Report From Engine Co. 82 - Dennis Smith [2]
It’s impossible to see impoverished families living in these neighborhoods and not ask why things haven’t changed in the last thirty years. It’s not enough to shrug and say, “The poor have always been and always will be,” or, as my mother used to say, “God loves the poor, and that’s why He made so many of them.” How many years are needed before a national consensus demands that residents of our country live in decent, safe, and well-kept housing? Particularly among the upper classes, there seems to be more concern for ideas written about art than about Americans who are poor, and anyone riding through these needful neighborhoods can see that a truly decent, civilized society would be better judged, not by its art, but by how it cares for its poor.
The poverty of the ’90s is not much different from the poverty of the South Bronx in the ’60s, or even from the poverty I knew coming of age on the east side of New York in the '50s. The absence of money is still less important than the absence of good food, good housing, and the belief in a positive future. The young, cocky malcontents I see on the streets of the South Bronx today are no better educated and no better prepared for employment than they were when I watched them from the back of a fire truck. Most important, those young people don’t think they’re a part of America’s future, but separate, isolated, and uncared for. This is the crux of our society’s shame, and the tragedy of our present.
Social conditions directly affect the firefighter’s work. The Bronx today continues to be one of the highest fire-hit areas of the world. In every city, the amount of fires and false alarms is always highest in poorer neighborhoods.
The firefighters you will meet in this book are no different from the firefighters who are closest to your home. I know firefighters in almost every state from Maine to California, and I also know that men and women who fight fires experience similar hazards and gratifications wherever they’re located. A firefighter in a company that responds to a hundred calls a year can find himself in the same kind of collapsed building as one working in a company that responds to five thousand alarms each year. And he’ll take the same pride in his work when he carries someone from a burning building or cuts someone out of a wrecked car.
Firefighters respond with alarming regularity in the United States. Our fire load is a problem that plagued America when I wrote this book, and continues to plague us much more than other industrialized countries. In the last year there were nearly two million fires in America and over four thousand fire-related deaths, resulting in almost $9 billion in financial loss. Ninety-six firefighters died in the line of duty. I continue to be hopeful that Report from Engine Co. 82 will make more people conscious of the hazards of fire, for awareness is the only way to reduce such startling numbers.
This book changed my life, and since its publication I have gone on to write nine other books; create a national magazine for firefighters, Firehouse; start several fire-fighting-related businesses; and institute the Foundation for the Health and Safety of American Firefighters. I couldn’t have done any of these things without Report from Engine Co. 82, because it gave me a credible platform for addressing the important issues that affect firefighters everywhere. Representing such courageous, committed people has been, and continues to be, a great privilege.
Firefighters may be the most ubiquitous civil servants we have. Think of any natural or man-made disaster you might have seen on television or read about in newspapers. A building is bombed; a hundred buildings collapse in an earthquake; a flood cascades through a town, flattening everything before it; a fire speeds from town to town, devouring houses the way