Out of the ashes: Letter from the President of FSWO

Out of the Ashes:

Letter from the
President of FSWO

Louise Hine-Schmidt

Now more than ever, fire departments are being asked to be accountable and responsive to the communities they serve and that means a commitment to inclusion and diversity. Fire Service Women Ontario is committed to helping fire departments make that commitment a reality. We are pleased to partner with Canadian Firefighter magazine to bring a twice-yearly round-up of news and ideas to challenge your lens and grow your ideas.

FSWO’s goal is to educate, encourage and empower women in the fire service. We seek to inspire positive change, develop a diverse workforce, develop our potential, recognize role models and mentors at all levels, and foster professional and supportive relationships and networks among women in the fire service. We are a member-driven, non-profit organization. Any person of any gender who supports our mandate is welcome to join as a member, whether as an individual, department, or union.

This year marks our 10th anniversary. I’d like to tell you how FSWO was formed from the ashes of a near tragedy.

On February 12, 2007, Ottawa Fire Services responded to a working structure fire in an attached three-storey row house. Five Ottawa firefighters were injured, two critically. One of the critically injured was a probationary firefighter named Carissa Campbell-Darmody. She responded on the first pump with her crew who entered the structure to search for a reported trapped civilian. All three crew members were forced to jump out of a three-storey window onto the pavement below when conditions rapidly changed from light smoke to intolerable heat. Injuries sustained during the fall put Carissa and her lieutenant out of duty for many months. Carissa sustained burns to her arm, fracture to her foot, broken teeth and broken vertebrae.

During her recovery time, Carissa was away in Maine and met a firefighter who was a member of Fire Service Women of New York State. She told Carissa about a women’s firefighter weekend in Montour Falls that offered hands-on training. After getting approval from her Chief, Carissa attended the training weekend to help her gain back some confidence in her firefighting skills while networking with other women firefighters from across the state. Carissa saw the usefulness of women learning from each other, especially as women were (and still are) often isolated from each other in a profession still mostly staffed by men. She also learned of a firefighting camp for young women called Phoenix Fire Camp, and encouraged other Ottawa firefighters to attend as instructors. This was the driving force to create a similar camp in Ottawa, now ten years strong, called Camp FFIT (Female Firefighters in Training). FSWO was created to manage this camp, but quickly became a more wide-reaching organization to serve the whole province as a network of support.

FSWO held its first education event in October 2011 in Ottawa and formed its first full board of directors, and began holding a yearly event to bring the network together to share skills and learn from the best. Fast forward to the present and we are organizing our next training symposium in Ottawa on October 18-20, 2019. All this came from a near tragedy from one of our founding members, Carissa Campbell-Darmody, who is now a mother of two and working C shift with Ottawa Fire as a Hazmat Technician. Although no one would wish for any firefighter to go through what Carissa has, especially so early in her career, the legacy from that incident has continued to help so many women in the Ontario fire service. The results of the investigation of that fire fundamentally changed how Ottawa Fire Services (OFS) functions today. The Forward Avenue Fire Report has propelled OFS to the forefront of science-based firefighting with the creation and implementation of “From Knowledge to Practice,” a training curriculum and guide available free of charge for any fire department. FSWO will be offering a one-day hands-on course on this program at our training symposium, providing participants an opportunity to learn more about the course and bring the information back to their own home departments.

The years have been good to us! Over the past decade, we have supported the development of Camp FFIT in departments big and small. Please read our article in this issue on the best practices we’ve learned in hosting these firefighter development camps for young women. Encouraging youth in our community to care about our fellow citizens and learn life-saving skills has been one of our greatest projects.

Barriers exist not only in motivating a new generation of women to consider firefighting but also in the hiring, retention and promotion of women once they begin serving as firefighters. Seeking to better understand the barriers in the full career spectrum of women in fire, FSWO sought and was rewarded full research funding from Status of Women Canada in 2018. We have been interviewing women working on apparatus floors all the way up to the chiefs of many departments to ultimately create a toolkit and best practice model for fire departments to boost their inclusion and diversity commitments.

We know this research is needed. In March 2019 FEMA produced the report Emerging Health and Safety Issues Among Women in the Fire Service, a round-up of research in the US and Canada. Overwhelmingly the report notes that insufficient data exists on gender-specific health and safety concerns, and women are often excluded from studies because of small research sample sizes. We must increase the presence of women as subjects in our fire service research. Please contact us if you’d like to be a part of this ground-breaking research.

We hope you will benefit from the information we share in these pages. Please consider adding to the FSWO momentum by becoming a member at www.fswo.ca, and attending our annual training symposium. This year’s event promises to be the best yet. We are featuring a keynote address by London Fire Commissioner Dany Cotton (see interview in this issue), as well as hands-on training in fire dynamics, forcible entry, chainsaw work, search and rescue, imposter syndrome (see article in this issue) as well as fire investigations. All registration details are available at www.fswo.ca.