Monday Morning Crisis Quarterback

On March 24, the city of Flint, Michigan announced that it would be laying off 23 firefighters and 46 police officers the next day.  Within minutes of the press conference, an arson fire broke out in a vacant building.  In the nine days since, there have been nearly 40 such fires,  including five last night alone.  Three firefighters have been injured.  Flint has asked for mutual aid, a system under which cities and towns agree to help each other in an emergency, from other county fire departments.  Now those departments are starting to cancel their mutual aid agreements because they, too, are stretched thin.

No one knows for sure who is starting the fires.  Many have speculated that they are a protest against the layoffs.  Some have gone further and accused firefighters of setting them.  The head of the firefighter's union has said he is truly insulted by that accusation, and that he does not believe the layoffs and the fires are connected at all.  It is always possible that this is a horrible coincidence.

Layoffs can be very distressing to people in any profession.  In a profession, like firefighting, where colleagues are closely knit, it is especially difficult.  Unless you know or are a firefighter, it's difficult to imagine how much these men and women rely on each other and bond together.  Layoffs represent a separation of one or members of, essentially, the family.  It's a grotesque understatement to say that that is bad for morale.

On the other hand, you might expect that firefighters don't mind a string of fires.  After all, putting out fires is what they do.  Most firefighters will tell you, however, that while they like their work and are glad to be able to help the community, they don't actually want there to be a lot of fires.  Like most emergency workers, they like being able to make a difference, but they wish they didn't have to.  What's more, every fire represents a danger to the firefighters who respond.  Any fire could become dangerous or even lethal.  In that sense, every one of the arson fires in Flint is an intentional assault on the fire department.

In addition to the double-whammy of layoffs and the fires, we now have other departments saying that they will not come to Flint to help.  I'm certainly not in a position to criticize those decisions -- every city has to do what makes sense for their people and their community.  To the Flint fire department, however, this just adds insult to injury.  People who go through critical incidents often feel helpless.  The sense of not being able to do anything is horrible.  Asking for help and not getting it greatly complicates the situation.  Imagine someone who is assaulted in broad daylight while passersby ignore it.  Their reaction may have as much to do with being ignored as with the assault.  Now the Flint firefighters are being assaulted repeatedly, and neighboring cities are saying they will no longer help.

I don't know who's setting the fires in Flint, or what their motivation is.  I will say that if they are motivated by support for the firefighters and protest of the layoffs, their actions are truly counter productive.  They have taken a situation that would be hard under the best of circumstances, and escalated it severely.  With friends like this, the firefighters in Flint sure don't need enemies.

This week, many in the blogosphere are writing about their "top 10" or "bottom 10" for the past year or decade, or about their hopes for the coming year in their particular area of expertise.  I thought long and hard about writing about my hopes for the coming year in crisis response, but my honest hope is that very few people will need crisis response in 2010.  That may be unrealistic, but if we're talking about New Year's Wishes, then that's mine.  Besides, I am a Monday Morning Quarterback, which means I specialize in looking back.  So here is my review of the last decade's major crises (as designated by my executive Quarterback fiat) and how they were handled:

• Y2K.  Remember that?  Remember how civilization as we know it was going to come to a grinding halt at the stroke of midnight 10 years ago?  This was the crisis that wasn't.  Quarterback Points go to the people who realized there was a problem and set about trying to solve it.  Quarterback Demerits for the complete failure of anyone in government to share any kind of unified message about what to expect, or even to figure out how big the problem really was.  The result was people with stockpiled food and weapons and nothing to do with them.  Never a good thing.

• 9-11.  This was undoubtedly a defining moment for our country and perhaps for the world.  It also was a defining moment in crisis response to see what the early trauma intervention community could do on a truly huge scale.  Quarterback Points to ICISF and the many CISM Teams around the country that went to Ground Zero for months after the event.  Points also to the various agencies that recognized the need of their people for immediate and longterm mental health support.  We also have points for the surrounding communtiy in New York that took responsibility for nourishing the first responders' bodies and spirits.  Finally, points for our country and the world for recognizing the need to support each other in addition to getting angry.  In a million small ways, for a few weeks we all remembered what it meant to be human.  We were all in this together.  Quarterback Demerits to the quick transformation from a balance between the emotional reaction and the tactical response to an entirely action-oriented focus where grief and trauma had no place to breathe.  Big demerits also to the brass at the New York City Fire Department who had long resisted implementing CISM in their organization and had no effective way of supporting their people, and to EAPs and corporations who violated basic rules of CISM like "don't mix the people who were there with the people who weren't" and then threw up their hands and said that CISM doesn't work.

• Hurricane Katrina.  Much has been and will be written on the governmental response, or lack thereof, to Katrina.  While I certainly have opinions on whether things were handled decently, I'm only looking at the emotional and mental health repercussions.  Therefore Quarterback Points to Jesse Jackson and other leaders, particularly in the African American community, who recognized quickly that dispersing the residents of New Orleans throughout the country was a bad idea.  People needed to stay together and as close to home as possible.  I didn't get that at the time, but I see it now.  Quarterback Demerits to everyone who opened their mouth without sufficient information during and immediately after the storm, or who put a rosy face on things to save their own rear ends.  It is one thing to not have your needs met.  It's another to have someone say on national TV that they are helping you when they aren't.  From "Heck of a job, Brownie," to press conferences claiming there were no people stranded at the convention center, what was said publicly was a kick in the teeth for the people of New Orleans.

• H1N1.  If you read this blog with any frequency, you know I've had a lot to say on this topic. This story isn't really over yet, but that's never stopped me before.  Quarterback Points to the CDC and local health departments for coordinating their fall prevention and education efforts so much better than they did in the spring.  Quarterback Demerits also to the CDC and local health departments for completely failing to coordinate in the spring, causing the message to be garbled, confusing, and scary.  Demerits also go out to Joe Biden for his absurd comments about flying on airplanes, and to every person who had the unmitigated gall to try to use this disease as an argument regarding immigration policy.  Finally, the whopper of all demerits to the U.S. media, who simply could not report facts without hype and are still having trouble doing so, and who can't seem to find context for statistics to save their lives.

Finally, a personal note.  I've been writing this blog for just about 7 months now.  It is not in any danger of overloading the servers at Blogger with its many daily hits, but there are a hardcore few of you who read it regularly, and many more who drop by on occasion.  Quarterback Points to you for supporting this effort, and for recognizing that approaching the fear, sadness and anxiety that our world can provoke with a trained eye is worth striving for, for all of our sakes.  Here's to a crisis-free 2010.

A fire broke out at a crowded nightclub in Russia on Friday night, killing 112 people.  Faulty fireworks are being blamed, and a number of people are under arrest.  Most of the dead breathed toxic fumes from the fire.  Reports from those who were inside indicate there was a stampede which wound up blocking everyone's way out.

This may sound familiar to Americans, who remember the fire at the Station Nightclub in West Warwick, Rhode Island in 2003.  In that fire, pyrotechnics ignited foam installed around the stage, causing a fast moving fire.  A stampede ensued, completely blocking the main entrance where most of the patrons headed even though there were four exits.  100 people died.

I had the privilege of taking a class with Dr. Anne Balboni, one of the CISM responders to that awful event.  She described in gruesome detail the piles of bodies that firefighters had to remove, one corpse at a time.  She also described their surprise after removing the bulk of one pile at finding a man who was alive and uninjured on the bottom.  He had rolled on his side as he fell, protecting himself from being crushed, and the bodies above and beside him had protected him from the fire and smoke.

Perhaps the most riveting story, though, came when she talked about working with the children of the firefighters after the Station Nightclub tragedy.  She invited all of them to draw a picture of their firefighter parent in whatever clothes they liked -- dress uniform, gear or whatever.  One child drew a picture of his father and said, "He's in regular clothes.  I'm going to be a firefighter so he doesn't have to anymore."

When something awful happens, we focus on those who died, those who were hurt, those who survived and all of their families.  If we're astute, we remember to focus on the first responders, too.  This story, however, illustrates vividly an important aspect of any event.  Everyone affected brings their stress and associated symptoms home with them.  That in turn impacts their families, leading at best to strain, and at worst to the breakup of families.  I imagine somewhere in Russia there's a small child saying he wants to be a firefighter so his dad doesn't have to.  I hope both of them get some support.

Notes:  The fact that everyone headed for the main entrance at the Station Nightclub is a lesson for all of us.  No matter where you are, always look around and figure out where the nearest exit is.  If we all did that, fewer people would die in incidents such as this.

Also, I'd like to apologize to Anne Balboni if any of the details of this story are incorrect.  The thrust of it is basically right, but I can't say with certainty that the particulars are 100% correct.