Combustible

On September 4, 2024, Greene County Fire Rescue Battalion Chief Chris Eddy was tragically killed at a tractor trailer fire. In this episode, Fire Chief Rodney Wiggins, who was at the fire when the trailer exploded, sits down with us to talk about his theories on why the trailer suddenly exploded, and what he thinks has changed about fighting fires in refrigerated containers.

One word to describe Fire Chief (Ret.) Pat Kenny’s story is heartbreaking. But you could also describe it as raw, honest, inspirational, optimistic, and most of all…a call to action. In this episode, we talk to Pat about his son’s mental illness, Sean’s suicide, and the helplessness that he and his wife felt trying to save their son. We also talk about how he balanced (or didn’t) his family life and work life as a fire chief. It’s an emotional discussion in which Pat admits that his “firefighter” mindset failed him many times; both at home and at work. This isn’t an easy episode to listen to as you can hear in his voice that Pat continues to struggle with the grief of losing his son to mental illness and then his wife to cancer. But we think this episode is also one of our most important for you to hear. Listen for Sean.

This is the second part of our discussion on whether this podcast’s focus on the challenges of leadership are discouraging the next crop of leaders from stepping up. If you haven’t listened to Part 1, go give that a listen first.

On this episode, we examine the crash of a B-52 in 1994, and the events leading up to it, through the actions of two of the four USAF officers killed: the pilot whose disregard for safety led to the crash, and the copilot who had tried to have him grounded. This is a story about missed opportunities and what can happen when warning signs are ignored. It’s a story about tolerating things that we shouldn’t. But most of all, it’s a story about copilot Lt. Col. Mark McGeehan’s bedrock belief in the most sacred of leadership principles.

A recent discussion with one of our listeners led us on a discussion of what part emotion plays in our roles as firefighters and our responses on this podcast.

We talk about it A LOT, but we’ve never really tried to define what we think leadership is. In this episode, we discuss various definitions of leadership; what we like and what we don’t like.

In this episode, we dive into how firefighters’ decision-making process works, and how critically reliant that process is on experience. So, where are we missing opportunities to build experience and convert it to expertise? We’ve come up with a new concept called DIFOS that is a series of questions that can be asked to really examine how a decision-making process evolved. It can be used on-scene after a fire or in any situation where an important decision was made.

Bob is the first guest we’ve had to show up to the recording with a powerpoint presentation. And while that gave us a chuckle, it’s a presentation filled with concepts that blew us away…and it’s a presentation that he threw together the day before. There’s a lot here, and we barely scratched the surface on some of it, but we really dig into purposeful non-compliance in Part 2. We also discuss getting everyone dialed in on paying attention on scene, as well as teaching all of our folks to speak up when they see something they think may be important. We also discuss what accident investigation in the airline industry may hold for the fire service, heuristics, and Bob throws in a literal war story from Vietnam about tunnel vision.

This episode started with the deceptively simple question, “At what level in your organization do people begin to feel and act as if they are valued more for their judgment than for their technical expertise?” We applied that question to our own experience in fire departments, but it’s an interesting question for any organization. And that’s just the jumping off point for a discussion on the nature of judgment, what experience has to do with it, and the other ways you can build and strengthen your judgment.

Like the picture above, psychological contracts can be binding, circular, heavy, old, rusty, and sometimes broken. Before this episode, two of us hadn’t ever heard of a psychological contract, but apparently we all have them. What they really are, who you have them with, and whether or not it’s okay to break them are questions that aren’t so easily answered, but we give it the ol’ Combustible try.

Murder holes, force multipliers, and obstacles. All of them are components leading to what very well may be a unified theory of firefighters.

What happens when lightning doesn't strike a house, and you don't act like the other firefighters?