Where There’s Smoke...

We live in a relatively small world and it is getting smaller all the time. I think I first learned

that when I was on the Kansas Public Employees Retirement System (KPERS) Board of Trustees

and traveled to Topeka once a month. Anita and I went out to supper one night and ran into a couple

of businessmen from our small town. Unfortunately the women they were with were not their wives

(and probably not a cousin either) - oops! The fire service world is even smaller. I recently attended

a National Volunteer Fire Council meeting in Rapid City. One evening several of us went to a

community supper which was raising money for a small rural fire department south of Rapid City.

I introduced myself and we began to talk about our communities. I often don’t think people would

know where I live so I try and describe it by telling them the name of a larger community near me.

Immediately the chief of department was able to guess the name of my community. He had done

business with the local feedyard. His son had even been in the county north of me on a wildland fire

in the last couple of years.

Do I have a point to this - well of course. There is a reason that we attend meetings. It is to

get to know our neighbors and, in this day and age, our neighbors may be several hundred miles

away. I just saw, on facebook, a link for the Haysville Kansas grain elevator explosion in 1998. I

took a class from Sedgwick County Fire Chief (retired) Gary Curmode in Salina, Kansas a year or

so after that incident. Chief Curmode was the incident commander. I learned so much from Chief

Curmode in that class and passed that knowledge along to my department and other departments

around the state. I knew that if I ever had a grain elevator explosion who I would call - and then it

happened. It wasn’t an explosion but it was a fire in a grain elevator in the neighboring town. Chief

Curmode had become a good friend and I called him on my cell phone for advice. He and one of

the battalion chiefs that worked the incident in Haysville dropped everything to answer my questions.

If I hadn’t taken that class from Chief Curmode I would not have known who to call. The same thing

can be said about oil tank battery fires. I had one of those and was able to call an instructor in an oil

tank battery fire class for options.

This is why you attend classes. You get to know other firefighters. You get to know their

capabilities. You get information - mostly for free and generally fairly close to home. This past

month many of the Kansas State Firefighter Association attended Symposium in the Sun presented

by the Volunteer Combination Officers Section (VCOS) of the IAFC. They didn’t attend to

vacation. They attended to get knowledge, to get contacts, to network. Who knows how that will

all pay off in the future but rest assured it will.

Now I realize that most of us have jobs that support our volunteer habit. Taking off work

can be a problem. This is, however, a job that can kill you - or kill your crews. I am not saying you

have to take a class every month - maybe just one or two a year. There are lots of training

opportunities available now on-line. Those are also excellent but never discount the value of in

person training where you can look people in the eyes, get to know them and learn that we are all

pretty similar in communities all over the nation, because where there’s smoke...