Stimulus & the Rescue Community

If the national US&R program is going to see any stimulus benefit, we must be coordinated & aggressive

It may seem a little crazy and even a bit unbelievable, but last month I completed a cover-to-cover review of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act 2009, or the “stimulus” package, something even all of our legislators were not able to do before they signed the act into law.

I had to kill a small tree to print it all out; the 3"-thick document locked the copy machine up for quite a while, and I had to use a couple of thick rubber bands to hold it all together.

My objective: to look for funding for the fire service, specifically the rescue community, and to identify funding that our agency could take advantage of.

What I Found
To my disappointment, I found very little funding for the fire service and none for the rescue community. I did identify some money for fire station construction, which hopefully will be made available to our agency.

I guess it would have been hard to convince lawmakers that stimulus or shovel-ready projects applied to the fire service outside of fire station construction. Prior to the act’s approval, I worked with one of our legislative field representatives to try to include warehouse or storage facilities language for the 28 National Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) Task Forces, but we were a day late and a few million dollars short.

The National USAR Program, sponsored by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), has grown considerably since the attacks on New York and Washington on 9/11. Example: Before 9/11, our task force equipment was comfortable but crowded in our 5,000-square-foot warehouse. Today, with the addition of a WMD cache, an entire second equipment cache, a fleet of trucks, trailers and vehicles, and additional personnel and positions, our task force equipment has a hard time fitting into a rented 26,000-square-foot warehouse, more than five times larger than a decade ago.

Striving for Sustainability
Some may argue that the Urban Area Security Iniatives (UASI) or Fire Act Grant funds should be used for equipment or facilities, but I would counter that federally sponsored task forces that have federally purchased equipment need to move to the next level and institutionalize permanent storage locations or homes for these teams.

To back up that concept, I recently traveled to Washington, D.C., to support the National Fire Caucus and the International Association of Fire Chiefs (IAFC) by meeting on fire service issues with our locally elected public officials during the Congressional Fire Services Institute annual seminars and dinner.

D.C. was packed with special interest groups and individuals who all seemed to have the same goal in mind: find money. With a new administration and congress in town, many are visiting their elected officials to encourage them to support a variety of causes, programs and stimulus projects. The concept of that stimulus money has created a feeding frenzy in Washington.

As I found out very quickly, although everyone seems to love the fire service, we either don’t ask for things or at times lack the organization, support and backing for important issues and items. With the help of the IAFC and the IAFF, along with the Fire Caucus, things have gotten better, but there is much left to do, especially because the landscape of politics is a constantly changing panorama.

High on my own personal list of priorities was the promotion of sustainable funding for the National US&R Program. I believe sustainability is the word of the day in a down economy. Several of the legislators or their staff members I met with were not only familiar with the National Program but also the need for level funding.

As we move forward in uncertain and difficult economic times, sustainable funding, program survival and the promotion of issues important to the fire service will require that we become more aggressive in how we promote those issues to our elected officials. We must do a much better job, not only in the promotion of those issues, but also the coordination of those requests across the nation.

Harold Schapelhouman is a 27-year veteran firefighter with the Menlo Park (Calif.) Fire Protection District. At the start of 2007, he became the first internally selected fire chief in 21 years for his organization. Previously, he was the division chief in charge of special operations, which includes all district specialized preparedness efforts, the local and state water rescue program, and the local, state and national Urban Search and Rescue Program (USAR).

Schapelhouman was the task force leader in charge of California Task Force 3, one of the eight California USAR teams and one of the 28 federal Department of Homeland Security (DHS/FEMA) teams.