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Running the fire and rescue agency in Maryland’s most populous jurisdiction is an enormous job. Montgomery County yields an average of 300 emergency medical calls a day plus another dozen for fires. The agency employs about 1,250 career firefighters and medics, has a large volunteer force and runs dozens of stations across 500 square miles of land.
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Now, with the retirement this year of Chief Scott Goldstein, who’d served since 2015, County Executive Marc Elrich has nominated another agency veteran to take his place: Division Chief Charles Bailey. To become chief, he would need majority support from the 11-member Montgomery County Council. A vote is expected sometime early next year.
If confirmed, Bailey would become the county’s first Black fire chief and take over an agency — the Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Service — for which the word fire perhaps shouldn’t be the first word anymore. Approximately 80 percent of its calls are for reported medical emergencies, not fires, similar to the shift at “fire departments” around the country, said Earl Stoddard, a top aide to Elrich and former emergency management director in the county. “This industry is going through a real revolution. It’s becoming more fundamentally about public health,” Stoddard said. “Charles has been driving that discussion in Montgomery County for five years.”
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Bailey grew up in the county and pursued an engineering degree at the University of Maryland before — as he puts it — switching to art history to give him more time working as a firefighter. “I was able to do what my grandmother demanded, which is get a degree, and what I wanted to do, which was ride on the firetrucks,” he said this month in a wide-ranging interview.
He spoke of dramatic recent events in Montgomery County — including an apartment explosion and a small airplane that flew into a power line tower and became suspended off the ground — the opposition to his chief nomination by the local firefighter’s union, and his plans for change, if confirmed.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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Q: In your current job — operations chief — what is the one thing or the three things that keeps you up and worried? Another covid? A bomb? A mass shooting? All of these things?
A: What those three things you just named all have in common is that you’re able to imagine them. The thing that keeps you up at night is the ghost, the amorphous creature for which there is no name or definition that can emerge tomorrow. And the organization will be required to pivot very, very quickly in order to address whatever that is. And that is scary. The complexity of the world says that there are interactions that can happen that I can’t control and can’t predict. What I think is comforting — and one of the other things we’re trying to do — is that with the right mind-set, we can be adaptive enough. There’s a latency. It may take us some time to catch on, but the organization should be able to adapt to what’s next.
Q: Let’s go back to college. How did switching majors free up your time?
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A: It’s not that art history wasn’t hard. But it required a different skill set. Engineering required me to move my brain in a way that was not my natural tendency. Writing and reading and analyzing visual imagery suited me well. It didn’t require as much effort. I had an email exchange with a professor two months ago when I was like, “It’s been 30-plus years since we’ve talked, but you’re still influencing the way I process the universe.” … You look at a piece of art that you know nothing about, and you ask yourself three questions: Function, meaning, style. And if you can answer, or derive answers to those three questions, it allows you to place the work of art into a context, which is the first step in deriving some sort of meaning from it. A lot of the work we do now, people think, is just the fire department — you show up with the truck, you squirt the water, and it’s that simple. Turns out it’s not. And it’s kind of really complicated — or complicated and complex, which are two different things.
Q: What’s the difference?
A: Complicated means there’s a lot of moving parts, but we understand the relationship between those parts, and we’re pretty sure that when we push button A, outcome B will be the result. Complex means that what happens when I push button A depends a lot on some externalities that we don’t have any control of. And sometimes you get outcome B, but sometimes you get outcome C, and the cause and effect relationship is either opaque or not fully understood or so highly variable that we can’t depend on it.
Q: When you talk about things like this — talking this way — do you feel you’re unique in fire department administration circles around the country?
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A: I may read things that other people may not be reading. I think my inherent nerdiness sometimes comes out. But in general the fire service as a whole is starting to realize that there is a paradigm shift going on.
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Q: When you speak of shifting from a “public safety” viewpoint to a “public health” one, do you expect internal resistance?
A: There will be some resistance, but I don’t see it as huge because for the most part, this fire department, that fire suppression piece, these guys are a good. The rescue piece — like if you’re trapped under 200 tons of rubble — these guys are amazing. We’re good at that. We have to sustain that. These dudes figured out how to get an airplane out of the sky, 100-feet up, with two living people in it, in the fog and the mist. They’re bright and they’re good. We have to sustain that. The future space — let’s get better at these other things.
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Q: How specifically would you move the department from public safety thinking to public health thinking?
A: If you start framing out medical emergencies as a public health problem and even a house fire as a public health problem, that allows you to look at things and ask, ‘What are the common predictors for chronic diseases or social problems?’ … If you’re at Thanksgiving dinner and your Aunt Suzy has the big one, and her heart stops beating — if someone in that house puts their hands on her chest and starts pressing, that’s not going to save her by itself, but it circulates enough oxygen and enough blood to give us time to get there. What we’ve identified are the places in Montgomery County where people get bystander CPR with lower frequency than in other places. So, starting somewhere in January or February, guess where we’re going? We’re going to the places where people are — based on census tracts — where they get CPR training at lower rates. And we’re going to teach people how to do bystander CPR. Your neighbor, your friend, pressing on your chest for five minutes before we get there will have a proportionally larger impact on your outcome than me showing up in three minutes, because the cost of putting an ambulance or a firetruck spaced out over all 500 square miles to get to every point within three minutes is impossible. So we come and we teach you how to do those things that are going to keep you alive. We are also working with some partnerships to get blood — actual blood, human blood — and carry it on EMS supervisor cars. When you have a traumatic injury and you are bleeding out, being able to replace the blood volume that you’re losing on the scene is again, the sort of thing that can save lives. Because I can replace a lot of fluids, but none of those fluids carry oxygen like blood can.
Q: The career firefighters union and an association that represents volunteers are two influential groups in the county. The volunteers group tells us they support your nomination. The union gave us the following statement: “There were a number of concerns with Chief Bailey that the County Executive did not address during the Executive Branch’s selection process. We look forward to working with the County Council during its confirmation process to make sure they have all of the information to make an informed decision.” They wouldn’t elaborate. But if you are confirmed, how will you work with both groups?
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A: It is so easy to talk about all the spaces in which we disagree. We have to ask, where do we agree? There’s two things: The mission should always come first and the health, safety and welfare of the people who work here is important. If we agree on those two things, well, then heck, we can find our way through the other paths.
Q: What about cultural challenges? A lot of people get into being a firefighter because they want to run into burning buildings and save people.
A: Sure they do. And listen, I can’t diminish that it’s dangerous and it’s hard. Physically demanding, emotionally demanding and intellectually demanding because it is not as simple as just turning a hose on and squirt the water. You’ve got to have some understanding of chemistry, physics, fluid dynamics and all these other things. But I see these firefighters — more than 300 working on a given shift — as ground sensors. They know when there’s a bad batch of dope in Silver Spring before anybody else does. They know which apartment buildings are delinquent in doing maintenance and the fire alarms are busted and there’s vermin infestation. You know why? Because they go to these buildings to answer these calls. They know where the elderly are aging in place and are socially isolated, which is a bad, bad, bad indicator for outcomes. What we’re trying to do here is take the information that they’re gathering, that they’re picking up in the course of their duty and make sure that we as a fire department are like a central node in the network, a high degree of connectivity with the other nodes. The way I amplify their work is by redesigning our notification systems so that it is easy for them to notify and get feedback that they were heard and some action was occurring.
Q: You headed up the department’s covid-19 response. What did you learn?
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A: The number one lesson to take is the power of listening. We created a feedback mechanism with field providers. We said, “Tell us what you think of these new policies.” And we had set up a program to decontaminate ambulances outside of hospitals after they dropped off covid patients. We had teams at the hospitals specifically to do this. And somebody sent in a remark that this was precisely the dumbest way to decontaminate an ambulance. So our response was, “Well how do you do it better?” And the person said, “I need three buckets and a mop.” So we gave him three buckets and the mop and three days to try it. It turns out ours was dumb, theirs was not, and it changed on the spot. The word got out that if you fill out a form, they actually read it — and if you make it make sense, they will listen.
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