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Some clouds. Low around 70F. Winds light and variable.

JENNIFER HARRIS/The Warren Record

Tony Bailey, deputy state fire marshal, left, and Bryant Pitchford, Warren County ranger with the NC Forest Service, are among advocates for the Everyone Goes Home Advocate Team in North Carolina. As lead state advocate, Bailey will help coordinate and provide safety training to reduce firefighter line-of-duty injuries and deaths.

JENNIFER HARRIS/The Warren Record

Tony Bailey, deputy state fire marshal, left, and Bryant Pitchford, Warren County ranger with the NC Forest Service, are among advocates for the Everyone Goes Home Advocate Team in North Carolina. As lead state advocate, Bailey will help coordinate and provide safety training to reduce firefighter line-of-duty injuries and deaths.

Reducing firefighter line-of-duty injuries and deaths is a top goal for the new Everyone Goes Home Advocate Team in North Carolina and its members, including Warren County Ranger Bryant Pitchford with the NC Forest Service.

A captain with the Littleton Volunteer Fire Department and having more than two decades as a firefighter and in the forest service, Pitchford was chosen as one of eight advocates statewide by lead state advocate Tony Bailey, deputy state fire marshal for North Carolina, who has 30 years in the fire service.

On average over the last 20 years, close to 100 firefighters a year lose their lives in the United States, Bailey estimated, for reasons including medical emergencies, working a fire, building collapses or motor vehicle accidents.

“As this program develops, we feel like we can reduce that number simply by some education,” Bailey said. “We know that firefighting is an inherently dangerous job.”

Part of that education is a focus on risk assessment, or, for example, determining when it’s worth the risk of putting a team of firefighters in a burning building, and when it’s not. 

“You don’t want to risk firefighter health and safety for no reason,” Bailey said, adding that today’s fires are hotter and construction of buildings isn’t what it was 20 years ago.

There is scrutiny with the Everyone Goes Home program, Bailey said, with some people maybe thinking the advocates want to “safety us to death and take us away from our jobs.”

“That’s not the case at all,” he said. “We just want to educate you on why you should really look and do that good risk assessment before we commit these people to do what they’re trained to do.”

Education on safety issues may be a harder sell with volunteer firefighters, PItchford said, especially when the talk is about firefighter cancer. 

“(They think) ‘I’m a volunteer, it doesn’t happen to me, that doesn’t happen around here, people don’t get cancer, we don’t go to the number of calls that career firefighters go to (in big cities), it’s not going to happen.’ Wrong,” Pitchford said. “The same carcinogens are in our buildings here as in those buildings (in big cities). Technically, we’re at higher risk because we tend not to take care of our gear in the volunteer world like they do in a career environment.”

After losing a firefighter friend to cancer, Pitchford takes the issue personally.

“There’s not a time now that I don’t put my gear on that I don’t think about him,” he said. “Once upon a day, we walked around, and the nastier your gear was and the nastier your helmet was, we’re the ones that did stuff (fighting fire). Now, today … if you knew what I knew, you wouldn’t be walking around like that.”

Firefighters having soot on their faces and gear, and going to work all day, then home in dirty clothes, smelling like smoke is no longer seen as a badge of honor; instead, routinely cleaning helmets and gear covered in cancer-causing agents, and washing personal items worn to fire calls separately from clothes worn by other family members is now among safety protocols.

“Your gear does not tell the level of training and ability. Anybody can get a set of hand-me-down, nasty gear. That theory years ago has been thrown completely out the window,” Pitchford said. “Another thing is, and this is part of our advocacy, (firefighters go out on a hot day) and the next thing you know they’re taking coats off, hoods off, back up there with a pair of bunker pants, gloves and helmet, they’re not physically fit like a career department, trying to last as long as they can. We go from being able to put one to two departments on a fire scene like we used to, to four or five on a structure fire, there’s that many more trucks on the road and that many more lives put in danger, not just for the firefighters, but for the public, also.”

Getting buy-in from firefighters, selling them on the importance of good safety practices that will potentially save their lives, or the lives of others, is what Pitchford is most passionate about. He realizes there’s a balance between putting the information out boldly, but not scaring off a probationary firefighter or coming across as a know-it-all to those with years of service.

“As you get more experienced folks on the fire scene, you’re trying to say, ‘I understand you’ve learned this. I’m adding to what you’ve learned,’” he said. “We’re going in the right direction, we’re just not going fast enough.”

As a subsidiary of the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation, Everyone Goes Home is federally funded, which helps with the education piece. But what about funding to address safety aspects, such as a laundry system for turnout gear, for example?

For fire departments who don’t have such equipment, grant funding is available through NC Office of State Fire Marshal and other agencies, Bailey said. Pitchford added that local fire departments who have the laundry equipment have open door policies that allow use by other departments.

“The good thing is having good working relationships among all the fire departments, where you do have that open door policy of being able to go to another department and wash your gear,” Pitchford said. “It doesn’t matter whether you’ve got it, or your neighbor’s got it. Just make sure you use it.”

With well over 160 combined years of experience in the fire service among the eight advocates in North Carolina, Bailey said his team will begin train-the-trainer sessions in late August. Classes will begin sometime after the training is done.

The four core classes, about 8-12 hours each, are: The Courage to be Safe; Leadership, Accountability, Culture and Knowledge; Leadership So Everyone Goes Home; and Stress First Aid.

“If we just spend an ho ur or two in a firehouse just explaining the program, we’ve accomplished something,” Bailey said. “Granted, we’ll have what I call the 1 percenters who will phase you out as soon as you come in. We’re never going to get everybody. But the harder we work, and we try to reach as many of these departments and these firefighters as we can, the better off we’re going to be.”

Pitchford added that the fire service is transitioning from the way things used to be done to the way they are done today.

“i don’t care if you’re career or volunteer, you’re a professional, because nobody cares what the side of that truck says when it pulls up in that driveway when they’re in need,” he said. “So you perform and you act professional while you’re there. We’re trying to prevent injuries and deaths. All we want is the opportunity to educate you. We’re not trying to change your department or to change you. We want to educate you, and then you can change yourself.”

“Are we going to save everybody and eliminate every injury? No,” he said. “But if we reduce or lessen the effects of those injuries and deaths, then I think we’ve done as good a job as we’ll be able to do.”

In March 2004, the Fi refighter Life Safety Summit was held in Tampa, Fla., to address the need for change within the fire and emergency services. Through this meeting, 16 Life Safety Initiatives were produced to ensure that Everyone Goes Home.

The Everyone Goes Home program, founded by the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation, provides free training, resources, and programs to champion and implement the 16 Firefighter Life Safety Initiatives. The goal of the Everyone Goes Home Program is to reduce the number of preventable firefighter line-of-duty deaths and injuries.

The Everyone Goes Home Firefighter Life Safety Initiatives Program is made possible through the efforts of the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation with funding provided by the Department of Homeland Security, Assistance to Firefighters Grant program.

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