It was not only rocket scientists who gave us the ability to safely go the moon and back. It also took a spirit of teamwork, a “can-do” attitude, and spirit of ingenuity by thousands of people. That is one of the things that I admire most about the Fire Service. After 25+ years in the Fire Service, I continue to be amazed at fire crews rising to the challenge with that same can-do attitude.

With Covid-19, first responders have had to change the playbook almost daily. I have settled into a routine of checking all of the morning statistics and reading all that I can as it pertains to Fire Service best practices in response to this pandemic. That is when I came across a short video clip of a Fire Department in the northeast that had made a mass decontamination device out of a paint spray gun and their breathing apparatus. The firefighter was able to decontaminate and stay safe on breathing air at the same time. As I watched the video, I thought to myself, this is the very best of America. We rise to the challenge and invent new ways of doing things better. I was immensely proud of the Fire Service also. We were at the tip-of-the-spear in our nation's response to this pandemic and we were fighting with all our resources.

I showed the video of the contraption to the morning crews that were just coming on. I later walked out of my office and into the bays at around noon and found the crews hard at work on making one of the contraptions. When I left that day at 5 p.m., they had exhausted several design attempts but were still hard at it. It is no easy task to go from 4,500 PSI bottles down to 15 PSI for the spray gun. Our particular brand of breathing apparatus had many non-standard air connections.

In Horseshoe Bay, the crews work a 48 hour on and 96 hour off, work schedule. The crew worked on the device until around 3 p.m. the following day. I walked into the station after a meeting and they proudly presented their device. They had created custom connections and figured out how to make all of them work at the proper pressures so that the firefighter could breathe from the apparatus and use an attached spray gun with a powerful fog spray to decontaminate our apparatus and equipment.