By Rick Edinger
“Let him who is without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her.” John 8:7
Recently the International Association of Fire Chiefs partnered with Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration to convene a summit of hazmat response leaders to discuss working relationships with the rail industry.
Train derailments involving significant hazardous materials releases are low-frequency, high-consequence events, and historically they haven’t always gone smoothly for responders and railroads. Many incidents left everyone involved frustrated.
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Those stories often live on in training rooms. Responders who may never see a derailment hear the “war stories” and walk away with negative expectations about potential response partners.
In more than 50 years in public safety, I’ve seen similar dynamics play out again and again. Early in my volunteer days it was rivalry between neighboring fire companies. Later it was tension between volunteer and career firefighters — something that still exists in some places. In the hazmat world, industry partners — railroads, pipelines, or fixed facilities — were sometimes viewed with suspicion or even outright distrust.
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What was usually missing was simple: conversation. Rarely did anyone make a real effort to reach out, build relationships, or clear the air. Instead, the same negative stories were passed down from one generation to the next, shaping perceptions about people we barely knew.
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Today we might say we were talking past each other.
The Summit of Hazmat Leaders Unified Command Workshop was designed to change that. It brought together rail representatives, emergency responders, and government agencies to sit down face-to-face and discuss the problems people believed existed, some real and some imagined — and how to move forward.
The theme was working together within the incident command system under unified command, but much more than that evolved. A pending full report will outline the ensuring recommendations and action items, but several themes were clear.
- You can’t build or maintain relationships if you don’t talk to each other.
- It’s hard to trust someone you don’t know.
- What looks like someone else’s shortcoming is often just a misunderstanding.
- Perceptions aren’t reality until they’re validated.
- Talking through issues usually leads to a better understanding of why others act the way they do.
This may sound like advice from a marriage counselor, but the principle is the same. Relationships require effort, attention, and maintenance. When people are forced to work together under stressful conditions without those relationships already in place, stress increases and the chances of failure go up.
After two and a half days of conversation and planning, the result was simple but important: people understood each other better. Relationships were built. Trust was developed. Participants committed to continuing the dialogue and expanding it to others in their respective fields.
Is that world peace? Of course not. But if we continue building and maintaining these relationships between emergency responders, industry, and government agencies, we stand a much better chance of avoiding past mistakes — and making the next emergency incident a safer and more effective one.
You can follow and connect with Chief Edinger via LinkedIn.
