Fireman Working in South Kansas City - Reflection

1. As a young fireman working in south Kansas City we would respond on a weekly bias too an apartment building for cooking fires.  This apartment complex was known for extremely poor mostly Mexican occupants.  The most common cause of the fires was old hotplates that things like clothing would fall on and start fires.     We decided to focus on the area with fire prevention and education marking.  During this time we discovered that the apartments would have two and sometimes three family’s living in them.  They would cook not in the kitchen but in the bedrooms on hotplates to not disturb the others in the apartment.    After our fire education emphasizing the importance of cooking safety and the use of the kitchen our fires decreased.  

1. My seconded example also takes place in south Kansas City.  Assigned to a ladder company one of my worst nights occurred on an extremely cold January night.   Called to an apartment for an occupant not feeling well, when we arrived we found high levels of carbon monoxide in his apartment.   While investigating the source of the carbon monoxide we found it was coming from the apartment next to his.  When we forced the door we found a family of 5 that had been using a gas stove to stay warm.  The parents were unconscious and three children were semi conscious.   We transported all of them and they recovered except the father who passed away at the hospital.  

It was found that the landlord was aware that they did not have heat and that he had told the father that he didn’t care if they were cold.   The apartment did not have any smoke or co detectors.   The family was extremely poor and did not speak English.  

After this call the city started enforcing the rental codes forcing landlords to improve rental units.   The fire prevention department increased the number of Spanish prevention literature for our Spanish-speaking community.

1. My third example happened overseas in Kosovo.  Keeping the story short  the Serbs and Kosovo Albanians hated each other and you could find a Serbian town next door to an Albanian town.   The Serbian government was in charge of the region when we arrived governing both Serbian and Albanian.   Part of my job was to complete risk analysis of communities in our operating area.  What I found was communities could be the same size but if it was Albanian the emergency service had not been supported.  Fireman lacked training and equipment and over time it lead to a substandard service.  The Serbian communities received training and new equipment leading to well trained professional fire service.  

I also could find differences in the data lack of fire prevention resulted in more fires and fire related fatalities.  The lack of firefighter training and equipment resulted in more fire fighter injuries and a higher dollar loss due to fires.