This report comes courtesy of Mr. Sean Kelly who graciously offered this piece of history to the site. His grandfather, Michael Fallon, was a battalion chief with the Cleveland Fire Department and was a responder to the Collinwood School fire. As noted in other sections of this site, the Cleveland Fire Department responded to the Collinwood School Fire because of the enormity of the event and the lack of resources of the Collinwood Fire Department. This account gives a graphic description of the event and of victim recovery operations from the school ruins. Firsthand accounts are crucial to understanding the circumstances of an incident that has so many witnesses, victims, and potential sources of misinformation (in other words, sensationalist newspaper reporters and wire services). Even more important are the observations of professional responders who take note of specific aspects of the event that give us a clearer and logistical understanding of the circumstances they encountered during their response.

This report also illustrates two familiar challenges faced by emergency responders during significant or mass casualty events:

1. Victim recovery obstacles – In this instance, all the floors of the school had collapsed, creating the challenge of recovering bodies amid debris and the depth of the basement.To remove debris with shovels without damaging victim bodies beyond their current injuries was paramount to Chief Fallon. The idea of floating bodies by flooding the basement may sound crude, but it was effective in using the available resources and technology of the day to accomplish the task. This was forward thinking on his part, knowing that to inflict additional damage on the bodies with shovels would only make the emotional challenges facing victim families that much more horrendous. Remember – victim identification was taking place at the railyard storage house. Identification consisted of parents walking amid the rows of bodies and viewing the remains of 177 children until they found something recognizable that could put a name to the victim. Chief Fallon knew that horrific experience would only be exacerbated by additional damage to the bodies. His “out-of-the-box thinking” was an innovative way to spare parents additional agony.

2. Crowd control – There are two sets of crowd group problems with this event. First, parents were on-scene looking for their children. They breeched the fire lines hoping to see something or someone recognizable amid the devastation. The second group were curious onlookers who wanted a glimpse of the carnage. For as macabre as it seems, this is still a problem in the present day. The modern difference is that cell phones and social media are a major challenge to contain in large events. It is one thing if a person streams or uploads video of an event because they were there or involved. It is another to have to deal with gawkers who are looking for clicks or to satisfy morbid curiosity.

To the credit of Battalion Chief Fallon, his report illustrates that responding to an event is not simply a robotic job of putting out the fire and recovering bodies. He recognizes that the victims are children, that his firefighters have a daunting task, that care for the victims postmortem is important, and that the tragedy of that day was immense on the community and those who witnessed it. Emergency management deals not just with facts but also human factors and emotions. Emotions must be controlled in order to effectively serve the community and victims during an event. However, those in supervisory positions cannot and should not lose sight of the impact on the human psyche of those they lead, not just in the immediate aftermath but even years down the road.