Leaders model the vulnerability and early intervention that can shift fire service culture from reacting to crises to catching the embers before they ignite
“Culture doesn’t change with words alone. What really makes the difference is modeling. Vulnerability from leaders doesn’t make you less of a firefighter.”
Lt. Tyler Capron said those words to me in his office at Boulder Fire Rescue earlier this year. Twenty years on the job, VP of IAFF Local 900, part of a 12-person peer-support team. This was not a one-off standpoint, rather a summary of what I’ve heard from many chiefs: the fire service is still struggling to build a prevention discipline for the people who run into the building, not just the building itself.
We inspect buildings and enforce code because someone decided a long time ago that catching a problem early isn’t optional. We do the same with apparatus, response times, staffing. The one part of the operation we still don’t forward-protect is the person doing the job.
The tools we’ve got are built to respond after the alarm and everything is derived from the “loss” that occurred. CISM kicks in once a call has gone bad. Peer support gets paged when someone’s in crisis. The EAP sits on a bulletin board. None of these tools are bad, they are just responsive and built for a fire that’s already burning.
Prevention Must Start With the People, Not the Incident
When you look at any station, the embers are everywhere else. It’s the firefighter running hot after a rough stretch of nights, the volunteer who stops showing up, the veteran whose coping started cracking at home long before anyone saw it on the floor. If your department misses it, then six months later you’re looking at a comp claim, a resignation, or worse. The Firefighter Behavioral Health Alliance counted 112 firefighter and EMT suicides in 2024. That’s only what we know after the fact.
The heart-wrenching part is that the core of the fire service is helping others. ”Officers are tight-knit with their crews. They know when something’s changing,” says Marie Balak, a firefighter and peer-support team member. But what is lacking is the agency and nudge to reach out for help. And at times, it’s also plain to see that what’s missing – beyond seeing the pattern before it turns into a call for help – is the ability to point people to the right, most effective resources. (Queue in the oft-cited story of the city therapist breaking into tears when hearing the first responder’s story!)
And it doesn’t stop at the firehouse: a dispatcher carries the same calls, alone, with nobody keying up on the radio to take the weight for a minute. What’s more, most American firefighters are volunteers. One chief I talked with this year has watched young volunteers – who never got the chance to process what they saw – walk away for good after hard calls. As 24-hour crews give way to shorter shifts, you lose the overnight hours where people actually used to talk, and nothing has come along to replace them.
“Data drives funding in today’s fire service,” Capron says. “If you can’t provide it, any peer program looks like a cost instead of an investment.” So we need to treat readiness the way we treat an apparatus check. It has to come from the top, and it has to be measured from day one with real numbers, not anyone’s personal story.
Early Check-ins Can Change Outcomes Before They Become Crises
Now, full disclaimer, the check-in tool I’m about to describe is mine. My company built it. In Hyannis, Mass., a peer-support team led by Rich Alger is running a trial. First responders get on their phones and do a check-in that reads tone, language, and expression over time. The results belong to the firefighter and to nobody else.
Two things happen from there: When readiness starts sliding, the platform nudges that person to reach out to someone they already know or access available resources.
On the peer side, when participants opt in to share anonymized data, an organization sees aggregate patterns and the impact of certain events on operations, past and future. It delivers a layer of information the department didn’t have before.
Of course privacy is everyone’s utmost concern. Will the captain see my score? Can the chief pull it into my file? That worry isn’t paranoia. But if you think about it, this is also what has kept the service struggling for decades. People keep their distance from the support that’s already right there because of the fear of judgment. The platform flips this around by providing a safe space that has not existed to date. Many leaders we talk to, including in DoD, put it plainly: “Chiefs don’t need individual details, that would break trust, but we do need to see usage and trends.” Individual scores stay with the firefighter. The department sees patterns.
What Officers Can Do Today
If you’re a company officer, you don’t need an enterprise rollout to start catching embers on your shift. Make the conversation normal, so “you good?” stops being a question nobody answers honestly. Rather focus on “are you ready?” When behavior changes, fold it into the post-incident cleanup, the same as picking up hose. Have the peer-support number ready before you need it. And model the thing yourself. If you’re burned out, say so. When the officer lets the crew see that they’re human, everyone else gets a little room to be human, too.
If you’re good at your job, people will follow you. That’s how culture shifts.
My question is smaller than any rollout: on your shift, who’s the ember you already know about, and what would it take to catch it this week?
If you want to see what the check-in actually looks like, come find me. I’m happy to walk you through it.
Greg Menvielle is CEO of Okaya, an AI-powered readiness platform for first responders and military operators, currently under a U.S. Air Force SBIR Phase II.
Photo by Steve Baer | FireDog Photos
