#5 Washington St. Fire Fighters: Hit Hard Early During COVID-19 & Review
Today we have a treat with a special guest and fellow professional fire fighter Dennis Lawson from Washington State. Dennis is the president of the Washington State Council of Fire Fighters (WSCFF) and also a 33 year veteran of the fire service who has served in multiple roles over the years and brings tons of knowledge.
Dennis goes over some of the early COVID-19 reactions from Washington State who was hit hard early on, had some of the first U.S. deaths from the coronavirus, and had several fire fighters test positive. He goes over many topics from the public safety and view from a fire fighters perspective. And discusses some of what to look for going forward.
All right, welcome. This is Robert Sanchez, host of Firefighter Kingdom. Welcome back to the Firefighter Kingdom. We have a great person today, a friend of mine, definitely a person that’s well-educated in the fire service and the IFF, which we’re both proud union members of. I’m here with Dennis Lawson, president of Washington State Council of Firefighters in Washington State, a 33 year firefighter there in Washington. Dennis, glad to have you on here. It’s always an honor talking to you. Tell us a little bit about yourself, brother.
Dennis Lawson: Hey, Robert. Hey, thanks for extending the invitation. As you mentioned, I’ve got 33 years on the job, getting ready to start my 34th year. I’m currently a battalion chief here with Central Pierce Fire and Rescue just outside the city of Tacoma. Second generation firefighter, my dad worked for Tacoma Fire Local 31. My brother is down south in Vancouver, Washington. Married, couple of kids. Enjoy, really, the fire service a great deal. I spent most of my entire fire service life as part of my local, Local 726. Actually the year I got off probation is when I started in on my board, and I’ve been on my executive board for, well, I guess it’d be almost 33 years now, or getting ready to start my 33rd year. Held all the different positions concurrently like you described. State Council president, we represent right around 8,500 firefighters here in the state of Washington, 127 locals. Geographically we’ve got 11 executive board members and Secretary-Treasurer Greg Markley and myself are the two principal officers, and an office in Olympia, which is our state capitol. So a pleasure to be here. I hope that gives you a little idea of who I am.
Robert Sanchez: Yeah, very nice. That’s a mile long of accomplishments there, man. I know you’re a great leader and Dennis, we definitely bleed IFF. We’re instructors with the IFF and it’s always nice seeing you. Welcome, Dennis. He’s also a fellow pep instructor with the IFF with me. We travel across the country. We have the luxury and the honor to teach firefighters all across the country. And I’m happy today, I was thinking of today as I was driving to work just how lucky to have you on today talking about Washington State and the early COVID-19 virus that hit your state. Early in February that it hit, more than it hit any of the other states throughout the United States. And Dennis, tell me, you’ve been a firefighter for going on 33 years, right?
Dennis Lawson: Yeah. Yeah. Just getting ready to start my 34th year next week.
Robert Sanchez: Nice. Congratulations, man.
Dennis Lawson: Yeah, thanks man.
Robert Sanchez: So I bet you’re anxious to retire, and I’m not sure if your wife is, she wants you home so much or not, but …
Dennis Lawson: Yeah. Thanks Robert. Yeah. She’ll probably agree with you on that.
Robert Sanchez: So I know you’re a hard working man, and glad to have you on, and I appreciate for being on with us today. Just being a friend and just having the honor to teach with you with the IFF, that’s why I brought you on, because I knew you’d be a person with a lot of knowledge on the early COVID 19 issue that happened. And not that you really wanted to, got thrown into your guys’s plate there in Washington state.
So in early February, I know you guys got hit pretty hard specific to the Kirkland fire department there. Tell me about it. When they got hit so hard, how did they deal with it? We all say we’re ready. We all prepare as firefighters. We all know the training we go through, and we come out of the Academy, we do all these trainings, we think we’re ready to go, but sometimes you get ready to go and you get hit in the face with a hammer sometimes and it just happens. You can’t prepare for everything.
Dennis Lawson: That’s exactly right. In fact, it was interesting because you mentioned Kirkland and really what happened was it was a Friday night, and before we actually got the, the news went bad. And Friday night we had planned to have a conference call with the general president and some leadership back at the IFF. And then before Saturday morning … And the Friday night conversation was going to take place was regarding the first death, what they described in the first US death, and it happened at a nursing home here in Kirkland, Washington. And before, it was about 3:00 AM, things went completely sideways because at that point in time, we started to put our firefighters in quarantine.
And I think just to make sure everybody understands, but we had a couple different words that we were not familiar with, quarantine and isolation. And quarantine was for those folks who were initially exposed, and isolation was for those folks then who had tested positive. And in Kirkland, Kirkland’s a progressive department, they got good leadership, they’ve got a really good strong union president, good fire department, good history, very active at the IFF level. And what was concerning to all of us was is that if it’s going to happen to Kirkland, it’s probably going to happen to a lot of other people. And so it really, like you said, slap in the face. It was definitely cold water put on us at 3:00 AM.
Robert Sanchez: Absolutely. And sometimes it’s one of those things where it’s not going to happen to me, or it’s not going to happen to us, and Kirkland seems like a fair sized department. I was looking at them online and stuff like that. And that just goes to show that it can happen to you. It happened to Kirkland. And so how did it, I don’t know if crippling is a correct word, but how did it cripple them? How many people in early February did they have have in quarantine?
Dennis Lawson: There you go.
Robert Sanchez: Can you hear me?
Dennis Lawson: You’re back on.
Robert Sanchez: Okay, Thanks.
Dennis Lawson: Yeah, I lost you for a couple of seconds.
Robert Sanchez: Sorry about that, technology now with COVID-19.
Dennis Lawson: You got a virus in your speaker.
Robert Sanchez: Yeah, I’m sure it is. Yeah. So we all talk about Kirkland, it’s not going to happen to us as a fairly decent sized department. But it did happen to Kirkland, just shows that it could happen to anybody. So how did they deal with it? Because how many, at the initial stage when they started getting infected, the firefighters, how many got infected and how many were in quarantine initially?
Dennis Lawson: Yeah, initially about 17. And that number, and so that happened really quick like I mentioned. As soon as they had the death, they started to figure out … And again, progressive department, they were able to identify through tracking some of their run calls that they had been going to the same facility. And then all of a sudden they got the one death, and then they got another death, and they started looking. They started putting common denominator and that facility was the common denominator. Then they backtracked and started pulling the records up of who had responded there. And they put, initially I think was 16 or 17 people in quarantine right away. And for them, that’s pretty much a couple stations worth. And they actually took a station, they closed the station completely down and used that as a quarantine facility.
Robert Sanchez: Geez. Okay. That’s pretty crippling for a department that size. I can only imagine even the department that I work for, that would definitely, it would cause a lot of problems cause it puts a strain on the community. It puts a strain on firefighters. Talking to more people, on one of our other episodes in our podcast we talked about PTSD. We always talk about that, on the Dr. Rogers on here. And he happened to ask me, “How was it stressful being COVID, are they getting PTSD from it?” And I said, “Well, I’m sure eventually some firefighters may, but I think just the stress of knowing that you potentially have to respond to these calls and the stress of putting on masks and gowns and making sure you don’t have it and making sure your family’s not going to get it if you get it, that’s just adding stress to the job.
Dennis Lawson: Right. I think you touched on it pretty good. For the most part we come into the fire service with, I think a little bit of understanding that we potentially could have some exposures. At times the job can be very difficult. But we drew the line, I think most of us, and said that, how’s the family impacted? We don’t want to take what we’ve got, if we were exposed on a fire to a carcinogen, if we develop cancer as a firefighter, our family’s not going to get that because it’s not contagious. Right? But you get this virus, something like this where you could take home to your loved ones … And a lot of families, depending on where you are in our country, you may have multiple generations in a household. You could have grandkids and grandparents still living with people. And both of those are on the very high ends of that spectrum, older or maybe very, very young.
Dennis Lawson: So we, yeah, I think you’re right, Robert, I think that’s something PTSD hasn’t manifested yet in that right away. But I think down the road, it could. We’ve been really pumping out peer support groups, making sure that our members talk to each other, we keep an eye on each other. We’re tracking sick leave to make sure that, not for tracking sickly to see who’s using it, but more or less to see if we see any trends related to how people, a bad call, something went different for a day for somebody. So we’re doing those kinds of things.
Robert Sanchez: Absolutely. So as a great leader that they have in a state, they’re fortunate to have you, are they doing okay now in Kirkland? Obviously they’re being well taken care of, but are they recovering from the situation in February?
Dennis Lawson: Yeah. I think Kirkland again, they describe that epicenter, right? That was the initial hit. Everybody had it. But about 15 minutes west of Kirkland’s the city of Seattle, that’s our biggest city in our state. And they had a number of people who also who were in quarantine. Based on pure numbers, I think there’re around 950 members in their union. And I want to say somewhere around 30, 40 members of their department alone had testing positive. And so those are pretty good, those are high numbers. And some of the other departments on our east side of our state, we may have some combination departments, volunteer paid, and we get two positives out of a department of 10, and that can cripple that department.
Robert Sanchez: That’s a big hit. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, good. I’m glad to see they’re recovering from it. And I hate to say this, but I think the rest of the United States, especially fire department wise, and I know I was paying attention when you talked at our legislative conference and also when you had the kitchen table with with Harold Schaitberger, the general president, I was listening and I think we got a lot of information. I think I even called you about some issues we’re having here in New Mexico. And we learned from you guys. It’s sad that it came to hit you guys first, but that’s what firefighters do across the country is the brother and sisterhood, the men and women that work in the fire service across the country definitely came out and help each other out. And we learned from you guys and, and what you guys had to deal with. And-
Dennis Lawson: You mentioned the learning part, there was a couple of things we learned right away. One was that the IFF, you mentioned them. They put out that toolkit. And I think when I addressed the group back in DC on the legislative conference, I had glanced the tool kit, but I didn’t get into it. Quite honestly I was looking at something like, this is a virus that’s going to take place in China. It’s going to stay over there. It’s not going to manifest in the United States. Thinking that we’re so much above those things. And it really hit us all. So I think that, I don’t want to say apprehension, but it was just really just not the … I should’ve been much more aggressive. So that’s something I learned.
Dennis Lawson: The other thing that I’ve expressed to our executive board, and we have 11 board members in the state of Washington geographically placed out there, and we do a lot of really good things. But one thing that we were not really deeply entrenched in was our Department of Emergency Management. Because we do a lot of politics stuff, so we’re talking to the people we’re talking maybe to the County directors or executives, but we didn’t get into the Department of Emergency Management. We didn’t have anybody who was able to get into Department of Health, places like that where they’re making some decisions that really we should have labor voice at.
And so we really made a strong push in King County, and King County has King County Medic One, which is probably one of the best in the country. They always talk about how good they are, and they are very good. We were able to crack that right away and get labor involved. We had two of our board members that got onto a conference call really from that first week on. And they valued our input because we were really the people out on the streets, and it made a big difference. So a couple of real lessons learned, things that we would do different, things we’ve talked about already for gearing up what comes up next. Or if we get a resurgence of this virus, we have to be prepared at least in our state to continue to keep moving forward.
April 4th or so is when I think they talked about us hitting our peak. It was about a week before, maybe 10 days before they had anticipated. And we’ve done well, we flattened out as they described. That’s a word everybody wants to use. And I cautioned even our state, and we’ve talked about this, we have weekly conference calls for our board, is that flattening out doesn’t mean the virus is gone. It still means that people are getting sick. It’s just at a pace that it doesn’t overwhelm everything. And the unfortunate part is people still die. And really that’s the sad part because this is going to be around for a while for it.
Robert Sanchez: Absolutely. just the way it’s looking, I think just watching it and seeing of course the news and everything else, it just, it’s hard. Nobody’s been able to predict what it’s going to happen. We all, like myself, I thought it was just a flu virus, everybody’s in a panic. But even just being in the field and being on the firetruck, I see that it’s not a panic. Look what’s happening in New York. How do you explain that? So across the country, the numbers in some States aren’t as high, but how do you explain New York? How do you explain their morgues are full? They’re having to get trucks to put the body from people who are suffering, who passed away or expired from the COVID-19 virus. So, it’s real and it’s out there, but I’m just hoping that with the four stage plan that the States are having right now that it’s done correctly and we can work it out where it brings us from that curve.
Dennis Lawson: Right, right. I know in the state of Washington, I mentioned our four phases and part of that’s putting our state back in service, back to business. I’m not sure how you guys are doing down there. The economics here, a little concerning. We have municipal fire departments, and we have County fire departments, fire districts, and I work for a fire district. It’s basically, it’s a city, there’s counties, it’s a combination of a bunch of things. But I’ll use Seattle as an example. Their hotels are running at 20% occupancy, if that, right now. They canceled the entire Alaska cruise season, or at least up until probably late August. And so they won’t be running cruises out of there. Our airport’s probably at 10 or 15% capacity.
Dennis Lawson: This has completely crippled a lot of things. And so our municipalities who rely on tax dollars, really the sales, that’s going to be a significant problem for them as they move forward. And so we’ve talked about using our DVP, Mickey Walsh trying to get some of the same things we teach when we do our prep stuff in negotiation, starting to forecast using our municipal financial analysis, getting the IFF on board and making sure that we’re preparing our people. We’ve talked about, maybe it’s a really good time to maybe consider rolling contracts for one year instead of getting full blown into a deep contract negotiation and not knowing what the numbers look like as we move forward. I’d hate for our members to give up stuff and then things turn around rapidly. And on the other hand, I’d hate for us to say that we’re going to get something and then have to give it back.
Robert Sanchez: Absolutely. Yeah, so we’re having the same problem here. We have the city of Santa Fe, which is the capital of New Mexico, and the city firefighters, even the County firefighters in Santa Fe, they’re struggling because Santa Fe really relies on gross receipt tax, right? They rely on tourism. Tourism is huge in Santa Fe. And looking at the numbers, talking about MFAs again, we’re getting into that and we’re making sure to have a municipal financial analysis to see, do they have money? And they don’t have money. That’s there, we could see it.
Robert Sanchez: But yeah, so if we’re planning for the future and it’s definitely we’re going to have to be creative on contracts, and it is going to have to be a give and take in this situation, especially if we know exactly what the money is. And so it is concerning. We start coming into brown outs and layoffs and hopefully we can prevent pay cuts and cutting our benefits. And we just had a huge bill pass our last legislature, which is a funding our pension, which is good for firefighters. And here we are again, having to, hopefully it doesn’t come up and we have to deal with that.
Dennis Lawson: Right. So you mentioned legislation, how have you guys done on any presumptive type coverage or anything like that in your state?
Robert Sanchez: Well, so our legislature finished in February, mid February. So we didn’t get a chance to even work on that issue. But we did have an executive order, and we have a great governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham here in New Mexico, she’s pro firefighter a hundred percent. And so is our legislature, both our Senate and our House, but she came out with an executive order which basically says that per our presumptive bill that we already had in place, it basically explains to the municipalities and the counties that if they get this on duty, it’s going to be presumptive. It’s presumed that it happened on duty. So it swings a bigger hammer if you will, on that executive order. It’s not what we wanted, it’s not legislature, because like I said, our legislative session was over. But it’s something definitely we’re already in the works.
Robert Sanchez: I just got off a zoom call with my executive board of my presence in my state. And we talked about how important politics are now, right now at this time, because we’re going to have to get the right people in there that understand firefighting, would understand what we’ve done, firefighters and what we’re doing for them to make legislation that that helps us for presumptive issues. We all know, Dennis, that we can actually say right now, and I could say with confidence that we weren’t held up with these last couple of months because of the billionaires and the CEOs. We were held up because of the transit workers, the semi truck drivers, the factory workers, the firefighters, the healthcare workers, the police officers. So it’s the working men and women of the United States that kept us afloat, and they still are. So I’m happy to say that for sure.
Dennis Lawson: Yeah. I agree with you a hundred percent. Our governor, we have governor Jay Inslee, and he’s been very outspoken. Especially when this thing happened, of course Mike Pence, vice president of the United States flies out here and they have a conference call, and for the most part everything went pretty well. And then that information of course gets taken back to the White House, and unfortunately you hear that some comments made there probably aren’t appropriate from the White House regarding our governor. Our governor has done a good job for us. He’s very much been in our corner for a number of years. He was a former state, or I should say congressional member at one point in time, and he’s dialed in on our issues. And he did the same thing.
Dennis Lawson: He didn’t have an executive order, but he did, he put a policy down, policy directive through our state labor and industrial workers’ comp. And that’s the way, we’re same way as you are. Our legislative session had ended. We will go back. We have language right now that’s currently in place that says that infectious diseases. And we also have language in there that talks about respiratory, which COVID is very much a respiratory disease. And so we’re going to go ahead and firm these up as we go back in. We’ve got a board of, they call it a board of epidemiology, it’s our doctors that will be starting to work on this during the interim right now. So we’ve got a few things we’ve got to continue to work on, but I’m thankful that, like you said, we have good people, good support, and our governor, our House, our Senate as well.
Robert Sanchez: Very good. Yeah. So we’re lucky here in New Mexico. I hope other States learn from us and learn from you. We’re definitely learning from you now, all the information you’ve laid out in our legislative conference, just even being on the kitchen table with our general president. And I’ve been lucky to work with team district also. DVP [Lima’s 00:21:19] Doing great for us. We’ve had several zooms with probably 160, 70 participants, and it was real informative. And some of the information they got I know was from you and from your state. So I appreciate that.
Robert Sanchez: So I was just going to ask you, so would you change anything on the way that it happened? Obviously, we try to be prepared the most we can. Was there anything that you think that we could change that if we ever had another pandemic, in the fire service?
Dennis Lawson: Yeah, I think like I mentioned, I think we have focused so hard on the political part of our state organization, working on our legislation, where I think we needed to be much more entrenched into our communities. And it doesn’t always have to be our executive boards from our state groups, but our local need to take, as an example, the city of Seattle, they have a Department of Emergency Management just for the city of Seattle. And I know president Stewart from up there was trying to do those things to have his members’ interests taken there, but that doesn’t happen in all the different cities. And so that’s one strong lesson we learned.
Dennis Lawson: The other one was just simply just to make sure that we have really good communication. And I think for the most part we did really well. We tried to reach out. When we talked to the IFF, we wanted one consistent message. We wanted the IFF message. We wanted the seventh district message, which coincided with our state message, because we knew right away if we start to go different ways, we’re going to have a problem with fracture, shows little signs of weakness. And then probably the other thing that if I was to do something different, maybe a little bit earlier on, maybe treat it like a fire incident where you actually have a command type system, command board. I took on probably more than I probably should have initially. I figured it took me about maybe 14 days to figure it out that this is not sustainable.
Robert Sanchez: Right. And we all would do that. As a leader, you’re going to do that.
Dennis Lawson: Yeah. So I really realized on a couple of board members, our vice president, our secretary of treasure, and a couple of key board members, just, “Okay, can you do this?” We have a standing health and safety committee. And I really, I tasked him to do a lot of work and he did a really good job. Kevin is his name, fantastic guy to work with. Just those little things like that. So the delegation, because like you said, we all want to do those kinds of things and maintain a lot of our own work. So yeah, just little things. Maybe if I was probably, as we gear up, maybe just a little bit more attention to what the IFF is putting out, just because they know. Like I said, I saw it, I read it. I just didn’t think it was going to happen to us.
Robert Sanchez: Right. Yeah. We talked about that earlier. Do we ever think it’s going to happen to us? That’s a part of the issue that we have, is we have tons of resources out there, we have tons of information. But as firefighters, we’re constantly on training, and online training, and training in the field, and we just sometimes it becomes just a, we just do it and go with the flow and just do it. So I think that we need to start paying more attention to some of this stuff, even as far as wearing masks and gloves on duty on calls. We all knew we used to wear gloves, but we weren’t real religious in doing what we’re supposed to do in the first … We were supposed to be wearing gloves and face masks anyways on calls. But there’s a lot of times that we weren’t doing it. We lacked on it. So it definitely woke us up, gave us a wake up call.
Dennis Lawson: That’s a good point too, is the PPE part, is that I think it’s important for people to realize that the individuals in Kirkland had the appropriate gear on for the type of call. They got dispatched to a low blood sugar call, now how many of us would wear a gown, the whole bit? Right? Well, they get there and the person was, basically they were unconscious, unresponsive. So they had to begin CPR, and they didn’t have time to put all their gear on. That was one example. The other example was a patient that fell out of bed. Well, they fell out of bed because unfortunately, they had passed away. So they get there, they work on them.
Dennis Lawson: But I think from the fire service standpoint, maybe we need to look a little bit different. Instead of N95 masks, maybe we should go to a different mask that has cartridges like an APR. We went to those things early on, so everybody has issued an APR. A little bit more money, but the cartridges are good for a very long period of time. You decon them, they’re quicker to get back in service than most anything else. And so I think that would be helpful. Just, what are we wearing? Is the type of gear that we wear on an EMS call, is that appropriate? Does a gown give us the best protection? So I think those are the kinds of things, and I’m glad Pat Morrison from the IFF and a few, Jim [Brinkly 00:26:07] And a few other people are just, they’re starting to look into those different things.
Robert Sanchez: Well, that’s good. Yeah. I think that definitely when this is, hopefully it ends and we get a vaccine or something to help us out with. But I think we’re going to come up with these ideas, what’s better, what worked and what didn’t. We’re all going to learn from our own mistakes unfortunately, but that’s just the way life is in general. Right?
Robert Sanchez: So just one last thing, so how’s the firefighters out there as far as mentally? Are they holding together, or have you seen any difference? I know we talked about the stress of them.
Dennis Lawson: Yeah. I think for the most part, again, the unknown is the worst part, right?
Robert Sanchez: Absolutely.
Dennis Lawson: You go to a fire call and you got it in front of you, and you pull your line, whether you’re fire tack or you’re doing exposure or whatever it is, you got something you know what you’re dealing with. This one, you just don’t know. And I think for the most part, you know how a firehouse can be. I think a lot of times you can feel the dynamics, you can feel when there’s tension in the air in a fire station. And some of that is because people are just not really sure what’s going on.
Dennis Lawson: And like I said, we’ve utilized our peer support, support teams, to make sure that they’re reaching out, talking to people, putting things out. We actually started in different organizations, mine included, brought back a safety week a little bit earlier. So we had, because just some time to make sure people are staying really focused on themselves. Our call volume’s down. I’m not sure about you guys, but we’re down about 20% here. And I think that is because people don’t want to go to the hospital right now, because I think they’re fearful that they go to the hospital they’ll catch a virus from somebody already there.
Robert Sanchez: Absolutely.
Dennis Lawson: And so, yeah. Is that what you’ve experienced as well?
Robert Sanchez: Yeah, definitely the call volume is down. And I think, yeah, they’re staying home, whereas most people are, and taking it serious. And yeah, I think that we do, when we respond to calls a lot of them are, they’re saying, “I don’t want to go to the hospital because I don’t want to catch COVID, or coronavirus.” And that makes a lot of sense. So I think that also shows that sometimes maybe not everybody needs to go to the hospital like they think they should, because they’re totally fine after that.
Dennis Lawson: We’ve been saying that for a long time.
Robert Sanchez: And don’t get me wrong, it’s an honor for me to be a firefighter, but sometimes we got to definitely look, is this something that I really need to go to the hospital for? Because it was really causing a huge backlog in some of our hospitals here in Albuquerque, New Mexico. But I think people are realizing now that maybe they don’t need to go to the hospital all the time.
Dennis Lawson: I think you’re right. I think you’re right on that. Yeah.
Robert Sanchez: But definitely, I just wanted to thank you. I know you have a family with career firefighters. Your brother and your father is also a firefighter, were firefighters, are retired, right?
Dennis Lawson: My brother is active down in Vancouver. My dad was Local 31 in Tacoma. He passed away. It’s been a number of years now.
Robert Sanchez: I’m sorry.
Dennis Lawson: It’s okay. He was a tiller man for years. Some good fire calls. I’ve got great memories of hanging out at the fire station when I was really little, going down there and playing basketball with all the guys, and doing those kinds of things. And then he moved up, he went into the Fire Marshall’s office and retired as the Fire Marshall for department.
Robert Sanchez: Very cool man. So you come from a line of firefighters. And your brother’s in Canada, right, being a firefighter?
Dennis Lawson: No, Vancouver, Washington.
Robert Sanchez: Oh, Vancouver, Washington. Okay. My apologies. So that’s nice, man. Well, thanks Dennis. It’s always been a pleasure. I like talking to you every time we talk, we have a good conversation, and I miss having a beer with you, man. And when you see we’re instructing, and we’ll get back together when we start being instructors again, the United States, hopefully we start traveling.
Dennis Lawson: Yeah, I’m hoping that the IFF convention still goes off.
Robert Sanchez: Me too.
Dennis Lawson: I’m not sure what that’s going to look like or how we’re going to do it, but I’m sure if we get back there together, it’d be nice to dip a beer and say hi to ya.
Robert Sanchez: Absolutely. Yeah. And you’re always welcome in New Mexico. Come and have a beer. Hope you and your family’s doing well.
Dennis Lawson: You too buddy.
Robert Sanchez: And thanks again for the information. We definitely learned something.
Dennis Lawson: Let me know if I can give you something, I’m more than happy to share it.
Robert Sanchez: Thank you, sir. I appreciate it.
Dennis Lawson: All right buddy. You take care.
Robert Sanchez: You too. All right. So signing off, that’s it for Firefighter Kingdom. Thanks for being in the Kingdom, firefighters and community. Thank you Dennis for the being on the podcast, it’s always an honor having you on here. A leader like yourself, educating firefighters across the nation. And again, thanks to Vince Trujillo. He’s the mastermind behind everything. He makes me look good. I know it’s a hard job. Again, signing off. Thanks again, Dennis.
Dennis Lawson: All right. Thank you.
Originally published at firefighterkingdom.com on May 16, 2020.
