One big brotherhood

  • Posted: Wednesday, October 16, 2019, 10:20 am

Bill Ho-Gland, Pantex assistant fire chief, discusses leadership and expectations with fire officers at Y-12 during a recent visit.Bill Ho-Gland, Pantex assistant fire chief, discusses leadership and expectations with fire officers at Y-12 during a recent visit.

The Pantex and Y-12 Fire Departments work to operate as one team — the CNS Fire Department. They often aid the other site establishing best practices across both departments. Most recent collaboration includes the Pantex Honor Guard training of Y-12 Fire Department’s newly created Honor Guard, providing subject matter experts for exercise evaluations across both sites, and having a single team at the Hazardous Materials Challenge at Los Alamos. The two teams work together to have a best-in-class enterprise fire department.

Recently, the two sites helped train each site’s fire department leadership. Assistant Fire Chief Bill Ho-Gland and Assistant Fire Chief Roger Paul collaborated to develop the training and teamed to deliver the training at each site sharing leadership expertise.

“While both sites are different in their daily functions, the emergency response elements are almost identical,” Paul said. “We feel that we can combine the knowledge and experience from both sites to assemble a ‘best-in-class’ enterprise-level fire department.”

CNS Enterprise Emergency Services Senior Director Doug Trout shared, “We want our fire departments to be successful and wanted the leadership training to provide a strong foundation to build upon.”

To help achieve their goal, Ho-Gland and Paul shared pertinent leadership material and expectations with fire officers (captains, battalion chiefs, division chiefs, and assistant chiefs).

Ho-Gland said, “The primary focus of the training is to review and delineate the absolutes between the captains and battalion chiefs at both sites, since these positions are the primary response officers on a given emergency.”

As employees, we hope we don’t need to call on the fire departments for their expertise, but we can rest assured we are in good hands if the fire departments are needed.

“The fire departments at both sites are among the most trained and equipped responders in the country,” Paul said. “Both departments are capable of managing and mitigating fires, technical rescues, advanced life support medical response, hazardous materials response, and vehicle rescue.”