Many people first saw Baltimore City Fire Department Chief James Wallace in the predawn of March 26, 2024, delivering the first information about the Key Bridge collapse.
“Everybody ready,” Wallace said to reporters at a staging area in the westbound lanes of Fort Armistead Road in Hawkins Point. Wearing a navy blue BCFD baseball hat, he then introduced himself and other officials, and began detailing what he knew.
Seven months into the job, Wallace—a 33-year fire department veteran—was facing a monumental situation. And though far from the first time, this was different.
As he spoke, divers were in the water searching for possible survivors, though they didn’t know how many. Sonar detected submerged vehicles. Other local and state resources were converging on the scene. Wallace appeared calm while addressing the media and clearly answering questions about what happened, though the situation’s unnerving scope was on the Bel Air native’s mind.
“The Key Bridge was difficult because it was the Key Bridge,” Wallace says nearly a year later, sitting at a conference table at the department’s executive headquarters downtown.
The truth is, Wallace’s job isn’t to fixate on the morning that the Key Bridge went down, though nobody around Baltimore will ever forget it. Emergencies happen all the time in different forms. His department gets some 500 calls per day, including EMS requests, with which he’s intimately familiar. He began his career as a paramedic, and that experience convinced him, upon his hire in 2023, to redesign the department’s response to such calls without exhausting its staff.
Mainly, though, Wallace assumed leadership of the department with a mandate to revamp both operations and culture after another tragedy.
On January 24, 2022, a fire collapsed a vacant rowhome at 205 South Stricker Street, killing three firefighters who were trapped inside—Lieutenant Paul Butrim and Acting Lieutenant Kelsey Sadler, each with at least 15 years of experience, as well as 30-year-old paramedic Kenneth Antonio Lacayo. It also left six-year veteran John McMaster critically injured.
It was the department’s most tragic incident since 1955. A lawsuit from McMaster and the families of the deceased, refiled in January against the mayor’s office and the city council, alleges negligence. It claims that the city was at fault for ceasing its identification of vacant buildings as Code X-Ray—or “unsafe” locations, marked with red-and-white placards warning firefighters not to enter—without firefighters’ knowledge.
A pilot program for Code X-Ray started in late 2010, but needed additional funding by spring 2011, and it’s unclear how long the initiative was active. At least 445 vacant rowhomes caught fire from 2017 to 2022, more than half in West and Southwest Baltimore. McMaster and the families of those killed at the Stricker Street fire, a few blocks west of the B&O Railroad Museum, say the firefighters didn’t know they were entering an empty, fragile building—let alone that a partial collapse at the same location had already injured firefighters—and thus they unnecessarily risked their lives.
In December 2022, previous BCFD chief Niles Ford resigned after the 314-page city report on the Sticker Street incident. On October 5, 2023, Wallace, acting director of the Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management, was sworn in as chief.
Exactly two weeks later, a fire at a residence on Linden Street in northwest Baltimore killed two more firefighters—31-year-old Rodney W. Pitts III, who was in his third month on the job, and 26-year-old Dillon Rinaldo—as well as injured three others in what was later ruled an accidental blaze.
After that, Wallace says he began making immediate changes to evaluate new fire academy graduates and supervisors.
Still, the challenges and stresses of the job are ever-present despite the best intentions. In May, the department mourned two more on-duty deaths. Charles Mudra, a veteran emergency vehicle driver, died after suffering a medical issue during a skills assessment session at the Fire Academy on May 16. Lt. Mark Dranbauer was critically injured after suffering a medical emergency while approximately 30 to 40 feet up a ladder at a rowhome fire on West Saratoga Street on May 12. He passed away five days later.
On the day we spoke with Wallace in March, a four-alarm fire broke out around 3:40 a.m. in the 2200 block of North Fulton Street in West Baltimore, and the fire spread to 15 other buildings in a wind-driven blaze. At least nine residents from four rowhomes were displaced. Other vacant structures, a corner store, and a church were impacted.
Once again, Wallace was on scene, delivering another sobering update to the media before sunrise.
“The challenge was that one of the exposures [a building adjacent to a source of fire] was what we know as a Code X building, so that’s a no-entry for us,” Wallace said as he briefed reporters amid flashing emergency-vehicle lights in darkness.
About 12 hours later, with a huge mug of coffee within his grasp, Wallace is still on the job, outlining steps he’s been implementing to create a better fire department.
During one question, he looks at his phone and pauses. “I’m listening, I’m just checking. That’s in South Baltimore, okay,” he says, taking a deep breath. “I know right away when there’s something.”
He’s talking about new fires in the city, and the department putting them out. But as Wallace explains, his job entails even more responsibility than that.
Where are you from originally and how did you start with the department?
I grew up in Harford County. I got hired as a paramedic in 1990 and did all my time downtown on Lombard and Eutaw Streets [at Steadman Station]. I love downtown—the challenges, the call volume. I’m still a paramedic to this day. But I decided to demote to firefighter, which changed the trajectory of my career, and I worked my way up. I would say to people, where else in a career can you see the fruits of your efforts more so than saving a life? I’ve been Hazmat coordinator for the city. I’ve been the chief of special operations, shift commander, emergency manager, and here I am.
You’re two-and-a-half years into the job. What have you focused on since becoming chief?
What I’ve tried to do here is make us a lot more innovative. We’re evolving as a department to be really data-driven. It shapes not only who we are, but the service that we provide. We look at call types, volume, day of the week, time of day, month of the year. We try to analyze how those factors contribute to how we perform.
As a department, we have always been very mission-driven. Good fire departments know how to fight fire, but I think better ones also know how to take care of their people…how they function and their cognitive ability in very stressful situations. A lot of the training that we do now focuses on the mind. Especially our decision-makers, because if they’re not functioning properly mentally, we will never gain control of a fireground.
How do you measure that? How do you analyze how somebody’s doing mentally in a chaotic situation?
We’ve brought in different training opportunities. We’ve done a lot of work with members of the FDNY, who have a program called Leadership Under Fire. It’s that higher level mental training and conditioning that really helps you. We put people through the Fire Academy where we develop physical agility—you hear all about that. But where is that mental agility? We now have training designed to really address the mental demands. We’ve seen a lot of very positive results.
We’ve suffered a lot of losses over the past few years, and we’ve really had to take a look at who we need to be to prevent that in the future. There’s been a lot of operational changes, tactically speaking, with how we respond to certain situations.
People have heard a lot about our Code X program. For us, a Code X means “no go” for interior firefighting. The only exception is if we have very credible information that there may be someone trapped inside and it appears as though there could be a chance that they’re alive. When we do our smoke alarm installs, we’re looking for those buildings that, as they stand on a warm sunny day, appear to be extraordinarily dangerous, aka in a condition where there may be imminent collapse. You take that situation, you add fire to it, and it expedites the rate at which that building will collapse.
Those go into our fire records system, and then they’re exported into our computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system. When we get a call for a particular address, the dispatchers bring it up in the CAD system, and it flashes if it’s a Code X. When it’s dispatched, our people are told Code X on the dispatch, and they’re told it’s a Code X while en route.
That takes us back to that mental function piece. You’re speeding towards a fire. You want to get in there, you want to make the rescue, you want to stop the fire. But early on, upon dispatch, we put that it’s a Code X building right up front. This is a very dangerous building that you’re en route to, so we attempt to frame that mentally for our personnel.
How are the Code X buildings physically labeled now? I recall in 2022, after the Stricker Street fire, red signs were put on doors.
Yes, a red placard, like a red diamond. And it’s a challenge because people rip those things off. That’s why it’s so essential to have that CAD program and real-time credible data that is coming from either us or the Department of Housing & Community Development [DHCD]. Their data comes to us. Our data goes to them. That sharing is very crucial among agencies, especially in these times, because firefighting has changed. Furniture and [other household items] are way more petroleum-based than what they used to be. They burn hotter and quicker.
What are the main causes of fires in the city?
The three top causes of accidental fires are probably falling asleep with a cigarette, cooking, and creative heating in your house. We do a lot of campaigning on cooking safety and portable space heaters. Kerosene heaters are illegal in the city, but we get the plug-in ceramic heaters and small space heaters. They need to be three feet away from anything combustible, more if you can get it. We talk a lot about extension cord use and power strip use, too.
Unfortunately, vacant housing is something a lot of outsiders associate with Baltimore City. What does fighting fires in these buildings signify to you?
It’s just one of many challenges. As the world evolves, fire departments have to evolve with it. And that’s what we’re doing here. Whether it be in the industrial world, an urban environment, a wildland-urban interface environment. You just saw it on the West Coast—you have a fire up in the hills and it comes all the way down, it runs through the Palisades, and it goes right to the ocean. We’re probably more of an “all hazards” department now. We have a harbor, we have rail, we have passenger rail, we have an airport fairly close by. There’s significant industry. We’re a densely populated city, so we’ve got to evolve with our surroundings.
You were one of the first people speaking to the public following the collapse of the Key Bridge. What’s your training for that situation? What were you thinking going into that?
In a press conference setting, or on incidents of a significant size, I really try to focus on one statement that keeps my mind straight: Command the facts. Everything else is noise. I try to ask myself, what do I know? What do I think I know? And what do I need to know? Then, as I’m evaluating an incident, and this is used a lot, it’s called a CAN report: What are the current conditions? What are the actions that have been taken? And what are our needs? That’s how I try to keep myself organized.
The other thing I’ll tell you is, and I very much believe in this, when an incident moves fast, your heart has to beat slow. You cannot let the incident run away with you. Because if you get excited, your heart’s pounding, you’re moving fast, you’re going to become part of the incident. That’s why it’s so crucial that we train. It takes you back to some of the training that we’re doing now because that’s what we’re teaching our people to do—really evaluate yourself. Sometimes it’s hard to get your mind in the right place with certain things.
How did that morning start for you?
I got a phone call from the captain working in our dispatch center. Right away she said, “Are you awake?” Of course, the simple answer is, “Well, I answered my phone.” Then she said, “No, I need you to make sure that you’re not dreaming what I’m about to tell you.” …While I was talking to her, our first units were arriving there and they made the confirmation that the bridge, in fact, had collapsed. It was our Engine 57 that had gone up on the beltway and reached that point where the police had stopped the traffic and the bridge in front of them was gone.
Then, the primary phone call that I made, the most important, was to the mayor. I told him the same thing. His reaction was like mine, “Wait, what?” I said this is reliable intel, something has hit that bridge and it’s down and we have people in water.
When I got there, I went to the boat launch [at Fort Armistead Park] right down the water’s edge. Because when we would get water rescues down there, that’s where we launch our zodiac boats. It was just an empty skyline. I can’t even tell you how I felt. You were just stunned that that bridge was laying on top of that ship, and it was in the water.
Your team initially led the rescue effort. How long was that the case before it became a before a unified command situation?
Some of that unified command started to stand up early day one over on the other side of the river at the MTA building. We ran in rescue mode all day. We had everything we needed at our fingertips—Secretary [of Transportation Pete Buttigieg came out the first day and came right over to me, as well as the governor and the mayor, and said, “Whatever you need, just tell us. We’ll get it.” We had all the resources we needed, but it was becoming a very large incident. By five o’clock, day two, it had transitioned into a state operation.
In emergency services, incidents always begin at the lowest level, and they’ll escalate up through state and federal level, but eventually they’ve come right back down to local government. As we moved to beyond rescue, it became recovery. But then it evolved. They started looking at the criminal side, the legal side, the support for the family side, support for the industry and infrastructure around here. There’s a lot to take in on something like that.
The fire department could be viewed differently among the community than the police department, where there’s a certain tension. But it seems like you have an opportunity to connect with people in a positive way.
We’re in the process of developing a program where we do a lot of our community engagement together. You’re going to see us very soon doing our weekend neighborhood safety walks with the police. When we go out on Saturdays and really do our heavy sweeps for smoke alarm installs, we’re looking for the Code X’s, the police are now going to be with us. And when we engage residents in conversation, we’ve offered an opportunity for residents to now talk to both police and fire about their concerns. It’s a big win-win situation.
How are you using technology to interact with residents?
We now champion a 3-1-1 app to report illegally occupied vacant dwellings, so [the city] can go out, offer services, try to get people into shelters and things like that. My assistant-chief put it together this year. We do a lot of smoke alarm installs. City residents can call 3-1-1 and request a smoke alarm installation and we’ll be out there within two hours [for free]. If you have other smoke alarms in your house, we’ll check the batteries and will replace those if needed as well.
Where do you recruit new firefighters? What are those efforts like?
Up until right now, they would advertise out locally. I don’t know how they would reach outside of the city, but there were times when written tests would be given up at the Convention Center. You’d have thousands of people show up. Then you transition into other phases—physical agility testing, a physical, interviews and things like that.
Now, we have a company that we’ve contracted with that does our advertising nationwide. Once I get a list of candidates, we’re going to start doing physical agility testing and face-to-face interviews on the same day. If you succeed in both, we’re waiting on you with a list of dates where you can go get your physical. We want it to be a quick turnaround. We’ve taken probably a six- or seven-month process and hopefully compressed it into about a month or two. The department’s growing, and we’ve got like 70 in the academy right now.
Have you made any changes in the academy after the Sticker Street and Linden Heights incidents?
In our academy, [prospects] used to go through about nine months of training. After that, they would be put in the field. We changed this after the Linden Heights incident. Now when they come out, they’re assigned to do 10 shifts in the field under direct supervision. As an example, you’re assigned to Engine 5 in Fells Point. You will go to that station, and for five 24-hour shifts, you will ride on a shift with me, and you’re on an engine, a pumper, and you’re attacking fire, and I’m evaluating you. After those five shifts, we’re going to have you ride on the opposite discipline, which is Truck 3 in Fells Point. Now you’re going to do ladder truck work. You’re going to ventilate buildings, climb ladders, search and rescue. You’ll do that for five shifts.
At the end of that time frame, I, as the engine officer, will evaluate you, and the truck officer will evaluate you, but you’re also going to evaluate yourself. How comfortable are you? What have we done? We also do a complete 360-degree evaluation of your first year in the fire department. We take that data, we look, and we say, “Well, we had 20 people that said they weren’t very confident in ladder truck work. So what do we do?”
We adjusted the Fire Academy so that when they come out, they do feel more comfortable. We may need adjustment just as much as a student does, and if we don’t realize it ourselves, we’re destined for failure. [This evaluation] has been a huge tool for this fire department. And that’s something that, again, we’ve done just in over a year.
I heard you’re doing something interesting with predictive modeling and EMS?
We track our call locations and call types, like opioid overdoses. We’ve collected enough data now that we can model the busiest day of the week, the busiest time of day, using historical data. We have 29 EMS transport units in the city under the fire department. We’re about to be fully staffed at 30. Those have either EMTs or paramedics on them. What we’re finding is we’re a very high call-volume fire department. Right now, we are averaging 500 to 520 EMS calls a day.
Wow. A day?
Yeah, a day. But in that, somewhere between 200 to about 230, we actually transport people to the hospital. To go even deeper, we see that 100, 125, 140 are advanced life-support calls, where a paramedic is needed. So we’re attempting to do what we call a chase-car model, which is we’re pulling our highest-level trained paramedics back and replacing them with EMTs, who are a basic life-support provider.
The data shows half of the calls you actually transport, and the other half, EMTs can handle. But we still have those critically ill and injured patients. So, we put our paramedics in twos or threes in a Tahoe or a Suburban that we’ve fully equipped with everything except a stretcher [which will arrive with the ambulance]. Then, we strategically dispatch them to support on critical calls, as opposed to running them around the city and burning them out. This keeps your high-level providers available for your most critical calls, because when you need those clinicians in certain places, you need them right now. We’ve been piloting that program for a little over a year, and we have some very successful data.
It boils down to resource management, but most importantly, it comes down to putting the right clinician at the right place with the right patient at the right time. It’s strategic deployment. It’s not new by any means, but it’s new to our city. Our median response time for that unit is about 7.5 minutes. Almost 87 percent of the calls are high acuity, where we need the paramedics. The data structurally supports the program.
[Editor’s note: In March, the city reported BCFD exceeded its $333 million budget for fiscal 2024 (July 1, 2023 to June 30, 2024) by $33 million, or 10%, due to staffing shortages that have forced employees to work considerable overtime. For instance, David Lunsford, a 21-year BCFD paramedic, took home $358,586 despite his $113,158 salary because of overtime, making him the city’s highest-paid employee in 2024, including the mayor.]
We’ve talked about a lot. Is there anything else you want to mention?
One final thing that I’ll show you is this book [a three-inch-thick, three-ring binder on the conference table between us] that I’ve kept since I came over here on what we’ve done as a fire department to improve. Any order that we put out—policy change, training, recommendation—we now do after-action reports on all our significant [incidents]. I’ll go through at the end of each month and I’ll review it, and ask myself, what did we do this month? What changes did we make? [It began with] one of the internal reports that was done after the Stricker Street incident.
And that fire this morning, there is an after-action report right now being worked on. We will take it from the 9-1-1 call till the time the last unit leaves. We will do a 360-degree evaluation of ourselves. We’ll call out what we did wrong and we’ll call out what we did right.
A lot of things were being worked on since I’ve been here, but a lot has changed since I’ve gotten here. I can’t take credit for everything and never would, but it has to continue. There may be a day when I hand this to the next person and say this was mine, it’s now yours.