I hope there isn't anyone else that has had to deal with a chief like mine. I know we all bash our chiefs from time to time, but mine is just a deceitful, number crunching, responsibility shrugging, impersonal, lying jackass and is rewarded for it. I'm newer to the fire service (7 years split almost evenly between 2 career departments), but I already dread coming to work. Not because I have a bad crew or my shift is overall negative, it's because none of us can look our leadership in the eye and respect them. It's sad.

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Back in March, my chief (at the time) and deputy chief (now current chief who this post is about) were at our new station being constructed when a call came in for a 3 year old in cardiac arrest across the street. The rest of the dept was on the south side of the city for a whole shift training (VEIS I think) and every rig we had out was tied up in one way or another. 5 or so minutes go by and the first engine is driving towards the scene and sees the chiefs traveling away from the scene like they had just left the station. They pull over and won't even look at the Captain in the engine, because they know they've done wrong. Another engine arrives on scene and those crews handle the call. Engine 1 goes back to the station and asks the deputy chief if he knew what the call was and he acknowledged he heard it come in as a pediatric cardiac arrest and he didn't respond. He had no other response and just tried to brush it off with a "sorry". The crews who worked the kid were able to get pulses back but she died 4 days later in the hospital. This was incredibly unacceptable, as firemen we are trained to act and help people in need. They weren't even doing anything important at the new station, just harassing the construction workers. The deputy chief (who is also a CPR instructor) sat there knowing a child was in cardiac arrest across the street. He could've literally walked across the parking lot and been there to make a difference.

The next shift day everyone wrote official statements for an investigation that was to bed conducted. A few people were interviewed and then the deputy chief came out and said sorry (now lying and claiming that he had no clue what the call was after telling 2 people he did). The newest Captain on my department said that wasn't good enough and that disciplinary action should be started. No action was taken. In fact, the chief at the time retired and the deputy chief has since been promoted. Not in to an acting role, he was permanently promoted to the chief of the department during an active investigation of dereliction of duty. Nothing has since happened. Chief now comes around and pretends like everything is all sunshine and rainbows and we are all disgusted and pissed off and lost. We have now heard from city management that we just need to move on because "the child wasn't viable anyway" Excuse me, HOW THE FUCK does a deputy city manager with no duty to act as a first-responder / EMT get to tell us if a patient is viable or not. And since when does that make it ok to not even respond to something?

A lot of us were hopeful that all of this would come to public light when the stepmom of said child was charged with manslughter but nothing has happened and its been almost 6 months. Everytime the chief asks me how my wife and daughter are I'm disgusted to even be in the same room as the man.

Since then there has been one other case of the chief being at a centrally located station when all of the houses were out on multiple cardiac arrest, and another cardiac arrest came in (at the same location as the above incident) and he didn't respond. Instead, an engine from an outlying department came in on aid and the CHIEF of another department responded to it.

Sorry if I'm being whiny or w/e I just needed to get this off my chest. I pray this kind of stuff doesn't happen all the time.