FACILITY FIRE BRI FIRE AND EMERGENCY SERVICES INS FIRE PROTECTION, DETECTION, AN
FIRE SERVICE HYDRAULICS AND WATER SUPPLY HAZARDOUS MATERIALS TECHNICIAN PRINCIPLES OF PASSENGER VEHICLE EXTRICATION GROUND COVER FIRE FIGHTING FOR STRUCTURAL FIREFIGHTERS
Little did the group know at the time of this decision, what a profound effect it would have on the future of the IFSTA/FPP organization. Sensing that IFSTA/FPP dropped the ball and that there would be a market demand for a new Essentials -like manual in response to the 2002 version of NFPA 1001, a large trade and industrial publishing corporation, Thomson-Delmar Learning (commonly referred to as simply Delmar), released a manual titled Firefighter’s Handbook: Essentials of Firefighting and Emergency Response in 2000. It not only covered the requirements of NFPA 1001, but also contained information on hazardous materials and terrorism. Interestingly, a significant number of those same customers who asked IFSTA not to develop a new Essentials for the 2002 version of NFPA 1001, jumped at the chance to adopt the Delmar manual. They had varied reasons for why they chose to make the switch, but the most common one was that they wanted something fresher looking than the IFSTA manual. It didn’t necessarily have anything to do with the quality of the content in the Delmar manual. Delmar also had a number of other advantages over IFSTA, including the fact that they were a public corporation that was able to do things such as buy customers meals, pay for them to assist in reviewing drafts of their manual, and pay for them to travel to meetings, not only travel expenses, but also a stipend for their participation. These were all things that FPP was not able to do because the restrictions of being a state-government agency. Unfortunately, this did influence the decisions made by many potential customers who made the switch to Delmar. For reasons that will be explained later, this was the only edition of their manual that was developed and released. A second competitor to the Essentials market came in 2006. Jones & Bartlett Learning (J&B) was a world- leading provider of instructional, assessment, and learning-performance management solutions for the secondary, post-secondary, and professional markets. They were already one of the two major publishers in the emergency medical services (EMS) market. They released their first edition of Fundamentals of Fire Fighter Skills and Hazardous Materials Response that year. The timing of their release put into question their understanding of the NFPA standards-making process. Their manual was based on the NFPA 1001, 2002 edition and was released less than a year before the new NFPA 1001 came out in 2007. This miscalculation did not seem to hurt them. They soon passed Delmar as the number two seller in the Essentials market. This eventually led Delmar’s choice to not develop a new edition of their manual and ultimately to leave the market. While at the time that this paper was written, J&B’s manual was in its 4 th edition, it is not believed that their market share has greatly exceeded what Delmar had when they first came out. The IFSTA Essentials manual remains the dominant leader in this market. Early in the process of IFSTA/FPP developing the 5 th edition of the IFSTA Essentials manual, FPP leadership was contacted by representatives of Brady-Pearson previous Publishing (hereafter referred to as simply Brady) to discuss a possible collaboration on the development of the 5 th edition. Brady-Pearson was a unit within the much larger Prentice-Hall publishing conglomerate. They were invited to Stillwater to discuss their ideas. At the meeting, it became evident that if we chose not to work together with them, they were going develop their own version. They would been a much more formidable challenge to deal with than either of the other two previous publishers. They were much larger and had more resources than the other two. As well, they already had a significant presence in the fire publishing market, particularly in the higher education fire science textbook market. They had a much better idea of how to market to the fire service than the other two did. They were also the dominant publisher in the EMS training market. IFSTA/FPP had already decided to print two versions of the new edition. One would simply address the fire fighting requirements of NFPA 1001 and second one would cover the fire fighting, EMS, and hazardous materials requirements contained in that standard. In the discussions with Brady, it was determined that IFSTA would develop the first 20 chapters of material that would be the fire content and Brady would develop three chapters on first aid and hazardous material awareness and operations. The basic version of the manual contained only the 20 chapters of fire service requirements (Figure 27, p. 34) . IFSTA developed the content for those chapters and published the basic version. The expanded version would include the exact content,
IFSTA/FPP: THE FIRST 90 YEARS 33
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