As a busy wildfire season is expected out West, President Joe Biden recently announced the federal government is hiring more firefighters and upping their minimum pay to at least $15 an hour.
The government wants to hire more than 1,000 federal firefighters. Good luck with that.
Putting one’s life at risk for a pittance? One can make that flipping Big Macs — at least in Chicago where the minimum wage went to $15 an hour on July 1.
I’m pretty sure most employees in the Lake County fire service make more than $15 an hour. And well they should.
Firefighters are the only ones running into buildings to extinguish blazes, like the immense lithium battery factory fire at the Illinois River town of Morris in Grundy County. That stubborn fire is just one of several which have recently found firefighters on the front lines of tragedies and rescues.
Biden moved last week to raise the pay of federal firefighters after finding some were earning just $13 an hour. A Biden administration official told NBC News the goal is to ensure firefighters are “fairly paid for the grueling and risky work that they’re willing to take on.”
The industrial blaze in Morris came two weeks after the explosion and massive fire at a chemical plant near upstate Rockton, an Illinois community along the Wisconsin border, which burned for several days.
Watching first responders and rescue workers pick through the rubble at the high-rise condo collapse in South Florida has been heart wrenching.
Tons of lithium batteries burned unchecked in the former abandoned factory in Morris, forming a cloud over the town of 15,000. Firefighters couldn’t use water or foam because of the volatility of the batteries, which officials were initially unaware were even housed in the old paper plant.
While firefighters wore breathing apparatus at the Morris site, there must have been some nasty particulates floating about. Fortunately, no first responders were sent to the hospital with side effects from the blaze.
That’s just one of the dangers of firefighting: One doesn’t know what’s in building materials, let alone what’s in buildings that are on fire. Then there are those elected officials who like to deny firefighters on-the-job disability payments after they come down with life-threatening illnesses.
In the case of the Morris fire, Fire Chief Tracey Steffes said officials then turned to the dry-chemical fire suppressant called Purple-K, name for its violet color. “The lithium fire laughed at the Purple-K,” he said. “Didn’t make a dent in it.”
Leave it to fire folks to scoff at danger. They have a wry sense of what they do because they’ve seen a lot of things we don’t want to have the opportunity to view.
After finding the suppressant failed in extinguishing the fire, a brigade of firefighters poured dry cement over parts of the building in attempts to smother the fire. Watching his explanation of firefighting techniques at a news conference the other day, Steffes reminded me of Sam Dada, the late Gurnee fire chief.
Dada, too, had a straightforward way about him. Following the devastating December 1984 “unforgettable fire” at Warren Township High School on O’Plaine Road in Gurnee — now the campus for freshmen and sophomores — Dada was asked if perhaps the fire rekindled after firefighters first extinguished it. The fire appeared to be restarted after it was thought to have been struck.
“Rekindled,” Dada said, “is not in my vocabulary.” In fact, the blaze turned out to be relit by someone a second time, arson investigators later determined.
He also opined that firefighters got antsy without a working fire now and then. After all, putting out fires is what they are trained to do.
That was something Fire Chief Steffes reminded Morris residents at a news conference the other day, that they “might not see a lot of firefighting activity going on at the scene.” He said that was difficult for him and his crews to accept.
“It’s hard for a firefighter or a fire chief to stand outside a building and watch it burn, it’s not in our nature, it’s not what we’ve been trained to do,” he said.
That’s when they want to run at the blaze and extinguish it, as well-trained firefighters want to do. It’s good to have those well-paid professionals in fire service when you need them.
Charles Selle is a former News-Sun reporter, political editor and editor.
Twitter: @sellenews
