“It Must Be Terrible to Think That Way All the Time”

When I was on a Parks & Rec Committee in a small western town a few years ago, one of our facilities was rented for a dance by a community organization. I had occasion to visit the facility, a gymnasium, during the decorating for the dance. Immediately I noticed that decorative screens had been put up in numerous places throughout the gym, including in front of three of the four exits. The only exit that was visible and unimpeded was the main entrance. The fire exits were out of sight, with no clear paths to them.

I found the person responsible for the decorating and explained the problem with the views and the paths to fire exits being blocked. I even sat down at a table with him and showed him that a person sitting there could see only the front door, through which they had entered.

“What are you worried about? There are sprinklers in here!” He truly thought that the presence of sprinklers negated the need for visible exits and clear paths to them.

“Sprinklers are a good thing for containing fires,” I agreed. But I went on to explain further, “People in darkened areas, smelling smoke and not knowing where to go, could be injured or worse by smoke inhalation or trampling.”

“This isn’t a big city. You’re worrying too much.” Another version of it can’t happen here.

Because I was often seen in the gym wearing old FDNY shirts from my days as a Brooklyn dispatcher, it was well-known in the community that I had been in an urban fire service. In fact, those old shirts started a lot of great conversations. In this case, however, that part of my earlier life was being used as an argument to not worry about life safety here, in a rural setting.

“I lived in a small New England town for 20 years and they had fires there, too,” I said.

“It must be terrible to think that way all the time,” was the rejoinder designed to both discount my safety concerns and show some sympathy for my apparently defective thinking.

At this point, I was out of patience with this person.

“You know what’s terrible?” I said. “Making fire exits invisible and blocking the paths to them. If something happens, even a small fire that produces a lot of smoke, people start to head for the one exit they know about, the one where they came in. People can panic and get hurt or worse. That’s terrible. Our volunteer firefighters have to deal not only with the fire but also with the consequences suffered by their neighbors in the community. That’s terrible!”

The decorating guy may or not have agreed with me. He may or may not have gotten the point. But he did move the screens that were blocking sightlines and paths to fire exits.

In the disaster planning component of public safety, we are forced to think about unhappy possibilities. It can be personally disquieting. I remember, during a night-tour study session for a promotional exam, one newer dispatcher coming across information, news to him, about a jet fuel pipeline that ran under his neighborhood. It wigged him out a little bit.

Of course, for many of us, hazards are always nearby. Highways, railroads and harbors are conduits for dangerous chemicals. I grew up a few blocks from The Narrows, the body of water that is the primary entrance to New York Harbor. I used to play baseball on the fields that lined the Brooklyn side of the harbor entrance. The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge had not yet been built and, if we wanted to get to Staten Island, we took a ferry from Brooklyn. I enjoyed watching the water go by as we made our way across the harbor. The various ships we passed were majestic and powerful. It was a pleasant place in which to spend part of your childhood.

Fast-forward fifteen years or so and I find myself on the Brooklyn side of The Narrows when an oil tanker, the Esso Brussels and a container ship, the Sea Witch, collide in The Narrows. I had been an FDNY Fire Alarm Dispatcher just shy of one month when I pulled a street box on Shore Road for this major catastrophe. Now, when I think of the baseball fields on Shore Road, I think of running to catch fly balls, sure. But I also remember seeing those same fields lit up by balls of orange flame slicing through the thick black smoke rising above the two ships. No longer powerful or majestic, they were stuck together and being carried out on the tide towards the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.

The light crude oil from the Esso Brussels, burning in The Narrows gave the impression that the water itself was on fire. The scorch marks seen on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge the next morning were other-worldly. The previously idyllic setting in my memory of green playing fields with passing ships in the background now had added elements of death and destruction.

Did this experience lower the bar to my thinking about unhappy possibilities and, thus, make it easier to plan for them? Maybe. Clearly, I had experienced this same location at different times in my life in vastly different contexts. It was an object lesson in unhappy possibilities. Did that experience make me think that way all the time? No. Do you have to experience disasters up close in order to plan for them? No.

I have met with dispatchers in dozens of states who have told me of their awareness of attitude changes in themselves because they handled so many unhappy events on a regular basis. Since becoming 911 dispatchers, they had developed a sense of the world as a more dangerous place. Many of them reported being much more situationally aware in crowds (How many people at this concert are carrying knives?), in theaters (Let’s sit near an exit, honey), and driving home late at night (I know the stats say about how many impaired rivers are on the road after 8:00 P.M.). Some report their family members rolling their eyes at what they think of as hypervigilance.

To some degree, such changes in your thinking are unavoidable when you do the work you do. It is important, though, to work at keeping your thinking rationally informed and framed in a balanced way.

"Yeah, we handled a dozen structural fires tonight, but there's four million people living in Brooklyn,” was one refrain I’d frequently revisit with my colleagues. “Do the math. The risk to anyone, especially us, who have plenty of smoke detectors and loads of fire extinguishers at home, is really very low.”

Public Safety people aren’t the only folks who contemplate unhappy possibilities. Emergency Department docs and RN’s, for example, study techniques for dealing with gun-shots wounds, auto wrecks and other trauma. They do so in order to provide the best service possible when it’s needed in a hurry. 911 Dispatchers are proficient in critical conversations with distressed callers, knowledgeable in the specific capabilities of a community’s resources and those of nearby communities, and really good at staying calm and collected on the radio when handling extraordinary conversations. All because these professionals “think that way” some of the time. It’s part of a job that itself is part of a larger public good: Public Safety.

Typically, the well-functioning PSAP’s I have visited across the country have an operational philosophy that is something akin to: To deliver the best, prepare for the worst. It would indeed be terrible if public safety people did not “think that way” some of the time. That’s how you stay sharp. That’s how you stay ready. That’s what makes you the effective professionals you are.

As demonstrated by my encounter with the party decorator in a small-town gym, not everybody is going to “get” this. But we all know that when people are in a jam, whether they “get” this or not, it’s you they are going to call. It’s you they are going to expect to be prepared to deal with whatever unhappy possibility has suddenly become an unhappy reality in their lives. And, because of your preparation, it’s very likely that you will be able to help.

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