Burn Baby Burn - Johnson County, Kansas firefighting motto?

This is my critique of the Overland Park, KS. fire department and their 3-alarm fire in the 7900 block of Santa Fe Drive Tuesday morning (January 9).


First I will qualify my opinions - I was trained and spent 5 years as a firefighter for Kansas City, MO in the mid to late 1970's. My respect for the profession is and remains immense. We were trained to attack structure fires at their source - which was more often than not - inside the structure.

What I saw taking place in downtown OP that morning did not seem to befit a highly-trained and lavishly equipped (sub)urban fire department.


The initial alarm was sounded around 6:50 am and within 10 minutes came the first pictures from KSHB's television news helicopter. There didn't seem to be all that much smoke and only a small amount of flame coming from a roof vent in the about 30-foot-wide and 80-foot long business in a strip-type shopping center.

There didn't appear to be any firefighters on the roof of the burning liquor store nor did there appear to be any crews inside nor trying to get inside the structure.

Soon, there were two aerials raised on the east & west sides of the fire building. Two streams from handlines could be seen throwing water from an alley on the backside of the building. The aerials began playing their master streams onto the still-small fire on the roof - then - reportedly because of water supply issues - shut them down for about 10 minutes. There was still no visible attempts to make access to the interior of the building with handlines to attack the seat of the fire.

Forty-five minutes after the initial alarm was sounded - the small flames had engulfed much of the eastern third of the roof and blossomed out of openings in the rear of the building and heavy gray-black smoke billowed southeastward in the gusty northwesterly wind. Around this time, a 3rd-alarm was sounded. When that section of the roof collapsed - the aerial water streams finally made headway on the flames.

At one point - even a FOX-4 news anchor remarked about how the fire which seemed so small & containable early on had gained so much ground on what seemed to be adequate firefighting resources.


This fire is in line with another firefighting fiasco I witnessed in Olathe in 1983 or 1984 - when fire virtually destroyed a plumbing fixtures business. After that fire - I actually obtained my OWN firefighting equipment for our home - not trusting my family's life & property to the OFD.

In addition- I was told by a longtime friend who is a retired KC-MO chief fire dispatcher of another incident while he was on the job.
In that incident- KC-MO fire companies had been called to assist a Johnson County, KS. fire department on a structure fire and those KC-MO crews made entry to the burning structure to attack the fire. The JOCO chief ordered the crews out but those crews - according to my source - resisted leaving as they had nearly "knocked down" the flames.
That resistance reportedly created some "issues" between the JOCO chief of that fire's operation and KC-MO's department.


The Metro's 'big-city' fire department only engages in "surround and drown" fire-fighting tactics as a very last resort.

Frankly, if I lived in or had a business in Johnson County, I would want - no - PREFER the KC-MO fire department and their rapid and professional fire-fighting tactics to respond.