Fire Chief Case Study

I will be commenting on the following dilemma a fire chief than is working to serve his firefighters to protect the community versus a fire chief that works for the government to protect the community. I will indicate if this dilemma is true or false and why. Being a leader of a Fire service in any place in our modern world is no easy task with more and more being demanded from communities and less that governments want to provide the harder this task will become in the future. Through reading I have learned that geographic s and demographics have an immense impact on the fire service. So many factor come into play and coming from a great country like Canada it seems fairly strait forward on how a fire service should run, now let’s not mistake …show more content…
He was more of a manager because he was never a firefighter to begin with so for him to know what his crews were going through or what they had to deal with was foreign to him. At the time there was a lot of tension between the union and the corporation quite a few grievances were fought and moral in the department was heading downhill at steady pace. The second was a very smart individual, he came through the ranks he basically received the department on a silver platter the guys were encouraged with the change in command. This hope of things turning for the better was short lived, his budgeting skills and planning was second to none but the relationship between him and his crews on the floors was worst than the previous chief. This chief was also working for the government to serve the community. As the years passed the moral got worst and worst. Until the chief was able to hire a deputy chief to help with the heavy workload and the new deputy chief came from the ranks he held every rank we had even was union president more than his share. All through his ranks no matter which one he commanded respect by respecting everyone he dealt with. Therefore when …show more content…
We are a composite department and our number of volunteers has been dwindling at a steady pace. We had 40 volunteers plus 16 career at one time, we now have maybe 5 volunteers now and this problem is affecting fire services all over New Brunswick. The provincial government which can ultimately decide what’s going to happen in communities and municipalities, have recently decided to implement a huge 911 radio frequency grid which when fully operational would have the capabilities all fire services in the province to communicate. This system was implemented to our department last year at any given time we hear roughly 10 other departments in the area because we are all on the same radio frequency. This was a huge eye opener for me and many of our members, hearing what was going on in other fire departments in the area. In all these fire departments we are the only ones with full time staffing all others are strictly volunteer. We did realize that of course response times wouldn 't be as fast but that is to be expected its the reality of a volunteer department, but we started noticing they were having the same problems with members not being active and dwindling numbers in their ranks, hearing thing like calls having to be rerouted to three different departments before one answered the call. Or hearing a chief from a neighboring