Armchair fire fighting: The growing impact of online criticism on fire crews

Smartphone video footage shows the back of a house on fire against the backdrop of a perfect sunny day. Two firefighters make their way to the source of the flames with a hose line, and then a fireball engulfs the frame. You can hear whoever’s taking the video in the background yell, “[expletive] told ‘em,” as they take cover behind a pick-up truck.

Kristy-Lynn Pankhurst Hutchings was on her way home from the hospital when she first saw the video of her caught in that explosion posted on Facebook. Earlier on that sunny day in June 2020, Pankhurst Hutchings, a firefighter and fire prevention officer with Ontario’s Scugog Fire, responded to a house fire. The structure had a propane tank around the back that exploded and collapsed a structure on Pankhurst Hutchings and her partner, leaving her severely concussed.

“It wasn’t until I saw the video that I realized the impact and the road of recovery that was ahead of me,” says Pankhurst Hutchings. “But the most frustrating part of the video, to this day, is the comments on it.”

On a repost of the video on X, there are still comments that criticize the firefighters for getting too close to the propane tank, saying that they or the captain who ordered them near the house were being reckless. The video went viral over Instagram reels in the global firefighting community and is cited in trainings as an example of what not to do despite lacking any operational context of how the incident came about.

“If my partner and I had all the hours in the day to respond to every single comment, we would respond and we would clear up what we were doing and why we were doing it, and justify the location that we were in,” says Pankhurst Hutchings.

She doesn’t regret that the video was captured; it clarified the incident and, in context, can be used to educate new firefighters. What Pankhurst Hutchings does wish is that in the days following her accident, she had been able to interact with the community—to have a productive conversation about the explosion and what could be learned from it.

Instances of social media criticism, what those in the fire service know as “armchair fire fighting” are common across Canada. Whether it is firefighters critiquing each other online or “keyboard warriors” from within the community who write negative comments over social media about fire fighting performance, volunteers are exposed to a high volume of negative comments on their feeds without formalized tools to steel themselves against the negative impacts, or the resources to respond to the criticisms in a way that reinforces public trust.

“It does put a blemish, at times, on fire departments when most information is not even legitimate,” says Greg Jones, president of the Fire Service Association of Nova Scotia, representing all the province’s volunteer fire departments in government. Armchair firefighters’ criticisms rarely have accurate insight into the context of a fire and what tactics could have been better employed to fight against it.

Jones, the fire chief of Amherst Fire Department since 2014, is not immune to the negative personal impacts of online criticism. “I even struggle with social media, and simply because we go to a call and within an hour or two, there’s always some type of negative comment on there,” he says. “Folks in my community will try their best to back up the fire department or back up the fire association on numerous things, but for me, it has a negative mental health effect. It caused me to stand back from that and not review it.”

Paul Maynard, deputy fire chief at Hantsport Fire Department in N.S., outlined countless examples of criticisms firefighters throw out toward each other. “It’s people saying, ‘Why is the ladder put up that way? Why are they attacking the fire this way? Why are they using two and a half versus inch and three-quarter lines?’” says Maynard. All of which contribute to added stress and anxiety in a high-pressure role.

Halifax firefighter David Steele and community member in dialogue at house fire in Dutch Village on Sep. 30, 2024. Photo credit: Jacqueline Newsome

“I get them all the time after a call. Somebody will send me a screenshot where someone has said, ‘Jeez, it took Hantsport 12 minutes to get to my fire call today,’” says Maynard. Maynard favours dialogue, not online retorts. “If someone wants to criticize something we’ve done, the worst I might do is send them a note and say, ‘Hey, if you want to talk about this, reach out to me; I’m not fighting with you over Facebook or Instagram.’”

Robin Campbell Bromhead, a researcher in occupational therapy and social work, wrote her dissertation at Dalhousie University on the occupational environment of volunteer firefighters and how it impacts well-being on the job. A former volunteer firefighter herself, she spent 10 years at the Wolfville Fire Department between 2006 and 2017.

Her research shed light on what the province’s volunteer firefighters experience when photos of them on the fire ground are denigrated online. Campbell Bromhead interviewed 30 firefighters from three volunteer departments in focus groups and one-to-one interviews. Social media criticism was repeatedly mentioned as an unaddressed stressor on and off the job.

“It came out as part of the environment of being a firefighter. It’s having a huge impact on them,” said Campbell Bromhead. “Every single age demographic talked about it.”

Campbell Bromhead suggests that unaddressed public shaming over social media threatens the trust instilled in volunteer firefighters, especially in small rural communities. Fire departments’ most common response to the criticism has been to remove firefighters’ agency online through organizational policies.

“I presented my research at the Canadian Fire Chiefs’ Association,” said Campbell Bromhead. “And leadership doesn’t know what to do. The only thing they’ve been doing is taking more, policy-wise, away from the firefighters.” Restricting firefighters’ ability to post, comment, and share online is the solution she has heard of the most. “That seems to be the only approach they know how to do.”

Campbell Bromhead cautions that asking firefighters to ignore comments directed at them and sanctioning firefighters who choose to engage with community posts online fail to address the occupational stressor that social media can be. She emphasizes that research must be devoted to investigating how deeply social media affects the perceptions of both firefighters and the wider community.

“What we don’t know is the extent of the distress it’s causing,” she says.

Steve Horner, a trainer for the Critical Incident Stress Management program delivered to volunteer firefighters to build mental resilience in fire halls, says fire department leaders should do their part to relieve the impact on individuals. “If they put out any sort of official communication around an incident, in order to quell rumours or to mitigate any possible effect of criticism being levelled at their staff, that can go a long way to supporting people,” he said.

For volunteer departments, the task of managing public communications would become an additional unpaid responsibility for frontline firefighters. The alternative would be to transfer a firefighter to public information officer (PIO) duty in the department.

Pankhurst Hutchings, who studied communications and digital media and works as a community outreach officer for her township of Scugog, Ont., describes the immense benefits of the PIO to the public and to fire departments of any size.

“If your department is not prepared in 2024 to engage your stakeholders on social media, you’re just waiting for a bad story from your community to go viral, whatever viral means in your community, whether that’s in a local paper, on a Facebook page, or a huge news source,” said Pankhurst Hutchings.

Jones cautions that the volume of social media comments is too great, especially during disasters, to be handled by any one person. His department instead encourages open forum training sessions with anonymous Q&A, where social media can be addressed head-on.

“It’s been a big item here for the better part of the last 15 years, so it continuously comes up, and unfortunately, the negative stuff on social media potentially has an effect on retaining members and recruiting new members,” he warns.

Jacqueline Newsome is a master’s student of Journalism at the University of King’s College in Halifax. She also volunteered as a firefighter for four years with the Wolfville Fire Department of Nova Scotia. Originally from Toronto, she writes about matters of public safety.