Command School starts where fire training ends

Sirens blare. Firefighters, police and emergency personnel race to the fire.
The scene is chaos, and the emergency personnel must bring a sense of order. As the firefighters hook up hoses, the incident commander (IC) takes charge and directs people to their positions so that they can do their jobs efficiently and safely.
In an ideal scenario, that’s how an emergency situation unfolds, and the purpose of Command School is to give ICs the training they need to keep their personnel safe and to minimize human and property damage at a fire, accident or natural disaster.
Command School is a business owned and operated by Lancaster Township Fire Chief Glenn Usdin. Its purpose is to fill a niche in the training provided for firefighters and emergency personnel.
David Bryson is captain of the Fairfax (Va.) Volunteer Fire Department and an EMS specialist with the federal National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. For him, Command School has provided an important addition to his extensive training, which includes training in various programs across the county.
“Though these other courses were well done in reference to fireground tactics and in-station behavior, I felt that they left me wanting more in the arena of incident command,” he said. “Command School filled my educational void for more IMS (Incident Management System), and I feel that I now have enough information to truly evaluate myself as an incident commander.”
Guerry Barbee, assistant chief of the Cornelius Fire & Rescue Department in Cornelius, N.C., had a similar experience.
“Command school not only teaches you ways to keep your firefighters safe on the fire scene, it teaches you how to deal with personnel in your department, how to boost morale in your department, and even how to deal with the public and improve public relations.”
Command School fills a need in the fire service because, Usdin said, firefighters receive plenty of training on how to fight a fire and on management issues, but not enough on taking control at the scene.
“We’re the nuts and bolts of how to command a fire,” he said. “Pre-planned moves and maneuvers turn chaos into a successful attack. Our niche is that we spend a lot of time on the operational aspects of command.”
Usdin has been active in the fire service since he became a volunteer firefighter on Long Island in 1974. Since then, he’s served continuously as a firefighter, and he’s worked in many different aspects of the fire business. Most recently, he was founder and president of Northeast Fire Apparatus, a firm that he started in New York and moved to Lancaster.
Northeast purchases used fire trucks, refurbishes them and resells them. Usdin sold half of his business to Freightliner Corp. in 1999 and the remaining half at the beginning of this year.
While he was operating Northeast, Usdin began Command School as a sideline business. He held the first school in Lancaster in 1997 and drew 180 people.
This year, he’ll hold eight seminars, and most will attract 300 or more people. A conference in Lancaster in March was the biggest yet, with 365 attendees. The cost per person is $365. Departments that enroll five or more members can get discounts.
This year’s conferences are in Lancaster, Orlando, Louisville, Cleveland, Chicago, Atlanta, Kansas City, and Nashua, N.H. Geographically, that lineup covers much of the country, and Usdin has two primary reasons for not going farther west. One is that his instructors must haul equipment with them, and the other is that the population thins out significantly west of the Mississippi River.
Originally, Usdin held his conferences at hotels with convention centers, but he has switched to community colleges and universities, such as Harrisburg Area Community College, which has a Fire Science program, and Georgia State University in Atlanta.
Most conferences have taken place on weekends, and all subsequent conferences will be on weekends. Usdin recently held a conference in Chicago from Monday to Wednesday, and he said he won’t do that again because such scheduling made it very difficult for volunteer firefighters to attend. “It was an experiment and not a smart one,” he said.
In addition to its eight conferences, Command School includes Abbotville, a tabletop simulation of real disasters. Don Abbott, a division chief of a fire department in Indiana, developed the tabletop city more than 10 years ago. For a decade, he and his wife, Bev, spent 40 weeks a year on the road, taking Abbotville to fire and emergency departments across the country. Late in 2001, Usdin purchased Abbotville from the Abbotts, and Command School’s instructors are now busy making presentations nationwide.
Abbotville consists of more than 400 buildings and can be adapted to any area, including rural and industrial locations and urban high-rise buildings. The instructors do everything possible to make the scenarios real. Actual fire, smoke and chemicals are used, when permitted, in the scenarios. Emergency equipment is “dispatched.” Handheld radios are used for communication. Small-scale fire trucks, police cars, ambulances, emergency personnel, fire hoses, dunk tanks, decontamination showers and other types of props are available. Abbotville also uses background noises of fire, sirens, wind and screaming people.
The daily rate for Abbotville is $1,650, and if the session has more than 40 participants, there’s an additional charge of $500 for a second instructor.
For Command School’s first complete year, Usdin expects to gross between $1.3 million and $1.5 million. The business has four full-time and two part-time employees at its Lancaster location, with 10 contracted instructors for Command School and 14 for Abbotville.
“The instructors at the school were some of the most admired figures in the fire service today; some of them are actually living legends. Every instructor is a wealth of knowledge, and they were willing to share every bit of it with all of the students. These people are the best at what they do, and they try to make you the best fire department official you can be,” said Barbee. (See Command School instructors, this page.)
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, Usdin said, demand for his type of training has picked up significantly, and he sees great potential for growth.
“The only bounds are our imagination and the quality of our programs,” he said. Programs that are being developed will focus on fires in correctional facilities and school security incidents, such as at Columbine High School in Colorado.
Such attacks and incidents are rare and immediately gain nationwide attention, but fires and natural disasters happen regularly, and Command School and Abbotville will design programs to meet anyone’s needs. Recently, for instance, Abbotville has been to shopping malls, industrial sites and cities including Richmond, Va., which staged a mock terrorist incident at a sports stadium.
Timothy Sendelbach, assistant chief of Missouri City Fire & Rescue Services, has attended both Abbotville and Command School, and he recently asked Usdin to design a two-day seminar that would encompass incidents such as a house fire and a train derailment on one day and a large-scale hurricane disaster on the other.
“We are surrounded by the city of Houston, which is one of the top refinery cities in the country. Taking that into consideration, our organization is susceptible to a multitude of response hazards equal to any comparable metro-sized city,” Sendelbach said.