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Public Information Officer and the Volunteer Fire Service Essay & Outline

The Volunteer Fire Service – History.

The history of the fire service in the United States, can be traced back to Philadelphia in 1736 and is attributed to one Benjamin Franklin. Franklin had been living in Boston before moving to Philadelphia at the age of 18. Franklin first witnessed a fire when he was aged six, and from then on went on to see and understand the misery and pain that these fires were causing. In the years between 1653 and 1676, Boston experienced many fire outbreaks, and after the fires of 1676, the city decided to buy a London pumper. A man named Thomas Atkins and twelve others were hired to fight these fires and thus, became the pioneer firefighters in the history of the United States. In 1711, The Mutual Fire Societies was created. In 1682, William Penn founded the city of Philadelphia. Having seen the London fire of 1966 and not wanting Philadelphia to suffer a similar fate, a fire ordinance was implemented in which buildings, which were also majorly to be built by bricks, were to have their chimneys cleaned occasionally. Penn observed that buildings that were constructed using bricks were not prone to catching fire. In 1718, Philadelphia bought the Shag Rag – its first fire engine. It later turned out that the fire engine wasn’t well equipped in fighting the fires that ravaged the city in 1730. Benjamin Franklin called for organized strategy to fight the fires better after noting that the Boston ‘’Fire Clubs’’, as they came to be known, only catered for their members and not the whole community. Thus, in 1736, Franklin formed the union fire company comprising of 30 volunteers, with Isaac Paschal becoming the first fire volunteer. In time, the popularity of this concept increased and several other fire companies were formed with membership being kept to a maximum of 40 members. These fire companies went on to enlist some of the most famous people in American history with notables like George Washington, Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and many others. In 1818, the first ever woman recruit was enlisted into the firefighting companies. Her name was molly Williams and she served in a New York fire company. Soon after, other female firefighters started getting recruited into firefighting and an eighteen-year-old girl by the name Lillie Hitchcock wrote her name in American firefighting history (Peters).

Full-time firefighters came into the scene in 1850, but volunteer firefighters still play an integral role in saving peoples’ properties and lives.

The US Fire Department - Profile Overview

As at 2014, the national fire protection association (NFPA) put the total number of all active firefighters in the United States at 1,134,400 with 82,550 being female.
Out of this, there are 346,150 full-time firefighters with 12,100 being career women firefighters.
During this same period, the department had 788,250 total volunteer firefighters with 70,450 of them being women.
The number of career firefighters per 1000 people population had been kept constant during this entire period, but statistics indicated that the number of volunteer firefighters per 1000 people population was actually going down.
The ages of 50% of the firefighters range from between 30 years to 50 years.
The United States has 10,980 fire departments out of which 14% are mainly career departments serving 64% of the United States population.
The expenditure of the fire protection service has seen an increase to almost 170% starting from the 1980’s to 2013.

The US Firefighting Department

The Department of firefighting has roughly 1,134,400 personnel, according to a survey carried out by the National Fire Protection Association in 2014.

The career firefighters normally include the uniformed full-time personnel and, for the purpose of clarity for this study, did not include firefighting personnel in private brigades or in federal or state agencies. Volunteer firefighters are those who are involved in active firefighting albeit on a part-time arrangement.

70% of these career firefighters serve in communities that have approximately 25,000 persons and over while 95% of the volunteer firefighters serve in communities of fewer than 25,000 persons, with slightly more than half of the volunteer firefighters serving in rural departments that offer protection to less than 2500 people.

Volunteer firefighters decreased slightly in the 1980’s and 1990’s but soon leveled up thereafter. Accordingly, the United States Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, estimates that the number of Latino and Hispanic firefighters in the department was approximately 28,700 (9.5%) with African Americans numbering about 23,250 (7.7%) and the Asian full-time firefighters making up 2,150 (0.7%) of the total population. Female firefighters involved in active service full-time were 12,500 representing 4.1% of the total population of the full-time firefighters (Haynes and Stein).

Over the years, the number of full-time career firefighting personnel has continued to increase, but the ratio of firefighters to population has managed to remain level. It is important to note, though, that the figures referred to here, do not ideally represent the ideal ratio but are the representation of data as carried out by the survey.

The United States has approximately 29,000 fire departments with 2,440 of them being comprised purely of career firefighting personnel with volunteer firefighters comprising the remaining 19,915 departments. The departments are basically classified into four groups, namely : ‘all career’ departments made up of purely career personnel, ‘mostly career’ departments made up of 51 % - 99% career personnel, ‘mostly volunteer’ which contains from 1 % - 50 % career personnel and “all volunteer” departments made up of 100% volunteer personnel (Haynes and Stein).

During the period 2012 -2014, estimates put the number of equipment at 75,000 pumpers, 7200 aerial equipment, 81,000 suppression vehicles and 58,150 stations. For departments serving smaller communities, the rate was noted to be marginally higher since smaller departments just needed fewer equipment in order to operate a station, and therefore comparatively, had an advantage over their larger counterparts because the ratio of equipment to population would then be higher.

In terms of emergency medical services, a larger community was highly probable to have a fire station that offered EMS as compared to a smaller community. Out of all the fire departments in the United States, 13,665 (45%) offered basic EMS, 4,635 (15.5%) offered advance EMS while 11,680 (39%) departments didn’t offer any EMS.

The Incident Command System (ICS)

A bid to develop a coordinated action plan in combating information flow between the Federal State, the states, the tribal states and the public information officers, led to formulation of a management referred to as Incident Command System (ICS). The mandate of the ICS primarily being to convey relevant, accurate, timely and actionable information between different stakeholders as to help save peoples’ lives and properties during an incident.

The ICS offers guidance to public information officers on a raft of issues such as preparedness, incident response, incident recovery and federal information support.

The ICS as a management structure is meant to integrate facilities and equipment, personnel, procedures and communication, within an organizational structure to facilitate efficient, prompt and effective incident management.

The ICS command structure starts from the top where the incident commander(s) assume responsibility of the all the management aspects of a particular incident. On most occasions, this can be done by one IC but if the incident affects a cross-section of several jurisdictions, then it’s recommended to have a convenient number of IC’s in which case we talk of unified command (UC). The entire command structure will, therefore, consist of the IC as well as command staff. Command staff are positions that are established to delegate or assign responsibility to each of the prescribed command actions that ideally the IC cannot carry out due to one reason or another. These positions are generally occupied by, among others, the liaison officer, the public information officer, the safety officer, and any other office that the IC deems relevant.

The ICS has five main management functions i.e. command, operations, planning, logistics and finance and administration. The IC assigns each section a section head (section chief) to carry out the key functional areas of the ICS.

The level of preparedness for any organizational structure determines to a large extent, the success or failure rate of that organization in carrying out an efficient response. Therefore, the exercise of public information should begin at an earlier stage and can involve things like exercises, resource gathering, training, and organizing. Public information aims at having lifesaving measures e.g. evacuation routes and alert systems communicated to the public in a timely and coordinated manner and this helps the individuals respond in a calculated manner.

Some of the factors a Public Information Officer (PIO) should take into consideration when planning for an event are; public education campaigns, training, exercises, media relations, special needs population, communication equipment, joint information systems (JIS) planning, contacts list, go kits, additional support for public information and emergency management assistance.

Roles of Public Information Officers during Emergency

The role of a PIO during any emergency is to gather, verify and coordinate timely and accurate information regarding the incident, its magnitude, the present situation on the ground subject to the incident, and any other pieces of information that might be of interest to the general public and the command. In liaison with other players, the PIO employs the most effective methods of facilitating information dissemination to the public and affected audience.

Once this is done, the PIO embarks on informing the audience, which includes the public, through a series of actions i.e.

a)Gathering information – this is done by accessing the ICS command and also the General Staff.
b)Verifying information – in conjunction with EOC and any other technical experts that are involved in the incident management team, as well as other PIO’s that are involved. They can compare notes to verify that the information is accurate and consistent.
c)Coordinating information – coordinating information is done between the general staff and ICS command and includes, obtaining approval before any information is released, etc.
d)Releasing of the information – the information gathered is then released to the concerned stakeholders which may include, the affected population, non-governmental organizations (NGO’s), community leaders, private sector, and the media, etc.

After an incident or a planned event, the PIO then makes a report based on media coverage, media and public inquiries to determine how effective the recovery efforts were. The report can then be taken by the ICS planning section to be consulted when the After Action Report (AAR) is being made. The AAR, typically, will contain the executive summary, the incident overview, capability analysis, strengths areas for improvement and lessons learned (Public Information Officer :Standard Operating Procedure).

The value that the office of the public information officer would add to the fire department is evidently immense. The rescue operations between the firefighters and the public would be much better coordinated resulting in minimal losses of both properties and lives.
However, it is also important not only to look into the office of the PIO, but also on the qualities and skills that would make one be a competent public information officer. I believe that a public information officer should possess some of the following qualities, if not all;

The public information office should be occupied by that person expressing a strong desire and passion for wanting that job. In my opinion, such a person will deliver more
The public information officer should be a resident of the area where he works. This is to eliminate instances of him being out of town if an emergency situation occurs.
He should be an individual who is familiar with the fire departments and preferably someone who has hands-on experience in fire management, terminologies used and the general practice in firefighting.
The PIO should be a person willing to put in more than his stipulated hours of work. During emergencies, PIO’s are normally the last people from the scene because there is the need to conduct interviews with the media, convey information from the ICS command and so on.
The position of a PIO is very stressful, as such, it’s important to have a person who has a strong but amicable personality. Essentially, he should be a person who can “take the heat” and not let it affect his work.
 It’s advantageous to have a PIO who is conversant with modern technology like using a camera so that they also can document their personal pieces of information that may be needed in future (Szymanski).

From the foregoing, it is clear that the public information officer will not only be crucial in disseminating information to the public about safety procedures during a fire, but will also be instrumental in aligning the functions of the station. This will make firefighters’ work easier as there will be considerable division of labor. Firefighting personnel can therefore concentrate of the exclusive exercise of fighting fires having the guarantee of an educated and well-informed public.

Annotated Bibliography

"Basic Guidance for Public Information Officers." National Incident Management Systems (2010): 10-20. Article.

The website offers a clear perspective on the management systems that have been put in place by institutions to aid in crises management. It analyses the methods that have been used extensively in this approach and supports the use of these methods based on findings.
Cloutier, Patrice. "The role of the Public Information Officer." 26 May 2013. crisis comms command post. electronic. 16 February 2017.
Patrice Cloutier examines the relevance of public Information Officers in organizations and gives comparisons between organizations that don’t have PIO's with those that have PIO's and highlights their respective efficacy in handling emergency situations.
England, Robert E. INTERNATIONAL FIRE SERVICE JOURNAL OF LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT. 3 September 2010. Website. 16 February 2017.
The author highlights the chief characteristics of effective leadership in crisis management and matches these characteristics with the key tenets that are necessary for effective service delivery especially search and rescue missions like firefighting.

"Fire in the United States ." FEMA (2017): 9-30. Article.

This article highlights the history of major fires in the United States, the possible human errors that led to them, and the government interventions that changed the course of history. It similarly examines the trial and error nature of these mechanisms and their subsequent evolution to tried and tested methods that could be counted on to produce results.
Graham, Barrett. North Carolina Fire Law. Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2010. Book.
Graham Barrett looks at the correlation between policy and fire management. He opines that efficient fire management is synonymous to the policies that guide the organization's response to disaster. He identifies the top management as being the link between policy and effective action response.

Haddow, Bullock and Coppola. Introduction to Emergency Management. New York: ISBN: 9781856179591, 2014. Book.

The authors introduce the concept of strategic management as key to making good decisions with regards to emergency management. They, similarly, postulate that policy and action plans are related to the extent that they are streamlined to solving a particular problem.
Harrah, Jon. "The Importants of Chief Information Officer." 16 October 2015. LinkedIn. electronic. 16 February 2017.
Harrah expounds on the importance of having a Public Information Officer in any organization. He characterizes organizations having this critical component of management, as having a better ability to handle incidences and events.

Haynes, Hylton J.G. and Gary P. Stein. "U.S. Fire Department Profile 2014." National Fire Protection Association (2014): 2-15. Document.
The article highlights the critical successes and failures of practices on ancient practices and traces the history of the firefighting body in the United States and the growth and development that this body has witnessed. It examines practices and policies that have worked and proved effective.

National Emergency Training Center library. 14 February 2012. website. 16 February 2017.

This article looks at the practices that modern firefighters are trained on, their efficacy and the improvements that still need to be done. It details the necessity of change in organizations and how change can be beneficial but face resistance.
Peters, Marty. "The History of Volunteer Firefighting." 23 June 2016. Weebly.com. document. 16 February 2017.
The article highlights the critical successes and failures of practices on ancient practices, and traces the history of the firefighting body in the United States and the growth and development that this body has witnessed. It examines practices and policies that have worked and proved effective.

Rudman, Jack. Public Information Officer. New York: National Learning Corporation, 2016. Book.

Rudman highlights the importance of having a Public Information Officer in any organization. He characterizes organizations having this critical component of management, as having a better of recording success at handling incidences and events.

Szymanski, Timothy. "THE FIRE PIO: Qualifications of a Fire Department Public Information Officer." FIREHOUSE (2012): 1. Article.

Timothy Szymanski substantiates on the relevance of public Information Officers in organizations and gives comparisons between organizations that don’t have PIO's with those that have PIO's and highlights their respective efficacy in handling emergency situations. He looks at the key character traits that are the real game changers in the crises management.

Reference

"Basic Guidance for Public Information Officers." National Incident Management Systems (2010): 10-20. Article.
Cloutier, Patrice. "The role of the Public Information Officer." 26 May 2013. crisis comms command post. electronic. 16 February 2017.
England, Robert E. INTERNATIONAL FIRE SERVICE JOURNAL OF LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT. 3 September 2010. Website. 16 February 2017.
"Fire in the United States ." FEMA (2017): 9-30. Article.
Graham, Barrett. North Carolina Fire Law. Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2010. Book.
Haddow, Bullock and Coppola. Introduction to Emergency Management. New York: ISBN: 9781856179591, 2014. Book.
Harrah, Jon. "The Importants of Chief Information Officer." 16 October 2015. LinkedIn. electronic. 16 February 2017.
Haynes, Hylton J.G. and Gary P. Stein. "U.S. Fire Department Profile 2014." National Fire Protection Association (2014): 2-15. Document.
National Emergency Training Center library. 14 February 2012. website. 16 February 2017.
Peters, Marty. "The History of Volunteer Firefighting." 23 June 2016. Weebly.com. document. 16 February 2017.
Rudman, Jack. Public Information Officer. New York: National Learning Corporation, 2016. Book.
Szymanski, Timothy. "THE FIRE PIO: Qualifications of a Fire Department Public Information Officer." FIREHOUSE (2012): 1. Article.

The Vikings Sample Essay & Outline

The Vikings were violent sea-borne raiders. They migrated from Scandinavia, sailing across the seas to the coasts of England. Their hostility and raids affected communities they came across on their way. Even monasteries that seemed secure and strategically sited on inland rivers were victims of the Viking’s ships rowing upstream. The Scandinavians settled in the North Atlantic islands, Russia, Normandy, and Sicily. This essay tries determine whom the Vikings are, where they came from and their way of life.

The Vikings history dates back to the eighth century. The Vikings were warriors. Their name is derived from vikingr a word meaning ‘pirate’ in the early Scandinavian language. They were the Norsemen who were raiders for two centuries on the Britain coast. Their migration from Scandinavia was their last after moving from Lindisfarne Island at the coast of England where they were unwelcomed by the monks at the island. They regarded them as the violent raiders from the sea (Arnold, Martin, 45).The Vikings were mainly attracted to areas with sufficient wealth to raid, but they later settled.

The Vikings came from Scandinavia although the countries of Scandinavia did not exist, as they are presently known. They had travelled in their perfectly streamlined long ships in search of new lands to settle (Hall, 87). They carried out raids and killed the inhabitants of places they went. However, they made a deal with the King of England who gave them part of his land to settle. This became their new home, and they settled down. Some though sought more adventure and sailed to Ireland.

Initially, the Vikings were not full-time soldiers. They were farmers and fishermen who spent the larger part of the year at home. It was only during the summer when they rallied to the call of a local leader and sailed across the sea to raid, trade and seek new places to settle. The changes in activity were due to temperature changes, different seasons, and climate hence each activity was carried out at its opportune time. The Vikings were experts in the production of tools they used to increase efficiency and self-sufficiency in food production (Arnold, Martin, 72).

They established industries in their houses-cum-workshops at the streets, which developed to become manufacturing centers. Here, they developed a wide range of everyday items. The Vikings acquired raw materials from neighboring estates, which the craftsmen made into necessities for sale in the market places. They engaged in metalwork, leather work, carving, and textile making. Combs were common objects found at their market places. The combs were used for grooming, to get the troublesome lice off their heads (Hall, 67).

However, deterioration of climatic conditions because of global warming, diet and standards of living, the lives of the Vikings deteriorated. They became vulnerable to diseases due to reduced resistance. The larger population died from Black Death (Ferguson, Robert, 29). The Vikings were no longer able to survive or migrate to other areas. Sailing expeditions were no longer an option. Therefore causing the demise of the Vikings.

The Vikings were powerful people that had many means of survival but harsh climatic conditions and deterioration of living standards led to their end. Hence, care should be taken to ensure healthy living standards of people and curb global warming effects.

Works Cited
Ferguson, Robert. The Vikings: A History. New York: Viking, 2009. Print.
Arnold, Martin. The Vikings: Wolves of War. Lanham, Md: Rowman & littlefield publishers, 2007. Print.
Hall, R A. The Exploring the World of the Vikings. London: Thames & Hudson, 2007. Print