The New Orleans Fire Department: 130 Years and Counting

The motto of the city of New Orleans is “Laissez les bon temps rouler”—Let the good times roll. However, maintaining that state of mind has been a challenge for the New Orleans Fire Department (NOFD) over its 130 years of existence. Nevertheless, it’s persevered and excelled, including as of most recently in its ramped-up dedication to its members. Their health, their safety and the pursuit of their contribution beyond emergent incidents have been of utmost priority in the 2020s, 2010s and before.

Doubling down

On Dec. 15, 2021, the NOFD celebrated its 130^th anniversary. The department’s history is honorable and admirable, filled with achievements of varied sorts (see “Pompiers and Circumstances”). However, the challenges have been many, not the least of which has been the regular onslaught by Mother Nature via her fondness for unleashing triple-digit wind speeds and fierce storm surge in the form of Hurricanes Ida and Katrina and their older siblings. Intermingled with the punishing weather over the past two-plus years has been a major building collapse, a cyberattack on the city’s systems and, of course, COVID-19.

On Oct. 19, 2019, The Hard Rock Hotel in the historic French Quarter collapsed. Of primary importance, three people were killed. After the fact, the collapse crippled a lot of the downtown economy, which cut a lot of tax revenue, which trickled down negatively to fire department operations.

On Dec. 13, 2019, the city’s computer network was taken offline by a ransomware attack. For months, the city’s capability to collect revenue was eliminated.

Then came COVID. Then came Ida.

“When I go around and talk to the members, I remind them that, if they’re feeling a little tired, feeling a little burnt out, they should,” NOFD Superintendent Roman Nelson tells Firehouse Magazine.

• Also: New Orleans Fire Dept.at 130: Pompiers and Circumstances

Nelson’s revealing this to us in the very first minute of the conversation that we had with him is indicative of what seems to be of foremost importance for the department: its members.

Firehouse Magazine hit upon numerous touchpoints during the discussion with Nelson. Each time, unprovoked, Nelson returned to the matter of the department’s members—in regard to helping them, empowering them, protecting them.

Among the top matters: focusing on behavioral health and wellness.

“We’ve had good employee assistance and critical incident stress management programs in place for quite some time, but we are doubling down on that to help members recognize the signs, the triggers, of burn out, fatigue and stress, especially with all of the things that have been going on over the past few years,” Nelson explains.

What has been particularly effective for the NOFD in this vein is training a core group of members on firefighter member health and then putting that group in charge of the department’s efforts.

“The members themselves are looking out for each other,” the superintendent explains, because it’s the members who are the first to recognize that something is wrong with a fellow member.

“Once we got a good core group trained, and they kind of started spreading the word, more and more members started understanding that it’s really just talking things out, voicing it, not holding it in.”

Every day, it seemed, more and more members who once discounted efforts that are aimed at firefighter mental health as touchy-feely, cry-on-each-other’s-shoulders nonsense realized that there was substance to the work.

“There are certain triggers that you look for, and once members started learning what is at the root of these types of issues—what the work is and isn’t—they started to say, ‘OK. This makes sense. We can do this.’”

Safety on the fireground

Another of the top matters is new rescue bailout kit setups, and Nelson explains that the NOFD’s endeavors in this area serve to show that, sometimes, an attempt to do something good can encounter something bad along the way.

“A few years ago, we got a grant to replace all of our SCBA,” Nelson recounts. “We were at the end of the NFPA standards.”

The grant permitted the NOFD to acquire SCBA that had all of the bells and whistles. These included lumbar support, which is a favorite of department members. The SCBA also included integrated personal bailout rescue kits that integrate into the harness, but they weren’t delivered when everything else was.

“When the rescue belts came, it was found that they couldn’t be used without removing the lumbar support,” Nelson says. “Many members found that their backs hurt and the packs swung around and all of the weight was on their shoulders.”

Determined to rectify the problem, the department pursued and obtained another grant. A remedy to the glitch is in the offing: a rescue belt, harness and rescue bailout kit tailored for each individual.

“It isn’t practical to have them sharing.”

Health in the firehouse

Amid all of the curveballs that the NOFD has been thrown recently, it was the beneficiary of some good luck and good timing recently: the enactment of the federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. It will help the city of New Orleans and help the NOFD—to help its members.

The department’s station alerting system dates back to pre-Katrina (2005). The ransomware attack on the city didn’t do the system any favors. Nelson says that it wasn’t difficult to get the city’s administration to understand the detriment of an antiquated station alerting system on New Orleans’ firefighters. Fingers are crossed for an upgrade in 2022.

Nelson laments the fact that “currently, every time that a bell goes off, the firefighters get an adrenaline rush.

“The latest station alerting systems are designed to help to alert via a softer tone that escalates. It doesn’t get members’ heart rate ramped up as fast. This concept has been proven to help to reduce the heart attack risk in firefighters,” he explains. “There really is a science behind it, and it’s about firefighter safety.”

The NOFD was aided by some good timing, too, just before the pandemic hit. Early in 2020, the department was in the process of putting to work the funding that it latched onto via some SAFER grants. While the city of New Orleans was under a hiring freeze amid so much of its operations being, essentially, shut down, the fire department was in the position to continue its staffing efforts. In fact, the NOFD was looking to get its last SAFER class started at press time. This will fill out the department’s main positions.

“I suspect that a lot of departments didn’t have that opportunity,” Nelson offers. “Just imagine their staff without the ability to onboard new people.”

Hand-in-hand with continuing to hire is the NOFD’s procurement of staffing software. Up until recently, the department still used a paper-based staffing process, which dated back some 30 years.

“It was time-consuming. It was complicated. It was difficult to understand,” Nelson says.

The timing of the implementation of the staffing software might not have been able to be better. With COVID raging, the department was using a lot of overtime.

“The staffing software enable us to keep better track of firefighter hours, and the firefighters benefit by being able to pull it up on their phone, see who worked the next tour, see where they were on the overtime list and so forth.”

So, a benefit to the department, but another benefit for the members. Nelson goes so far as to say the members love it. “It has given complete visibility to our firefighters on all of our staffing and process, and that’s really gone a long way for their confidence.”

Member say-so with apparatus

Beginning in 2018, the NOFD took delivery of 21 pumpers and two ladders. Six more vehicles are on order with delivery expected in early 2023.

In contrast to the all-the-bells-and-whistles approach to the specification of the new SCBA that the department purchased, the design of the new apparatus was more conservative. Why? Unsurprisingly, it ties in with the recognition of the importance of NOFD’s members, in this case, embracing their viewpoint.

NOFD apparatus isn’t maintained within the department but by the city’s maintenance division. That said, firefighters who are mechanics help the folks who are in the maintenance division in small ways and large to improve the city maintenance division’s grasp of the fire vehicles. These same firefighter/mechanics are afforded the responsibility to do the heavy lifting regarding the rigs’ design under the hood.

“Our mechanics have been driving the show when it comes to engines, with a concentration on easy-to-repair and easy-to-keep-in-service,” the superintendent explains.

Nelson tells Firehouse Magazine that the NOFD had a private consultant, from a county fire district that owns hundreds of apparatus, come in. That person helped the NOFD develop some specifications, but the price tags that resulted when those vehicles went to bid were too expensive.

“We took those specifications and let our mechanics go through and look at when we needed,” Nelson says. “They stripped some things down and kind of reshaped them.”

He explains that some of what these in-house mechanics find can be simple tweaks: the relocation of an oil filter, different positioning of a connection.

Perhaps most notable, “A lot of apparatus manufacturers have gone to electronic control boards, where everything is controlled from those boards. We’ve gotten away from that,” Nelson says.

He says that the result not only has been “good, affordable apparatus specifications” but also not having to put companies out of service as much. “Mechanics have been able to stay ahead of the curve and keep things in service.”

Cancer

Nelson took over the helm of the NOFD on January 15, 2021, after he served as interim superintendent following the retirement of Tim McConnell in October 2020. At the time of Nelson’s appointment to superintendent, New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell said Nelson’s suitability for the position became clear to her quickly once the search for McConnell’s replacement started. It isn’t out of hand to surmise that Cantrell was impressed with the dedication to the department’s firefighters and officers of the native New Orleanian and 23-year member of the department. Another case in point: his commitment to the numerous efforts regarding cancer awareness and prevention—from the nuts and bolts (educating on cancer risks, wiping off contaminants immediately after a fire, improving the department’s inspection and cleaning programs) to the more substantial—and costly (acquiring more bunker gear extractors, retrofitting some stations for the addition of the extractors, acquiring bunker gear so members can have two sets).

Nelson admits to being a bit confused about some younger firefighters’ disregard of cancer risks, because he finds many of the younger firefighters extremely tuned in to information, news and data. Of course, this is in lock step, in general, with so many of their fellow Millennials (and fellow Gen Zers), what with their unparalleled access to and pursuit of information. That said, he’s confident that the younger members who remain latched on to an air of invincibility will have their eyes opened quickly.

“They’re seeing their mentors battle these cancers, and that’s kind of waking them up,” Nelson says.

“It’s still just overcoming that bravado, that macho firefighter thing,” he adds, “and seeing that these things that keep them safe also are macho. Good, tough firefighters keep themselves safe so that they can help others.

The next 130 years

In the press conference in which Cantrell announced Nelson’s promotion to superintendent, he conceded to feeling the weight of the office immediately but said that “it feels good.” He spoke of his dedication to “pay down the debt owed to those who came before me” and told NOFD firefighters to “keep the faith.”

The many departmental efforts waged on their behalf seem to indicate that there’s reason for them to do just that.