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To look at the tidy little house at 48th and York, you’d think the fire that killed Pearl Gallagher on June 14 didn’t really amount to much. Sheets of plywood cover the windows, but there are no flame-scarred walls, no singed rafters. The flower garden just beyond the front door blooms as if nothing happened. The perky impatiens nestled in a ceramic lamb at the bottom of the steps wait to be watered.

This fire, like most of the 200-odd blazes the Minneapolis Fire Department puts out each year, was pretty routine. The dispatcher downtown got the call at 8:21 p.m., and by 8:24, Engine 28 was on the scene from the station six blocks away. Engine 25 arrived a minute later. The house was already engulfed in smoke, and Gallagher’s son was there telling firefighters that his mother was in the living room. Two firefighters went inside. A third engine, number 22, pulled up at 8:27, just as the first ladder truck showed up. Five minutes later, a heavy rescue crew arrived.

Meanwhile, inside the house, firefighters couldn’t find Pearl Gallagher. She wasn’t in the living room at the front of the house as her son had thought. Fighting through thick smoke, they finally found her in the rear of the house, where she had collapsed from smoke inhalation. At 8:38, firefighters pulled the 70-year-old woman from the house and began efforts to revive her. Soon she was hustled off to the hospital.

Four days later, Pearl Gallagher was dead.

To a civilian reading through an official incident report, a tragedy like this is both instructive and provocative. Firefighting is romanticized all the time—never more than in the past two years—but it is a highly technical and tactical profession. Every second counts, and every firefighter has a specialized job to do. When you lose time or have the wrong equipment or not enough firefighters, the results can go from bad to worse in a hurry.

An expert looking dispassionately at the circumstances surrounding Gallagher’s death would say that our fire department did its job. Four firefighters were at the scene in less than five minutes. That is within standards established by the National Fire Protection Association. Fifteen firefighters were there within eight minutes—another NFPA standard.

It’s certainly true that people sometimes die in fires even when the department is firing on all cylinders. Still, in firehouses around the city, Gallagher’s death added fuel to a smoldering controversy. Budget cuts at the Minneapolis Fire Department have resulted in layoffs and ladder-company closings—including a ladder company at Station 27, less than three miles from Gallagher’s house. Ladder trucks and crews are key to ventilating a burning building—cutting holes in the roof to help clear the air inside. Could Pearl Gallagher have been saved if the ladder crew from Station 27 had answered the alarm, rather than the one at Station Eight at 28th and Blaisdell, a mile and a half farther away? Would it have made a difference if there had been four firefighters on those three engines, instead of three? Nobody will say for sure. But one firefighter told me, “Four minutes less in that atmosphere, would her chances be better? Yes.”

Many people, some of them in positions of authority, have no idea what a Minneapolis firefighter actually does. They don’t know that firefighters are the city’s first responders, and that they make tens of thousands of runs to “medicals” all over the city, including shut-ins who have no contact with the outside world other than with whoever responds to a 911 call. People don’t know that it usually takes more than one firefighter to lay down “charged” hose, because one firefighter can’t pull hose past more than two 90-degree turns. And people don’t realize that one of the most important things firefighters do is knock holes in things, to provide lifesaving air.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, fire stations are no bastions of card-playing, truck-washing layabouts, shuffling around the station until some opportunity for heroism beckons. At least once every half-hour, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, a crew is being dispatched somewhere in the city on an emergency medical call. They are the first to arrive when somebody’s suffering a heart attack or a gunshot wound. Crews also responded to more than 9,000 calls last year to handle various other “hazardous conditions.”

There are fires, of course. The numbers have declined steadily over the past 30 years, especially as older commercial properties have either burned down or come up to code, with sprinklers and the like. There were 724 structural fires in 1970, compared to 261 last year. Still, the number of people needed to battle even a routine blaze hasn’t really changed.

The crew of the first engine to arrive on the scene usually sends two people in—one with a charged hose—for search and rescue. With a four-person crew, one starts the pump and another provides support for the “attack line” (the first hose in)—helping to feed hose if it gets stuck rounding more than two corners or if it gets lodged beneath the wheel of a car. As a result of budget cuts, that fourth person now often comes from the crew in the second engine to arrive on the scene, which can cost the first crew valuable time in its search-and-rescue efforts.

Equally vital is the arrival of the ladder company, which is called upon to ventilate the structure by chopping holes in the roof to let out the smoke. Inside a burning house, firefighters generally cannot see more than a few inches in front them; they navigate by feeling along the walls. Also, without proper ventilation, volatile gases can accumulate and explode.The fierce debate about public safety in Minneapolis has all the makings of an epic Hollywood disaster flick: Heroic rank-and-file firefighters seethe with anger over their betrayal at the hands of an ambitious chief; the chief’s love for number crunching has left him estranged from the people on the rigs he once captained; the City Council and mayor are at odds with a militant union and generally clueless about the risks their decisions have created; and a city full of people blithely goes about its business, assuming that when you call 911, somebody’s going to show up in time.

Last January, when city leaders first began to get a whiff of the budget-cutting climate at the Capitol, Mayor R.T. Rybak asked each department manager in the city to put together a business plan reflecting the prospect of large cuts in state aid to Minneapolis. Fire Chief Rocco Forte and his staff eagerly dived into the task of redefining fire department operations and in May released a business plan that—depending on whom you’re talking to—is either the envy of every city manager or a prescription for disaster.

The plan is a 79-page document. It is filled with trends and initiatives, revenue models, and staffing strategies. It also paints a slightly schizoid picture of the future of firefighting in Minneapolis. The plan is so loaded with wacky, desperate ideas for how to raise money (advertising on fire trucks, emergency medical services for public events, pull tabs), you’re tempted to think that someday soon all ladder trucks will come equipped with espresso bars and slot machines. Then you glance at the more sober long-range finance plan, and you begin to wonder whether firefighting operations in 2008 will largely consist of a two-person bucket brigade showing up in a station wagon.

Minneapolis already employs fewer firefighters than any other comparably sized city in the country. But the Minneapolis Fire Department will be getting a lot leaner in the next five years, if state aid to the city continues to decline at the rate projected by Rybak and the City Council, and if they follow the plan authored by Chief Forte. Average daily staffing levels will drop from 97 firefighters today to about 85 next year, before dipping to 84 in 2005. Here, at the midpoint of his projections, Forte says we’ve reached the “absolute minimum level of daily staffing required to maintain safe and effective emergency and fire response for the citizens of the City of Minneapolis.” But terrifyingly, the plan doesn’t stop there. Projected department cuts of more than $700,000 in both 2006 and 2007 will bring the daily staffing down to 80. Another $211,000 cut in 2008 and we’ve got 79 firefighters on duty each day.

It may seem an odd exercise for Chief Forte to visualize so dutifully the complete and utter evisceration of his own department. (Police Chief Robert Olson’s response to the council’s request, by contrast, essentially was to flip them the bird.) But Forte is a numbers guy, someone who’s happy to trot out a doomsday scenario to make a political point. What that point may be exactly (leverage in current union negotiations, a slap at Pawlenty and Republican legislators, a testimony to his own administrative brilliance), only the chief seems to know.

Forte has already closed two of the less-busy ladder companies (Number 8 on the South Side and Number 7 in Northeast) and is now running three-person crews on 12 of the city’s 19 engines. The business plan hints at hiring college students and volunteer firefighters to take up the slack.

To fully grasp the enormity of these projected cuts, consider that the recent fire on East Lake Street that destroyed a partially constructed housing project required the attention of 70 firefighters. That left fewer than 30 to cover the rest of the city. And though it’s relatively rare for two structural fires to break out at any one time (there were 18 such instances in 2002), those 30 firefighters also had to be available for EMS runs. The upshot is this: Based on our present budgetary course, the Minneapolis Fire Department’s ability to do its job is already being tested. It will be severely hampered as early as next year. It will be effectively crippled by 2006. “If staffing is reduced below the level of 84 personnel deployed on response vehicles,” the plan warns, “the Minneapolis Fire Department will not be able to handle more than one structural line fire simultaneously and still be able to provide effective emergency medical service in the city.”

The cuts sparked union protests at City Hall last spring. Even more embarrassing, last month at a conference in Canada, our very own fire department was singled out by International Association of Fire Fighters president Harold Schaitberger as the worst example of cuts in service at any fire department in the United States. In a speech to fire chiefs of North America’s largest cities, he called the situation in Minneapolis “a recipe for disaster.” He said, “Minneapolis is not Podunk! It is a big city with big-city fires and emergencies that require fully trained personnel and safe staffing that complies with national standards.” Chief Forte—who says he was “disheartened” by Schaitberger’s statement—is quick to note that he won’t be happy until he has 27 rigs carrying four firefighters each. The business plan, he says, is all about “contingencies.” He says he has no intention of having his department operate anywhere near those levels. But critics say the department has already downshifted toward a firefighting strategy based on fewer ladders and fewer personnel. (Forte has already been given permission by the council to replace several older trucks with combination ladder-and-engine units, called “quints,” which are designed to be run with three people. The union’s view is that quints are a safety compromise.) “I’m sure he was trying to do a good job, trying to trim the fat,” says Tom Thornberg, president of the Minneapolis Firefighters Association. “What made the firefighters so angry with the chief was that he was the first guy to wave his plan in the council’s face. He stepped right up to the plate and said, ‘Here you go; here’s how we can do it.’ The council called him the best city manager ever, and the firefighters were like, ‘What are you doing?’”While the union seethed over the chief’s apparent eagerness to cut jobs, the rank and file wondered out loud why the council couldn’t dip into some of its reserve funds to keep the department fully staffed. Some pointed to the $30 million “Hilton Fund” (money earned from the sale of the downtown Hilton hotel); others looked to the millions already in question in the city’s embattled Neighborhood Revitalization Program. The council demurred on both counts, arguing that none of these funds were available.

I took the question to the council myself. “If pushed hard enough, we would tap into the Hilton money,” says 10th Ward Council Member Dan Niziolek, chair of the council’s Public Safety and Regulatory Services Committee. “But if we tap into it right now, we’ll lose 50 percent of its value. We’d be writing off millions of dollars, and that has long-term implications.”

There’s not a lot of NRP money, he explains, and it’s tied up legally with legislative mandates. The best bet may be money from Target Center, which he says should be going into the city’s general fund. But if there’s a change coming, it won’t be anytime soon. “Nobody liked the choices we had to make this year,” he says. “We’re not at a level that we’re happy with right now, and the major effort right now is to rebuild the strength of our public safety.”

What that effort might entail at this point is anyone’s guess, since Niziolek and the rest of the council seem to be leaning happily on Chief Forte’s assurances that he’ll be able to turn the department into a profit center sometime before the next five-alarm blaze. But if that fire happens first, one wonders who in City Hall will get burned the worst—the accommodating chief or the city council playing Russian roulette.

One of the reasons Forte is well-liked by the council is that he seems to be making the numbers work. He argues that his new deployment strategy—mixing and matching three- and four-person crews and juggling ventilation and other ladder company duties between the crews of whatever apparatus arrives first on the scene—has allowed the department to maintain its response times with fewer resources. Indeed, he points to a May 3 fire at 29th and Ulysses in Northeast Minneapolis as an example of how the department can respond with fewer people and fewer ladder companies. “It is critical at this point in time to get more flexibility out of our existing suppression force, and our incident command system and deployment strategies allow us to do just that,” Forte wrote in a May 6 email to firefighter Josh Tunks. “I want to emphasize that our system is working exactly the way it was presented to [the] council.”

What about Pearl Gallagher? Would Ladder 8 have made a difference? When I ask Chief Forte point-blank, he bristles slightly before replying that the department “met all the standards” in responding to that fire. He says he’d need 38 rigs to fully staff every station in the city. Sometimes, no matter how many firefighters you’ve got, people still die, he says. “I don’t want to appear callous, but we had fire deaths before the budget cuts and we’re going to have fire deaths after the budget cuts.”



I hear they’re riding four to a rig up at Station 14, but when I show up mid-morning on the Fourth of July to get a glimpse of a fully staffed outfit, the big red doors are open and both rigs are gone. A guy unloading cases of soda from a station wagon tells me the crews are out and about.

The vintage station at 33rd and James has the look of a Carnegie library, all blond brick and neo-deco flourishes with real brass firepoles. It’s spartan and slightly soiled, nicely echoing the look of this quiet North Side neighborhood. Before long, the big ladder truck rolls up and backs gingerly into the garage. The captain jumps out of the cab to greet me. “Fire already this morning?” I ask. “Nope,” he says, flashing a sandwich from Subway. “Lunch.”

He invites me into the cramped kitchen and dining area at the back of the station, where ESPN plays on a TV overlooking the table, and the rest of the crew is quickly assembling a meal. A bulletin board carries various official-looking documents and, I notice, a press clipping announcing Pearl Gallagher’s death. On the clipping someone has scrawled in black magic marker an undecipherable comment relating to the recent layoffs.

Around the table, small talk easily turns to grousing about the chief’s five-year plan and his betrayal of the rank and file. “People heard about being laid off on the TV news,” one firefighter says. Another speculates that Forte wants to create and run a county-wide fire department. Yet another laments the long distance they have to travel to cover for a Northeast ladder company that has been shut down.Before the bile can really get flowing, though, a scratchy loudspeaker announces a car fire at 29th and Girard. The crew flies through the kitchen door, climbs into their boots, pulls up their suspendered pants, grabs their jackets and helmets, and is out the door.

I’m maybe a minute behind them when I spy the red sedan and the embarrassed woman on the corner. Whatever fire there was has been extinguished, and the crew is already climbing back on the big truck. Later, back at the station, I ask the firefighter on the tiller (who steers the rear end of the truck) the cause of the fire. “Fireworks,” she says, with a grimace. “We’ll be busy tonight.”

Talk with firefighters—especially some of the almost 40 percent of the force who have been hired in the past five years—and you can’t help being struck by how passionate they are about their job. And if it’s part of some post-9/11 hero posing, I’m not seeing it. These people are jazzed about what they do. “I love the ambiguity of it,” one guy tells me. “You never know what’s going to happen from one day to the next.”

Rocco Forte also loves his job. But to talk to the chief is to descend into a realm of firefighting that most firefighters neither completely understand nor respect. This is the world of NFPA standards and department accreditation, strategic planning and council politics.



“I’m a statistics person,” Chief Forte tells me, as we sit at a conference table in his spacious office. “I look at the fire department as a business.” Forte’s come a long way from his North Side childhood to this corner office on the third floor of City Hall. A 29-year veteran of the force, the gray-haired, crisply dressed chief says he first fell in love with firefighting during navy boot camp in the 70s, and the passion he once felt for putting out real fires in houses he now uses for putting out administrative fires in the department.

Even his fiercest critics admit that, at least as a manager, Forte may have no peer in City Hall. Most agree that his work on the diversity issue over the past several years has been superlative, and some, like firefighter Jeremy Norton, admit that while the cuts have not been handled with great elegance, the chief at least seems to appreciate the severity of the city’s fiscal crisis. “Rocco’s been doing a great job being an efficient manager,” Norton says ruefully. “To the detriment of the rank and file.”

Elsewhere, the accolades flow more freely. “We have a very efficient Fire Department,” says the City Council’s Niziolek. “The chief has clearly demonstrated to us what the impacts of the cuts are. Other managers, you won’t take them seriously.”

Even so, Forte doesn’t seem too concerned about what others think of him. He’s more concerned about making his numbers. “It’s an interesting dynamic when you get blamed for being too efficient,” he says, when I ask him about union allegations that he was too quick to cooperate with the council on the budget cuts. He’s heard all the criticism about the public safety risks and his alleged betrayal of the rank and file that has come in the wake of the five-year plan. But he argues that he’s not at all happy about cutting his force. “The worst thing I’ve had to face in my career was having a firefighter friend die in a fire,” he says. “The second worst were these layoffs.”

He says his plan simply lays out the various scenarios if the budget is cut further. It is, he argues, all about contingencies. “We’re getting further and further away from where we should be,” he says, pointing to the projected staffing cuts in the plan on the table before us. “We should be at 109 to 110 firefighters on duty per day. This chart is not something I’m recommending. We won’t go here,” he says. He points to a gray line denoting a daily staffing level of 79.

The cuts, he explains, are simply a management problem, one that can be solved with a little innovation and a hefty dose of patience on the part of everyone involved. Resources are getting tighter for the city, so the department has to reinvent itself as a profit center, find new ways to pay for the staffing and equipment the city can’t afford.He points to certificates from the National Fire Academy that line the walls of his office. He’s been attending the academy since 1983 and credits the training he’s received there for his improved managerial skills. It was the academy that stressed the importance of writing a department business plan. It was the academy that pushed him to find new revenue sources.

Those moneymaking sources are out there to be tapped, Forte argues. The department last year increased its revenues by 69 percent and expects to raise them by another 20 percent this year. He says the county will soon be paying the department for extricating people from their vehicles after accidents; he’s confident he’ll be able to collect insurance money for EMS runs; and the department will soon be getting paid for doing housing inspections. NASCAR-like ads on all the rigs are a little less certain, he says. “Nobody’s done that yet.”

If anyone’s going to do it, it’s Forte. To him, it all makes perfect business sense, part of a larger goal of getting the department national accreditation, something he says fewer than 60 departments nationwide have achieved. (Burnsville has the only accredited fire department in Minnesota.) Accreditation could lower the city’s insurance rates and help Forte hunt down more federal grant money, but it would also elevate the department into the nation’s elite forces—and raise Forte’s already sterling public profile. To do that, though, the department must get back to the staffing levels it enjoyed before this spring’s budget cuts, whether by crazy money-generating schemes or a serious reality check at the council.

“The key is January and the 2004 budget,” Forte says. “[Local Government Aid] cuts won’t be as severe and the financial initiatives could help.” If all goes well, there will be no new layoffs, he’ll bring back as many of the laid-off firefighters as he can afford, and he’ll get the cadet class back in school. “We’re going to get these firefighters back,” he says.

Daniel Casper, for one, is hoping the chief is right. Hired in June 2002, the 36-year-old former teacher graduated from rookie class in December and was laid off with 44 other firefighters (10 others took early retirement) in April. Since then, he’s been lobbying the chief and City Council members to come clean to the public about the risks inherent in the cuts that claimed his job.

“The frustrating thing has been trying to convince the powers that be that there is an issue, trying to convince the City Council that it wasn’t just about a bunch of people angry about their layoffs,” he says. “This is an issue for everybody.”

Casper says he took a 40-percent pay cut when he gave up his teaching position in the Hopkins School District to sign on as a firefighter. He was attracted by the sheer physicality of the job, he says, and by the way it translates public service into day-to-day results. He waited two years to get onto the force (“and that’s fast,” he says), survived a rookie school that featured all the discipline and focus he could ask for (“the captains were real drill sergeants”), and was finally assigned to a station just when rumors of layoffs were on the breeze.

“I had this captain on my ladder company who was always trying to get me to take a chew of tobacco. He said they’d never lay off firefighters. I told him, ‘If you’re right and it doesn’t happen, I’ll take a chew,’” Casper recalls. He won the bet but lost his job. Today, Casper spends his days sitting nervously in the passenger seat of driver-training cars, his foot steady on the extra brake, as his teenage student drivers navigate unsteadily on streets he once surveyed from the tiller of a big red ladder truck. He figures he’s pretty low on the department’s call-back list, but what that means is anybody’s guess right now.

It’s hard for somebody from outside the culture of firefighters to grasp the allure of this job, the connections forged between people working together every day to save lives, but here’s Daniel Casper, whose aborted firefighting career amounted to no more than a few 24-hour shifts, sitting at his dining-room table talking passionately about the dangers his brothers and sisters on the force—and the people of Minneapolis—are now facing daily. It’s a little like my cousin Ron who got his leg shot up in Vietnam and fought with the desk jockeys who ordered him to go home. To him, it just wasn’t right to leave his buddies out there in harm’s way.

At the big Lake Street fire in June, Casper watched from the sidelines as crew after crew battled the three-alarm blaze through the night. At one point, he ran into Chief Forte, who assured him that he’d soon be calling people back to work. But Casper left unconvinced. “The rumors are all over the place,” he says. “I’ve just heard so many possibilities, and I don’t know how viable they are. It could be years.”

Then, in mid-July, Casper and his compatriots were summoned to the newly remodeled Station Six, where Forte and Rybak acknowledged that the St. Paul Fire Department was adding to its force by aggressively recruiting the already-trained firefighters Minneapolis apparently can no longer afford to employ. Rybak and Forte told them that the department’s revenue-generating plans are moving along so well that they hope to be able to bring all 32 of them back in January.

Even leaving aside the bizarre notion that St. Paul, whose population is 100,000 less than Minneapolis, may, by the end of the year, have as many firefighters as its upstream neighbor, Rybak’s announcement rises effortlessly to the level of parody. Imagine the scene: The mayor and the fire chief plead with the firefighters whose jobs they just axed to hold on for a few more months so that the city’s mammoth training investment (a cool $1.6 million) isn’t stolen by the sharps across the river whose own budget-cutting process has apparently allowed them to increase their firefighting force.

The mayor’s message was received with guarded enthusiasm by many of the assembled, including Casper, who says that he now hopes the mayor and the council finally get it. “It still remains to be seen,” he says. “I do feel a certain sense of allegiance to Minneapolis, and so, in some ways, I don’t like the idea of a group of us migrating. At the same time, it would be crazy for anybody in our position not to apply and not to keep our options open.”

The upshot of the episode is that Rybak and the council are going to get their pockets picked. And why not? St. Paul officials figure they’re probably saving close to $100,000 in training and recruitment costs for each Mill City firefighter they can poach. “I can’t imagine that Minne-apolis is not looking at losing a significant number of firefighters. It’s a loss in terms of really good people,” Casper says. “I’m a little disappointed that something more dramatic couldn’t have been done to prevent this.”

So Daniel Casper will wait, vacillating between taking another teaching job or holding out hope that what Forte and Rybak told him will eventually come to pass. The rest of us, meanwhile, are left with hoping our luck holds out.


Craig Cox is executive editor of Utne magazine and editor of The Minneapolis Observer.