Vancouver.
I still work as a firefighter down at the coast in Vancouver.
So I do that commute. We're on 24, so we do that.
We do that commute. We're on 24, so we do seven shifts a month.
So I drive back down to the coast seven times a month.
So with that, I'm just going to jump in.
People are going to be groaning because I talk about the firefight work week all the time.
What is the work schedule for you guys in a week?
So we came from the two days, two nights, four off system, two tens, two 14 nights, four off.
I worked that for well up until last October.
So we're talking 28 years and moved into this 24.
Some of the departments in Metro Vancouver.
So for people that aren't aware, Metro Vancouver's 20 or 25 different cities
that all have their own fire department.
A lot of them have their own police department.
So we border multiple cities.
So some of the cities have gone to 24 on, 24 off, 24 on, five days off.
My city's gone the other way, which is 24 on, 48 hours off, 24 on, four days off.
So it's kind of a mix depending.
And of course, the paramedics are still running 12s, at least they're alpha cars.
They have some different car schedules, but generally say 12 hour days, 12 hour nights.
And they do two days, two nights.
The police are still running days and nights.
And I don't know if they do tens and 14s or 12s.
So you can figure out that everybody's mixed now.
You have no idea which platoon you're matching with within your own city,
let alone the cities next to you.
See, I've had this conversation with so many people.
And as I'm sure you're aware in the training that you do, Ryan's a perfect example.
You know, there you guys are doing tens and 12s and you see us a lot.
So tens and 14s.
And you see us a lot where it morphs and people go, OK.
And I agree with this 100 percent.
And the fire service specifically, it makes more sense for us to be there 24 hours.
I always argue by the time 12 hours are gone, I've barely finished my checkouts, workouts,
you know, training, etc.
I can't imagine coming in and then having to do all over again.
But the crazy disconnect that you can have a firefighter doing the exact same job in,
you know, in Canada and Vancouver that's working 42 hour workweek and then Orange County,
Florida, you've got a firefighter working 56 hours a week.
Same exact job.
And then, you know, if you add in understaffing, now you're working 80 hours plus because of
mandatory overtime as well.
Yeah, it's I know I've done a lot of training worldwide and even in Europe.
I mean, it's your original area.
I mean, Great Britain, we'll call it close enough to Europe.
But when I train, I train a lot in Belgium and they were doing one on one day on two
days off, one day on two days off and just rotated that shift.
But they also get a bunch of weird days off in there.
It's very hard to track what they were doing per se.
But yeah, so you travel around.
I was doing some competitions in Taiwan and they go to work until they go home.
And people say, well, yeah, I go to work until I go home.
But think like three months.
And so you do these competitions and you're like, why are all these people's families
here?
Like, why are they all showing up?
Why are their kids here?
There's big hugs and everything.
Well, it's because they literally haven't seen their family in months.
It's like the military, they just disappear.
They go on tasks, they go on, you know, deploy, they go to base, whatever.
And then they come back when they're done, they're stint, whatever that might be.
And so, yeah, you get to see a lot of that.
We have a pretty nice schedule.
I mean, I can't complain about it.
Is there things that could be better?
Of course, there's always things that can be better.
But when you travel around and see how some of the other firefighters, even in some of
the states, you know, you talk about Orange County, I've worked with a lot of guys out
of like Knoxville, their private fire, you look at their pay and their hours and you
go, I don't really have a lot to complain about.
Yeah, no, I think this is what I talked about.
What you have got or the 2472, which I think would be the most consistent because, you
know, we're trying to get away from only one day between a sleepless night and a sleepless
night, you know, in these patterns.
But, you know, I think that that should be the industry standard, you know, and I've
talked about this a lot.
We have unions that represent us in North America.
And I'm baffled because in most other industries, that's one of the first things that they put
down is, all right, well, let's standardize a work week first before we talk about anything
else.
And then how long can you be without sleep is usually in the trucking industry and aviation
and everything.
And so I think what you guys and, you know, some departments that have moved to it now
in Florida and some of the Northeast, you've got the schedule I think we should all be
doing.
It's spreading the word to the rest of the fire service.
I just had two Firefire wives on the show and one of whom her husband worked for a CDF,
California Department of Forestry, and he could be gone for a month at a time.
That's a month on shift, not, you know, here and then off at a base and whatever, like
24 hours straight for 30 days.
And it's pure insanity.
And you align that with a lot of the mental and physical health issues that we have that
either retire our people or even worse, kill our people.
You know, it's one of those conversations where we really have to all come together
and say, look, enough is enough.
You know, what you guys are doing, in my opinion, is what we need to move to or a version of.
Yeah.
And I mean, we looked at the two different processes and that was the one we decided
upon because of the health benefits or I guess the not the detriments that the other one
had compared to that particular schedule.
The big concerns, I mean, firefighters being firefighters everywhere is everybody would
rather have the five days off.
But I, my business partners at the company that we own and get into that later too, they're
both on a different department.
They border my city.
So I'm south of Vancouver.
I work in a place called Delta.
If you ever take a ferry out of Tawas into Vancouver Island, you've gone through my city.
If you've ever shipped stuff into Delta port, you've been through my city sort of thing.
But the city next to us, Surrey, they've gone to the one on one off one on five off and
they're destroyed.
I mean, that one day off is a right off of a day a lot of times.
Like they're not there.
It's by miles will be a work three days.
Yeah.
When I worked in California, Anaheim, so, you know, way south of where you are, it was
one on one off four times.
And then the end of that, that four tours, they called it, you'd have a four or six.
So that was a full 56 hour work week.
And you know, yeah, but I mean, so I know like by day two, by day three, you are just,
you know, exhausted.
So by spreading them out, and this is all the, the sleep experts that I've had from
pretty much every profession that would be parallel to us from all the branches of the
military to the sporting community.
They're all like, you know, you, you people are crazy, you lost your mind.
You need to have X amount of rest and recovery between 24 hours without sleep or really shit
sleep and the next one.
So yeah, I mean, understanding that space and why we need it, you know, and I think
I get it, you know, some of us, a lot of us live a long way from where we work and there
is that, oh, it's easier to smush shifts together, but that goes against the actual health conversation.
Yeah, I mean, a couple of odd points to that, I guess, is like Vancouver's got an incredibly
crazy housing market.
It's been, you know, rivaled with, I think the latest stats is like the medium income.
You need more than average medium income to afford a house in Vancouver.
And now you get that conversation where people are wanting a certain shift pattern so they
can work a side job in order to make more money to get housing.
And now what's the bigger stress?
Is the bigger stress being at work more or is the bigger stress that home life stress
where you can't afford to live in the city that you're actually working in.
So now you're moving out further and further, you're driving two, three hours to get to
work.
You know, I don't know what the answer to that is, but it certainly seems to be, you
know, a compounding problem.
I forget if it was my German guest, but there was someone I remember where they actually
gave affordable housing to their first responders.
And I love that.
I mean, obviously, assuming it's a kind of a home that you would want to live in, but
giving some sort of, you know, tax break to the people that are protecting that city so
they could afford to live in these neighborhoods.
Well, I think what's touch wood is going to happen eventually.
We're going to have that event that all of a sudden you want your first responders back
to your home community and it's going to be, they can't get there or they're going to be
there in days because of the infrastructure.
We had a flood event here in November, I'm guessing 2021, a big atmospheric river and
it truly was not like, you know, a pineapple or express or a wet week.
Like I want to say there was over 250 millimeters of rain in the mountains and like less than
a day.
It took out all major routes out of Vancouver, like bridges gone.
It took weeks to get bridges back up.
They brought in the military, you know, there's, I volunteer with local SAR.
We were picking people off the roofs in local communities and things like this.
But now you look and you go, I mean, I got on a plane.
I flew back to Vancouver.
I've been around long enough.
I have that means, but you get some new firefighter that's making 60% of first classes.
What's what they start with.
Now you're going to ask them to fork out a thousand bucks.
Cause of course the airlines did no favors by, you know, ensuring the pricing was held
when the disaster struck, you know, having to fly back to Vancouver now to go to work
in order to get back on shift.
So the other one that's going to come up, I think with us with this 24.
So we get the urban interface much like the States will deploy structural firefighters
to those incidents.
So BC wildfire runs wildfire when it starts crossing into city boundaries, it ends up
with structural firefighters doing either structural protection or sprinkler protection
or a combination of both.
And now we're coming from 24 hour shifts and those can be eight to 14 day deployments for
us.
So how do we come off of our shift, move into that 12 hour shift pattern, come out of the
12 hour or whatever that is and move back into the 24.
So I think there might be some challenges with that this summer as well.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I appreciate the, uh, the tangent.
I think it's, it's so important to get all these different perspectives rather than just
say, you know, Oh, this is the way it should be done.
But you know, I mean, these are all factors that need to be discussed and obviously the
pay and then the fire service.
I mean, I worked in Anaheim, I'd say when I was at Anaheim, I was paid for the firefighter
should be paid.
I mean, it was, it was appropriate.
And then I had a, like a 40% pay cut when I went to Florida and, uh, you know, I was
back on the, in the meat grinder.
Um, I want to start at the very beginning of your journey though.
So tell me where you were born and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic, what
your parents did, how many siblings?
I lived in the ultimate nuclear family from the seventies, right?
Um, I tell jokes to, so I was born in the city that I currently work, city of Delta,
which is just, uh, south of Vancouver.
It's a suburb of Vancouver, 150,000, 200,000 people kind of thing.
Obviously a lot smaller when I grew up.
Um, and the guys and girls that I work with now laugh cause I grew up right on the, uh,
United States border.
There's a little piece of land, a peninsula called point Roberts that belongs to the United
States and it's only accessible by land through Canada.
You could fly in or boat in to get in, but otherwise you got to come in through Canada.
And so I lived on the street that paralleled the border.
We would get on dirt bikes at eight, 10 years old, ride that street, cut through the border.
Like the border guard wouldn't even get up.
Oh yeah.
Like he knows where we live.
Just, oh, it's the kids riding dirt bikes again, right?
Go down, ride the gravel pits down in point Roberts, turn around, ride home.
And so, I mean, as I've grown up and now work in Delta and, you know, seeing different things
with the border, I was down in New York, you know, just after nine 11, I've been a firefighter
for awhile and seeing how that changes, you know, no one can really believe that we actually
just grew up in road motorbikes, you know, city streets with no licenses under age, crossing
international boundaries.
And nobody seemed to care.
Um, and I understand there's a lot of complexities that go with that, but, you know, that was
kind of the childhood life.
My father was a firefighter, same department that I'm with.
Uh, he passed from occupational cancer after he retired.
Uh, mom stayed at home, raised myself, only child, you know, uh, typical kind of late
seventies, early eighties upbringing, riding motorbikes.
Maybe that wasn't that typical, you know, playing out on the streets till the street
lights came on where there was street lights.
Um, went to high school at the local high school, you know, nothing like that.
Uh, you know, very unremarkable from that point of view.
I'm sorry to hear about your dad.
How old was he when he passed?
Uh, 72, I want to say.
So it was one of those things.
He was Eastern European, born in Germany, uh, came over after the second world war,
became a firefighter in Calgary and then moved out to Delta.
Um, when Delta was kind of expanding back in 1970.
And uh, when he retired, he was very tight lipped about stuff like that's that Eastern
European.
It's my problem, not yours.
I'll just got it out.
Um, and then when he passed, his doctor actually had said to me, why don't you go for a work
safe pension for your mom?
Cause it's going to be line of duty.
And I'm like, how do you figure?
And he goes, Oh, cause he's had these problems since before he retired.
He's been treated for different cancers.
I think he had four or five cancers when he died.
Um, yeah.
So, but yeah, he had been treated for those since he was on the job.
And so, yeah, he, I mean, he had a decent enough retirement, but like 15 years or whatever,
kind of being able to 14, 12, something like that years being able to get out.
I mean, you always want to be retired for as long as you were employed.
That would kind of be the goal of that.
But, uh, I mean, he came from the era as he used to tell the stories that they would only
use air packs at chemical fires.
You know, you think about the humor in that statement at this point.
I mean, we're obviously not in insulation with horse hair, like the old days, but still
I, we only used air packs at chemical fires.
That's kind of an interesting statement, right?
Absolutely.
What about the immigration story?
I love hearing, you know, all these kind of international immigrant stories, the good
and the bad, because I think, you know, with a lot of modern day rhetoric, um, immigrant
has almost become like a swear word these days, you know, kind of spat at people.
Um, and I get the difference between illegal immigration and immigration, but I feel there's
been a kind of blurring of the lines.
Um, but there's so many, you know, incredible stories of people that went to this country,
you know, full of hope and, and built a life for themselves and their families.
So if he, if he told you at all, what were some of the things he talks about being a
German immigrant around world war two times?
Um, that's, that's interesting.
Yeah.
Cause he, so when he came over, he knew new English.
Um, his youngest memories are actually, uh, coming out of cellars and seeing roads melted
and things like that.
Um, they made their way by ship into Halifax.
I have some of the rings.
I don't even know what they're worth.
I never bothered getting them assessed, but they took a lot of their money, put it into
gold, melted it down as jewelry, stitched it into the clothing, came in through pure
21 and Halifax, and they were over on a sponsorship program, uh, to go work on a farm outside
of, uh, Calgary, Alberta.
And so they took the train across, uh, and this would have been mid fifties, I guess.
Um, so he was, you know, teenager late teens sort of thing, maybe early fifties.
Um, and he says he remembers his mommy, mom, giving them some money in Montreal to go get
bread and he came back and he's like, this is all I could find.
But he was amazed at the way the bread was because he had lived basically on rations
his entire life.
And so like, like the bread soft and stuff, you can't beat somebody with this bread.
He remembers, remember him telling that story.
Um, you know, it was just his mom that he came over with.
His father obviously died.
He was a German soldier, died during the war.
Um, and then they lived outside of Calgary, Alberta.
He learned English in the schoolyard and yeah, there was a lot of, uh, it wasn't popular
being German in those years.
I can imagine more Japanese.
Yeah, there was, there was a little bit of problems back then.
So, um, he spoke with a stutter for a long time, spoke English with a stutter.
Um, he worked his way through that as he went up through the ranks and obviously had to
speak more with fire department.
He retired as a deputy chief.
Uh, he had to have better speaking skills.
So he ended up going to school to do that sort of stuff.
Um, but at the end of the day, yeah, there was, he literally taught himself English.
He knew Polish and German, although I didn't realize that.
Um, when I was 12, I met my grandmother, his mother, and, uh, they started speaking German.
She started speaking German to him.
He answered in German.
I almost fell over.
Like, what do you mean you speak another language?
That might've been like, I was thinking that could be useful.
Like I could learn another language.
Thank you.
And, uh, but when he came over, he kind of just pushed that life aside and said, Hey,
we're Canadians now we live in Canada.
That's that.
I mean, it was a different history, right?
I mean, it's, you're coming from a time in history where it wasn't popular.
There was a lot of atrocities, obviously that were done.
And so he wanted to start a new life of fresh.
And I said, I didn't, wasn't aware of a lot of that until later in life.
Yeah.
Well, thank you for sharing.
I mean, this is, these are the, you know, the, the colors that make up this country.
And again, you know, you've got a little boy that's coming out of a horrendous war, but
I've always kind of made this very clear.
We paint entire nations with one brush and I, there's no way in hell that all German
people knew what was going on under the Nazi flag at that time.
And a lot of them were probably just defending their lands.
You know, they were being bombed and, you know, there was an invasion ultimately, or,
you know, a recapturing, I guess, of foreign countries and ultimately German itself.
But you know, allowing that trauma to stop there and allowing the next generation to
go back to being, you know, good people again, rather than holding it over their heads for
decades and decades and decades.
We need to remember all the bad things that happened, but you know, I don't believe that
all Russians want to invade Ukraine.
I don't believe it all Israelis are happy what's going on in Gaza, you know, but you
know, until we stop it and then give the rest of the people the benefit of the doubt, but
we weren't directly involved, then we're just going to keep perpetrating this, this
message and creating, you know, hurt people.
And as I say, hurt people, hurt people.
Yeah, it's interesting.
He tells a story as a kid, there was a cow in the, the back of his, the property, they're
moving around a lot inside of Germany.
And he said the cow is in utter pain because no one is milking it for days, but nobody
would dare go out and milk the cow because if they got caught milking the cow, because
everything went to the German army at that point, they would be shot.
So at the end of the day, someone just shot the cow, put the cow out of its misery because
nobody wanted to milk it.
Although that's all that was required because they would have been shot for milking the
cow.
Like, and you just, you talk about that, just like the perplexity of chaos that goes there,
like how broken a system becomes when that sort of stuff happens.
Absolutely.
And again, usually from the tyrannical few that negatively affect a whole country.
Yeah.
And as amazing as a young boy, you'd remember a cow being in pain or having this problem,
but not being able to do anything about it for fear of death.
I mean, it's a cow.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Well, back to you as a young boy, you ended up being in a very physical profession.
What were you doing as far as exercise and sports during your school age?
I played a little basketball in high school.
I played soccer for a good portion of my growing up years.
Swam competitively for a few years.
So kind of was always involved in some type of sport or another.
I joined the cadet system when I was, I guess, earlier teens.
And it wasn't so much that that was sport, but it kind of pushed me more towards, I guess,
I've worked either, I've worked some form of government my entire life, pretty much.
So I guess it kind of steered me more in that direction.
And then when I was my last year of high school, I joined the reserves that I left for basic
training like five days after high school finished.
So it was one of those times.
It wasn't that high school was a miserable time.
I just, I think I keep in touch with one person from high school.
Most of the people I keep in touch with are people that I ended up serving in the military
with.
So what took you into the military specifically?
Were you thinking about that when you were in high school or were you thinking about
the fire service?
I don't know if I, it was much like my son.
Like my son for the longest time was like, I don't want to be a rescue guy.
Yet he's competed at Grimp Japan and now he's going to Seville.
And I think for the longest time, I didn't want anything to do with the fire service.
You can remember as a kid, you know, your dad coming home and there'd be times where
like, Hey, your mom's like, Hey, you got to stay quiet because your dad's sleeping because
he had a terrible night or, you know, he went through a floor a couple of times, you know,
herniated, hernia at one point, herniated disc at another point.
And so, you know, those injuries that occurred, you kind of think, well, is that really what
I want to do?
So I joined the army instead.
That's, I didn't really think about it at that point.
And maybe it's you're too close to it.
I don't know.
I mean, I know when my kids came to the fire station to visit me, they'd be more interested
in watching TV than they would be at looking at a fire truck.
And maybe it's because you're so close to it.
It's, you know, it's not that familiarity breeds contempt, but it's, you know, one
of those types of things.
And so with the cadet program here, it's, I use the word paramilitary quite lightly.
I mean, it's sponsored by the department of national defense.
You wear a uniform, you go away on camps, that sort of stuff.
You learn how to shoot rifles and march and fly planes and do leadership things.
And so, yeah, it was a bit more of a direct lineage.
I'd been accepted into military college for a full ride, sort of, I'd say like your West
Point, but not like your West Point.
So we're a military college in Canada.
You don't need a Senate, you know, permission or a senator's permission or a waiver to get
in.
You don't need to really apply.
But at that point in the nineties, the Canadian military, they didn't really want to give
you what you asked for per se.
So I thought I would just try it out by enlisting in the reserves for a couple of years.
And during that time, I think I did about four and a half years full-time service.
Always as a reservist, Canada's a bit different.
They were cutting entire regiments at that point in time, but they still needed the staff.
So they bled from the reserves staff to fill the full-time regiments.
It was almost impossible to get in.
And then towards the end of that, they just bled the reserves dry because they brought
those full-time regiments back on to full strength.
But they needed, obviously, trained soldiers to do that.
So it was one of those, you know, cyclical events in life that happens.
Yeah.
And it was a good time.
I mean, I really enjoyed my time in the reserves.
I learned a lot.
It's an influential part of your life.
For all the negative you hear about the military, I can't speak ill of it.
You're at a time from like 16, 17, till I think I was like 22, which is an influential
time in life.
And they do teach you some valuable lessons about teamwork, about responsibility.
I did my section commander's course.
I think I was 19 years old.
You're calling in aircraft.
You're calling in machine gun fire.
You're calling in artillery.
What other 19-year-old in the world gets to learn how to clear a Russian trench line with
combat arm support?
Like the responsibility that they put on you, they treat you like an adult.
And for the most part, you act like an adult.
And it's something I think that the fire service, at least in my areas, could really learn from.
If you treat people like children, they're going to act accordingly.
If you can train them properly and give them the responsibility that they should have with
the positions that they're in, most times they'll amaze you and actually do what they're
supposed to do and probably come back with some pretty decent feedback on maybe how to
do it better.
And that was somewhere where I think the military experiences could have a direct influence
in a positive fashion in the fire service.
It's so interesting that you say that because I think the only difference between the really
good fire departments, and I would say Anaheim, for example, was one where we were trusted.
When there were literal simple commands that the captain would say at a fire like, lay
one, lay two, lay the bundles, we're going to do a heat hole, strip, whatever it was.
And that was all need to be said because there was a high level of training and a high level
of kind of the orchestra that was all of these pieces.
And then there was a high level of trust because you'd been trained extremely well.
There was no need for micromanagement.
And then that bled into a lot of these firefighters and engineers and captains running entire training
divisions because they were trusted and they knew they could teach them well.
Conversely, the departments that were very lacking that I worked for, it was the polar
opposite.
The bar was set very low.
The training was just check in boxes and therefore you had all this micromanaging.
So what is your perception?
It can be the fire service and obviously what you're doing now on the role of humility in
leadership.
Buddy of mine Shaggy, Chris Williams, Zones Vertical Integrity Rescue down in Texas.
And I'm trying to remember the quote.
He got it from somebody.
It's like if service is beneath you, leadership is beyond you.
And I think that speaks to that humility piece where you're not going to know everything.
I mean, I went through the basics of leadership training in the military.
The leadership training we do in the fire service, I would suggest isn't leadership
training.
I don't remember taking what I would consider a leadership course in the fire service.
I took a lot of emergency scene management programs and how to do budgeting as a battalion
chief or whatever.
But I never really did a leadership component to that as I would view it.
And so I think it has to come from somewhere else right now.
So it's people that have played in team sports and have been defeated or have done other
things.
I mean, you want to get your ego checked, go walk into any military school and you'll
learn very quickly that there's people there that can do things much better and much faster
than you can.
It's I think any athletes, I go back to my son just because I mean, his experiences are
closer in memory to mine.
He swam at a fairly high level.
He made Olympic trials.
And so he thinks he's all that in a bag of chips walking around the local club.
You go to Toronto or you go to Indianapolis and you're swimming in pools where they got
fireworks and doing like a US national competition.
And there's people swimming there that are swimming at Olympic level.
And you realize that there's always somebody out there that can do this better than you.
He learned that there, I've learned that along the way, whether it be in business, whether
it be going to these crimp competitions, whether it be at the fire service.
I mean, I've been one of those unusual people, maybe it's a tangent for later.
I've been part of a rescue intervention crew and I've been the cause of a rescue intervention
crew being deployed.
And so you really got to sit down at times and think about what you did to cause those
situations and what you've done to help mitigate those situations.
And the fire service, and I don't mean to knock on, I mean, it's been my chosen profession
for 29 years, but I mean, I wrote up a fairly lengthy after action report for the last one
when I tore out my shoulder going through a floor.
And I mean, the first line of it is, this is my fault.
Like I'm the guy who fell.
I mean, there's a bunch of other contributing factors to this, but at the end of the day,
I was the one who went through the floor and there's certain things that I could have done
and there's certain things that apartment could have done.
But I've found a lot of those things just get pushed aside.
They get hidden.
Nobody wants to see it.
It brings up liability issues.
It brings up sometimes leadership and management issues.
It brings up training issues.
And instead of eating the elephant one bite at a time and just go, okay, let's start chipping
away at this list.
We just kind of hide it and hope it doesn't happen again.
You're nodding.
You I think seen this before.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, I preach.
No, because I've had that.
I mean, even I'll say Anaheim, which was phenomenal.
There were a couple of near misses that when I was on scene that I witnessed and another
one, it happened.
I think it was a shift before and they were big events and it wasn't really discussed
and it wasn't really sent to the kind of near miss.
We can all learn from this system in the fire service.
It was kind of it was an embarrassment.
So it was swept under the rug.
And then a much more devastating one, the last place I worked at Disney Springs, which
is the kind of shopping area outside Disney in Florida, the pulse shooter went there first
and that was his original target.
And it was just sheer luck that there happened to be a load of sheriff's deputies all there
at the same time.
And they have him on video with all the guns and in a stroller and then going back to the
car, packing everything up and then going straight to the nightclub and killing all
those poor people.
That was also swept under the rug.
You know, I know about it and it is public knowledge, but it was never discussed with
us in the fire.
So we never, okay, here's what we're going to do.
Here's what we're going to change.
We're going to do more work with law enforcement.
Let's really think about this active shooter stuff.
Nothing, you know, and it's, you know, I say that because we need to, we need to learn
from these because there's no greater gift than a near miss, especially if no one was
seriously hurt or killed.
That is the ultimate opportunity for learning.
It's a freebie.
But if we brush that under the rug and then someone dies the next time because we never
fixed it, shame on you.
Yeah.
And it's, I think you'd probably agree where a lot of the incidents we're going to, some
of them might be more complex because of the complexities that we as a society are putting
on the pressures and complexities we as a society put on ourselves and on our first
responders.
But a lot of these incidents have happened in the past.
I mean, it's a different place.
It's a different name, but they've all occurred before.
And if we can learn from somebody else doing it, if you can learn from my mistakes, you
know, it's funny, just another tangent.
We were putting a spare truck together just like two days ago at work and we're all we
could find was an old set of jaws.
And so it's the old, not the new like Hummaltr where you've got the one line and both the
systems are running inside of that line.
It's the old two line system.
And one of the firefighters pulled the system apart, not realizing that it's a loop system.
So he's trying to put his thumb over this.
And I'm like, no, don't do that either because you don't want hydraulics pressurized into
your skin either.
But it's like, you got to close this valve here and remove both of these to make this
work.
And it's these, you know, and that's just a humorous little incident, but it's those
learning things that we've lost over the years.
They've been lost in time.
They've been lost within organizational knowledge and culture that needs to still be out there.
If we still have this equipment and we obviously still have these fires and these hazards that
occur, then let's make sure that we're passing those bits of knowledge on to those next people
so that they don't have the same problems or the same injuries that I did.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And I think again, it goes back to the humility.
You know, there's a lot of finger point and I hear it all the time now about these Gen
Z's, you know, and it's like, well, these Gen Z's as you mentioned, are the ones flying
drones and in charge of rockets and, you know, fire jets.
These are the same kind of generation that we're talking about.
So they can be molded and mentored into phenomenal firefighters or soldiers or whatever you need
if you have the humility to find out what they do know, find out what they don't know
and then raise them up.
And you know, they obviously in turn are going to be well versed in technology and some of
these other things that my generation is really trying to struggle overcoming.
So again, you know, if you're a humble senior man, for example, when someone comes in, as
long as they're willing to put in the work, you will mentor them.
You will teach them the old ways.
And then you'll also, as you said earlier, give them the opportunity.
Like, what do you think?
If you know, you've got a fresh set of eyes, if this was the problem, what would you do?
And they may bring something in that you'd never thought about that becomes the next
go-to in the fire service.
Oh, it's interesting.
Within Ronin, we hire full-time, I call them kids.
I mean, they're 20s to late 20s.
They're all trying to be firefighters.
So they come, they work with us.
They mostly do our rope access and rescue standby teams.
And you know, they gain knowledge.
We end up giving them courses as well.
And eventually they get hired with fire and end up working for us part-time, teach in
or whatever else, you know, the future brings.
And so you're talking this, you know, this is millennial generation, the Gen Z, whatever.
And so you start chatting and you get these, you know, why are you doing that?
Like they're asking us.
That's a really good question.
Now that I sit down and think about it, because they're just, they didn't go through the 18
steps to get to where we are today.
They're just looking at it as step one, which we're looking at as step 18, but we're biased
by those previous 17 steps.
And now all of a sudden they're looking at it going, well, wait a second, why are we
doing this without that, you know, bias?
And so where there is teaching them some of those things so that they don't get hurt and
they don't, you know, do the same mistakes we did, there's also trying not to teach them
the biases that are intrinsic in some of these systems that we grew up with that they are
completely, it's completely foreign to them.
And I mean, it's even in the fire service, we have a lot of new people we've grown, I'd
say a quarter of our job or a small job, a couple hundred people.
I bet you a quarter, if not more, are brand new.
And it's post COVID and during COVID most fire departments, like we did nothing, like
we wrapped ourselves in bubbles and stayed separately and then got on trucks and ran,
called and deconed ourselves, wrapped ourselves back in bubbles and went and stayed separately
again.
And so the culture completely shifted.
And then you get these new people that come in that ask that question, why are we doing
this?
Well, back in 1987, we used to, you know, but it's, and I'm not saying, you know, turn
on a dime, change the culture, away you go, but there really is something to be said for
taking five minutes and actually critically analyzing why they're asking that question
and that point that they're coming from.
And you know, to the flip side of that, we had a podcast where we brought on, called
it, I think Gen Z and rescue, and it was some of the young people that we had working for
us.
And we asked them things like, what in high school prepared you for the workforce?
Nothing.
What in university prepared you for the workforce?
Nothing.
And then some of the shock they got, we run them through Sprat rope access training.
And one of the girls was saying she was going through a rope access course.
So one of the guys, somebody, you know, just a student off the street, it was a mixed class
of Ronan staff and paying clients.
Guy failed at like 10 in the morning and it was, yep, see you later.
Goodbye.
Have a nice time.
And they're used to a system where it's like, wow, we'll give you a retest or why did you
fail that?
And so, you know, some of our systems may need to tweak, but also they need to tweak
to some of our systems where there are consequences to not performing.
I think that was pretty long and drawn out.
Sorry.
No, no, no.
There was a spot on though, and I couldn't agree more.
And it's funny.
One of the things that I remember, and again, just a fresh set of eyes, and this wasn't
initially in the fire services a few years later, but, um, well, two things.
Firstly, I mean, the ultimate thing that a lot of the American firefighters need to take
a step back and go, why are we doing this?
Is the 56 hour work week.
And I've just was recently saying like the people that keep voting against you getting
more time off work 40 hours a week.
Think about that.
The people that say that 56 hours is ample for a firefighter work 40 hours and go to
bed every night.
So that's the first thing for us all to question.
So I'll leave that right there.
The other thing though, car fires.
I have never seen a car fire with, oh yeah, we're just going to clean it up and then we'll
sell it again.
Every single car fire is a write off.
And if you go back to basic firefighter training, class A fires is wood and paper.
And that's what you use water for.
Every car fire I've been on except Anaheim, it was war and it's a big class B dumpster
fire.
So again, you know, either foam or people laugh at it, that big old sheet that they've
used in Europe, we just pull it over and smother it and problem solved as well.
You know, so the number of injuries that we've had and obviously beside the roads, how dangerous
it is.
You know, I've dumped a whole tank on a car fire that's had a petrol leak and the mags
are sparking everywhere, but we've always done it that way.
But I mean, you take a step back, a car fire is a class B dumpster fire and that's where
we should fire.
If there's no one trapped, you shouldn't be anywhere close to the struts or the tires.
You shouldn't be flowing just water, you know, smother it or cover it in foam from a distance
and then walk away because no one is using that car again.
Let's be honest.
It's funny you say that.
I mean, two points to this whole conversation.
I remember pulling up on a car fire and we're it's on the opposite side of the street and
it's a fairly busy street.
It's not a highway, but it is a major commuter route, like triple lane road each way.
And the boys on the back, I mean, they're they're like Dobermans all the time, right?
They're chopping out the bit to go and I'm like, somebody chalk the tires and let's get
some cones up and block traffic because we're going over the median here.
And you know, at the end, they're like, well, you know, the car fire grew like we're kind
of debriefing the call.
And I'm like, the guy didn't want his car back anyways, I guarantee it.
Like I tell my wife, if your car catches on fire, roll down the windows, open all the
doors and let it go.
Wait five minutes before you phone 911.
The worst thing you want is that car back at that point.
Part two, your comment about firefighter safety.
So I don't feel that I'm that old in the fire service, although a lot of people probably
tell me now that I am.
I started in 96 and we didn't use air packs at car fires or at dumpster fires or for overhaul
or for anything like that.
Like those are considered non air pack events.
And you like you say, it's a class A dumpster fire driving down or class B, a class A, class
B dumpster fire driving down the street.
And it was, yeah, we just stay out of the smoke.
It's fine.
Right?
Yeah, exactly.
Well, with that an interesting tangent, you lose your father to job related cancer.
Talk to me about the evolution in Delta from when you first got hired, not wearing packs
during these events to where you are today.
Things are certainly improved.
I mean, I think I had the first, my first set of turnout gear is the stuff I went to
the Academy with.
And I think I had it for 12 or 13 years.
Like you could put your hand through the crotch of the gear.
Oh my God.
Like it was destroyed.
And now I mean, there's a regular replacement gears washed, you know, it's tracked, it's
washed.
We're getting a, they just closed the bid for a set of like rescue gear that we'll run
for MVIs, technical rescue, wild land type.
So we're not wearing our full structural turnout gear except for structural firefighting.
So when you look at that, I mean, in some 96 to today, I was talking like 28 years going
on 29 years, but like from wearing one set of gear for everything, we would wear that
to the car fire.
We would wear that to the car accident.
I would wear that jacket walking into somebody's home for a medical call later that night.
You know, it was the be all jacket.
You couldn't even tell what color it was anymore because it was so beat up and disfigured.
There was no striping left on it or anything, but that was cool back then, right?
That was the first thing you did when you got new gear, you rolled around on the bay
floor just so that you didn't look like you had new gear on.
And now, I mean, we just almost religiously preach to our people, wash your helmets.
We're issued a second, a Bella clava.
We're issued a second, the liner that goes around over your ears, your earflap piece.
You know, you're issued a set of rescue gear coming up, your gears, you know, washed on
a regular basis.
And I think that's huge where that's where we do need to educate that younger generation
of this is why we're doing this because you want to actually live and collect a pension
out of this.
You don't want to die doing this job.
You don't want to be, you know, have a miserable retirement and be in pain and in agony because
of what this job did to you.
Absolutely.
Well, you've been an interesting person to ask this, and this is a very unpopular observation,
but I didn't come on, you know, create this podcast to make friends.
I created it to change things.
But one of the things that drives me crazy and bearing in mind, I was trained in Florida.
I worked in California for a few years on a truck company and we had so we had the big
old helmet, the smaller California helmet, then back to the big old New Yorker again.
And I think what really kind of got my back up at first was this nauseating patronizing
rhetoric on the European helmet, the space helmet.
I have one.
Yeah, very good.
Good.
So this is going to be this is going to go well.
Now what I always say to people is what happens when you have to hold C spine in a car accident?
Where is the first place your helmet goes on top of the car?
I know I always did.
You know, when you look up, what happens?
Your lip bangs a tank.
You know, so if you are part of the VR team or the high angle rescue team, they're not
wearing their leather helmet unless they're doing a picture for Instagram for likes.
But if they're real rescuers, they're wearing a different kind of helmet.
And if you see behind me and you can see over there, you've got the schematics.
I've got the kind of schematics of that style helmet and think this is 1937.
And if you look at all the special operations, special forces members I've had on the show
and the pilots and everyone else who's, you know, tip of the spear, our Navy SEALs don't
wear tin helmets, but we hang on to that helmet, you know, and we call it history or tradition.
And it's not tradition.
It's history, history.
And it's what we used to wear, but there is better technology out in the world.
And I've had British firefighters and German firefighters, and they talk about what is
involved in this helmet and how easy it is to decontaminate it from the carcinogens that
get sucked in versus leather, for example, which is not only heavy and cumbersome, but
is also a giant sponge for all things cancer.
So in that, that is James Gearing's opinion.
So I don't want to load the question, but what is your perspective when you have to
at least wear a different helmet for what you are a specialist in?
What is your perception of, you know, what we wear and do you think that we should be
progressing with technology when it comes to what goes on our head in the fire service?
In a nutshell, absolutely.
We so, I mean, I have a European helmet.
I don't wear it here.
We don't wear leathers up here.
It's a composite plastic.
I wear one that's a little bit smaller.
It doesn't have quite the large brim on the back of it because of the exact reason you
mentioned where I look up with a tank on my back.
I end up, you know, limiting my stuff.
It's funny because when we go on to work sites, like we go to the port, oh, you got to be
wearing a helmet and steel toes, your general PPE for any construction site.
We all put on our helmets.
Nowhere in there is there a CSA or an ANSI standard on that helmet.
It is a firefighting helmet.
It is not even really all that designed with the, I mean, I have a lot of helmets for other
things.
We'll chat about that in a second, but it's not even the way the internal structure of
that helmet's made.
It's not even designed to take a very hard drop on top of you.
And like you say, yet we still wear them.
The European one I have was given to me as a gift when I was teaching over there and
it's reflective.
It actually glows in the dark, which is an interesting concept.
I mean, yes, people talk about, oh, how long is that going to last?
Well, apparently it lasts a fair bit.
And then when you look at the specialties, I have a Swiftwater helmet.
I have a rope rescue helmet.
I have a helicopter rescue helmet.
I have a firefighting helmet.
You know, the list goes on and on and on.
And where my helicopter rescue helmet, if you rip the electronics off of it, it's a
certain brand.
I don't know, but Team Wendy, I don't know if you care if we mentioned brands or not
on here.
I could wear that for rope and I could wear that for water.
I do wear other ones because it's a little lighter at times or whatnot.
But I mean, generally those helmets are all very similarly made.
They all meet an ANSI or a CSA standard for impact.
You could wear them as almost a construction helmet.
They've got different types of venting systems in them.
So they're cooler.
You won't get your head ripped off if you fall into the drink in them.
All those types of things that like you say, and then we go back to firefighting and we
put on that helmet.
I don't know that answer the question.
No, but it does.
And it's just simply getting people to acknowledge that, you know, especially first, if nothing
else stop making fun of the European one, like ours is better because it's not.
If you accept, hey, this is really shit, but I care more about how I look than being able
to do the job and you acknowledge that, then hang on to your shitty helmet.
That's fine.
But if you actually look in the mirror and go, I actually want these, we say for them.
All right.
So say it's actually for them.
I want the best piece of equipment.
I want the smallest gloves that are decks, you know, have dexterity that I can actually
hit my Mayday button properly that I can tie knots with rather than the two pillows that
I have normally.
You know, I want to be the best.
I want the best, you know, stuff because, you know, SEAL Team 6 and the SAS and all
these other people, they're constantly getting the absolute cutting edge technology.
But to rebuke that and to belittle technology advances, to me is, again, when you have to
step back and you have to ask that question like you said before, why are we doing that?
Because looking like Kurt Russell is not the servant leadership.
That's narcissism and we have to separate the two.
It's interesting because, I mean, I think it was the military, every ounce added to
your foot is like a pound to your back or whatnot.
And I mean, we already, I mean, our packs are, they've got to be 45 to 50 pounds, if
not more.
The particular model we have, we've got the buddy breathers and, you know, the whole battery
pack system in there for the pack trackers and all this sort of stuff.
And you look at the FDNY, they're back down to a base pack.
And the reason why is, I think, probably because of the weight and the cumbersomeness of the
pack.
And I mean, I've been, people will laugh when I say this, I've skirted the rules a lot in
my life and most people will go, somewhat, yeah, no kidding.
I'm the guy that went out and bought his own leather boots.
And I was the guy that called up a guy out of London and found a different set of gloves
that were more dexterity.
And I've been wearing those gloves.
And as the fire department's progressed and we've, the thing with the fire service, I
find here is you have to get to a certain level of seniority before anybody bothers
listening to you.
And I'm fortunate that I've made it to that level of seniority where I can actually influence
some of these outcomes.
And it's sad in a way that you have to get to that point to do it, because I'm on the
downside of my career.
I'm almost done.
And so the, I mean, when I was buying my own gloves and my own boots was because I was
kicking doors every day.
Now I'm more standing on lawns and directing people to kick doors.
So it's those people that are on those frontline posts that need those gloves and need those
new boots or the better fitting ergonomic gear or the smaller and lighter helmets or
packs because they're the ones that are out there doing the work.
They're the ones that we need the feedback from in order to make those changes.
And you know, it's really frustrating as I work in the public sector and I work in the
private sector.
And when we go and do these competitions, we sponsor a team every year to go and compete
internationally.
And we get some stuff donated to us and there's some stuff we just out and buy.
And I mean, I'll throw out to Arc'teryx.
They've been sponsoring us since the beginning.
And we R&D a lot of their gear, packs that they have that we brought back and given updates
to is because we go to here.
And so we all of a sudden get this ability to constantly being able to play with the
latest and newest equipment on the market and testing it in real world circumstances.
And then I go back to the public sector job of the fire department and we're arguing about
what bulky pair of mitts we should be wearing.
It does get frustrating.
Yeah.
I was just talking to somebody the other day about fire conferences and I love, like for
example, the Orlando fire conference is amazing.
Ryan Central Florida wrote rescue challenge.
Awesome.
You know what I mean?
These smaller organizations where a few firefighters get together and do something local, I think
is phenomenal, but it kind of gets my back up a little bit when I've gone to, for example,
fire rescue East and you know, they're saying, oh, it's the latest and greatest.
And you're standing there going, no, it's not.
That's the same shit you've been selling for 30 years.
Don't tell me this is this is innovation.
It's not.
Show me something.
You know, like you said, go to the go to Europe, go to the places where they are truly innovating
because we make some amazing things over here.
Like I love our fire engines over here.
I mean, I think some of the, you know, like the hose rolls and some of those ideas in
the UK are pretty interesting.
I don't know.
I've never tried them, but you know that I love that philosophy and I quote it all the
time.
You know, the, the rising tide lifts all ships.
Every country has things they do really well and it takes humility to actually go, you
know, Hey, the UK, okay, show us these helmets.
Tell me, tell me what it's all about.
You know what I mean?
But if you just constantly refusing this technology to advance, then you're only hurting your
people and your delivery of service.
No, absolutely.
Like we sent over some people, we went to the technical rescue school or the fire school
for the technical rescue program in Belgium.
And I mean, these are guys on this class that are, I mean, one's a former engineer.
They're all technical rescue.
We're all qualified in our own areas.
Yeah, we went back.
Let's start at the basics.
Let's do your program.
Let's go to your school in your country with your equipment.
And there's certainly things that you look there and go, no, that's not going to work
for us, but there's definitely things you look there and go, Hey, that's, that's a takeaway.
We can incorporate that into our systems and it's those weird things.
So while we're there, their school is on an old British army base in Belgium and they've
got a, I think it's a five or six story structure where they do their fire training.
It's an old barracks accommodation and they had a team leader course going there.
And so we said, Hey, you know, can we do time out here for five seconds for learning tech
rescue?
I'm kind of interested in seeing what your team leader program looks like too.
And so just to stand there and watch that as their team leaders go up with a scribe
and the tick and the information that they're recording and passing on to their people and
what they're doing.
And it's like, okay, there's some cool stuff here.
And then that conversation led into flow control.
I mean, we're a PPV department where, you know, understand flow control because I've
learned it in different venues, not so much in my own department, but now these, they're
a flow control kind of areas.
So they're showing me different smoke stoppers and flash over simulators and different things
like this.
So I go to that school for tech rescue and I walk away with other takeaways that I can
directly come back and use in the fire service in my fire service.
And they want us in that school because they're humble enough as their instructors to ask
us, Hey, so what do you think about this device?
Or what do you think about that device?
Cause they're pulling devices out of North America.
Now a lot of the artificial high directionals, your vortexes, your terror adapters that are
made over here, you know, which ones do you prefer and why and what?
So there's this massive sharing of information, but it's occurring and I'm using this term
a bit more openly, but like at the firefighter level, this isn't occurring from department
to department or from chief to chief or even from captain to captain per se, this is, this
is at the user level.
This is occurring.
Absolutely.
And again, it's, it's, it's humility.
It's literally saying, you know, show me what you do.
And like you said, and then it's the Bruce Lee term, you know, absorb what is useful
to scars, what is useless.
It doesn't mean it's useless to other people, but they are, that's not going to work.
Cause I live in, you know, I work in Manhattan and everywhere I go is a high rise or I work
in orange County, Florida.
And everywhere I go is a hundred square foot crack shack, you know, whatever it is, of
course there are, you know, horses for courses, but if we're not knowledge sharing, and I
think this is one, a real kind of eye opener to me was when you really step back, you realize
how fragmented certainly the American fire services, you know, and there are literally
cities and counties that won't talk to each other.
No matter knowledge share and grow together, they won't even talk to each other.
They won't even interact on a fire, which is absolutely disgusting and pathetic, but
this is what we've got to fix.
This, this, this ego in leadership or lack thereof, putting that humility back in and
realizing that we are all doing the same job, just not nationally, internationally, you know,
and there might be something that they're doing in Indonesia that will blow all of our
minds, you know, but, um, you know, if, if we don't, if we're not humble enough to ask
other people the way they do it and have the humility to actually listen and take a step
back and again, ask the question, that's the theme in this conversation.
Why do we even do this in the first place?
That is, that is where innovation occurs, you know, otherwise Steve jobs would have
been like, yeah, you know, abacus is fine.
We'll just leave it there.
I'm laughing because we run a leadership program with Ronan and I partnered with a fella who's
a team lead on Antorp fire tech rescuer, ex military guy.
And we're over in Texas teaching this just like two weeks ago or something.
And so we're doing two demos of, you know, different leadership styles for, you know,
leading and briefing a rescue team.
And Jill stands up and he's like, you know, okay, you four are with me, you're this, you're
that boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
And then he runs like he's off it or like a sprint.
And these five people are like looking at me like, um, I'm like, yeah, you might want
to run after him.
And it's so foreign to us.
Like you say, the fire service is like our team leader is literally sprinting at this
point.
Like he's told me what to do and what to bring and he's off at a trot.
And these guys are like, uh, wait a second here.
But yeah, it's, and I'm not saying that's the way, but it's like you say, it's, it's
a fire service internationally and picking up those differences and learning, taking
what you can take.
You got a horse for each course and I also, you know, people need to think that they look
so short term at times.
So what do I need in the next year?
Did I think I'd be involved in SAR again to the extent that I am at this point in my life?
No, the rope rescues we do in SAR and the technical rescue we do in SAR.
So I work on their winter team, the rope team, their water team and their helicopter team.
Our average rollout on a bag is a 200 meter rope.
600, three feet a meter, just under 600 feet.
We don't even have, I think we might have two in the fire service.
Our highest thing in Delta is like a 37, 42 story apartment.
Maybe the crane's down at the docks at 300 ish, you know, but when we go out in SAR,
putting someone out on 180 or 190 meters of rope is not an uncommon thing.
And you have to go back into your thought processes now and go, okay, yeah, I'm running
on longer ropes, I've been trained to do this, but maybe it's buried back in that far away
part of your brain.
So it's not like, you know, you learn a skill and just stay in that box because that's all
you're ever going to do.
You get tasked out, like you say, to go into the next district.
You have a regional emergency, which gets you called out to a wildfire or an urban interface
or for whatever reason, you end up moving and end up back with search and rescue teams
doing something different where this information just gets pulled back out.
So it's all valuable stuff.
It's just how it's applied.
It was interesting hearing Ryan talking about rescuing from the Orlando Eye.
Is it Orlando Eye?
Orlando Wheel, I think they call it, but the London Eye that we have now in Orlando as
well.
And I forget, I think it's 300 feet tall, if I'm not mistaken.
And I didn't realize that they belay people down, you know, from wherever they were sitting
in a harness all the way down to the roof of the building that they pay that.
So when you think about that, I mean, a 300 plus foot drop with a person who up until
that moment had no idea they were going to be descending on a rope.
I mean, it blew my mind.
And then also he was talking obviously about the climb and the kind of little access points
that they've got to climb through.
And again, you're talking about efficiency of weight and smaller lines and placement
of lines.
I mean, it was absolutely fascinating.
But if we're not drilling on that, that's not something that you want to be making the
plan on the fly.
No, I mean, if you're not to shoot at my fire department neighbors, but if you're still
a 12, 5, you know, 12, 5 millimeter rope fire department, and now you're climbing structure
to 300 or 330 feet, this is, you know, those systems just almost don't jive anymore.
You're going to do, you're going to make it more complex and cause more issues and take
more time than if you just took the time and learned a newer system, a smaller system,
a system that may be more applicable to that particular job.
And yes, it might mean you have to specialize a little more.
It might mean that you have to train a little bit more, but it's what also the client, the
public, the people that's paying our wage expect, you know, I mean, I was, I've never
been to the Orlando one.
I've been to the London Eye.
I was there one of the nights they were doing one of the trainings on there.
I know some of the boys from the UK that train on that and do the evac.
And I want to say that there was like 25 people a cabin, like, so it's not even like, Oh,
I got these problems at 300 feet.
I got 25 humans.
I could be handicapped.
They could be disabled, you know, mentally or physically, and I'm not trying to pick
on people, but that's a whole different rescue now than taking an able-bodied person and
tossing them out on a rope.
And so you not only got the height, you've got some other leadership and technical rescue
challenges around that.
Yeah.
And I mean, if we're going to be completely blunt, I mean, if they are tourists from the
US, they could be three, four, 500 pounds as well.
And I'm not saying that to be a dick.
I'm just saying it mathematically.
Well, I mean, our tech rescue, we very seldom got called out to lift large people when I
started the job.
We cut people out of showers at the hospital.
We've taken out windows of front entrance, like front home windows.
We've done, you know, and that's not unusual.
I mean, it's just the nature of the beast now.
Like technical rescue also does bariatric rescue.
End up picking up heavy people.
It's just the way it is.
I was almost crushed by a 600 pound guy who lost his balance and was sitting on a lazy
boy and I was between him and the seat.
And then another one that was in Anaheim, another one on the calls.
It was exactly what you're talking about.
We didn't have to take him through the window, but he was the kind of person and it's just
heartbreaking and he's definitely not with us now.
This was probably 15 years ago now, but he was one of those people that when he lay on
the bed, he was a pancake, like a full circle, like one of the Mr. Man books that I grew
up with.
And when we took him out, we literally had to pour him through the door and at halfway
point he looked like an hourglass, you know, half a circle on each side.
And it's so sad, but that guy was basically all but a thousand pounds.
A thousand pound human being.
And I just interviewed Tulsi Gabbard a few days ago and I was talking to her about this.
Like, you know, the politicians don't talk about the obesity crisis.
And like you said, in our lifetimes, we went from, you know, there were some people that
were obviously heavy, but not anywhere near to the point where we are now.
And in America, we're 70% overweight or obese.
And the comment has also been made, it's the first time in human history that they predict
that our children to die before us, you know, if you're part of that group.
So it's, you know, it's an extremely important conversation, primarily for the health of
our nation, but even from the hospitals and the fire departments, because the number of
times that I've had to take a stretcher out the back or rescue so we can slide someone
on a dolphin sling into the back and, you know, how humiliating for that individual,
you know, this is an important conversation nationally, I think.
No, absolutely.
And it's, it's funny, because it's not, I mean, not funny isn't the right word.
But when I go over to Europe, like Berlin, their tech rescue team, they've got bariatric
stretchers.
I mean, it's no longer just a North American or an American problem, it's becoming a European
problem.
And when you talk to my friends in Belgium, they're doing tech rescues weekly, and predominantly
it's because their elevators are the size of a shoebox, and they can't get the people
out there.
So they're having to take them up the stairs or out the window.
And as you know, from being over there, narrow streets, you can't get ladder trucks into
a lot of those places, higher buildings mashed together.
So it's all rope work now to get either the sick or the large out of these buildings.
Well, speaking of that, we haven't really kind of taken you on the journey of your first
kind of exposure to rope training, wherever that was through the creation of your own
rescue company.
So when were you first exposed to it?
And then what was that point that made you not just immerse yourself, because I did ops
and tech, but didn't ever join a team.
And so it was really more the knowledge rather than actually being competent at it.
And I'm not competent at rope rescue, I'll say that right now.
But you can really lean into it the same way that Ryan did.
So what was the exposure and then what made you jump in with both feet?
I guess the first exposure to rope was basic mountain operations in the military, which
is a whole different ball game.
And the crossing of those worlds was actually quite humorous.
The military at the time was laid nylon, two ropes, double wrapped through a steel carabiner
out the helicopter door you go, off the skid you go, wherever that might be.
You would break and leaves you.
There might be someone fireman belaying you below.
I use that term, you know, as per the old school of what it was, you know, they pull
the rope to try to stop you.
You can't do that on a helicopter though.
So you would have just fallen.
And you know, those types of things like the safety margin was definitely a little lacking.
And so when I came to the fire service, I joined in 96, 97, we started a tech rescue
team.
I had some rope background, so you know, get thrown on some courses to do that.
And it was funny and I bring up that little tangent piece earlier is so we're doing this
course and I am left somewhere basically I'm derigging something and they're like, Oh,
can you get down?
I'm like, yeah, just leave me one rope and I just loop it and double wrap this carabiner
is wrap off the side of this thing.
And people's heads are exploding, right?
Like, oh my gosh, you can't do that.
And I'm like, wow, I've been doing this for years, I'm still alive.
But yeah, and so we've seen that and I guess so I thought it was about 97.
I became an instructor in rope rescue for the fire department in 2000.
And then I took over as program coordinator for tech rescue in 2010 in my fire department.
And in the meantime, about 2003, I started my own company doing just rescue standby work.
And it didn't take us long to kind of figure out that there was a lot of people doing rescue
by rote.
And by rote, I mean, memorization of a skill, which they could apply repetitively to the
same scenario.
But as soon as the scenario changed by even a couple of degrees, all of a sudden that
skill set didn't fit the scenario anymore.
And instead of understanding the principles of why we did things, this rote process wasn't
really taking them anywhere.
And I'll be honest, a lot of what I was taught was taught by rote.
I mean, the military, they didn't, if they tried to explain to me, you know, what that
actually were the safety margins or anything in there, they couldn't.
But I mean, when you look back at it, the principles in the military is you didn't
want a soldier hanging underneath a helicopter.
They just wanted you hitting the ground so the next soldier could move into that door
and carry on and do that mission.
And that was the principle behind it is clear you as fast as you can off those ropes.
Where the fire service, you know, wanting a bit more of a safety margin, we start looking
at different principles.
About the same time, you know, into the 2000s started into rope access.
And then we're really, I guess, so it's always kind of been there.
I rock climb.
I started with search and rescue in 2007.
I was working on my own sort of business in 2003.
I was doing rope with the fire department.
And then in 2013, we ended up having enough ability as a private company to go to our
first Grimp Day.
So our first rope rescue competition and that was in Belgium.
And at this point, I've either competed or been staff.
I'm going to take a stab at about 25 of them.
I've competed with different teams in different languages, you know, technical advisor in
places like China, I've helped set them up in places like North America.
And going and working with other people and seeing different scenarios and seeing the
way other people solve these problems really is what kind of opened the eye and maybe either
relit the flame or, you know, poured gas on the existing flame to it.
And it's at the point now, even with our local SAR team, if I can, you know, give them a
couple of clutches to help out and provide that training, you know, we're also one of
the British Columbia rope rescue providers for search and rescue.
Why wouldn't I?
Because it helps out those people.
There's people with a passion for it.
Let's get them to do it so it's safe and effective.
And so not just safe for them, but safe for the people we're trying to rescue, not just
effective for us, but effective to the people we're trying to rescue.
And I find that a lot of that's been lost.
And I'm going to go, I know a bit long here, but I'll go on another one, the pike and pivot
really cool thing.
Everybody learns that it looks really sexy.
It's terrible for the patient, really.
You know, if you have a patient that's in a basket stretcher because of some sort of
traumatic injury, let's take an instantly flip them into the standing position and drop
their BP right down to the floor so we can do a move that looks really cool, opposed
to maybe learning a couple more rope skills and taking a little bit more effort and doing
it a different way.
And so it's going overseas and training with Japanese and Chinese and Taiwanese and Germans
and French and Belgians and, you know, through the different other areas that we've been
through America, Central America, through Canada, and picking this up and trying to
realize that it needs to be safe for us, but you can't hurt the person anymore.
You know, it's not that snatch and grab scenario per se that we all think it is.
So that's kind of the whole spectrum of rope rescue.
I mean, I'm fairly passionate about it and technical rescue in general.
Well, I want to get to some of the innovations from these other countries.
I know Ryan talked about, I think it was Japan when we were speaking.
But before we do, when I was listening to you on the CMC podcast, which was a podcast
about podcasting, it was very entertaining to listen to.
It reminded me of something that, again, you know, some of these observations coming out
the back door of the fire service through, you know, bizarre twist of fate and ending
up doing this for a living now.
I always remember, again, like you said, I mean, rote is that perfect kind of description
the same way as we call them, you know, cookbook medics, the guys that can't think outside
the pages.
The times when you do have, for example, someone trapped under a car and it's like, OK, we've
got a crib and we've got airbags or we could just turn and face away from the car, grab
the fucking frame, lift it up and someone drag the person out.
And I realized, you know, there's occasions where, you know, absolutely two is one, one
is none to a point.
And if there's not an expedient element to a rescue, you've got all the time in the world
to ensure all the safety stops.
But like you've all the Texas, there's also times where you've got to put your big boy
pants on and, you know, you not have time to do all the safety things, do what needs
to be done, get in there and get the person in a snatch and grab scenario.
So what have you seen, if any, about sometimes an over redundancy and safety at the detriment
of a patient?
There's a lot of ways I could go with this.
So to start with your initial comment, I mean, the military calls them TTMPs or fire department
may refer to more of them as SOGs.
Also hear of them as like immediate actions.
I've been out of the military for, I don't know, long time.
Double top dash down, crawl observed, communicate, sites fire.
I mean, they drill it into your head so hard.
It is an immediate action.
You get shot at, no one's telling you, oh, they're shooting at you.
You might want to throw a few rounds down range that way.
It is a boom.
It is a drill.
It is done.
Then, okay, we know something's happening.
Let's get control.
Let's do a quick frag order.
Let's move on.
It's with limited direction at that point because there was a full set of briefing orders
before you walked in there.
You have tactics, techniques, and procedures.
If I'm going to do a right flanker, I'm going to do a frontal assault, I'm going to do whatever,
that's drilled into me.
I went to a very long school, a long time ago, on how to do those things.
We did them over and over and over again.
There is a part of that where the leader, the commander, has to sit back and give an
order and direct that train, but there's a lot of stuff that was commander's intent before
you walked out a door and your orders processed.
There's a lot of operating guidelines or procedures or immediate actions that occurred to get
you into a place to be successful.
I find the fire department's SOGs, once again, I hate speaking ill of my own profession,
I find the fire department's SOGs are ass covering documents for management.
They are not what they're intended to be, which is we roll up on a scene and I say,
it's a tech rescue and I want you and your harnesses.
What does that mean?
Does that mean helmet, glasses, gloves, your harness with so much equipment hauled?
If I say, hey, you're going to be this rope, you're going to be that rope, what does that
mean to grab?
And that shouldn't be me sitting and taking time out of a rescue in a scene to say, well,
Billy, I'd like you to get this rope out of this cupboard.
No, if I say, you're rigor one, you're rigor two, there should be an SOG as to what you
grab.
I'm not waiting for you running up the stairs.
And that's where I mentioned that thing with Jill and Jill's like, you're rigor one, you're
rigor two, this, this boom.
And he starts running and the rest of the people are like, what the hell's going on
here?
And Jill understands and assumes based on his training, you're a professional, you know
what to grab to do your job and away you go.
And that's always in the back of my head when I run tech rescues is that golden hour is
trying to get it done within that hour.
And it's not that I'm going to short circuit safety, there are safety parameters that need
to be in play.
But there's some redundancy.
It's a bizarre word, isn't it?
Like you look up redundant in the dictionary.
It's not what we use it for in the rescue service.
There's areas where you can badmouth certain organizations, I won't people who listen to
this will know where they're from.
Why do I need to rig plates stitched together?
Why do I need change a projection carabiners on devices where the manufacturer says I don't?
Why do I need to back up pulleys the manufacturers say I don't?
Adding in elements of confusion, I'm adding in elements of time, I'm adding but none of
it's for safety.
This thing's never blown apart in the million cycles that it's been in its life over all
of the users worldwide.
But I'm going to back it up because somebody in some agency thought it might be safer.
But at the end of the day, we're eating up time for that patient.
And that's where I go back to, oh, the pike and pivot looks really cool.
Not really great for the patient.
We need to be timely.
And we need to remember there's a human on the end of that rope.
We think we're really cool.
And you know, the fire department labels it sometimes special operations.
I want to rescue truck.
You know what I do?
I get a medical victim from point A to a medic with the limited amount of medical skills
I get.
And my job is to get them there in at least as good a shape as I found them in the quickest
amount of time.
And so if I need to do training with my crews, so we have operating guidelines.
So when I tell the riders on the back of my rescue, rigor one, rigor two, they're not
showing up wearing nothing.
And when I tell the driver, grab the package equipment, top now, he knows I'm not even
putting a harness on.
He's grabbing what he needs to get medical supplies to a patient.
Right?
And it's that breakdown.
And you talk about over safetying it.
And I'll mention Shaggy back again.
And we said we should run a course that says let's make rescue less safe.
I mean, maybe not the greatest in advertising, but when we get this onerous amount of safety
added in to these, and this is where I truly think the competitions are doing us a disservice.
Because we go in, and when I started doing the competitions in Europe, even when I went
and trained in Europe, rescue or access to a patient is on single rope.
But now all of a sudden you're making it a competition.
What happens with competitions?
Well, you get insurance involved because nobody wants to get sued.
Now insurances get involved.
What do insurance companies naturally do?
Put as many redundancies into this system as possible so they don't have to pay anything
out at the end.
And so we get all these people from around the world doing these competitions.
And I've seen accidents at the competitions.
I'm not saying we should have been at that level.
But sometimes I think where we've gone to is onerously too safe.
And we're now creating a training scar with our people because we're almost back to rote.
That was a bit diatribe.
Is that all right?
No, no, that was spot on.
And this is, you know, there's two observations.
Firstly, a parallel for me was learning how to throw ladders in Florida.
And in Florida, in the fire academy, my fire academy was phenomenal.
However, this one, this was a state standard, you know, you'd pick up a ladder, 24, suitcase
carry, walk it to the wall, you know, put the base of the ladder up against this nice
open drill ground concrete area.
You'd walk up the rungs, then you'd pull it away, stand to the side of the ladder,
supposedly, you know, foot in it, but not really, and then extend it, then lay it down.
Then you had to rotate it and then you tie it off.
Then I go to California, where they go on the roof a lot in their fires.
And it was like, oh, shit, because I got hired from the East Coast and my learning curve
had to be like almost a vertical line to catch up with all these California trade guys and
girls.
But no, it was pick it up, shoulder it, stick the ladder, raise it, drop it in the window,
tie it off, get your ass in there.
No spinning.
And then even when they raised it, they were facing it.
So the foot wrapped one side, the knee was bracing it and you could literally let go.
And it was solid.
That way is just better, not to mention that you can't throw a ladder the Florida way in
the real world.
There's cars and hedges and fences and alleyways.
And so California was just better.
But the thing was you needed to be stronger to do it.
Male, female, whatever you needed to be a strong firefighter with good technique to
throw a ladder that way.
Then the other side, which should be interesting to get your perspective, is I think there's
a culture as well that pushes against what we're talking about, that sense of urgency
that you've got scenario A, Ferris wheel has stopped, no one's in danger.
Take your time, put all the safety measures in place.
And then scenario B, again, the vehicle is flipped, it's on someone, they can't breathe.
Now we need to just lift this off the person.
And what happens though is, and I just had a guest recently who made a grab and then
got disciplined by his department.
Danny Dwyer was on a couple of years ago, he was fired by his department for his grab.
Yet if law enforcement did the exact same thing, they get medals.
So I think that this is a really important conversation in the fire service that we have
shackled our men and women, even in EMS reports, it's a refusal.
You need to write a 12 page document on why they're a fruit.
No, there was nothing wrong with them.
They refused the fucking end.
Let's move on.
You know what I mean?
Again, big boy pants.
You got some vitals and all the rest of it.
Yeah, go on.
I mean, come on.
So and now our paramedics are scared because we're, you know, I had a guy in paramedic
school who was a giant cock, for lack of a better word, parading around like a fucking
idiot telling us how many medics he'd put to prison with his, you know, testimonies
because he's an expert witness.
He's an expert piece of shit that got a bunch of brand new paramedics terrified to actually
do their job.
If you do a job properly and you document it properly, that's all you need to know.
If they get taken into court, then hopefully your department will support you and be like
they did everything that we told them to do.
But we've created this culture of fear that if you don't do every single, like you said,
check every single box, you know, then you're going to get your legs cut from under you.
So I think culturally, this is something that we need to look at.
Like you said, have, you know, this is the perfect scenario in which case you do need
to do all the things, but also have that kind of leeway where if this is an urgent scenario,
you know, maybe one person does have to go in and search the house at that moment.
You're on a rescue.
There's two of you.
One's outside giving a size up.
The other one's running in and just doing a quick kind of skirt around.
They found someone, they pull it out.
Beautiful.
You know what I mean?
So I think, you know, getting, like you said, away from that rote, away from that cookbook
mentality and that fear we need to give our firefighter is the same leeway that law enforcement
gets.
Sometimes you have to do whatever works to rescue someone.
Yeah, it's interesting.
We just had this conversation last night.
We're bringing some new people on to our CDFL team, class D flight rules.
So in Canada, we saw short haul.
So you, uh, the single line underneath the helicopter for a lot of our wilderness rescues
and we're bringing some new people on and, you know, we're talking about crew resource
management and things like this.
But a lot of it in that particular role comes down to there's maybe you and a pilot or maybe
you and a pilot and a team lead and everybody almost needs to be a team leader because you,
there is no real cookbook for where we go.
You have all sorts of other concerns, density, altitude, you know, time, you know, nightfall,
all, you know, sunrise, all those types of things.
And then we go into the forest where we're literally hundreds of kilometers away from
any sort of road.
And three of you have to make a decision on safety, on aircraft viability, on patient
viability on all of these things.
And a lot of places where, where I live, I mean, I don't have cell comms for a lot between
when I drive from my house to the coast.
And there's a lot of places we go, we'll be lucky to get radio calm back to a SAR manager
or to the government who tasks us out or to the police who are responsible for it.
So there's three human beings that have to have enough skills, training and guidance.
And that's mentioned when you talk to the fire service is that guidance piece to be
able to make a decision that works for everybody.
Yeah.
Well, I think, and that's what we're actually asking our people to do.
If you look at an engine crew, a rescue crew, a truck crew, truck company, when we're actually
on the job, we are doing all of these things.
The problem is, you know, then they come back having done the things and they're told, oh,
you shouldn't have done that.
But, you know, I've been on a rescue and of course, I mean, you're in the middle of a
fricking gunfight trying to extricate a patient or, you know, there's someone hanging upside
down and you're trying to get them out the car before they choke to death.
I mean, these are things where you might have to, you know, forego cribbing at that moment
before that person dies, you know what I mean?
So I think it's just, you know, the conversation that there's always going to be a gray area
in medicine, in extrication, in rope rescue, whatever it is.
And that can't be seen as the moment you step out of the white, just know that disciplinary
action is coming because otherwise you're going to, it's paralysis by analysis and you're
going to basically stop good first responders from saving lives.
And it's tough too.
I mean, when people get into that officer's position where the buck does stop with you
really, like it is your decision now as to whether or not you move forward and you better
be able to justify that decision.
And I see a lot of new officers where, like you say, they get this analysis paralysis
type thing because either they don't have the training or they do have the training,
but the culture of the organization is such that they're not given that freedom of thought
and they're more concerned about the negative consequences of the decision they're going
to make than making the decision.
Where they're good people.
I mean, we're a lockstep seniority system.
Become an officer, an acting officer at our fire department, you're probably looking at
15 or 17 years of experience.
You know what the right thing to do is.
Everyone just needs to let you do it.
Absolutely.
Well, you made a comment earlier, so I'm going to have to make sure I pull this out of you.
You said that you've been, you know, you've run rescues and you've also been the cause
of a rescue.
So I'd love you to elaborate on that.
I guess as well as a start, the run, I mean, I've run a lot of rescues with the one in
particular when I talk about RIT and I mean, RIT's now Rick in a lot of places, Rapid Intervention
Crew.
This particular one was.
I want to say August of 2001.
It was just before the whole world kind of changed for fire departments and we had just
been introduced to RIT at the time.
It was Rapid Intervention Team under the ICS system as you know, team, crew.
There's a bunch of conversation around that, but we'll just call it RIT for the sake of
this.
And I remember pulling up on a scene and it was a warehouse fire.
It was Scott paper actually.
So think like minivan sized rolls of paper on fire.
The roof was compromised.
We saw that we're coming over a bridge coming down to it.
We could see that coming in and they had sent a crew in to try to find the seat of the fire,
old school fire department tactics.
And so we pull up and the next, we were the third, I guess, in and the next crew in had
been pulled for RIT.
And so we had walked by them just so that we could give them shit for being, ah, you
know, basically you guys get to watch us firefight for the rest of the day.
You know, what used to happen with RIT?
I mean, nobody wanted to be on RIT.
People would actually drive faster, slower to stagger what truck they came in on just
so they wouldn't get that job, right?
And back to a culture of the fire service.
As we're there on this RIT, are bugging these two guys on RIT, there's myself and another
firefighter off the back of one of the engines.
And there's these two guys here that were, you know, taking the piss on the door opens
a man door opens down the building, like 50 feet.
Think of a building.
I mean, we're talking, I think it was a five acre storage warehouse.
So like, we're not talking a small building.
I don't know what that is in US units, but like hundreds of feet across frontage.
And so 50, 75 feet down the road or down the side of the building door opens, the captain
comes out, he's missing a boot, helmets gone, jackets ripped open.
And we're all kind of like stunned, like, holy shit, like what, like what's going on?
And he's like, there's been a collapse.
I don't know where my people are.
So the four of us just kind of rocking the door, right?
Like there's another officer outside.
It was back before alarms in my fire department.
We've opened two stations since then.
So definitely a personnel staffing manpower issue at this particular point.
So four of us go in, two people are down.
There might've only been another three people on scene in the fire department at this point
of time, because like, this is a three, four truck response.
One of those trucks was a two person ladder at the time.
So I think we've had three, four person engines in a two person ladder there.
So we're talking 14 people, someone's in charge.
Four of us just went in the door, three are either unaccounted for or injured.
So I mean, you're, you're easily eating up almost three quarters of the staff on scene
for this.
And we went in, these people were buried.
We dug them out, what have you, you know, don't need to go too far into that.
Some of the takeaways from it though, was while we were in, they called the evacuation
and it was a bit of a shit show.
The chief that was in charge was an idiot.
I'll just throw that out.
He came from an old school of chiefs where they were grandfathered through positions
where they never took training.
You've been here long enough.
You don't have to go back and do the command officer program at the time, which turned
into the fire officer program.
And so also didn't understand a lot of the guidelines.
So when he calls for that evacuation, the four of us are like, is he telling us to get
out of the building?
Is he telling them to get out of the building?
Like we already know they can't get out of the building or they would have got out of
the building, right?
And it definitely causes some mental anguish when you're in those types of situations.
You talk a lot about, you know, mental health on your podcasts, you know, and I look through
those things.
Now you're making a conscious decision of, do I leave people or is he calling me out?
I mean, I already know the roof's compromised.
I saw it on the way through.
I have to assume he knows something I don't.
So you know, we ignored it.
We stayed in.
We found these people.
But little things about the way we vented the building, the way our RIT teams or our
RICs now were structured, what equipment they had, what training they had for that.
I mean, there was a lot of after action that came out of that.
And if you realized I sounded a little bit sour about after action reports at the start
of the podcast, you now realize why, because I was a five year firefighter when this occurred,
come out of, you know, time in the military.
So I'd seen after actions, I'd seen, I'd screwed things up.
I've seen things get screwed up and seen people have to take responsibility for that.
You know, people get hurt and injured and those types of things in the world, in the
military where it just didn't seem like that was the case here.
There was a lot of, you know, when we did the debrief on that, they brought in a lawyer
so that everything was under client confidentiality because of the legalities and the suing that
went on after this.
It was the biggest money loss in my city.
I think to date.
So these two firefighters that were injured or three were injured, two were trapped.
One never came back to work.
He's actually an inch and a half shorter because it broke his back.
Right?
So you look at the learning potential from an incident like that and you look how it
was squandered because it was put under wraps.
And I remember the senior men that, and I use the word senior men, just, you know, I'm
not trying to be sexist here.
It's just the term that was used to the day in the debrief ripping the lawyers and chiefs
new assholes in this meeting because they were like, this needs to get out and get public.
Like I said, the fire department has that until you're somebody or nobody, and these
people are somebody at that point in time, you know, and going up to bat for trying to
get that information out as a training aid and whatnot.
And what went on there?
And just from the mental health point of it.
So we got, we pulled those guys out.
You know, like I said, we ignored the alarms that went off the May days, the recall of
people, which puts you in a different mindset because obviously then you're start to contemplate
a bit your own mortality.
We get them, we pull them out building collapses after we pull them out.
And what do they do?
They give us a new air bottle, stick us back in around the corner where it's not collapsed
to go fight fire again.
I was on that fire for another 22 hours.
Oh my God.
So yeah, well, it was a staffing issue back then.
We just didn't have the staff.
They brought in neighboring departments at that point.
You know, we brought in three neighboring departments who, you know, kudos to them,
set full alarm assignments to that.
But when you look at the learning that could occur and what didn't occur and the mental
health concerns that come out of things like that, when you do those types of things and
the fact that there's no help for that at the day.
There's no counseling you go to.
I mean, hell, they don't even take you off scene and say, Hey, are you all right?
You might've had a close call there.
Building you're just 10 dropped around you.
Now it's, go put another bottle on and go around the Delta side.
That's still standing.
Maybe we can put something out over there, right?
And how you take that back as an officer and pass on to your crews where they say with
the car fire, the buildings are the same way.
When the building's done, the building's done.
There's no sense trying to hurt anybody else for shit that's written off.
They're dropping it.
I mean, they're not going to go, Oh, we saved the one back wall.
They're going to put, leave that for us.
Right now they're just going to drop it.
So you fast forward a few years to a couple of years ago, we were out of fire, stubborn
fire in the corner, couldn't gain access to it.
Just the way the structure of the building was.
The building was on grade on front and on back.
So one of our communities is part of our community is fairly hilly.
So you come in on the front, the backs on grade two, and there's about 14 feet between
that.
So you think about things like the Mary Pang fire working above fire and we didn't want
people working in the upper floor.
Got most of the fire out except for the upper floor corner.
Couldn't get in there.
So I took a crew in, chatted with the incident commander, because we were also, this is December,
it was below zero.
We're flooding neighborhoods out at this point now also creating skating rinks.
So there's other hazards and damage we're creating.
So we have some discussion.
We're like, Hey, we're going to go in.
We have a really junior crew.
I'll go first, I'll sound the floor the entire way in till I find the seat.
We'll just put out what's left of this so we can start breaking crews down.
So start going in, banging the floor as I go.
I've got two junior firefighters with me.
Neither one had been in a structure fire before.
Make it I can see the seat of the fire.
I'm thinking, Hey, we'll let firefighter B come up, take the nozzle, put out the fire.
So I slide back.
I never sounded the floor when I said it slid back.
Right?
You didn't even think about it yet.
How many people train to sound going backwards, right?
You sound going forward, but you don't usually swap nozzle positions.
Usually I'm two or three in the stock kind of thing, right?
Sure enough, my foot finds a hole in the floor.
I go to catch myself and it is the opening of the stairs going down that's been burnt
away.
And as I go to catch, I hit the pony wall that's there.
It's a half wall and I hit it.
And now it just takes me entirely backwards into this 14 foot hole.
So I bounce stairs, go straight down.
They got like the two by six rail that then goes into like a great room.
So I bounce off the two by six rail, hit the ground.
And it's funny because in 2001 when the, when they called us out of the building, there's
a lot of crap that ran through my mind.
There's only really two things.
I mean, I guess age and experience on the fall.
I had enough time to think, fuck, this is going to hurt.
And when I hit the ground, before I opened my eyes, I just said, don't be on fire.
Like you're a firefighter.
It's just like, I just don't need another problem to deal with at this point.
And so the crew I was with talking to that firefighter after he said, like, I just disappeared.
Like I was there.
I was gone.
Right.
And he didn't really know what to make of it.
So there was a bit of a pause.
And then he kind of let out a Mayday, but didn't do a who, what, where or a lunar with
it.
And he did the Mayday really quietly.
And I chatted with him after and I said, look, if you're going to do it, do it.
Like it's not like being half pregnant, right?
That doesn't exist.
You're pregnant.
You're not pregnant.
We're doing a Mayday.
We're not doing a Mayday.
And I don't mean to give the guy shit.
It's just one of those where it's like, what the hell, right?
And it's the right call he made to do a Mayday.
But when I talked to the incident commander who was in my group, like he's in, he's in
my seniority, you know, people are outside kind of wrapping hose, you know, we're just
going to put out this last little thing.
And all of a sudden it's like, you know, like what the hell did somebody just hear like
what, where, what, you know, so now people are on the radio trying to get confirmation
of what's going on.
Rick Crew starts to self dispatch themselves through the front door, all those types of
things.
But once again, there's a lot of learning that comes out of that.
I mean, like I said, that's entirely my fault.
I went back.
I sounded how I sounded.
I would have noted the hole when I went through it.
That's a hundred percent on me.
But having crews that have that experience, you know, I'm not where I usually am going
through the door.
I'm not doing things I usually do.
It's those little twists and things, you know, having the Mayday.
Let's train these.
I mean, this firefighter's a year on the job, maybe less.
Let's train these people that to do these Maydays, do them loud and proud.
Hey, if you're going to do a Mayday, do it like you're not, you're not going to get in
trouble or anything like this.
Never hit the emergency button on his mic.
Just did the Mayday over radio, which is why the incident commander was trying to figure
out what's going on.
He's asking dispatch dispatch is like, we've got no Mayday going here because there's an
obvious upper of upping of the alarms and things like this now that occur with Mayday
calls.
And so there's learning points with that too.
Once again, what didn't change from 2001 to I guess it was 21.
I went through the floor 20 years.
Never briefed out to anybody.
I wrote an after action report.
Like I said, the first thing on that is this is my fault.
Like I'm not trying to put blame on anybody else here.
There is a shit ton, six pages we can learn of different things from, you know, parts
of this.
I'm not blaming anybody as the guy who went through the hole.
There's the buck stops there, but there is some shit we can learn here.
Disappeared into bureaucracy of stuff.
Never saw the light of day again.
Now you mentioned mental health.
You've had, you know, like you said, almost three decades in the fire service on top of
obviously all the responses you've made on the technical rescue side as well.
What has been your kind of highs and lows emotionally for your career specifically?
Obviously that one incident.
I mean, when they called for us to evacuate the building, you know, the state of the building,
whatnot.
And it's one of those where you kind of think, well, okay, you know, there's a decision point
that has to be made here.
You know, there's a distinct possibility.
You might not make it out of this now at this particular point.
And that definitely plays on you.
And I've found with mental health stuff over the course of my career, it's the things that
were more out of your control, I think that caused the bigger problem.
You go in, someone's hung themselves, someone shot themselves, someone's been in a car wreck.
Those are tragedies.
You go to the call where the guy cut his kid in half because it was the wrong sex.
Those are things where it plays on you differently, I think, because it's not supposed to happen
or things happen that you can't control or outside of the norm.
And I'm not saying seeing people at a car accident is the norm, but it is kind of the
norm for us.
It's those calls where because of guideline or procedure, you were handcuffed in what
you did, or it's so far outside of the norm that you've really got to sit down and go
WTF.
Like, you know, the call that we had there with that writ, you know, the chief yelling
at you when you walk out the door because you didn't come out on that.
And you ask him later, well, what was your plan?
Like, okay, so we all leave.
What was your plan?
All we would have assessed, oh, you're going to write people off is what you're going to
do.
And I mean, cool, maybe you're cool with that.
But I wasn't really in the position that I was in.
But he wasn't even following guidelines or any procedures on that.
He was talking to another chief somewhere else trying to figure stuff out.
And, you know, that's what really kind of eats you up a little bit.
But yeah, I think it's more of that where we've been on calls and there's some of them
I just can't get into because of the legalities that still exist around them where the city
has ascertained that we violated policy.
We've more like violated guideline, but guidelines can be violated.
Last time I checked, and then something's happened where the city's been sued, and then
the city kind of throws you under the bus as part of it.
And that doesn't help the mental health around that because now not only are you dealing
with an incident that may be outside of the norm, normal what you see every day.
And I mean, that could be a wide scope there with what we do.
But now you're dealing with it in a in a silo because you can't talk about it.
I don't know if that answered what you were talking about there.
No, it did.
Well, it mirrors, you know, several different ways.
Obviously, you touched on, you know, a grotesque call that is absolutely heartbreaking.
And sadly, I'm sure everyone listening has some of those in their mind.
I know I certainly do.
But then one of the things that's not really discussed that I think really adds a huge
amount of weight to mental health challenges is organizational betrayal or organizational
stress.
And when you literally have said to a city or a county, I am willing to die to protect
the citizens of this.
This is my tribe.
And then when you do everything right, that tribe turns their back on you.
If you think about it in an ancient, you know, tribal civilization, when you're shunned by
your tribe, emotionally, that means death.
That means you're, you know, off wandering the prairie somewhere and probably not going
to survive very long.
So put us in uniform.
It's the same exact concept.
And I don't think again, you know, talking to Tulsi again, when you put all these wrong
people in leadership positions with these fragile egos and the self-serving and all
these things that, you know, have sadly corrupted what should be a beautiful, honorable profession,
there is a huge cost when you then betray the very people that trusted you.
And I think this really needs to be underlined that, you know, that organizational betrayal,
if you do not support the people that serve under your leadership, that is, you know,
absolutely behind some of the suicides and overdoses and other issues that plague our
profession.
It's interesting.
And I mean, it came to light again last night because we were doing threat and error management
as part of CRM for helicopter work.
But it's interesting that the TEM that they have there, they go, there's going to be a
problem on the plane.
Like we just can't get rid of all of the things that might occur.
Something is going to occur.
And so do we, and how do we trap that threat?
Like do we let it go because it's non-consequential?
Do we, you know, factor it out in some way, shape or form?
And I'm being very simplistic about CRM.
I get that.
And I look at that then at the fire service and go, we're going to fuck up.
Like if you do this job long enough, you're going to get to a point where you make an
error and something goes wrong.
It's just going to happen.
And the organization has to understand that.
Yes, there might be some organizational distress around that, some embarrassment, some liability,
some newspaper coverage that you don't particularly like.
But then taking that person, that person didn't go out the door and go, Hey, you know what?
I'm here to screw this guy over today.
Screw the city.
I'm going out and doing a terrible job and I'm going to kill somebody.
Nobody goes out the door doing that.
I mean, you look at the psychometrics and the physical and all the testing we do to
get on the job, you're getting a certain group of people.
And then all of a sudden, because they get put into a position or a situation where they
have to make a crap decision, a true dilemma with piss poor information under a time constraint
and once maybe they get it wrong.
And then you shit on them for doing that.
They already have some mental health issues around the basket being three quarters full
because they've worked here for how many years.
This is a bit more traumatic of a call and then you dump them out the door to go with
it.
And you wonder why people get jaded.
You wonder why people get angry at management.
You wonder why those things occur.
I mean, and yeah, maybe there has to be some level of discipline to it.
Maybe they rightfully screwed up.
But there was also the fact that, you know, let's look at the circumstances around what
happened there and why they did what they did.
They didn't go out to say, oh, I'm going to try to hurt a member of the public or I'm
going to try to destroy a piece of infrastructure.
That was an unintended negative consequence due to some other thought processes before
there.
I'm almost positive of it every time.
I've always said this.
Two things.
Firstly, when there is a gray area officer involved shooting, not the George Floyd horrendous
abuse of power and then not the guy had a gun and he was aiming at the officer.
There's no discussion there.
That's just a justified shooting.
I don't care who you are.
But the one he's reaching and it turns out he doesn't actually have a gun, you know,
and that the officer makes that split second decision and he's not doing what the officer
is telling him.
It's not like he just went up and just blasted him.
No one ever says how many shifts of that guy worked.
Was he sleep deprived?
And of course, obviously level of training as well.
But it's the same with the fire service.
When we make mistakes, when was their last day off?
Had they been forced in mandatory overtime?
Because I can tell you right now, 14 years into my career, I remember clearly pulling
out on the apron after waking up at two, three in the morning, knowing my area and telling
my medic partner, hey, are we going left or right?
I couldn't even compute left or right out of the station.
I was so fucking tired.
And now you put that scenario and I'm trying to tie belay lines and anchor points and those
kind of things.
How many of the mistakes are grounded in sleep deprivation?
How many line of duty deaths are grounded in sleep deprivation, getting lost in a search,
falling off an aerial intersection wrecks?
And it wasn't a lack of skill.
It was a fact that these people have been worked and worked and worked and worked until
their ability to split second think is blunted.
And all it takes is a slight blunting in the job that we do.
It can be the difference between someone living and someone dying.
No, absolutely.
And I mean, it's even more to the point of, like you say, sleep deprivation and how long
they've been on duty.
But what have they seen in their past?
What is the Rolodex in their head doing?
I can't remember that prime decision, decision making, whatever it was, where you look at
something and you go through a Rolodex basically in your head and you try to find a solution
based on a previous positive solution that you've had before.
And you go to two of the same calls and maybe you're tired, maybe there's other things going
on and you go through that Rolodex and you get a slight, okay, this is a possibility.
But like you say, all of a sudden you're numbed because you've been working too long or you're
numbed because you're tired or you're numbed because it's the 15th run that you've been
on and number 12 was absolutely horrific and you probably shouldn't even be at work anymore.
And so you screw that decision making process up.
Absolutely.
Well, I want to shift to two more areas before we go to closing questions if you've got time.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Brilliant.
All right.
Because I think they're both very important.
Firstly, we talked about humility, we talked about knowledge sharing, all these departments
that you've got to work with through the fire service and through Ronan Rescue, what are
some examples of departments that really amazed you in the high level of performance and then
when you kind of reverse engineer, why were those countries so good at that particular
skill?
Probably even look at that from a 10,000 foot view.
You deal with people like the BSPP, Paris Fire, and if you read any of the documentation
around the fire they had at, and I'm throwing a blank, Notre Dame, the cathedral, and you
look at the risk that we would perceive that they put those firefighters in and then you
realize they are all army.
Paris Fire is military.
You have to go through a selection to get into Paris Fire.
When you train with their technical rescue teams, you do a selection after you become
a firefighter and what you did a selection, you know what I mean?
It just kind of goes on and on.
It's hard then to compare them to a North American fire service.
Sometimes the junior instructor in tech rescue in some departments is picked by juniority
as we call it.
Nobody else wanted to do it, so you're the junior person.
Congratulations.
You just got assigned this task.
So you go from a culture where you've basically gone through a double selection process as
a military unit to run tech rescue for Paris Fire using a North American term to delineate
them versus a department where hey, congratulations, no one else wants to do this, so you're it.
You can't even really compare what's going to happen there.
One's obviously invested in that particular field.
They're going to go out of their way to read articles on it and get professional development
and become what I look as a true professional in that field, understand the principles behind
what they're doing, look at past errors and mistakes and find ways to move forward with
that.
And then you're going to have someone that's going to be looking at the watch going, I
got three years.
I got two years, 364 days, counting it down until they're out of there, which doesn't
do the fire service, that organization or that individual any help.
If you want to look at specifics, I do find everybody, and I mean, this sounds like a
very wholesome and very family friendly conversation at this point, but everybody brings something
and everybody has something that's just totally off the rails that you just wouldn't do.
The Asian countries, I don't mean to, I'm not trying to ballpark people together.
I understand there's differences between Koreans and Taiwanese and Chinese and Japanese.
I've been to all of those places.
I have friends at all of those places, so just bear with me while I look at it from
a higher view, but their individual skills, phenomenal.
We did a hundred meters, so 330 foot rope climb at a competition in China and Chongqing.
The Chinese, you're tethered to your partner with a one meter, three foot, three and a
bit foot lanyard, so you're climbing together.
The fastest team was a Chinese team.
They climbed that in seven minutes.
I did like 20.
I'm 50 now.
Like give me a break, right?
Like I thought I was doing okay at that, but it's been mentioned.
I don't know if it was even mentioned on this podcast or something I was listening to earlier
today where the Asian culture, I've got gray hair under this hat.
I get naturally deferred to there.
That whole senior person thing really means something.
And so their junior people don't have the command and control experience that they should
in a lot of those positions.
Great individual rescuers, they have some command and control gaps.
You go over to a place like Europe, their tech rescue school, they have a special course.
Like you go do your tech rescue, then you go to the team lead for tech rescue course.
And you have to get so many hours and what have you.
And people fail this course.
That's another thing that's probably unheard of in a lot of places in the fire service.
What do you mean I could actually fail this?
When I went to tech rescue school there, when I went to their academy, you wear a blue helmet
on week one.
At the end of week one, you have to do an obstacle course, a rope course.
You have to do a crawl to crawl pick.
So a single rescuer pick off from single rope from ascent basically.
You have to write a written test.
If you fail those, you wear your blue helmet instead of a red helmet in week two to indicate
that you're not actually up to par to be in week two until you pass those things.
Which around here, I mean, I'm pretty sure I'd get in trouble if I did that in a recruit
class.
So you do two more weeks then for your tech rescue stuff.
So week one's kind of individual skills.
You do a couple more weeks to get your tech rescue skills.
At the end of that, you write another test and you pick into a hat and you pick out one
of six scenarios.
One of the scenarios is building a highline by yourself.
You pass or fail now based on that.
After that, you go back to your unit.
You do a bunch of years.
Then you go to their team lead school, which is another, they're failing 30, 40% of the
team leaders that go to that school.
I bring that up because I always like to bring context to these conversations.
To turn around and say, I find team leaders are better in Europe does a disservice if
you don't understand how they got there.
And so when you look at how they got there and a lot of their team leaders come from
the military, a lot of them are Red Sash or Red Cord people, which is their mountain warfare
stuff.
They're also, this is Belgium.
It's a small country.
The fire services, it's not nationalized, but consider it is.
They're regional, but my buddies in Antwerp and in Namur, which Namur is like an hour
and a half drive to Brussels.
When they had the bombing in the airport, they drove to Brussels.
It wasn't like, oh, that's another city or another problem.
They drove across the country.
It's a four hour drive across the country.
So I mean, once again, put things into context.
So they come from a different background than we do, but they're commanding control.
I find fairly interesting in the way they do things.
They use smaller teams and they do it a hell of a lot faster than we do.
Do we would say that there was some safety concerns?
They'll do single rescuer access.
I was trained in school or schools to do that.
They put in checks and balances prior to going on to single rope.
Rope can never touch an edge.
You have to put in a small re-anchor if you're going over an edge.
They teach you how to bolt.
They teach you how to drill.
So you can do that.
You have to be on a whistle stop device.
If you're not, you have to have a prusikin with you as well.
So it is.
You have to test the system while tied off, completely proof load it before you remove
that last safety.
So they have checks and balances.
There's also some administrative documentation type team lead stuff they do to do that.
So they put people into play faster.
So it's unfair to say, yes, they're faster than us because I mean, they are faster than
us, but they're trained to do that as well.
So as you travel around, you see that.
And then you also see things that just blow your mind.
Fire Department of New York talking about bailout kits with some of their, they have
a committee for bailout and we're playing with this little 3.3 millimeter firefly device.
It's made by a company up here in Canada and we're playing with it for like escaping off
a line at the end of a helicopter if you get treated or whatnot.
It's a bailout style device.
And a guy from New York reached out to me and said, hey, you know, I saw this on a podcast
or whatever, kind of interested in it.
I said, it doesn't meet any NFPA standards, blah, blah, blah.
We'll just have our engineers look at it.
Like there's a whole different level of, you know what I feel like I would have to fight
to get this in.
I'd have to go to NFPA committees.
They don't even view that as a problem.
Like if they want something, they'll just have their people implement it, right?
And so to work with people like that is another level of, you know, just when you see an organization
at that size doing stuff, it's really quite unique.
Another thing I see overseas and stuff that to bring back here, you had mentioned it where
some fire departments won't even talk to the city next to them.
The city next to us, it's a bit unique because I do train that other city with Ronin as well.
So between the two cities, we work together fairly well.
Our techniques, our procedures and everything on rope are pretty much the same.
You go, that's going east.
If you go west, that city's on 12.5 doing dedicated main dedicated safety.
We're an 11 mil department doing twin tension rope.
Our gear barely will even work together, let alone the command and control structure.
Our people know what dedicated main dedicated safety is.
I don't know if their people know what twin tension is.
So we couldn't even interface with them if we wanted to.
It would just be such a challenge.
It would probably create a safety issue unless you broke the rescue into components where
they just dealt with one person, you dealt with another.
So yeah, to see it in that avenue and then to go to places in Europe and Asia where they
coordinate at a national level and they train at a national level.
I mean, when I compete over there, I'm competing with a Belgian team in Spain coming up.
They'll give them like a fire van to drive from Belgium to Spain.
Like that's 22 hours.
You imagine your fire department giving you something in Florida to drive to Knoxville
or giving me something in Vancouver to drive to LA.
Nah, it'd be a hard no on that.
Right?
They're paid.
They actually, their fire departments will fund them and sponsor them to go because they
see the value in this.
So it's a totally different mind concept and trying to bring that back here and get some
of that implemented is a challenge, but it's a challenge that's worthy to do.
What about the fitness side?
When I think of the Sapa, Pompier, Paris, I think of that kind of muscle up they do
on that little shelf.
And every single time I've seen those bloody firefighters, they're in phenomenal shape.
And you look, I mean, I had the two French brothers on that did the 9-11 documentary,
the Bataclan attacks and the Notre Dame.
They did all of them and all of them incredible documentaries.
But you look at the physical exertion that was the Notre Dame fire.
I mean, it was horrendous and terrifying and hot.
And I think back to the Europe, excuse me, back to the US, and I've said this a thousand
times, my ocean lifeguard guests are held to a fitness standard.
If you can't compete at a certain level or finish these tasks, you cease to be a lifeguard.
My Navy SEALs, my SAS, et cetera, et cetera.
If you don't hit the bar, then you're gone.
And yet in police and fire and EMS in North America, our unions and administrations fight
fitness standard.
And it blows my fucking mind.
And then like you said, you look at the Belgians, the French, the Swedes, all these other firefighters
around the world, not including the UK.
I don't think they're held to a high standard.
But there are these clearly these good fitness standards because their first responders look
like they are ready to do the job that they are paid to do.
Yeah, I mean, I agree with you 100% on it.
I mean, we put these teams together to go compete.
One of the things we tell them, like we'll put a training thing out.
Part of it is, you know, rig a line.
Part of it is make sure you can run 5K in like 30 minutes.
Like so what's that?
Three miles, three and a half miles, whatever that is in the US.
But like some sort of that's not an off the record fitness standard sort of thing.
That's a six minute kilometer.
I can do that at 50.
Like these are things that you need to be able to do.
And part of it, I think, is I mean, a lot of this comes full circle.
It's the professionalism in the job.
Someone said it to me the other day.
When I got hired on the fire service, you know, it's like being a soldier.
It's what I was.
It's what I am.
And at some point, it went from being a calling to being a career.
And at some point, it went from being a career to being a job.
And at some point, it went from being a job to being a paycheck.
And I delineate those four things because I'm not saying there wasn't fat people when
this was a calling.
But if it's my calling and it's what I'm doing, I'm always a firefighter.
I drive down the road.
I drive four hours to get to work.
I got rope rescue equipment in my car.
I will stop.
People would expect that of me.
I also, you know, when I volunteer with SAR here to go hike five, six kilometers into
the back country, put two people down 200 meters on a cliff face to hang out with a
patient, sleep on the ground overnight, get picked up by a helicopter in the morning and
then pull all of those people off the side of that cliff.
There's a certain level of shape you need to be in to do that.
And you're not doing anybody any favors if you're not in there.
And you're kidding yourself if you think that, oh, well, you know, this is such a rarity.
I'll be able to just sidestep it.
It is until you can't.
And you look at that 2001, so as a five-year firefighter, I'll go and say I was probably
in decent shape at that point in time in my life.
We blew through an air bottle rescuing those.
Everybody, we were zeroed air.
They were out of air.
We were out of air.
And if I can, if I'm running out of air in that kind of shape, moving boxes of equipment
and rubble and stuff that's falling over, I mean, we're talking a rubber rubble pile.
My head was like probably 10 feet from the roof of that structure.
I mean, we're talking a massive warehouse.
I was probably 18 feet of rubble I was on.
Right?
So, digging through that and back then, like I said, there was like 12, 14 firefighters
on scene.
It's not like you're swapping me out.
Like you've got to be able at that point to have the physical fitness to do this job.
There's just, you can put lipstick on a pig and call it whatever you want, but that's
just the way it is.
Well, I'm always very fair.
I mean, the other side of the conversation is that the environment that we work in sets
us up for failure.
And, you know, sleep deprivation, for example, has massive hormonal implications and it does
cause weight gain and all these other things.
So it is not just on the firefighter to get in shape.
It's also on the organization to create an environment of fitness, an environment of
rest and recovery so that then we can put that bar up.
We can implement a fitness standard nationally and we can hold the best people to that standard
and they hopefully will have long, you know, productive careers and then long, healthy
retirements.
To oppose a fitness standard is a slap in the face, not only to the people we serve,
but to the families of the first responders who then barely make it past retirement.
Well, I mean, part of it goes to, so we had to do this thing.
I'm trying to remember the name.
I think it was called FireFit when we were doing it.
And it was a set of tasks scored.
Then you had to do the combat challenge to get hired.
And they wouldn't take anybody unless they were 90 percentile or higher.
And that's 90th percentile of the public, of General Pop or higher.
So if you have no fitness standard on your fire department, why don't you just hire whoever
you want?
Why do I have to be in that kind of shape to get hired?
And then furthermore, training, yeah, I need to go and do my inspections.
I need to ensure my crews trained.
I need to ensure my crews fit.
And why isn't fitness on the same playing field as making sure they can tie a rope or
pull a pre-connect off of the fire truck?
Because I'd be really interested to see, I'll retire out in a couple of years.
I'd be interested to go and do that test and see what the difference is between it.
Because you hired me at an above 90th percentile and then it kind of, it's do whatever you
want your entire career.
But like I said, back to the beginning, if you're not concerned about me during my career,
why are you concerned about me when I got hired?
When I retired out to do the podcast, there was a ticking clock.
And if I didn't make some money, because I basically cashed out my retirement within
a year and a half, I was going to have to go back into the fire service, which again
would have been a different department.
And actually, funny enough, it's a department that just moved to 2472.
So that would have been much better.
But being proactive and hopefully being humble enough to not assume that I was going to be
good for the next test, I went and did a CPAT.
I'm like, well, let me get one done, make sure that I can do it well.
And then I'm not just all mouth and no trousers, yapping on a podcast.
But also then it's there set ready for the hiring process.
And I forget the number.
It was either 720 or 740.
But anyway, it was fast and this was like 47 years old, 46, 47.
And they go, that was literally the record.
We've never had anyone do it that fast.
And I'm not telling this to be like, oh, wow, I'm so made quite the opposite.
All it means that a diligent firefighter that took his fitness seriously at almost 50 years
old was still able to smash the CPAT.
Now conversely, Orange County, when I worked for them, it was 1020.
If you just pass the CPAT and we'd have people like try two or three times and then everyone
be high fiving when they got 1019.
I just remember thinking, no, this is not the mentality we're supposed to have.
Like I'm not saying, you know, make the CPAT your everything you train for.
But if you're not at least, you know, like nine-ish, eight-ish, then you're absolutely
going for the absolute lowest bar there is.
And this is the problem.
I agree with you 100%.
For a lot of people, it's become a paycheck.
And that's not what this is.
This is a calling.
This profession burns so hard in my heart that five years out of uniform, I'm doing
a podcast trying to advocate for this profession because what we do is, you know, and what
you guys still do is the most honorable profession I think there is hands down.
I love military and police and everything is great, but the fire service to me is the
pinnacle.
So that is why, you know, when you see these standards slipping and then it goes back to
our conversation, you ask a Gen Z, you know, look at this and they'll be like, why do you
not have fitness standards?
And no one can answer it because it makes no fucking sense.
So this is why it's such an important conversation and there's no downside.
We are better at our job.
We are more likely to get out the fire ourselves and more likely to be able to make sure that
our men and women to the left or the right of us get out.
Then we're more likely to affect a rescue.
And then most importantly, we go home every night and then we have a long retirement,
which you guys have earned and then get to play with your grandkids and still be healthy.
But if we allow this bar to get lower and lower and lower, what we see is exactly what
we're seeing.
Men and women not even making it to retirement.
And if they do, the number everyone throws around is five years, five years later, they're
dead.
And that's just, you know, that's because we've allowed it.
It's that simple.
We've allowed this to happen.
Yeah, it's interesting because I mean, to your point, I think you'll see where I'm going
with this in a second.
So I managed for SAR as well for, and it's volunteer here.
It says volunteer search and rescue.
And part of the stuff that I'm worried about when I deploy SAR people out is, okay, if
it's a death, like SAR members don't have to go and do deaths.
It's a voluntary thing for body recoveries.
And I'll look for the paramedics and the coast guards people and the fire that are in or
police that are inside of the SAR team to have them do that.
If there's, you know, very dangerous things, I go back to looking at, I'm going to use
the word here, the professionals that do this every day.
And sometimes I piss off some of the SAR members that are the butcher, the baker, the candlestick
maker.
But it's like, I know what this is going to lead to.
And I know what the outcome of this is because of what I do.
And if I can shield you from that for a little bit longer, why wouldn't I?
So yes, we have this group of people and that's a, in SAR, that's kind of a given thing.
Like that using the professionals, I hate using that word in that way, but I think you
understand what I mean by it.
People that are doing this as a profession, not just as a volunteer to do those because
we expect that of them.
And then now you go back and you have this conversation that we've just had about fitness,
mental health, you know, and all that, and you go, well, hang on a second here.
The general public expects that of you.
They expect you to be fit.
They expect that if there's something bad going on, that you're going to be the people
that's going to show up to deal with it.
And if I have to have a choice between using a lay person and a first responder, then I'll
use the first responder.
And I'm not trying to say those lay people aren't professional in what they do.
They're great people.
But it's interesting how our minds naturally tend to go that direction.
Yet, what supports are there, like you say, like there's no fitness standard.
Even look at training standards.
Outside of passing fire officers exams and maybe the odd pump test, have I had to pass
a test in 30 years?
Yeah, no, exactly.
And it goes back as well to that leadership versus the officer classes.
You've got the pieces of paper that will get the little pin on your lapel.
But have you actually been given the tools to effectively do that job?
No.
And that's, yeah, I'm not saying it's any better anywhere else, but they definitely
do take a little bit more time in other parts outside of North America to make sure they're...
And we're talking, you know, like first world type countries.
I mean, obviously I've trained in some third world type countries where they're just lucky
to have someone show up and try to put something out.
But, you know, they definitely, like I said, that I brought up that team leader program
in Belgium just to see what are they teaching their team leaders.
And it's a very different program than what we would teach our fire officer.
And the fact they call it a team leader and we call ours a fire officer should speak volumes
as to what's actually going on there.
100%.
Well, I want to hit one more area.
Let's talk about Ronin Rescue.
But I thought what was interesting when I did some research is also the Ronin Charitable
Society to talk to me about the company, but also talk to me about the altruistic side
of the company.
Oh, the company, I mean, it's easy.
There's a bunch of us that are rope geeks.
Like you had Ryan on here.
We have a whole bunch of them.
I mean, Ryan and I were in Japan together for Grimp.
I've met...
Ryan's come and worked for us and, you know, we've done stuff for him.
So yeah, we have a group of people that are really passionate about rope and about rescue
and about helping people in general.
And it sounds corny.
You know, companies are there to make money.
I get that.
And it's...
And I've mentioned this on other people's podcasts.
There's times with this where you...
There's things we do that I don't think should be private sector.
I mean, the training, sure, but like the rescue standby and some of that work we do, we were
on a site, we were down underground in a building structure doing some rescue standby.
They come up, there's a bit of an issue going on outside.
Someone's broken in, climbed up a tower crane, jumped off, killed himself.
First aid attendant on a site vomits.
Our three people on the site are all professional first responders in their other life working
part time for us.
They're like, hey, let us take care of this.
They move forward.
They don't bill me for that time.
I'm not billing the client for that time.
But you see where now there's a part in here with...
This is a public sector concern.
We're doing public sector work there where we can't bill that to somebody, but yet somebody's
expecting to get paid, right?
Like, that's not lost on me.
Some of what we do should be in part of the public sector.
It really should.
I mean, I've been in the public sector my entire life.
I've been doing Ronin for 20 years and some of that should be there.
So with that in mind, we do perform rescue work.
We do rescue standby work.
We do rescue work around the country, around the world for different types of projects.
And some of it's because it is remote areas and they don't have fire services.
Some of it's because fire service won't respond to those types of areas.
And that's where our younger people start.
And then we also do a lot of training.
So we train rescue worldwide.
I mean, to list off, we've been through Afghanistan, Libya.
We're going into Lebanon to do some humanitarian work.
I could talk to that a bit more with the society type stuff.
Central America, the states, Western Europe, parts of Eastern Europe, Asia.
And part of it is to bring best practices back to us and pass those along.
And part of it is to bring our best practices to them.
And it's been a real honor to be able to do that over the years, to do something that
we love for other people that love it as much as we do and be able to make those differences.
You know, when you hear back from a client that says, hey, we pulled this rescue off
and we used a technique that we taught you and it worked, it's really cool because you're
doing a direct positive influence in more than one person's life in there.
So that's kind of what Ronin is.
Like I said, we've been around for 20 years and the elevator tagline kind of thing is
rope access and rope rescue training and services worldwide.
So you mentioned Lebanon then.
Let's talk about the charitable society.
Yeah, so it's not a charitable society per se.
It's a not for profit because there's a bunch of hoops that have to get jumped in in Canada,
much like I think your 401k or some sort of weird thing down there.
That's not it.
Yeah, something down in the state.
501c I think.
401k is our pension.
401k is your pension.
Yeah, that's the one.
The 501c's.
And there's a bunch of rules around that.
And it's not that I'm trying to skirt the rules.
I just literally don't have the time.
Like I would have to pay people to get that set up.
And it doesn't seem like a good use of money.
I could take your money to pay people to set up how to use your money or I could just use
it.
So that part of it's a not for profit.
So Ronin is a business company.
We do have a not for profit in the charitable society.
And what we started that with was doing transitions for military into emergency services.
And about every 18 months, and that's been skewed now because of COVID, but we would
run either a construction safety officer program or run a rope access program or run the 1001
1 and 2 fire school or whatever that case may be for serving military or just getting
out sort of thing that are transitioning, regular reserve NATO countries, although we
had an Israeli like that's fine sort of thing.
We're not taking communist countries or something along those lines, but people that are trying
to get out of the military and make a career into the fire service.
And we've generally had also, I mean, I served in military, my business partner served in
the military.
One of our full time staff is generally a veteran as well.
And we've had a pretty good success rate with about every year that person will get hired
on the fire service.
And we get that we bring them in, we understand it's a stepping stone to go on to those types
of things.
And then they generally come back and work part time for us on their days off.
But yeah, trying to help them bridge that gap from military service into fire service,
just because most of us had been there and had seen that it is a bit of a different life.
There's certain things you do in the military that just kind of frowned upon in the civilian
world.
And there's some natural tendencies for those organizations to align.
Part of that this year has now been reached out to by the Red Cross in Lebanon about providing
them training.
And it's not 100%.
I'm giving it about a 90 right now because the funding is coming now, excuse me, out
of Geneva, out of International Red Cross headquarters.
And we'll go into Lebanon and teach rope rescue to their rescue team.
And we've had some conversations on the ground with some different people.
That's one thing about being former military.
We do have some contacts still to make sure we're not putting our people into harm's way.
We're donating some equipment and what have you.
Our people are donating some time to go over there and do this.
We've talked to the Israelis about that.
Is there a problem here sort of thing?
What we're located, they're like, absolutely, it's the Red Cross.
They're there to help people.
We have no conflict with them.
Feel free to do it.
And the reason I mentioned Israel is because if we have to get out of Lebanon, it's either
flight or the other borders are kind of not ones you really want to cross, Syria, things
like that.
So, you know, and sure, we're making our people safe.
We take a look at these types of things.
We talked to different people within our government organizations as well about, you know, the
Canadian military had a training mission in Lebanon as well.
Some of our people that are going over our former military as well.
So they understand what we're getting ourselves into sort of in that sort of context by being
able to go over and help and, you know, be a platform for them to be able to go to the
IRC, the International Red Cross in Geneva and get more equipment and get funding for
some, you know, like I said, the training is costing nothing, but they're going to cover
us getting over there in some aspects and what have you and be able to provide this
training to them.
And they deploy outside of Lebanon as well.
I've talking to my contact there.
They've been in places like Egypt and other places doing structural collapse and doing
these types of rescues, sort of like your was it the White Helmets in Syria?
They're the only organizations that are there providing this.
The militaries of those countries are too focused on the conflicts that are going on
within their own borders to worry a lot.
So it's these volunteer organizations that are doing a lot of that humanitarian work.
And the least we could do is go over and try to help out in some aspect.
In traveling around the world and doing this, people are people.
I mean, I remember being in Libya right around the NATO bombing time and it was just after
and people getting murdered a lot of times.
And you go down to the market to have a dinner and people are there just trying to sell fish.
Right?
Like they don't give a rat's ass about who's bombing who generally.
They just want their kids to grow up.
They want their family to be safe.
They want to do their trade.
They want to make some money and move forward with life.
Right?
And so many places in the world that I've traveled that have been failed states are
in conflict at that time.
Outside of the people doing the shooting, everybody else just wants to get on with life.
I mean, even Afghanistan as in Kabul and you go and rug shopping and people want you to
buy their stuff.
Right?
Like it's they're just trying to make a living.
Like they're not wrapped up in the politics of that.
And if they can try to get by that without being wrapped up in the politics of it, perhaps
we can then too.
And then go over and assist some of these.
We're not going to assist terrorist organizations or things like that, but an actual humanitarian
front that's trying to do good by all means.
If that's the least we could do is to try to go there and help people.
I'm so glad we discussed this area because it ties into what we were saying earlier,
whether it's the Palestinians or Israelis or, like you said, the Syrians.
The number of videos I saw coming out of Gaza, coming out of Syria with the white helmets,
coming out of the Ukraine and Russia, like the firefighters are the firefighters.
They're the same people as you and me.
And none of them were dreaming of entering this place in the West Bank or this country,
Ukraine.
They probably just wanted to complete their shift, train a little workout, be a little
better than they were when they started their shift and then go home to their kids and spend
time with them and have dinner with their family.
And the moment we separate the normal human beings of these countries with the actions
of again, like I said, the tyrannical few, more often than not, we allow the tar and
feathering of an entire nation and we lose that.
And then they become them, them and us.
But when you actually travel the world and you immerse yourself in other cultures, you
see that we have 90% commonalities.
And the difference is usually are ones that you actually celebrate if you're not a giant
shit bag.
It's only these fucking tyrants and people that are just, I mean, it all boils down to
money and power.
That's it.
Most of these, whether it's Afghanistan wanting to be the tribe or whatever it is, the regular
people and I've heard this from so many military members.
I ask them, what's, tell me about kindness and compassion amidst the battlefield that
you're in and the indigenous, the kindness of the indigenous population and our men and
women in uniform, the people helping people, that's what it boils down to.
So I applaud you for doing what you're doing because not only are you actually helping
those people in those countries, but you're breaking down the barriers between other countries
and hopefully kind of allowing people listening at least to see the universal element that
is humanity because this division and pigeonholing in our country, for example, the last eight
years, which I point to all the time only leads to war and misery and loss of life.
But the sooner that we realized that we are all one people, the more we can squeeze out
the bad ones.
And we can actually, as I said, rising ship raises all ships.
Excuse me, rising tide lifts all ships.
Yeah.
And I mean, you feel like a hypocrite a lot of the times because everybody gets stuck
up in it and traffic and you're screaming at someone or you go on a shitty call and
it's like, you know, whatever.
But try to sit back and do the 10,000 foot view of it.
And I mean, a funny story, and I think you'll appreciate it.
We were in Taiwan and one of the days of the challenge, we're up in the jungle.
So we're like hour and a half drive outside of like kind of the nearest major city.
My business partner is firefighter in the, both firefighters, but one particular business
partner I was with the firefighter and his wife is a cop.
And as we're driving back down, there's a police station.
She's like, Oh, pull over, pull over.
I want to go say hi or whatever.
So she goes in there and it's kind of like, Oh, you're a cop, like, yeah, like that, you
know, like whatever.
So we get back in the car.
It's literally like a 30 second stop and we're driving down and there's a fire station.
Ken and I look at each other like I pull over, knock on the door.
Hey, we're firefighters from Canada.
Come on in.
You guys want something to eat?
They want to watch TV?
We did it just to get her goat.
But it goes to your point.
I mean, we're in Taiwan trying to speak to someone.
I mean, they don't speak English.
We don't speak either Mandarin or Cantonese.
I'd be remiss to know which language was being spoken there where we were.
But yeah, they're like, we're firefighters.
So yeah, everything must be cool.
Right?
Like, and that happens everywhere.
I say you talk to these folks that are Lebanese and I've been in communication with them for
almost six months now back and forth about this.
And the guy enjoys going out with his girlfriend or his wife and just live same way we do.
And, you know, going and doing complicated missions and learning new trades and new tasks
and going, hey, he's like us, but Lebanese.
You know what I mean?
It's it's just the way it is.
100%.
Well, it has been such an amazing conversation.
I want to make sure everyone knows firstly where to find you and where to find Ronan
Rescue online.
Ronan Rescue.com.
You can get me.
Mark at Ronan Rescue.com is my email.
Our Instagram.
If you just look for Ronan Rescue, we have a Facebook page too.
And I mean, we hit a lot of hits on that.
I mean, Instagram is where we put the majority of our stuff up nowadays.
I may have to get some of the younger generation to get me onto whatever the latest and greatest
thing is.
But yeah, that's where you can find us.
Yeah.
Beautiful.
Well, Mark, I want to say thank you so much.
I obviously, you know, when I went into this, I knew we were going to be talking about road
rescue.
But as with so many of these conversations, we've gone all over the place.
And I think it's been an invaluable conversation.
So again, I want to thank Ryan for making the connection.
But I also want to thank you so much for being so generous.
We've talked for two and a half hours now.
And so thank you so much for coming on the Behind the Shield podcast.
Well, thank you as well.
I mean, I really appreciate it.
I appreciate Ryan making the connection there.
And you just keep doing what you're doing.
I mean, I can't believe the amount of podcasts you're cranking out.
And it's just some really high quality topics and conversations that need to be having.
More people are better off to listen to.