Metro’s Fire Chief William Swann, who also oversees the Office of Emergency Management (OEM) will celebrate 30 years of service to the Metro Fire Department on Sept. 1.
Swann grew up in a large family and credits his parents for teaching him how to be responsible and accountable.
“The thing that drives me is working for the greater good,” Swann said. “I enjoy challenges. I enjoy making a difference in people’s lives.”
He joined the U.S. Army and served in operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. After serving for about five years, he left the military and was looking for a place where he could be involved in something bigger than himself.
“I wanted to give back,” Swann said. “And when I heard about the First Department and understood what the mission was, it was really a hand-in-a-glove fit.”
Over the years, he rose through the ranks and in 2018 became Nashville’s Fire Chief. The Fire Department employs roughly 1,500 employees with 18 full-time and one part-time staff at OEM.
What is the history behind combining the Fire Department and the Office of Emergency Management (OEM) under one department and is that typical for a city the size of Nashville?
The merging of OEM under the Fire Department took place under Chief [Stephen] Halford. It is not uncommon for a city of our size.
When you hear me speak, it’s always Fire and OEM. I merge them together. I don’t separate them. The men and women that work at OEM are a very essential part of our mission here at the Fire Department.
Anytime something happens in the city that overweighs one department, that overtaxes one entity and takes the whole city to mitigate and handle, then [the coordination] shifts to OEM. Then it is under my care, and I become like a conductor, just making sure that all the resources and things that need to take place to handle that situation are taken care of.
The Fire Department is an all-hazardous department. That means there is never a call under emergency circumstances that the Fire Department is not involved in. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a shooting, stabbing, homicide, suicides, drownings, whatever it may be, the Fire Department is always called because we respond to emergencies.
So, having OEM under the Fire Department is a very streamlined way of being proficient as a city. It cuts through a lot of red tape, and the relationships that we have forged are unheard of. A lot of cities actually envy how we work because here in Nashville, there are so many events that we deal with — not just emergencies but also planned events from concerts, marathons, ball games, other sporting events, whatever.
It takes a team. We do a lot of pre-planning, especially with Fire, Police, NDOT and many other departments. My point is, all of that comes together and it makes us work well, and not just among locals but also among our state and federal partnerships.
So, when [Metro] was trying to figure out where OEM could reside, the Fire Department was a perfect fit.
You have been a leader through quite a few major disasters in Nashville such as the March 2020 tornado, followed immediately by the COVID-19 pandemic, the May 2020 Derecho, and then the Nashville Christmas Day Bombing in the same year. You also oversaw the emergency operations of the Covenant School Shooting. These disasters not only put a strain on the people who are directly affected and who are considered victims but also on staff. How do you take care of your team and yourself?
You know that expression that “there is no crying in baseball?” When I first came on in 1995, it was sort of that way in the Fire Department. You just did not talk about it. It was just the culture. That doesn’t mean things didn’t weigh heavy on people because we’re all human.
Where we are today, for me, there is nothing more important to me than the men and women that work for this department, and that’s Fire and OEM. They are the commodities that make this department work, and we have to keep constant vigilance on making sure that they have the tools that they need to do the job, they’ve got a fair wage, and we take care of their mental health.
Mental health is a big factor, and we realize that and have peer support groups, we have [several volunteer chaplains], and we now have a couple of mental health professionals who are a part of the department.
We deal with death in this department all the time. So we are very intentional with our crisis counselors and peer support teams. We’ve got protocols in place, and ensure we pull a company together [after a disaster where people lost their lives], and we give them a chance to reflect and give them the assistance they need.
You have the REACH program, which stands for Responders Engaged and Committed to Helping. It is a partnership with Mental Health Cooperative to co-respond on calls where people experience a mental health crisis. How is REACH going?
[Before] the REACH program … one of the things that we saw was how hospital ERs are getting inundated. When we got a 9-1-1 call, we got there and we realized that this person’s problem is not being sick, hurt or injured. It’s a mental health issue. Of course we loaded them into the ambulance, treated them as best we could and took them to the ER. And the ER, of course they’re for an emergency. So when they receive a patient who has a mental problem, they really cannot service them properly.
The REACH program is designed to make sure that our teams are getting [people with mental health issues] to the proper place for the proper help. Initially, it got partially funded so we would do peak hours. We’re very appreciative to the Mayor and the Metro Council for giving us a little over $400,000 to be able to do it now on a 24-hour basis. We got two more paramedics. We work closely with the [Metro Public] Health Department. They’ve got clinicians as well who ride with us.
What REACH does is, we work closely with 9-1-1. They take the call, they cipher through, “Is this an emergency for a physical injury or is it a psychological issue?” They dispatch out the appropriate response. And if it’s a mental issue, our [REACH] teams will respond. If you deal with mental patients, the response has to look different and having a clinician along with our paramedics, it just works well. I’ve just seen some remarkable stories. It helps not bog down the ERs.
Your department is set up to respond to disasters like the ones I mentioned above. As a leader, how do you take as much of a proactive approach as you can?
For any organization to be successful, there are four keys to success. You’ve got to analyze the situation, make a plan, implement that plan, and then constantly reevaluate that plan because times change and you have to sometimes re-tweak the plan and put it back out.
But training is the key to making sure you’re preparing yourself for things you’ve either encountered before, or you see a trend of things coming your way. We look at other cities. We are trying to look at some incidents that we see from floods, tornadoes, the drug epidemic, even school shootings.
We make sure we take time out to make a plan. And training is a part of this. We realize that to be ready, it takes effort and you’ve got to be intentional about that. And for a leader, it’s sometimes difficult because you’ve got to set aside time, even though you have emergencies you’re still responding to. But there is nothing more important than preparing your people.
How has the extreme weather impacted your operations over the past few years?
When I first came to the department, they had a tornado that hit Downtown Nashville, and it was crazy. Then we had the 2010 flood. And those things only happened once in a while. But now, every year, we have a tornado that seems to hit our city. And then of course, the extreme heat that we deal with.
It goes right back to those four keys to success. You’ve got to analyze, plan, implement and re-evaluate. What we try to do is look at best practices that we’ve done, we look at other cities, and we also learn from mistakes. I think all of us can say we probably learn more from our mistakes than our successes.
When it comes to extreme weather, as first responders, we stay closely connected with our partners at the National Weather Service and we just try to make sure that we get the tools we need to make us better.
What’s your role in serving the homeless population?
First of all, when we start to think about a Hazard Mitigation Plan or a CEMP (Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan) for the city, it’s an overall component of how we deal with emergencies for all citizens. So when we talk about our unhoused population, we try to keep up with where there are pockets of our unhoused population. We work closely with April Calvin [the director of the Office of Homeless Services] and her team.
When it’s hot we go to known places and make sure that we take water and see if there is anything else [homeless folks] need. We check on people when it’s cold and hand out gloves and blankets. They’re thankful and appreciative. Most of the time, they are very educated about what they need. I mean they are survivalists. We don’t try to force anything on them. Then Metro has the cold weather shelter at Brick Church Pike.
And we always have other plans that we use if it becomes a heightened, more of an emergency situation. We got a strong partnership with the Municipal Auditorium, the Red Cross, and many other partners for those extreme situations.
But for our unhoused population, I think everybody has empathy and wants to make sure that we can do the best we can for them, and we’re definitely on board with helping anyway we can.
You have written a leadership book called Inspire, which was published last year. What is the main message you wanted to get across?
It’s a book about leadership. I think all of us are leaders. You may not be considered a chief, but you are parents, you are grandparents, you may be a supervisor at your workplace, or whatever. All of us are leaders, and this book gives 10 attributes for what I think would make up a great leader. It gives things from commitment, confidence, integrity, vision, communication, serving, responsibility, learning, passion and courage.
I tried to make this book very easy to read, but it’s very deep in thought. I think it will slow you down and make you really process. And I think it will make you the best that you can be. Each chapter starts out with a personal story of mine.
But my message was, all of us are leaders and I think we may be at different levels, but there’s instructions and there’s guidance and assistance and help to make you do better at where you are.
Anything else you would like to add?
At the end of the day, I would love for people to know about the servant leaders and first responders in the Fire Department and OEM. None of them want to be called heroes, but they are willing to put their lives on the line every time they are called.
I do want people to know, too, that they are human. We are human just like everybody else. Like I say in my book, there is courage. Courage doesn’t mean that you are not scared. But it means that you are doing it in spite of it, because you realize there is a task, or a mission, or something bigger than you to push you through that.
So, I hope people can really just get a great appreciation for the first responders from Fire, OEM, Police Department, and all your first responders. It’s not just a job, it’s truly a calling.
And I am absolutely honored to be in the role that I am. I don’t take it for granted. There is not a day that goes by that I don’t wake up in the morning and thank God for the opportunity and also for some guidance.