Mecey looks back on 33 years of putting out fires

Explaining why he shifted from police to fire, Mecey said, “Firefighting was my passion from the beginning, but I didn’t have any desire to leave the area and there just wasn’t any opportunities locally. In that era, it just didn’t seem realistic to drive back and forth to the St. Louis area.

“I figured policing would be my career, but as things started to transition and we started to see by the mid-1990s that we were probably going to have to make some changes and we got a lot more serious in the fire service, I got more involved.”

Things have changed

At the age of 51, the Farmington native is only the city’s second fire chief in 40 years, having taken over the position from Phil Johnson.

“Things have changed a lot,” Mecey said. “When Chief Johnson was here, they went from not having access to self-contained breathing apparatus; that was a real change. They would go into fires without any protection.

“I’ve seen changes in technology, thermal imaging cameras, safety being built into the self-contained breathing apparatus and having built-in personal alert devices. Our gear today is so much better ergonomically. The guys can get around in them — it’s kind of like a sports fit.

“The fire trucks are so much more technology involved, that’s great when it works. When I started there was not an aerial (ladder) truck in the county. We got one in 1998; that was a big change from a tactics standpoint.

“The biggest thing is from a call standpoint, we are over three times busier now than in 1998. From the time I came on in 1989, we were probably running 400-500 calls a year to now we’re are up to about 3,500 calls a year. The types of calls we respond to have changed. We run more medical than we did originally. Having full-time staffing allows us to do that. We think it is an important service we provide the community.”

According to Mecey, there were a lot more fires in the 1970s and 80s.

“We attribute a lot of that to building codes and public education,” he said. “We have more vehicle accidents with more automobiles on the road.”

Although there are more vehicle accidents, they are less severe than in the past.

“Used to, we had all those at-grade crossings on Highway 67,” he said. “We would run multiple serious accidents, multiple extrications a month along that stretch of highway. It’s rare for us to have a really serious crash in the city now. Last year we had four accidents where we had to cut somebody out of the car where that would have been 30-40 back in the ’90s.”

Know where to cut

Another factor leading to less severe injuries in auto accidents is the increased number of safety features installed in newer vehicles. That, however, also creates its own problems for Mecey’s department.

“You have to know where to cut,” he said. “In 1989, you cut the car apart and get someone out and it was no big deal. Now you have these seat belt tensioners and side airbags and things happen. If you cut through one of those tensioners, that can be a bad thing. We have apps on our phones and books in the truck where you can flip through and look up the model of the car.

“Hybrid was the big thing. On hybrids and electric cars, there’s enough amperage there to cause a fatality. Electric vehicles are a huge problem. There’s departments where they’ve put 200,000 gallons of water on a fire and still not put it out. It’s definitely an issue. We’ve got training coming up, Tesla is involved in the training.”

Even in the case of minor accidents, the fire department still responds — often performing cleanup duty at the end of processing a wreck — but Mecey says there’s much more to it than that.

“In vehicle accidents, we have a big truck that weighs a lot,” he said. “We can block lanes of traffic. We hope nobody hits us, but if somebody hits that truck, they’re a lot less likely to knock into the accident scene. If somebody’s hurt in a car, it takes more than two people to safely get them out of the car. It’s common in a car accident to have fluid leakage and have a fire after an accident.”

A major component to the fire department’s effectiveness is its quick response time to any incident that takes place within the city. Mecey explained that, on average, his firefighters are going to be on the scene in under four and a half minutes.

“Unless there’s something significant to take all our trucks out of service, we’re always going to be able to provide a rapid response,” he said. “It’s important and often changes the outcome of those medical calls. Over 50% of what we do is EMS, another 8% of what we do is rescue. The ambulance service is very busy. There’s only one ambulance house in Farmington. If they are out on a call, then you are waiting on an ambulance from Park Hills, Bismarck or Bonne Terre.

“Those times get extended. We are going to be able to get there and change the outcome of a lot of those service calls. Sometimes we’ll get there and there’s an ambulance coming from outside of Farmington that is leaving that community unprotected. We get there and determine the ambulance is unneeded and get them back in service.”

Providing muscle

With only two on an ambulance crew, the fire department also provides muscle on medical calls. Mecey noted that not every home or building is at ground level.

“There’s steps,” he said. “People are on second stories, in basements. To safely get people out of homes takes more than two people.”

Of course, maintaining a rapid response time makes a difference in how bad a fire can get. For Mecey, having that full-time crew on the scene quickly means that fire getting through the roof is now a rarity.

“What used to be a fully-involved house is a one-room fire,” he said. “What used to be a one-room fire is a fire in a trash can or on the stove. The change is not that we are the greatest. We do the same job as a volunteer department does. It just comes down to time. It comes down to two factors. We are only in the city. We don’t have a 20 or 30 minute response time in the city anywhere; and every time we are out the door in 80 seconds, we are altering the course of that fire.”

An often overlooked factor in the shortening of response times is the prevalence of cell phones.

“There’s more people in town — everybody has a cell phone,” Mecey said. “It’s that rapid notification. Used to you would go down Karsch and see a house on fire. If you didn’t have a cell phone, you didn’t stop and call it in. You would have to stop at a pay phone somewhere or actually come by the firehouse. We do get a lot of calls where someone thought they had seen something or smelled smoke and it’s nothing, but we’d much rather have that than a fire not called in.”

Another help in the shortening of response times is mutual aid — where departments help each other out in putting out fires. Mecey has seen mutual aid change drastically over the last 30 years.

“When I started in 1989, there wasn’t any automatic aid,” he said. “It was just mutual aid. Wolf Creek or Doe Run would get called to a fire. They would usually wait until they got there and [verified] they have a fire and send a tanker from another department.

“In the early to mid-1990s we were starting to employ automatic aid where we were making alarm assignments. On an alarm we will bring in two additional departments, Doe Run and Wolf Creek.”

Volunteer shortage

The increasing shortage of volunteer firefighters has led to changes in the way mutual aid is handled and determines how many departments can be called in to a scene.

“It was a trend of we were getting busier and we were seeing a drop-off of active volunteers,” Mecey said. “It’s continued on that trend. If you look at it nationally, it continues to shrink on the number of people available.

“As fire chief you have to look at things as far as standards. Standards aren’t laws, we’re not required to follow them, however NFPA standards are accepted in civil court, so we do have to look at that. Right now, NFPA says that you have to have 23 personnel on the scene of a residential structure fire. Come October, Farmington is going to have seven full-time people working. That still leaves us 16 short.

“We don’t look to conform to the standard. Used to we would use just Doe Run and Wolf Creek. Usually we would get plenty of people between them and our volunteers and off-duty staff that could handle about any fire. In the last two years, we’ve added Park Hills to that assignment. During the daytime between all four departments you might be lucky to get eight to 10 people total. When you see these two, three and four alarm fires, once that would have been a one alarm fire. If Farmington would have had a fire, you would have had 20 guys show up.”

Training is definitely different than it was 30 years ago. The Farmington Fire Department now requires its personnel to undergo certified training.

“When I started, that was around but wasn’t required.” Mecey said. “Training is now under really controlled conditions. It wasn’t uncommon that somebody wanted their house burnt down. We’d go and make sure that we could protect the neighboring homes and train in it. Now, the cost to prep a home to burn it to meet our regulations is very prohibitive. In addition to the liability — and on top of that, the regulations that are out there for burning — requires you to have so many certified fire instructors on the scene. It becomes really challenging to make that happen.

“So much more training is interactive through videos now, where it was all hands-on before. In 1989 there was no internet. If you were going to get some training, you were going to have to buy a VHS set, so the content was really limited. The guys will watch videos on transitional attack and study if we hit it from the outside before we go inside — we see the change in the thermal profile in the house. There wasn’t a lot of science to it, it was strictly about tactics before.”

Wayside Inn fire

When Mecey brings in new trainees, he often has them sit down and read a fire report from 1979 regarding the infamous, but largely forgotten, Wayside Inn fire near Farmington in which a boarding home/care facility burned down, resulting in the deaths of 25 of the 37 residents.

“It had a huge impact,” he said. “It was a big part of our history. It had a huge impact nationally — the push to have better fire protection systems and codes. That fire was investigated by multiple entities that included the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA). It was one of those super-rare occurrences that a national organization would come in like that and investigate a fire. The report was pretty blunt about mistakes that were made and things that could have been done different.”

A big part of the training involves the building of physical strength and endurance. Firefighters work in intense heat while wearing 70-80 pounds of gear and need to be in top physical condition to do their job effectively.

“Full-time firefighters are required to do an hour of physical training a day,” Mecey said. “That physical training is designed around running sprints and not marathons. You have to have the ability to run 20 minutes to an hour of going full-bore non-stop high adrenaline. Here, most fires are put out in 20 minutes.”

Generally, if a fire continues for a longer period of time, crews from mutual aid companies will replace the fatigued firefighters.

According to Mecey, the fire chief is the outside decision maker that attempts to determine the risk and reward calculations.

“You get there and do a walk around and look at conditions and try to do these assessments of how old a home is and how it’s built,” he said. “Is it safe and at what point it isn’t safe. As we get more and more newer homes, we are probably going to have to change how we do business drastically. Houses burn differently than they did 33 years ago. The materials burn differently. The construction of the homes are different. Every older home had 2×10 or 2×12 floor joists and you knew what it was going to take for those to fail. Now we have the fabricated trusses that can fail in 10 minutes.

“If I’ve got a basement fire in an old home, we can probably make entry more safely than something built two years ago. If there’s a good working fire in the basement, there’s a good potential for collapse. A lot of times it’s a guess. You have an older home that looks like a newer home that is remodeled. If it doesn’t have a basement, there’s nothing under there to burn, so you are not going to get a really hot temperature fire that’s going to cause a collapse. If it has a basement, is it finished or not? If the ceiling is finished, then that gives it protection for about an hour, that collapse potential has went down.”

As part of those calculations, the department spends time evaluating the age of Farmington neighborhoods.

“It’s not 100%, but this particular neighborhood was probably built in the 1970s, where another neighborhood was built in 1990s, where that neighborhood was built since 2015,” he said.

Things burn differently

Building furnishings can also be a factor for Mecey and his crew.

“Things burn differently,” Mecey said. “Used to be your couch had natural filling in it and now it’s composite products and they burn differently and put off different products.”

All of these factors are a part of the quick decision-making that happens upon arriving at the scene of a fire. It all starts with where the first truck is parked.

“The fire captain’s job when they are first there is to do a 360,” Mecey explained. “That lets them see all of the home. The first fire truck will pull past the house. That leaves the front of the home for an aerial truck. The other thing is you’ve seen the first side, the front and the other side of the house. Then the fire captain only has to go to the back of the house to take a look.

“Obviously, if it’s life safety, we are going to take larger risks than if no one is in there. We do go inside if nobody is in there, property conservation and evidentiary protection are two pieces of that puzzle. We want to preserve as much of the building as possible and allow an investigation of whether the cause was arson or accidental.”

With newer homes, part of the calculation includes the presence of solar panels. Mecey has found that every situation can be different depending on how the panels are wired into the home.

“We are used to pulling a meter or cutting electrical service to a house and being guaranteed that the house is no longer energized,” he said. “Solar panels change that. There’s virtually no way to stop those solar panels from making energy.”

Fewer fatalities

In firefighting, there are the inevitable fatalities that must be dealt with. That is the toughest part of the job. Mecey has always handled the deaths well, but realizes that not all of his crew will do the same.

“Fire fatalities are rare in the area,” he said. “I’ve been to a couple of handfuls of fatal house fires in 33 years. They definitely stick with you. There’s some of the more serious accidents where you have multiple fatalities that stick with you. I tell people when they’re starting this career that you’re going to see some bad things. Things that people shouldn’t have to see. It is our job and we have to do what we have to do. You can’t save everyone, you save who you can.

“If you can’t save them, you show them the most respect possible while you’re getting them out of that situation so that their families can start that grieving process. We do have access to critical stress debriefing personnel. We have a fire department chaplain that we bring in on a regular basis. The guys know when he is going to be here. He’s here to be a tool, not to teach religion. The guys have a good relationship with him. Everybody handles traumatic situations differently.”

Whether it is handling a multi-alarm blaze, a car accident, a public relations event or changing smoke detector batteries in a home, the Farmington Fire Department wears many more hats than a fire helmet.

“We ought to be called a community service department as much as a fire department,” Mecey said.