02/22/2025
This is what happens when the powers to be arent concerned about adequately staffing a Department. The politicians have no idea how this ripples in higher costs than the cost of adequate staffing would be!
“There’s going to be firefighters that die because of this there will be communities that burn,” said Steve Gutierrez, a union official who served 15 years as a firefighter with the U.S. Forest Service.
With the hiring freeze of Federal Wildland Firefighters in the aftermath of the recent California firestorms, I believe the possibility that State and local officials, under pressure to trim their budgets, will adopt the same foolish policy in making critical decisions between saving money and saving lives, That said, this may be a good time to revisit the message 11th Division, DC Joe Galvin delivered in a NY Times editorial upon his retirement during the FDNY War Years.
"Fire Commissioner John T. O'Hagan was recently reported to have said cuts in Fire Department manpower have been less harmful than expected. Statistics were printed to reassure the citizens that the risk factor, though not diminishing, has, nevertheless, not increased. When the available manpower in any field is reduced from five to four in, the workload is effectively increased by 25 percent. if the total load remains consistent. If the total workload increases, each worker's burden increases at a corresponding rate. When these actions are applied to a firefighting unit where the workload is already brutal, the results are not only appalling, they are unconscionable.
Cuts less harmful to whom? Perhaps the same city officials should take a trip down to the Fire Department Medical Office to see some of the pathetic results of the economies that Deputy Mayor John E Zuccotti praised Fire Commissioner O'Hagan for effecting.
Men are retiring from the fire department with bodies savaged, disabled from crippling line of duty injuries never envisioned by the “experts” whose myopia prevents them from seeing anything unrelated to dollar cost analysis.
The men that I supervised at hundreds of serious fires are intolerably being worn down. Even the possibility of spending the final portion of fire filled careers in an area of low fire incidence, is now remote as units in neighborhoods known as “slow”' are now responding to fires at an alarming rate. In addition those same units, both on a scheduled and unscheduled basis, are now often called to areas pf high fire incidence.
In jeopardy is not only the firefighter's lives but those of the taxpayers whose whose nearby firehouse is left vacant because the unit has been summoned to the Bronx, to Harlem, to Williamsburg or in fact anywhere in this vast city. Fires which heretofore have been one-alarm skirmishes are now multi-alarm wars. The physical land emotional punishment our city's most devoted and bravest men are now absorbing in their middle years (average age 38) can only be compared to committing su***de on the installment plan.
I have submitted my retirement papers. God help the poor devils I leave behind.
Joseph E. Galvin, now retired, was a Deputy Fire Chief in the 11tth Division, Williamsburg,
