LWV-LA members, from right, Wendy Swanson, Jody Benson and Barbara Calef enjoy a funny story told by Los Alamos Fire Chief Troy Hughes. Photo by Maire O’Neill/losalamosreporter.com

Los Alamos Fire Troy Hughes chats with League of Women Voters Los Alamos President Felicia Orth during a recent lunchtime presentation to the group. Photo by Maire O’Neill/losalamosreporter.com

BY MAIRE O’NEILL
maire@losalamosreporter.com

What does it take to run a fire department in a county that’s on the edge of a National Forest, with a National Laboratory right next to both towns, and a challenging configuration of old and new housing structures that are built along just about every available space on the mesas that form the townsite of Los Alamos?

Los Alamos Fire Chief Troy Hughes began his visit with League of Women Voters Los Alamos members during a recent lunchtime event, with a journey all the way back to how he got into the firefighting business in the first place. He noted that the fact that he grew up in Nebraska and that a lot of his family was in farming, allowed him to make an instant connection when he came to Los Alamos.

“The original Superintendent of Schools here was from Hastings, Neb., so when I got here, of course the newspaper people put my name in the paper and where I was from. I got a call probably within days from Morrie Pongratz saying, ‘Okay, the football game is on Saturday – here’s the address, you come to this house, you don’t bring anything, just bring your wife!’.

Hughes began his career in the fire service in 1985. He said that was strange because nobody else in his family was in the fire service.

“Most of them were farmers. My dad was on the railroad and retired from there. My son is now the superintendent of the railroad in Lincoln, Neb. He’s been all over the country. He was in Nebraska a couple of times, Colorado, Seattle, Casper, WY, and eventually Whitefish, Montana where I hoped he would remain for a while,” Hughes said.

Back in the day, when Hughes took the test to become a firefighter, it seemed to him like a good job.

“One day on, two days off, and you hang out with your buddies, and it was a good job. I started at $3.69 an hour in 1985. In those days, everything was public – all the wages for the whole county were published, and seeing guys being paid $7 an hour, I thought that if I could ever get to that point, I wouldn’t be hungry and my kids wouldn’t be starving,” he said. “At that time, I did a lot of part-time work such as mowing the sides of the highway to make some extra money until the pay got better in the fire service.”

Hughes said when he started in 1985, it was a different world.

“Today, paramedics are just part of our service, and of our 176 people at LAFD 50-60 have gone through the paramedic program. When I came in, the paramedics had a truck and firefighters didn’t even go out with them. They were carrying huge cardiac monitors and drug boxes with two people on the ambulance. When I got here, the program had only been in place for a couple of years,” he said.

In the old days, firefighters would sometimes say they had not applied to be a doctor. Now, firefighters go out with the paramedics and help move and lift people, he said.

“Nowadays we don’t have nearly the number of back injuries or firefighters being disabled by back injuries,” Hughes said.

When Hughes started in the fire service, most of the firefighters were “old-school” and they had a “21 year retirement”. Many of them retired in their 40s following a 20-year career that started when they were in their 20s.

“Many of them smoked their whole lives and when they were off duty they drank a lot. A lot of those guys died in their 40s, Fitness was not part of their department, although some of the departments were better. Some of the departments in places like Phoenix, Los Angeles and towards the West Coast were ahead and nationally they motivated the entire fire service to get better,” he said. “But that’s not the fire service I started in. They smoked at the kitchen table, which was small. The station was small. Probably designed for 3-4. You had to get used to it. If you were the new guy you couldn’t say anything.”

Hughes said it took a while for that to change. He was a firefighter for about six years and then took the captain’s test.

“I had a fondness for education itself and I could see as a young firefighter that we needed to get better with the fire service nationally and locally. The chiefs back then would point to their badges when there was a decision to be made. They would say, ‘This is why we’re doing this,’ and hold onto their bar brass. They really didn’t take any feedback from anybody – that was the fire service I sort of grew into. I was promoted to captain after six years and I was quite a bit younger. I was the youngest captain ever from my department, which was a hard pill for them to swallow. I finished so much higher on the test that they thought I would sue them if they didn’t give me the job. I was 10-12 points ahead of the second place guy and we took the same test,” Hughes said. “And they were like, ‘Oh no, here’s this guy that thinks fitness is good and wants a voice in everything that happens, wants inclusivity and fairness, and all that,’ so I was a little bit of a burden to them initially but we worked though that.”

That department went on to establish a fitness program but it wasn’t until the amendments to the Clean Air Act meant that people would not be allowed to smoke in the workplace.

“What they did was they initially read it with jaded eyes and just put tape on the floor and said ‘You can smoke on this side but not on that side’. A couple of the guys really sacrified their careers when they went to the Department of Health and said, ‘They’re not doing this right,’ and they knew they would get passed over for promotions for a few years until they would get a new administration. However they forced the department to create true smoking rooms that were separate. Before that I think they even had a line on the table, one side was ‘smoking’ and the other was not. Those things were ridiculous,” Hughes said.

That was how his career was formed. He served as a captain for several years before a chief’s position open up that he tested for and he was promoted. The position involved primarily training and buying the equipment for the department.

“One of the things I saw was that we hadn’t trained on a lot of other disciplines. It was really that old school where the thought was we were firefighters and that’s what we did. But we still had things like technical rescue, vehicle extrication using the jaws of life, and rope rescue. We didn’t have as much need as we have here because of our terrain. Things like that had not been incorporated and almost had to be forced on them,” Hughes said.

He noted that the biggest problem in a lot of county government was funding.

“Our department here is fairly well funded because of the Lab and the gross receipts tax, which helps us, but a lot of companies don’t have that kind of funding. So when you say we need to implement a new program, all those come with a lot of cost and as a result of that I became a grant writer and we got millions of dollars in training in technical resources. We became a regional HazMat team.,” Hughes said. “It was the timing too. After 9-11 there was a lot of federal funding out there on things like weapons of mass destruction and we were able to get a lot of things like monitors for gases and chemicals that were tied to that money that was put into the system and we got a lot of that stuff going.”

Hughes said here in Los Alamos getting funding is very competive. The fire department is not the only thing the County has to take care of. There’s also the Parks and Recreation and a whole plethora of things that have to be funded to some degree, he said.

“I think they do a good job of prioritizing and vetting all that stuff, and the County doesn’t get enough credit here for all they do to keep this place going,” he said.

After being chief in Nebraska, for about 27 years, Hughes began to look at moving to Durango, CO, ot New Mexico.

“I had spent a lot of time in the area around Albuquerque. I did a lot of riding bicycles in Durango and even completed the Iron Horse Classic from Durango to Silverton… I came out here, tested for the chief’s position in Los Alamos County and got the job. They didn’t actually tell me everything that was happening out here. Doug Tucker was a great fire chief but when I came out here there was no union contract. It had expired about three years earlier. Our DOE contract for funding was about to expire in about 1 1/2 years, so I kind of got both of those thrown at me as the new chief,” Hughes said. “We had this big labor issue, so I got here and started reading the contract. We were supposed to be holding quarterly labor meetings about issues and when I asked why there wasn’t one on the schedule, they said they hadn’t had one in three years.”

Hughes started holding those meetings once a week for a few weeks and then once a month after that and implemented interest based bargaining, which he said is really not controversial.

“It’s not positional. We’re not trying to ‘win’. It’s that we see what needs to be done and there are no winners or losers. So that has worked out very well,” he said.

Hughes said the cooperative agreement between the County and the Department of Energy was another issue at that time and that there had not been much interaction between the two agencies – it was all by email.

“I called the folks in the Procurement & Acquisition Services in Albuquerque and asked to go down and meet with them. It really helped with that negotiation and we got our first 10-year contract in 2013. Both sides were happy with that. A lot of it is just building relationships,” he said.

Hughes recalled the process for interviews for a driver-engineer promotion not long after he took the job in Los Alamos.

“I looked in and there were several ‘white shirts’ (chiefs) doing the interviewing. I thought, these guys probably didn’t even know the candidate’s name and hadn’t seen him at work. So we changed the process. We went back to the union and said how we would like them to be part of the promotional process. Now we have three managers and three lower level staff,” he said. “It works great, and now the guy who lies on the counch at the station – we don’t have much of this – can’t hide in the promotional process because they are telling the story to people who see him or her, so they have to be honest. So that has made the process much better. It’s part of that inclusion of our people at all levels that helps me,” he said.

Hughes is particularly proud of the fact that LAFD is internationally accredited. He said there are about 286 performance objectives that a third party, the Center of Public Service Excellence considers for accreditation.

“We first have to write a self-assessment that we submit to them and then they send a send three or four of their people here to look at the performance objectives and the evidence that we are implementing those objectives. They talk to a good share of our people in all the different leadership positions. We’re the only accredited fire service in the Department of Energy Complex,” he said.

In the last year, Albuquerque and Bernalillo have become accredited and Hughes said LAFD went down three or four years ago and helped them kick that ball forward.

“Now, they’ve carried that ball forward and become accredited themselves,” he said.

LAFD also has a Class 1 Insurance Services Office (ISO) public protection classification rating. For many LAFD responsibilities, personnel spend hundreds of hours training . For example, paramedics need 60 houirs of continuing education a year to maintain national, state and local requirements.

“Today we have 176 LAFD employees and that number moved up from 150 because the DOE thinks that dueof some of the new missions at the Lab, they need more support. Minimum staff is 37 per shift no matter what time of the day. All stations are supervised by a Battalion Chief from Station 1, which is just inside the Lab at Technical Area 3, and they’ll operate on that configuration,” Hughes said. “As soon as the present Academy of 12 graduates, we’ll move that minimum up to 40, so it adds a couple moe people a day on the Lab side.”

Five years from now during the second half of the agreement with DOE, there will be another move-up and the Department will have 188 people bringing the number to 44 a day. The additional people will be spread to Station 4, Station 6 and Station 3 in White Rock.

“We’ll see a little bit of an uptick on all our trucks, and a lot of that is tied to the NFPA standard, which now calls for four firefighters on a truck and a lot of our trucks have three, so we’re ticking that up slowly,” Hughes said.

He said unfortunately the Department loses people to retirement.

“People get old and leave for a number of reasons. We don’t lose a lot of people for anything other than that. So when we are running an academy, we might lose two or three to retirement during that time. We hire 10 to fill 10 spots, typically and by the time we are done, we’re three or four short. Typically we’ll try and hire above that need. We’ll try and predict the next six months beyond that so that way we don’t have to run an academy twice a year.,” Hughes said.

An academy involves 26 weeks of training at 50-60 hours a week. On Wednesday nights the cadets work overnight and stay in the firehouse in an attempt to acclimatize them to nighttime operations. Chief Hughes said the cadets do their regular work during the day, then they do dinner with the firefighters and it becomes a similiated firehouse life for them.

“They’ll wake them up in the middle of the night, get them out in the yard and do different things, then we send them back to bed. We can’t always train when it’s convenient. We have to get in eight hours of training to meet the requirements, so this helps,” he said.

Hughes pointed out that the expectations for LAFD are higher because the Department protects a national nuclear laboratory that produces plutonium pits and a number of other things.

“Our standards are very high for academics and fitness. For fitness, our firefighters operate on the National Fire Protection Association standards, so you’ll see them running a lot and doing other physical activities. We are well-supported by DOE and LANL through Occupational Medicine and the Wellness Center, which provides a trainer to work with our crews. Our firefighters are probably never more pyhsically fit than when they come out of the academy, A lot of them will lose 20 to 30 pounds during that six-month period,” he said.

Hughes noted that recruiting has been tough, however, the Department has put on a “pre-academy day” where all the candidates are brought in before they actually start the academy. They run through a day that’s pretty rigorous – maybe even a little harder than the typical academy day and then the candidates are asked if they are ready to do this for six months! Another element of LAFD’s recruitment is that staff reach out to the candidates here and there before the academy starts to answer any questions they may have and make the connection with LAFD more personal.

Of course the discussion of LAFD would not have been complete without Chief Hughes addressing the plans for new fire stations in the county. He spoke about how COVID-19 reminded the Department about the reality of what is carried back into the stations following a call.

“Today we have to walk through living quarters to get to lockers, allowing carcinogens, biological hazards or smoke to be dragged through the entire living area. New stations are designed where the truck bays are like a hot zone and then the crews go through a kind of decontamination area that’s air locked so that the living area are all pushing air out into the truck bays. There are decon showers and there’s a laundry right there so firefighters can immediately take their gear off and put on a gown before going into their area,” Chief Hughes said.

He said he used to see firefighters returning from a call with “the dirtiest gear and black helmets”.

“That stuff’s bad for you. So if you get dirty at all, we want you to take the gear off. We want you to live longer instead of just being a hero looking dirty,” he said.

Editor’s note: Chief Hughes holds an A.A.S. in Fire Protection Technology, a B.A. in Public Administration, and a M.A. in Management with a Leadership Emphasis. He is a graduate of the National Fire Academy’s Executive Fire Officer Program and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government Senior Executives in State and Local Government Program. He completed the Center for Homeland Defense and Security Master’s Program at the Naval Postgraduate School in 2017. He is one of fewer than 1200 fire service professionals in the U.S. that hold a Chief Fire Officer designation from the Commission on Professional Credentialing.