After a year of silence, two former Barrow County fire officials have stepped forward to call a halt to the local rumor mill and to reach out to the public on behalf of the firefighters they left behind.
Former chief Mark Melvin and former deputy chief Russell Wise left Barrow County Emergency Services within weeks of each other last fall. Both at the time declined to explain why.
Recent media coverage of questionable test scoring, undocumented training, and bootfund accounting has created intense pressure within the fire department, and that pressure has spawned some rumors that Melvin and Wise somehow are to blame for the mess.
So on Nov. 10, they requested a meeting with the Barrow Journal.
“There’s some rumors that they are blaming a lot of stuff on us, and we are trying to squash it now and be done with it,” said Melvin.
Added Wise: “I know it has not been an easy year for these people, but they have had a year since we left. If there’s something they don’t agree with, they’re in charge now. They can change it. They don’t have to continue to ride the same old dead horse.”
The interviews last week took place under only one condition — that the names of their current employers not be included in any articles.
Melvin, who left Barrow County on Nov. 6, 2009, is now the deputy chief of another county’s fire department. Wise, who left in October 2009, is now the business manager of an air ambulance service.
The meeting began at 1:30 p.m. at Fatz Cafe in Winder and lasted for more than an hour.
Melvin and Wise welcomed all questions and responded with answers that were open and frank. Only when the discussion turned to former fire chief Mitch Kitchens, whose recent job application ignited the recent controversies, did they hold back.
Asked how he ran the department, neither would respond. Asked if they would ever work for him again, both said they would not.
Former fire officials speak out
KNOCKED OFF TRACK
While Melvin and Wise seemed unable to speak openly about Kitchens or any other former colleague, they did not hold back when it came to assessing who bears the ultimate responsibility for the shape the department is now in.
They said county chairman Danny Yearwood and the Barrow County Board of Commissioners got the department off track last year by forcing the resignation of Chief Robert Post.
“They had the right person; they ran him off,” Wise said. “They had two other right people, but we saw ourselves to the door too.”
The fire department functioned well under Post, they said, who was a seasoned professional, coming to Barrow after retiring with 33 years’ experience as the deputy chief of business services for the Gwinnett County Department of Fire and Emergency Services. “We had a goal, we had purpose, we had direction,” Wise said.
“In talking with Chief Post, you can tell he is a very intelligent man,” he added. “To me, he was a person to study if you want to know about the true cost of manpower and equipment. He was a good mentor.”
Melvin agreed.
“He was great. He’d listen to ideas, and he’s got all that experience from Gwinnett, and if he knew an idea wouldn’t work, he wouldn’t just tell you ‘no,’ he’d tell you, ‘This is why it won’t work.’ And if he thought it was a good idea, he’d give you credit and tell you to run with it. He was a good leader.”
However, when Yearwood took office and began managing the day-to-day operations of the county, fire officials found him less inclined to listen.
“He knows more,” said Melvin with uncharacteristic bluntness. “He’s receiving information from someone. Someone’s educating him on fire service. And he obviously listens to them better than his department head. That was part of the problem.”
Post ran into trouble within a few months of Yearwood’s arrival — primarily over an issue that today appears ironic in light of the disciplinary actions the chairman took this week against the people now running the fire department: training.Facing a multi-milliondollar budget shortfall, Yearwood understandably had a single focus of cutting spending. He directed department heads to approve only state-mandated training, to cut out overtime, and not to allow most county vehicles to be driven home.
After learning that Post had approved a day of training that was hosted here for multiple departments, Yearwood made a call or two and discovered that the training was not statemandated, despite Post’s assurance that it was. Determining that Post had been “untruthful,” he took that and other issues about overtime and vehicle use to the BOC.
Post at the time said he did not intentionally lie about the training but had assumed that the training to meet national firefighting standards also met the state’s standards.
So with the approval of the commissioners, Yearwood suspended Post, and after serving his 40-hour suspension, the chief resigned.
Melvin said fire personnel were stunned by Post’s resignation on March 25, 2009.
“It was disbelief for a while,” he said. “I think most of the department understood the direction he was taking it. We were really stepping up as a department. People around the state noticed that Barrow was stepping up and bringing up the standard.”
Melvin, who had been deputy chief under Post, was appointed as the interim chief but didn’t welcome the change.
“I had no intention to become chief officer of this department,” he said. “I came as a battalion chief, and when Chief Post came, I saw I could learn from him. He took me under his wing, and I wanted to work under him for many years to learn, and it just didn’t work out.”
SECOND-GUESSING AN ISSUE
After Post’s departure, Wise served in the department’s No. 2 position as deputy chief of education and safety, and he and Melvin attempted over the next seven months to maintain some of the goals Post had set.
But they said they found it difficult for the department to function after the loss of the chief as well as other key administrative employees.
“We went from eight people in the office down to three,” Wise said.
Another problem was dealing with Yearwood’s hands-on oversight of the department.
“I would say I had a differing opinion with the chairman at the time,” Melvin said. “I wanted to be more proactive in our response in some of the things we were doing, whereas he was looking at being a little more reactive.”
Melvin said Yearwood would not listen, and he second-guessed standard operating procedures.
Yearwood questioned, for example, why the department sent fire engines on medical calls.
Wise said he explained that it takes more than two emergency personnel to provide emergency medical care — two people to administer CPR, others to open airways or to perform other procedures, and another to drive the ambulance.
Emergency responders in life-threatening emergencies have only 4-6 minutes to prevent brain damage or loss of life, Wise said.
On the firefighting side, Yearwood told Melvin not to send the department’s new ladder truck to fires until after the first units arrived and decided it was needed.
But a fire doubles every minute, Wise explained, and waiting would create an unnecessary delay of 12-15 minutes.
Yearwood also demanded that all equipment remain in operation, even when staffing was short.
“There’s a safety issue on the scene about a single firefighter operating without an intervention team,” Melvin said.
Melvin at the time issued his own directive, telling firefighters to enter a burning building only two at a time and with a two-man backup at the scene.
Asked if Yearwood resisted that directive, Melvin said: “He wasn’t against it but didn’t seem to grasp the concept that you can’t have that with a two-man engine.”
Said Wise: “You are expecting two men on an engine to do an offensive attack, but all they can do is be defensive by policy and really by common sense. You can’t go in a house by yourself.”
While Yearwood often points out that Barrow has a smaller geographic area to cover than other nearby counties, “a house fire is a house fire, whether it’s in Barrow, Gwinnett, Clarke or Jackson,” Wise said.
Asked if Yearwood directed them not to send more than a minimal number of firefighters to incidents, Wise said Yearwood didn’t have to.
Minimum staffing countywide had dropped to 21 by the time Wise and Melvin resigned. But even with Barrow’s full staffing of 12 firefighters and 12 emergency medical technicians or paramedics on each shift, the department operates in a “reactive” mode rather than “proactively” fighting fires, Melvin said.
Every Barrow County fire should have a minimum of two people from one engine to go inside the structure, two on a second back-up line to direct the flow of water, and somebody else on the first truck and an incident commander, he said.
“A minimum of six,” Wise added. “And you just committed half the resources in the county to one structure. That doesn’t include what is going on with other calls in the county and what the ambulance service may be doing.
“You are talking strictly suppression, and you just committed half of the resources to get on the scene.”
THE RESIGNATIONS
Wise and Melvin left within weeks of each other last fall, with Wise out first.
He said his decision boiled down to his inability to support Yearwood as his boss. “When you can’t support the boss, you know what you do? You find a new boss,” he said.
He said the board’s lack of commitment to safe, operable vehicles was another factor.
“We have med units that go through tires at a rapid rate because of the wear pattern from them being out of alignment — an alignment problem they can’t fix and a breaking issue they can’t fix and radio issues… “We were setting up for a catastrophic event,” Wise said.
“I’m not going to say it was going to be a line-of-duty death, but it was going to be a catastrophic event that would mark a lot of people, and I didn’t want to be a part of it. I couldn’t fix it. I wasn’t allowed.”
He said he had hoped his and Melvins’ resignation would get the attention of other county leaders so that things could change.
THE PUBLIC’S DECISION
Wise said he’s not sure the county’s elected leaders and taxpayers grasp the scope of the issues with Barrow County’s emergency services.
“They need to make a decision about what level of emergency services they want and are willing to pay for,” he said. “The public needs to tell the politicians what level of service they want.”
He said he is concerned about the public’s safety and about the fire personnel that he and Melvin left behind.
“We still have people we know, we care about, we helped hire into this system, that are in a bad spot,” Wise said. “And for us to sit on our hands and be quiet, whether there is self gain or self loss, is wrong.”
Wise said the county needs additional fire stations, more manpower, and an annual investment of $1 million in capital equipment so that engines and ambulances are safe to operate.
Melvin agreed but said the most important first step would be for the county chairman to step back.
“I think it’s a simple answer. If the department head could run the department, it would be fine.”
While Melvin and Wise seemed unable to speak openly about Kitchens or any other former colleague, they did not hold back when it came to assessing who bears the ultimate responsibility for the shape the department is now in.
They said county chairman Danny Yearwood and the Barrow County Board of Commissioners got the department off track last year by forcing the resignation of Chief Robert Post.
“They had the right person; they ran him off,” Wise said. “They had two other right people, but we saw ourselves to the door too.”
The fire department functioned well under Post, they said, who was a seasoned professional, coming to Barrow after retiring with 33 years’ experience as the deputy chief of business services for the Gwinnett County Department of Fire and Emergency Services. “We had a goal, we had purpose, we had direction,” Wise said.
“In talking with Chief Post, you can tell he is a very intelligent man,” he added. “To me, he was a person to study if you want to know about the true cost of manpower and equipment. He was a good mentor.”
Melvin agreed.
“He was great. He’d listen to ideas, and he’s got all that experience from Gwinnett, and if he knew an idea wouldn’t work, he wouldn’t just tell you ‘no,’ he’d tell you, ‘This is why it won’t work.’ And if he thought it was a good idea, he’d give you credit and tell you to run with it. He was a good leader.”
However, when Yearwood took office and began managing the day-to-day operations of the county, fire officials found him less inclined to listen.
“He knows more,” said Melvin with uncharacteristic bluntness. “He’s receiving information from someone. Someone’s educating him on fire service. And he obviously listens to them better than his department head. That was part of the problem.”
Post ran into trouble within a few months of Yearwood’s arrival — primarily over an issue that today appears ironic in light of the disciplinary actions the chairman took this week against the people now running the fire department: training.Facing a multi-milliondollar budget shortfall, Yearwood understandably had a single focus of cutting spending. He directed department heads to approve only state-mandated training, to cut out overtime, and not to allow most county vehicles to be driven home.
After learning that Post had approved a day of training that was hosted here for multiple departments, Yearwood made a call or two and discovered that the training was not statemandated, despite Post’s assurance that it was. Determining that Post had been “untruthful,” he took that and other issues about overtime and vehicle use to the BOC.
Post at the time said he did not intentionally lie about the training but had assumed that the training to meet national firefighting standards also met the state’s standards.
So with the approval of the commissioners, Yearwood suspended Post, and after serving his 40-hour suspension, the chief resigned.
Melvin said fire personnel were stunned by Post’s resignation on March 25, 2009.
“It was disbelief for a while,” he said. “I think most of the department understood the direction he was taking it. We were really stepping up as a department. People around the state noticed that Barrow was stepping up and bringing up the standard.”
Melvin, who had been deputy chief under Post, was appointed as the interim chief but didn’t welcome the change.
“I had no intention to become chief officer of this department,” he said. “I came as a battalion chief, and when Chief Post came, I saw I could learn from him. He took me under his wing, and I wanted to work under him for many years to learn, and it just didn’t work out.”
SECOND-GUESSING AN ISSUE
After Post’s departure, Wise served in the department’s No. 2 position as deputy chief of education and safety, and he and Melvin attempted over the next seven months to maintain some of the goals Post had set.
But they said they found it difficult for the department to function after the loss of the chief as well as other key administrative employees.
“We went from eight people in the office down to three,” Wise said.
Another problem was dealing with Yearwood’s hands-on oversight of the department.
“I would say I had a differing opinion with the chairman at the time,” Melvin said. “I wanted to be more proactive in our response in some of the things we were doing, whereas he was looking at being a little more reactive.”
Melvin said Yearwood would not listen, and he second-guessed standard operating procedures.
Yearwood questioned, for example, why the department sent fire engines on medical calls.
Wise said he explained that it takes more than two emergency personnel to provide emergency medical care — two people to administer CPR, others to open airways or to perform other procedures, and another to drive the ambulance.
Emergency responders in life-threatening emergencies have only 4-6 minutes to prevent brain damage or loss of life, Wise said.
On the firefighting side, Yearwood told Melvin not to send the department’s new ladder truck to fires until after the first units arrived and decided it was needed.
But a fire doubles every minute, Wise explained, and waiting would create an unnecessary delay of 12-15 minutes.
Yearwood also demanded that all equipment remain in operation, even when staffing was short.
“There’s a safety issue on the scene about a single firefighter operating without an intervention team,” Melvin said.
Melvin at the time issued his own directive, telling firefighters to enter a burning building only two at a time and with a two-man backup at the scene.
Asked if Yearwood resisted that directive, Melvin said: “He wasn’t against it but didn’t seem to grasp the concept that you can’t have that with a two-man engine.”
Said Wise: “You are expecting two men on an engine to do an offensive attack, but all they can do is be defensive by policy and really by common sense. You can’t go in a house by yourself.”
While Yearwood often points out that Barrow has a smaller geographic area to cover than other nearby counties, “a house fire is a house fire, whether it’s in Barrow, Gwinnett, Clarke or Jackson,” Wise said.
Asked if Yearwood directed them not to send more than a minimal number of firefighters to incidents, Wise said Yearwood didn’t have to.
Minimum staffing countywide had dropped to 21 by the time Wise and Melvin resigned. But even with Barrow’s full staffing of 12 firefighters and 12 emergency medical technicians or paramedics on each shift, the department operates in a “reactive” mode rather than “proactively” fighting fires, Melvin said.
Every Barrow County fire should have a minimum of two people from one engine to go inside the structure, two on a second back-up line to direct the flow of water, and somebody else on the first truck and an incident commander, he said.
“A minimum of six,” Wise added. “And you just committed half the resources in the county to one structure. That doesn’t include what is going on with other calls in the county and what the ambulance service may be doing.
“You are talking strictly suppression, and you just committed half of the resources to get on the scene.”
THE RESIGNATIONS
Wise and Melvin left within weeks of each other last fall, with Wise out first.
He said his decision boiled down to his inability to support Yearwood as his boss. “When you can’t support the boss, you know what you do? You find a new boss,” he said.
He said the board’s lack of commitment to safe, operable vehicles was another factor.
“We have med units that go through tires at a rapid rate because of the wear pattern from them being out of alignment — an alignment problem they can’t fix and a breaking issue they can’t fix and radio issues… “We were setting up for a catastrophic event,” Wise said.
“I’m not going to say it was going to be a line-of-duty death, but it was going to be a catastrophic event that would mark a lot of people, and I didn’t want to be a part of it. I couldn’t fix it. I wasn’t allowed.”
He said he had hoped his and Melvins’ resignation would get the attention of other county leaders so that things could change.
THE PUBLIC’S DECISION
Wise said he’s not sure the county’s elected leaders and taxpayers grasp the scope of the issues with Barrow County’s emergency services.
“They need to make a decision about what level of emergency services they want and are willing to pay for,” he said. “The public needs to tell the politicians what level of service they want.”
He said he is concerned about the public’s safety and about the fire personnel that he and Melvin left behind.
“We still have people we know, we care about, we helped hire into this system, that are in a bad spot,” Wise said. “And for us to sit on our hands and be quiet, whether there is self gain or self loss, is wrong.”
Wise said the county needs additional fire stations, more manpower, and an annual investment of $1 million in capital equipment so that engines and ambulances are safe to operate.
Melvin agreed but said the most important first step would be for the county chairman to step back.
“I think it’s a simple answer. If the department head could run the department, it would be fine.”
looks like mr yearwood is setting himself and the county up for failure.
Volenteer is right. Barrow Co. is not a prime time player! We are back woods and need to realise that fact! If not, we would have not elected a no nothing country pumkin like we did. (you did) Of course you did not have an option (A real estate agent).