First hall of fame class shows ever-changing firefighting history in Chattanooga

Dec. 31--The roles and accomplishments of three former fire chiefs who became the first inductees into the Chattanooga Fire Department's Hall of Fame earlier this year highlight the ever-changing history of firefighting in the Scenic City.

The chiefs -- the late W.H. "Harry" Jett, Joe Knowles and now-Hamilton County Mayor Jim Coppinger -- were honored for taking the fire department from a simple "put wet stuff on red stuff" methodology to being prepared for car wrecks, hazardous materials spills, cave-ins, backcountry and water rescue -- the worst nature and man can devise.

The Chattanooga Fire Department harks back to the Civil War, when firefighting techniques were limited to literally throwing water on fire.

As Chattanooga leaders in 1865 reorganized the city's government, including taking over fire protection from occupying military forces, they formed an all-volunteer department of 105 men.

From then till now, the focus of growth and improvement of the city's fire protection -- and fire protection the world over -- revolved around manpower, equipment, water supply and speed.

The department started out with one donated engine, a few feet of hose and fire hydrants on a few corners around downtown, according to historical accounts of the Chattanooga Fire Department History Book Committee organized in the early 1970s.

Today, more than 400 firefighters serving at 19 stations protect about 150 square miles in a city of more than 170,000 people.

The equipment is state-of-the-art almost across the board, tailored over decades to meet the demands of the city's terrain, infrastructure and industry.

But it didn't get that way by chance.

***

Jett had been a firefighter since 1936, almost his entire adult life.

He worked in the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s, served in World War II and spent his early firefighting career at Station No. 1.

When he returned from military service, he went back to his beloved fire department.

"He really loved these guys [firefighters] and just thought the world of them," said his son, Steve Jett. His father was promoted to chief in 1972, leading the department until his retirement in 1976.

Steve Jett's earliest memories are of his father in action. The firefighter's routine even invaded Jett's slumber when he was off duty.

"He could be at home asleep and if a phone rang in the night, he would roll over and reach for his boots," Steve Jett said with a chuckle. "It was like a fire alarm. He would reach for boots that weren't there."

As a youngster, Steve Jett saw firsthand the frightening scenes and danger his father sometimes faced.

One time, in 1949, a military plane crashed on Missionary Ridge, killing B-25 pilot Capt. William E. Blair.

"We lived over on 13th Street in Highland Park, and I remember looking up and seeing parachutes," Steve Jett said. "The pilot kept it in the air and kept it from crashing into Highland Park or Ridgedale."

Blair had ordered his crew to bail out, then he steered the plane clear of homes, a school and congested areas before crashing on the ridge.

"I remember going up there with my dad, and all I can remember is all the smoke and debris," Steve Jett said of what the scene looked like.

Then in 1951, he saw a newspaper article and photograph showing his father being carried out of the downtown Sears Roebuck fire, one of several firefighters hospitalized after that blaze for smoke inhalation.

But, "to me, the most significant thing that went on was annexation," Steve Jett said of the challenges facing the department during his father's career in the 1960s and 1970s. "That's when annexation was in full bloom. [The city] annexed parts of East Brainerd and Hixson and places like that."

During those years, Chattanooga's population and geographic size increased and new stations were added in the Highway 58 area, on Lee Highway, and in Brainerd and Hixson.

In 1973, the fire department took over the ambulance service from private operations, a move that also became a major part of successor Joe Knowles' career. Jett also worked to replace old stations and relocated some facilities forced to move by the construction of U.S. Highway 27 through downtown as the city continued to grow.

"The whole life of a firefighter is a life for which he must fully prepare and continually reinforce," Jett wrote in a letter to then-Chattanooga Commissioner Gene Roberts about his beloved department.

Jett died in February 2007, a month short of his 96th birthday.

***

Knowles started out in 1952 as a 19-year-old member of Chattanooga's police department, but it wasn't long before he transferred to the fire department, eventually becoming fire chief in 1976. As a firefighter, trainer and leader through the 1960s and 1970s, he saw the department grow into its modern form.

He spent much of his life as a trainer and trainee, attending 32 schools during his career. For more than nine years, he taught at the state fire school in Murfreesboro, Tenn., where he learned more about hazardous materials, radioactive materials and radiological monitoring.

In the 1970s, he mounted an effort to increase the amount of training firefighters receive, and he sought to ready the general public to help one another. One new life-saving technique he taught was cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR.

"We eventually trained every fire company in rescue procedures and equipped every firetruck with what they called a 'red box' at the time," he said.

The "red box" held resuscitation equipment a trained firefighter could use to try to keep someone from dying.

"Every class I had when I was teaching in the state fire school, I taught everybody in there how to give resuscitation. I made it part of my class," he said.

Also, the Chattanooga City Commission approved the purchase of a truck equipped with safety equipment and fire extinguishers so Knowles could travel the city training staff at nursing homes and health care facilities on fire safety and lifesaving techniques in the early 1970s.

But the skills he was teaching were known only by a few back then.

"One time I was over at Memorial [Hospital] -- I had about 20 in a class I was teaching on resuscitation -- I said, 'I feel funny with you all knowing as much as you do and me teaching,'" Knowles recollected. "They said, 'Yeah, but you've got a good technique that we want to learn.'"

They were good students.

And one of them would factor largely in Knowles' life.

***

Gray skies loomed over Cherokee Boulevard as a cold rain fell on the morning of Nov. 10, 1983.

Memorial Hospital nurse Saundra Lloyd was driving home from her shift at the hospital.

As Lloyd headed north on Cherokee Boulevard, a man in an oncoming Ford LTD lost control on the slippery pavement and spun into her path.

Their eyes met for an instant before the two cars violently slammed together.

Lloyd, bruised and battered, was pulled from her Oldsmobile Cutlass by bystanders.

She asked about the driver of the other car.

"He's dead," they told her. "There's nothing you can do for him."

Lloyd scrambled for her first aid kit, made her way to the other car and found a man slumped over the steering wheel. She needed to get him off the wheel, quickly.

"When I got to him, he wasn't breathing," Lloyd said in a 1983 hospital memo account. "I cupped his jaw the best I could to open his breathing passage a tiny bit. That's all I could do."

That's all it would take to keep the man alive, a man she thought she didn't know.

But the man was Knowles, who had taught Lloyd in the rescue squad 10 years before.

"It all kind of got started with Chief Knowles when they tried to get the fire department ambulances division going," Lloyd told the Chattanooga Times in the months after the crash.

"The Chattanooga Fire Department went out with station wagons and vans and said, 'We won't let our people put up with this any more,'" Lloyd said. "And I said, 'Well, if the fire department can do that, the least I can do is be prepared to help them on the scene until the fire department gets there.'

"And my family and I began taking first aid, CPR and everything. One thing led to another," she said. Lloyd said the training that helped her save her mentor's life led her to an emergency medical technician certificate and a degree as a registered nurse.

Knowles, who was chief until 1984, can only shake his head at his luck on a day he has never been able to recall.

***

Chiefs, as they come along, build on what their predecessors accomplished, said Coppinger, the department's 17th chief.

"It really is a team effort. Too often, when you're at the top you get a lot of credit for what others do," Coppinger said. "You have to have a staff that buys in to what you want to accomplish."

During Coppinger's tenure as chief from 1997-2005, stations were consolidated to make the most of capabilities. The new Main Street Station 1, opened in 2000, is an example of combining three stations. Also, the department was restructured so department heads reported directly to the mayor rather than the mayor's safety director. The arrangement allowed the department to have more direct control of its budget.

An expansion of "squad" trucks means the department today has highly specialized firetrucks outfitted with equipment for extricating car crash victims, and for urban search and rescue missions involving confined spaces, high-angle rope rescues, collapses and other extrication situations. Squad trucks also carry gear for dealing with hazardous materials. The expansion was a response to the consolidation that put more firefighters in fewer stations.

Squads were tapped for responding to all medical emergencies as well as fires and rescues, with personnel trained as EMTs and paramedics to backup ambulance crews. The first squad in Chattanooga was created in 1986 under Chief Jerry Evans and it carried the Jaws of Life, a crew trained in CPR and certified in fighting fires involving hazardous materials. They used an old van and an old sport utility vehicle in the early days.

Later, trucks and other fire vehicles were equipped with automatic external defibrillators for reviving heart attack victims.

Coppinger, hired by Knowles in 1977, is also credited with implementing the "quint concept" firetrucks now a standard for many stations in the Chattanooga Fire Department.

The quint has sparked controversy in some cities for a variety of reasons, usually having to do with overspecialization of the equipment or concerns over potential reductions in the number of firefighter jobs for some departments. But the quint puts a lot of firefighting ability into one custom-made vehicle, essentially making it sort of a firetruck-and-a-half, Coppinger said.

Coppinger said others, including firetruck manufacturer Central States Fire, share credit for developing the apparatus with a short wheelbase to make it more maneuverable on Chattanooga's narrow city streets. It was even more maneuverable than some of the conventional firetrucks that were shorter with longer wheelbases, he said.

A quint -- named for its five firefighting tools; hoses and a water supply, water pumping capabilities, ground ladders, an aerial ladder and an aerial water streaming device -- combine capabilities of engine and ladder trucks. The new program raised the number of firefighters in each quint company to five, expanded the trucks' firefighting capabilities, improved the city's fire ratings and helped to lower the cost of fire insurance for residents.

The development process and discussions and arguments on how they should be designed "were fun" and necessary for success, Coppinger said. The department's leaders at all levels worked on better strategic planning and fire tactics. The incident command system was implemented to centralize supervisors on the scene to make the best use of resources, he said.

"One thing you've got to remember is firefighters are problem-solvers," Coppinger said. "When they go out in this uncontrolled environment, regardless of what it is when they get dispatched, they are the only responding agency that the clock's on them; that by [firefighting industry standards] requirements they've got to be in these places in less than five minutes," he said.

"They take a lot of pride in that speed."

In its 151 years, Coppinger said, the biggest improvements for Chattanooga's firefighters came in the form of motorized equipment, breathing apparatus, training and life-saving techniques.

"It doesn't just happen by luck," he said. "It's because these people are well-trained. And it's because of good leadership."

Firefighting appeals only to certain people, he said.

"It's almost a calling," Coppinger said. "Firefighters live together so they become really, really close. They are an extremely close-knit group of people. Your lives depend on one another."

Coppinger said he misses his fellow firefighters and appreciates what he learned from them about the importance of teamwork, something of value in his current job as county mayor.

***

Chattanooga's current fire chief, 56-year-old Chris Adams, has been leading the department since July 23, 2015. He and Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke led the hall of fame induction ceremony in February.

Adams didn't know what he wanted to do when Jett, who was retired and working at the county courthouse, told Adams' mother, "'Tell that boy to apply to the fire department,'" Adams said. Knowles, who was chief, interviewed Adams and admitted him to the fire academy.

"It was a lot of action, a lot of adrenalin, a lot of helping people and a lot of making a difference," he said. "It really got in my blood."

Adams as a child daydreamed about helping people, and his advisor and teacher at Soddy-Daisy High School said his aptitude tests pointed toward a career of exactly that.

"The first day I reported for work I responded on an ambulance and I really saw how you can help people," he said. "Most things you do on a job, you don't see the results very quickly.

"You see the results of your efforts immediately if someone's lying there in pain or they're bleeding profusely or they've got a fracture or need CPR and you get them back. There's nothing like that feeling," Adams said. "Then I started going on fire calls and thought, 'Golly, this is something. I'm saving their possessions that they can't replace.'"

Adams found the place "where I need to be."

***

As the Chattanooga Fire Department moves into its 16th decade, the improvements are still aimed at the same foe -- time.

In February, the department announced the purchase of three new quick response vehicles, or QRVs. The specially equipped Ford Explorers each are staffed with two firefighters trained to the EMT or EMT "advanced" level and stationed in the areas with the highest volume of medical emergencies -- Willow Street, Hickory Valley Road and Hixson Pike.

The smaller, more nimble trucks can get to an emergency faster than ambulances or firetrucks and the crews can start helping victims immediately. And earlier this year, the department got a $1.8 million grant to add 14 firefighters to staff the QRVs and squad trucks.

In the next 30 years, Adams imagines robotic firefighting equipment, drones and technology that hasn't been thought of yet.

"What worries me about the fire service is we're going to forget all the people that came before us and what it was like then and what it's like now," he said. "We take it for granted, their sacrifice -- they didn't live long, didn't have air packs, didn't know what the smoke was doing to them."

If those men fail to pass along what they experience, their successors could be forced to retrace those steps, he said. The Hall of Fame preserves the history of the department's major players.

What won't change is the fire department's deep connection to its community and people, the chief said.

Sitting outside Station 12, he said, "I feel like I'm part of this neighborhood. People are coming by jogging, walking their dogs, they talk to you, they call the firefighters by name. They are part of the community. They do live there for 24 hours at a time.

"When something happens it's like it's their family."

Most times, people don't know who their firefighting neighbors are or how important they are until disaster strikes.

But that's OK, even when someone says, "I never thought it could happen to me."

If it does, help's coming and you'll know them right away.

They'll be driving a big red truck.

Contact staff writer Ben Benton at [email protected] or twitter.com/BenBenton or www.facebook.com/ben.benton1 or 423-757-6569.

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Correction: The 1949 entry in the text box was updated to show that Capt. William E. Blair was killed near the American Legion, not the VFW.

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