Kate Kapalo: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. I'm Kate. I'm originally hailing from Orlando, Florida. have been in the fire service for about a decade, tangentially as a researcher. So the big thing that I find to be most helpful to think about is when you think about the fire service, it's a lot like the military in that you can't you know, do research on firefighters behind a desk. So For the past 10 years, I've been doing ride-alongs, I've worked in different departments, I've worked with different fire service organizations to really understand, you know, how do we actually move the needle forward when it comes to training and occupational health.
Mickey: you're involved with the fire service and doing research and all that stuff and you went and got your EMT, right? So talk about a little bit about getting your EMT.
Kate Kapalo: Yeah.
Mickey: Like, did you ever spend any time on a truck? Did
Kate Kapalo: Okay.
Mickey: you did you work as an EMT or you just got it for research? Like, why do you get your EMT?
Kate Kapalo: Yeah, so that's a that's an excellent question. So going back to that philosophy, I started my career as a civilian research psychologist with the Navy and I was working with F-18 top gun pilots. and what that really taught me is that you can't really be a good researcher unless you're immersed in the field. So I went and got my EMT as a way to better understand what first responders deal with, but also kind of just as a way to You know, with the way that things are in the world right now, I didn't want to be one of those people standing on the sidelines that couldn't help. so it's one of those things where if you're a researcher and you're good at what you do and you want to design simulations that really help firefighters and EMS professionals, you have to know what they do. So I went and got my EMT as a way to kind of, you know, live that philosophy. I'm the person that really puts my money where my mouth is in terms of I've done a lot of different types of research. I've been outside with wildland firefighters. I have, you know, been on the been on doing ride-alongs with structural firefighting throughout my dissertation and afterwards. And I think really that philosophy is you have to know what firefighters do in order to be able to help train them for that job or to look at the research in a way that really like resonates. and so I think that's one of the key things that we struggle with in the fire service is. adoption of some of this research. And so that's what I really was focused on getting that EMT was how do I actually add some credibility to the background here. I have done, you know, some work on a tr I wouldn't say that I'm like an expert by any means. obviously that's you know something I didn't go into this, you know, with the mind of, I'll be a full-time EMT. But it was one of those things where if I need to help out, at least I I'm not going to be the person standing on the side of the road like hoping for the best
Mickey: honestly, you know, first responders in general, but especially firemen, we don't really take well to outsiders. Like, you know, if you're gonna come do therapy with us or you're gonna come talk to us about research and you don't know anything about being in the fire service, people are gonna kinda like, yeah, whatever. You know? So it's a great thing that you did that and you
Kate Kapalo: Absolutely.
Mickey: can you can bring that to the table and tell them, like, hey, this is you know. This is why I'm doing this research and this is what I've done to prepare for it. I think those are great things. Have you ever put any bunker gear on?
Kate Kapalo: I have, yes. so at NIST, they made all of the researchers do that. I am a proud graduate of Citizens Fire Academy in Seminole County, Florida.
Mickey: Yeah.
Kate Kapalo: and I also have worn bunker here as part of my previous role. I was a deputy director of health and safety at DC Fire. And so my first task there. when you start in a new department, the last thing you want to do is start changing things. As you mentioned, firefighters hate two things the way things are and change. so
Mickey: Yeah, exactly.
Kate Kapalo: I did a ton of ride-alongs. I I don't know, like when I first started doing my dissertation research, I was working with a battalion chief and doing some ride-alongs with him. And I was like, Wow, maybe I should have been a firefighter. This makes me feel alive. And he was like, Okay, that's just adrenaline. But I really
Mickey: Ha ha ha.
Kate Kapalo: do, I think it's important to, you know. Feel the weight of the gear, try to understand how you're dealing with all of these things. And my background's in human factors research, which is really focused on like how do people, it's really the science of people at work in simple terms. So for me specifically, I kind of came up the ranks in the same way that someone like Gary Klein. his training is similar to mine in the sense that. We have that background in human factors, and we're focusing on like what information are you taking in when you're under stress? How does that work in a military environment? How does that work in a paramilitary environment like firefighting? And so, really, like you can't understand the research until you've actually done some of those tasks. and I don't claim to be an expert, you know, it's funny when people You know, when I walk into a room, they're like, you know, like what do you what could you possibly know about firefighting? but I do do my homework because I learned that very early on with with the Navy pilots, with Navy aviator aviators, like trust is everything. And if you can't build that trust and show that you've done your homework, then you know, it it's a waste of time for everyone. So
Mickey: Yeah, I know. I I was gonna wait a little bit to talk to you about the the human factors research. But how like how does that actually relate to us being better, safer, you know, doing our job better? Like how obviously you're very good at it 'cause I've read all of your stuff and watched all your articles.
Kate Kapalo: Ha ha.
Mickey: So talk to a little bit about the human factors stuff. A little expand on
Kate Kapalo: Yeah.
Mickey: a little bit for us.
Kate Kapalo: Okay. Yeah. So I think I think the easiest way to probably do this is to kind of I I know the fire service likes stories and I think like narratively, like on a podcast, it's easier than like talking about all of my, you know, background, but really essentially human factors is understanding how people interpret information and cognitively kind of take that in through their through their work. so a lot of what I've done is looking at technology in the fire service, specifically with pre-incident planning. And I'll tell you, I'll I'll I'll walk back a little bit. so when I was starting my dissertation, I was focused on working with a battalion chief who told me that he had to keep a flash drive of the local schools in his command vehicle, because in the event of an active shooter, he would not be able to pull up a floor pan easily. And so that was like a light bulb moment for me that was like, my goodness, you know, this is this is pathetic that we can't do this. Like there's technology out there. I work in a computer science lab. Like we can make something happen to where you can you don't have to do this. You don't have to find all these workarounds. And so really that human factors piece of it is looking at how do I get you the information, the right information at the right time. And you can do that in a variety of contexts. You can do it in structural wildland. The interesting thing about wildland firefighting is they've they require in their leadership courses for wildland firefighters to take human factors classes. So there's a component in it that really focuses on like if you're under stress and you're making decisions, what does that look like? how do I design interfaces and technology that aligns with that? Because when you're under stress, you don't need everything all at once. You need curated information that helps you get to where you need to go.
Mickey: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And the pre-fire planning you talk about is it's come a long way. You know, we used to just do
Kate Kapalo: Yes.
Mickey: pre-fire plans kind of for the ISO rating for, you know, better insurance
Kate Kapalo: Yes.
Mickey: ratings and, you know, so we could be a class one department or whatever. And, you know, we walked around with some paper and a wheel and and walked around the house and didn't really do anything. Now there's programs I don't want to pitch anybody, but we'll you know, in Miramar we used first do and first do is real time and and you can pull it up. Yep. Probably not the first unit going to a fire is gonna pull up first deal and look at these things, but the second or third engine, definitely the battalion chief
Kate Kapalo: Exactly.
Mickey: can pull up and find everything. And the crews when they're running calls can put stuff in real time, like, hey, there's a propane tank, hey, there's a hazard here, there's an empty pool, there's a elderly female that needs help when you get there. There's all these things that you can
Kate Kapalo: Okay.
Mickey: put in there real time notes. Really helps us be better.
Kate Kapalo: Which is perfect because yeah. Well, and and there's like challenges too, right? Because with human factors, we we focus a lot on cognition and cognition under stress. So like that's why I started with the Navy was looking at, you know, decision making of these naval aviators. Like, how are they able to make some of these decisions? What are their processes? How do I how do they think about things? And so understanding that is really critical when you're designing technology because In human factors, we do everything from nuclear power plants to firefighting and disaster response. So it's it's thinking about like what what demands are placed on you as the person that's taking in this information. And then for things like those hazards, working memory is really important. But when you're under stress, working memory can be very taxed. So thinking about how do we show that information. And first does a great example of that because that was like their bread and butter. They started out with free planning. We did a podcast a very long time ago with verse two. they're
Mickey: Yeah.
Kate Kapalo: great. We've I I've worked with them before. They're awesome. But I think I think that piece is really important because it might not be such a big deal on a pretty simple fire. But for my dissertation, I looked at a big box fire at a big box store. and that that a pre-plan is really necessary for that in a lot of cases because you don't always know where things are hidden or where things might be. Occupancy is a big deal, like thinking about all those different Things that you take into consideration when you're doing your size up. Sometimes you need that critical piece of information that could change the outcome of an incident.
Mickey: Yeah, and and you know, what you talk about is coal as wealth when we're looking at a size up and we teach it all the time. We we'll get to our incident command stuff in a little bit, but we teach coal as wealth all the time and why it's so important to do size ups. we tend to as firefighters, most firefighters that are not used to running into commercial structures. We we treat like single story, single family residential structures and we do what we taught and we do what we did in Fire Academy and we pull our line through the alpha side structure and the host team goes right and search team goes left. But when we get into those big box that's where we get problems and that's when we get people hurt or worse, you know? So it's good to have those
Kate Kapalo: Ja
Mickey: tools and th those human factor stuff. I like that a lot.
Kate Kapalo: Absolutely. And I and I think it's helpful to like connect this to different stories too. So, like one of my dissertation committee members, like as part of your PhD, you present to a committee that decides like whether or not your research is sufficient enough to move forward to show that you're an independent researcher and that it answers the questions methodologically. one of my dissertation committee members actually has his PhD and he's a captain at Phoenix. And so you know, early on I was a big fan of Brunicini, but kind of looking at that, he really opened my eyes to the Brett Tarver incident. And that's really when I started to delve down and and think through, you know, like, okay, this is this is sadly common. And the reason that I bring that up is because in it was either in 2016 or 2018, there was a young firefighter. that died in a similar incident. He ran out of air, got confused, wasn't able to, you know, really focus on what's going on because of all those things around him happening. And he unfortunately lost his life. And the reason I bring that up is because both of his parents were firefighters. He was not a stranger to the fire service. He had just been hired on in a career department. So it wasn't like he didn't know what he was doing. It happens to everyone. Like Brett Tarver was really experienced. and so looking at those things, that's why human factors is so important because we're trying to understand like not only how do we present this information, but when we go back and we review incidents, like what actually happened and how can we mitigate that in the future? Because the last thing that we want is to see the firefighters dying of the same causes over and over again when we could potentially introduce something or intervene in a way that would have helped.
Mickey: Yeah, and and we we read the line of duty deaths and we read the Nyash reports and and we read all these things and we go and we teach these classes, what you're doing is actually putting research into it and we we just go speak firemen talk. But I think what you're doing is really important and I'm I'm very excited to learn more about it. but we go and we do these classes, like we just got back with Tenacity Saves Lives. We just got back from Jacksonville Fire Department. We were teaching Maydays. and You know, we were talking about the Vendrome fire and we're talking about Brett Tarver and we're talking about, you know, Michael Begg and how do we prevent these things from happening in the future? You know, we're very limited when we run our Mayday scenarios. We really have a couple options. We can use a a program that we put a picture in there and make fake fire and smoke, which is, you know, it's okay. we can use
Kate Kapalo: Right.
Mickey: still pictures of fires. Where it doesn't change, or we can use videos and videos have kind of like that audio simulation. But I'm really curious about your modeling and simulation software and your AI stuff because maybe we can make that experience for those people even better. Because we're running them through an organic scenario with radio role players on the other end. And these people sweat
Kate Kapalo: I love that.
Mickey: they sweat more in the classroom than they do when they're actually running a fire
Kate Kapalo: Principle.
Mickey: because they're now they're not only having all of these stuff happen, but they're doing it in front of their peers. which is often harder than it is to to do it in real life. but to have a better a better forum would be awesome. So talk to us about your modeling and simulation. I'm very excited to hear about this.
Kate Kapalo: Yeah. So a lot of what I do is kind of like agnostic. And what I mean by that is it's like not specifically tied to a technology vendor. when I was at NIST, I was working with a group of researchers and scientists who are actually like really skilled video game developers. and so they are amazing at creating fidelity, understanding, and so by fidelity I mean like how realistic the simulation looks and And there are new tools coming out every day. So I don't want to like, you know, harp on something that will be obsolete in a few years. But really what we're finding is that gaming engines actually offer that ability to kind of think through things more dynamically because you're right. If you show someone a static picture, it's not the same as a fire. And that was something that I that's that's challenging to run through in simulation based training is finding something. that can be changed dynamically by the instructor to make it a little bit harder. making sure that we're not seeing like learning effects because somebody has already seen this scenario before. So like, you know, say you're you're sitting there and you're watching someone else go through the simulation and then you do it. You already know the steps to take if it's not dynamic because it's seen what they did or what they didn't do. So those like different learning philosophies have to go into how. We think about simulation. And that's something that I think is really critical. I find gaming simulations work because you can customize them. So like there's a variety of different tools you can use. They're they're Unity, Unreal, they're typically free. and there are a like a couple of actual firefighters who have gone on to study these things and design simulations themselves, which I think is really cool and really important. an example of that would be Blake and Claremont. He he actually designed, he he went and learned gaming engines so that he could design a better training tool. But really what we were looking for in this is to understand, you know, how how exactly can I present something to you in a way that resonates with what you would see in real time on scene. So NIST actually created with FirstNet a facility. It's almost like a giant green screen. And so you can use different modular props. Like I can make it look like the back of an ambulance bay, or I can make it look like the front of a residential structure fire. I can make it look like a commercial space. And so being able to like change out those different dynamics and use a space in that way, I think is really critical in the sense that you can get a lot more bang for your buck if you're able to design a facility that offers that. And I think the hard part is in the fire service, there is so many, I guess you could say like there's a lot of diversity in how people think about things. And there's a lot of diversity in hazards too. Like you look at Florida, we have a bunch of hurricanes, we also have wildfires, there's a bunch of other things going on. that looks a little bit different from the West or from Texas or, you know, other places. So thinking about that, being able to design simulations that match the needs of firefighters. That's kind of like where my research comes in is looking at if we're talking about a certain scenario, how do we design that? And so at NIST, we did one that was focused on a basement fire and someone fell through the fell through the the floor into the basement. And I think that's, you know, if you look at line of duty death reports, that's unfortunately something that is pretty common to fall through the the structure and being able to you know, understand how to run that Mayday, how to talk on the radio, how to how to coordinate all of that. That's something that I think simulation is really helpful for because we don't want to be putting people in dangerous scenarios if we can simulate it sometimes. Not saying that you should replace live rider training with simulation, but there are opportunities to practice that more often.
Mickey: Yeah, well it's a good point that you bring because you should definitely not get rid of live fire training. We have to do live fire training and we we do these things
Kate Kapalo: Absolutely.
Mickey: we throw ladders and we do writ and we do search and we do all these things. And then once you make an
Kate Kapalo: Yes.
Mickey: officer position and especially like a battalion chief, you you s you lose that training because there is not a lot of training for it out there, which is one of the reasons why,
Kate Kapalo: Right.
Mickey: you know. We teach our class with Tenacity Saves Lives. Anthony Castros teaches a class. a few
Kate Kapalo: cool.
Mickey: other people teach command classes, but twenty years ago there was no command classes. And the only time you did it is when you got on scene and you were expected to be this all-star that could just, you know, do incident command with no training. Well, you know,
Kate Kapalo: Right.
Mickey: everything is a diminishing skill. So you have to practice and you have to train, which is why we do it. we did a class in Indian River State College a year or two ago. And this lady came over from the UK. I think her name was Katherine Lamb, and she has virtual reality training. and you
Kate Kapalo: So cool.
Mickey: put the thing on and you run a scenario and you're talking on the radio, but you're you're watching everything happen through the virtual reality. And it was really good. It put it up on the screen. It was really good training. They do it over in the UK and they certify their officers on it, but it was gamey to me. It was really good, but it wasn't like, you know, it was it was like a video game. I I love the the modeling and simulation because pilots have been using simulators forever, right? They've been
Kate Kapalo: Yes.
Mickey: landing airplanes way before they ever get in the cockpit of a delta plane. They know how to land and
Kate Kapalo: Yes.
Mickey: do everything about a delta plane. You know, why can't we do that with firefighting? police officers, soldiers, they have shoot no shoot videos, you know? We
Kate Kapalo: Right.
Mickey: need to get better with the simulation. So I'm very excited for that as well, too. I'd like to figure out how we could kind of meld our training in with some of your your simulation stuff.
Kate Kapalo: Absolutely. No, I I think you you bring up a really great point. And I don't want to backtrack too much, but what you mentioned about the it feeling gamey. So I was at I've done a lot of work with the Florida Hazmat Symposium. I'm a hazmat nerd. I was I served on the IFF hazmat advisory training board for a little bit. but essentially we were I was sitting in a session with one of my friends who works in Ocala. And he was watching, you know, someone present a simulation and it was supposed to be for an anhydrous ammonia scenario. And immediately he was like, that's not how anhydrous ammonia looks. Like that looks like water and anhydrous ammonia doesn't look like that. Like this is gamey, I'm not into it. And so I think that's a really important point is in my research, we look at, you know, how how do we get you to suspend disbelief. Like what do we need to think about in terms of cues and clues? Cause if you think of size up, we teach you how to investigate the clues. We teach you all of that in training. Similarly for simulators, we can't simulate everything and there might be scenarios where we shouldn't, right? and so it's kind of finding that that medium or that happy balance between, you know, what looks realistic enough and then how do I introduce that temporal time you know, stress feeling that you would have at the actual incident, where your heart rate is up, you know, you're thinking through things, you're projecting into the future, the situation awareness model, all of those things come into play. And so I just wrapped a study with NFPA. It was funded by the Fire Protection Research Foundation, and we were really looking at if you're gonna use simulation based training for three different scenarios, so a pump panel operational scenario, driver simulator. And a highway incident, because that could really be anything that could be EMS, that could be hazmat, it could turn into anything. what how are we actually showing transfer of training? So, like that's part of it is like, can we actually measure that you're learning what you need to learn from the simulator? And that's what the defense community has done for a very long time and they're they've really matured that model. But in the fire service, it's not as easy because again, you know, when you're When you're thinking about it, each state kind of has different qualifications or things to focus on. And even though we're all trained to a similar standard, it's not always the same from region to region. So I think modeling and simulation offers a lot of different depth to the things that we can do. We haven't unlocked it all yet in the fire service. So I'm really glad to hear that you all do that training on the radio because I think That's a huge gap. How do how do you expect someone to know how to do that if they've never done it before? That's crazy. We wouldn't ever do
Mickey: Yeah.
Kate Kapalo: that in the military. We wouldn't throw someone in a cockpit to your point and have them fly a plane without knowing what they're doing.
Mickey: Yeah. Well, you would prepare to fly the plane, right? And then once you were prepared to fly
Kate Kapalo: Yeah, it's
Mickey: the plane, you never train again. That's it. Just fly the plane. You know how to do it now. That's kind of what we do with incident
Kate Kapalo: Thank you.
Mickey: command. And we're we're you know, Walter Lewis is a deputy chief of the Orlando Airport. He was assistant chief in Orlando Fire. He put this whole group together and it's Jerry Tracy, Anthony Avillo,
Kate Kapalo: Wow.
Mickey: Bob Krause, myself, Rick George, Larry Doling, there I mean, there's so
Kate Kapalo: So cool.
Mickey: many amazing people that are Candy Ashby there's so many amazing people in this group that all come together and teach incident command, because we're all incident commanders all over the country and we see the value and the
Kate Kapalo: Yes.
Mickey: importance of it. I do a lot of the scenario stuff, which leads into your stuff, and you know, I do it with still pictures or I do it with videos, and I write the scenarios organically and and the people kind of have to do a little bit of imagination because it it's not gonna change. Normally you would see
Kate Kapalo: Right, right.
Mickey: a change in conditions, but the radio role players really adapt to your point of you know different tactics and different stuff. The radio role players react very, very well. They're awesome to how people are are running the scenario on the radio, you know? So and it's eventually going to go down the path that
Kate Kapalo: Okay. That's so cool.
Mickey: we want them to go down. But they'll be like, okay, we're doing this. And we're like, okay, cool, you're doing that. Mayday, made it, made it. I just fell through the floor and they're like, my God, what the heck happened? You know? So It it's really cool training. I just think with w the visuals, if we could get the visuals and there's, you know, fire softwares that that are out there but they just like again, they look gamey. They don't look real, you know. I I think a real
Kate Kapalo: Right.
Mickey: fire picture or a real fire video with that audio and visual simulation is better.
Kate Kapalo: Absolutely. I th and I think we're getting there. I mean, like part of it is accessibility too, right? Like, you know, you're able to put on these classes, but like making sure that like people in more rural parts of the the country have access to this, it's hard. And it's also like I I always find it funny because we expect chiefs or leadership to be experts in technology and like know how to purchase these things. We
Mickey: Yeah.
Kate Kapalo: just kind of like force it on them. And you know, that's where I think it's really important to work with researchers and and like have this dynamic because I'm more than happy to, you know, like help people understand the cost benefit analysis of purchasing a system or thinking about these things. And that's something that we looked at in that project that we just wrapped was, you know, like how do we think about this in terms of different budgets, different department needs, different state training academy needs, because I wish we could just give every department, you know, an unlimited training budget, but it doesn't work that way, unfortunately.
Mickey: Yeah. Well, you know, with our class, if you want the full experience of our class, it's, you know, three, four days and you're flying instructors in from all over the country. It there's a cost to that. It's worth its weight in gold, but there is there is
Kate Kapalo: It does, yeah, of course. Yeah.
Mickey: a a cost to it. And, you know, when people look at that and are like, Well, we would love to have you guys come to our department, it it it you know, there's a there's a price for it. It's you know, it's not free. So that's a limiter in a lot of departments, but
Kate Kapalo: Right. Well and and you shouldn't and
Mickey: You know, money shouldn't be a factor in making us better.
Kate Kapalo: Right. And I and I mean like you should be compensated fairly for your expertise. I don't I don't want to come across as saying that I don't believe that. I think it's just hard to standardize. And I think that's why we're at the point we are, because like when you think about the military, like it's a very homogenous, very like population. They have a different budget, it's a different structure, right? So training naval aviators looks a little bit different than training firefighters. There's there's a joke. when I first, you know, started with the Navy, I went in to run a study. And one of the pilots told me, well, you're just not gonna get that information because the Navy has paid millions of dollars for this brain. And like I just I just can't give that to you, just like out of the blue. It was funny. but the reason I say that is because I think the fire service has a little bit of that same mentality in the sense that like When you're a gifted incident commander, you don't always think about everything in every single step that you're doing, right? Like your experience, you know what you're doing. You don't have to always enunciate or explain or talk through each step unless you're teaching someone else. And so being able to like capture that expertise and put it into a simulation that can be shared across the country. I mean, that's super important. Like that's phenomenal. I I'm really I'm I'm in awe of you guys being able to do that because I think it's so important. you know, to be able to have access to different levels of expertise, different areas of the country, different incident commanders who have ran all kinds of things. I mean, when I was at NIST, we talked to the to the men and women that ran the Aurora Colorado shooting. and you know, like unfortunately those incidents are pretty are becoming more common or are more common now. So it's thinking about like how do we handle active shooter in different situations, all of that. But I want to get too off topic.
Mickey: Yeah. No, it's good. It's good stuff. I want to talk about your experience with the IFF and Washington. So you you worked with the IFF doing occupational safety and health, right? And then you were the deputy
Kate Kapalo: Yes.
Mickey: director of safety and health for Washington, DC fire and EMS. So talk a little bit about that. Like what what did you do? Did you do a lot of like mental health stuff? Did you do and obviously I everybody knows you're a cancer survivor, so I'm sure you were involved in the cancer stuff, right?
Kate Kapalo: Yes. So at IFF, I helped out with cancer cases. So we would have, you know, different firefighters that would come to us, either their families or, you know, through the union members, and they would be fighting either, you know, currently they're they're in treatment or unfortunately they had passed and we were trying to secure benefits for their family. So I worked with a a really great group of people there, Neil McMillan, amazing, Raquel. Pat Morrison. we we were focused on understanding how can we best situate this in a way if like presumption didn't cover it or something along those lines. So thinking of like appeals. So I was part of that legal process and that scientific process to help write those letters of support so that we could get those families the benefits that they were entitled to. it was really Huh, rough in the sense that like I personally, when I was going through my dissertation, lost three of my friends got occupational cancer in the fire service and they were all in their early 40s. so looking at this, you know, you see you see some patterns in the data, I guess you could say. And one of those things that really stuck out to me was like how many times they would go to the doctor. And they would be misdiagnosed with like a muscle strain. And then months later it would turn into like metastasized stage four cancer. one case really, really hit me hard. it was a firefighter originally from Nevada. He had a very rare form of bile duct cancer. and he was 44 when he passed. it's just one of those things where When you're sick, the last thing you have the energy for is to fight the administrative battles like this. And so I really have to hand it to President Kelly and the members of the union for creating a program like this because you don't you need all the support you can get when you're sick and and having that support system or having that resource is really critical. I hope eventually one day we don't need to write those letters anymore because we've expanded presumption and expanded. the law, but I mean there's always gonna be that that one-off, you know, situation where you might need help. And so the union has really provided a really awesome resource for that.
Mickey: Yeah, it's way better than it used to be, right? Like it used to be, you know, now
Kate Kapalo: Okay. Yes.
Mickey: they have the cancers and there's what, twelve, sixteen of that are covered? I don't remember the exact number.
Kate Kapalo: Yeah, it depends on the it depends on the state. But yeah, I mean they're they have expanded coverage so much more than than it used to be. because I I had a friend that passed, I believe he was 42 of colon cancer. And like he he died literally like two weeks after his benefits were denied. so it's just like watching that happen to people that you know, you're close to and their family suffering is like one of those things where, you know, I hope to turn something that I went through into something that could benefit people more just because obviously I'm not a firefighter. I didn't get cancer from an occupational setting, but knowing that process and knowing what it's like to go through the initial diagnosis. you know, you're Your mind is spinning. You're like, how much time do I have left? Like, what does this look like from an imaging perspective? Your hurry up and wait game. It's just really taxing. And so it was really a true honor to be part of that process and to to help where I could. and then I ended up transitioning to DC Fire as a result of that because I had been working so much with NFPA compliance and thinking through like different standards and health and safety and occupational. So I'm more on the, I would say like the occupational health side of things. I do do some behavioral health, but I'm not a licensed clinician. so what I really focus on is more of like the if we're analyzing an incident after the fact, like what patterns can we pull out and then what scientific recommendations. So as an example, I wrote with a team, but I drafted the behavioral health after action review for the Potomac aircraft collision. That happened in January 2025 to better support members of the department with that behavioral health piece. Because I I think, you know, when it happens, it happens so quick. And you, you know, you guys are wizards. You can win and you do what you need to do and you always handle it. I mean, I the men and women of DC Fire amaze me every day. But it's one of those things where we have to be mindful that we're putting Things into place so that you know if you need those resources, they're there for you.
Mickey: Yeah. And with the human factors research, and and doing after action reports, doing pre-incident planning like that. It it reminds me of you know, Chief Dennis Riley was one of my guests and he he got me to read the David Grossman on combat book, which we I have his
Kate Kapalo: Yes.
Mickey: I have some of his graphs in my in my presentations, but I actually never read the whole book. I'm embarrassed to say. But I read the whole book and listened
Kate Kapalo: Yeah.
Mickey: to him done. And he talks about letting these people that are going into battle or being a cop that's gonna have an officer involved shooting. Like explaining to them before it happens the emotions that you could possibly feel. And then that way when you do the Sism and you do the CISD, which is so important, and you tell them like, Hey, I felt that way too, they understand it. what do you think about that? Cause you know, we just don't we don't prepare first responders enough for what they're gonna see for thirty years. You know, firefighters are gonna see,
Kate Kapalo: Yes.
Mickey: you know. shot kids, dead babies, you know, we're gonna see stuff that we shouldn't, humans shouldn't see, to be honest with you.
Kate Kapalo: Yes.
Mickey: we're very good at compartmentalizing it, we're good at dealing with it, we're good at moving on. We're not good at talking about it and saying, hey, it bothered me. I say it on a lot of episodes. We have to break that stigma when you never know that one thing that's gonna break you. And then now you bleve it and you, you know, everybody's like, what's wrong with Mickey? We have if we tell people, hey, You're gonna see these things. These are some of the things you're gonna see. It's okay to cry. It's okay to need to talk to a therapist. It's okay to be tired and take a nap when you come home from work. You don't have to push through and work details over time, your second, third job. It's okay to say, Hey, I'm tired, I need a nap and I need to call my therapist. That should be okay.
Kate Kapalo: Yeah, yeah. No, I I think what you you hit the nail on the head in the sense that like we do a really, excuse my language, piss poor job of educating firefighters and EMS professionals about the hazards of the job in the sense that Trauma impacts you biologically. It's not something that's like you can willpower your way out of it sometimes. And so I think we have this like, you know, it's changing. And I'm excited about that change, but it is a little bit slower than I would like. I think to your point, if we are better about providing that psychoeducation up front, that's something that's really critical. Like I know a lot of departments do like a family day. in Recruit Academy where they come in and like have your family, you know, actually pretend to be on the job or like, you know, see some of your training. I think that's that really goes a long way because educating your family about the things that you're gonna see or deal with, they need to understand that it's like not a nine to five job where you know you log in on a computer, you're yelled at by your boss and then you go home for the day. Like not saying every nine to five job is like
Mickey: Yeah.
Kate Kapalo: that. But I think like there's just some different hazards. And then also I think some of the some of the challenges we don't really do a good job of preparing people for either when it comes to like violence on scene or some of those other, you know, occupational hazards that we're seeing. So like if you feel burnt out or if you need to talk to a therapist, that's not a weakness upon you as an individual. That is the weight of the job and the the the biology of trauma that's actually, you know. impacting you. So it's not, it's not something that I think we should be faulting ourselves for individually because you're going to work and you're doing your job and you're showing up for your crew anyway. Like I can't tell you how much of this is all impacted holistically by sleep, by whether or not you're able to access there. Like all of those things kind of play a role into it. So my job at DC Fire was looking at like How holistically do NFPA standards fit in with compliance? And then on top of that, because NFPA is just one baseline, what else might we need to help people be their best on the job? And that includes things like, you know, bullying and harassment too. Like those are occupational hazards. Those things all happen when you're at work. So I think looking at that mental health piece, like I I think getting it into recruit classes is great. But like what I also really want to do is be there's not a lot of resources out there for people who are moving up the chain in leadership, right? Like for line officers, you have peer support, but it would be really great to have more of a support system out there for for leadership when it comes to the mental health piece too, because fire chiefs and captains aren't immune to Trauma just because you've done it for thirty years.
Mickey: I agree. I agree. I you bring up two great points I want to hit on. One, you just spoke about one of the hardest things that I ever had to do as a battalion chief was deal a mental health thing. You know, they don't prepare us that for that at all. You know, I can run into burning buildings, I can do
Kate Kapalo: Right.
Mickey: hazmat, I can I can, you know, call a Mayday, I can do all these things. The mental health thing I wasn't ready for. And unfortunately I had a few
Kate Kapalo: Right.
Mickey: few opportunities to deal with it and they all turned out pretty well, luckily for all of us. But, you know, that they definitely do not prepare us for. And the other thing is family.
Kate Kapalo: Right.
Mickey: Family is huge because I'm very lucky in the fact that my wife is a police officer. So our whole house is first responders. We
Kate Kapalo: That is cool.
Mickey: can come home, you know, have a cup of coffee and talk about the day and and you know, discuss, hey, this really bothered me. I saw X, Y, and Z today. But a lot of people don't have
Kate Kapalo: Right.
Mickey: that. Their wife is a librarian, they got young kids. they're not gonna come home.
Kate Kapalo: Right.
Mickey: They're gonna isolate, they're gonna have some beers, they're gonna go outside and work in the garage. You know, the the family's like, You don't talk to us, you're you're you're not you're shutting us out. And they don't know why they're doing it, you know?
Kate Kapalo: Right.
Mickey: They don't even know that they're doing it. So if we have that family interaction before and we say, Hey, these are the things to look at in your spouses, maybe that conversation opens up to like, Hey, you don't have to talk to me because I don't wanna know about dead babies, but you need to go call your therapist, you know?
Kate Kapalo: Right. Yeah. And and I think I think, you know, it's good to have it in the recruit class, but like even as you get promoted, like we don't have, you know, a conversation when you at least to my knowledge, they don't do that. when you get promoted to captain, lieutenant, battalion chief, it's not like your family comes to your promotional ceremony and they're like, hey guys. Things are about to get a lot nastier for
Mickey: Yeah.
Kate Kapalo: everybody because now you're in charge of everyone on top of dealing with like just responding to the incident. And so I think there would be, you know, I there's a lot of groups out there that are working towards this. So, like just to to name a few, like the Florida Firefighters Health and Safety Collaborative, they put on webinars all the time for family. And I think like that's the right move in the sense that Just just get those resources out there if we can. And you don't have to use them if you don't want to. But I think, you know, being the person that's like, I can just willpower my way through this, that's not that's not a healthy thing for you or your family. And so, you know, being able to come to them and say like, hey, I'm just having an off day. I need to like, yeah, I need to call my therapist or I need to, you know, maybe I need to find a therapist. and making that resource more accessible, I think is important. that's like a really big piece of it. And the peer support side of the I mean, I can't say enough about peer support in the sense that that's really like your group of people that you can you can vent to, you can talk to and they get it because they're they're doing it too.
Mickey: Yeah. And and listen, I'm not trying to syssify the fire service because I'm an aggressive interior fireman. I like to break stuff. I'm not gentle.
Kate Kapalo: I know. I know. I know you
Mickey: I was teaching a class in Jacksonville and I poured the Cokes in the cooler and them all of broke. They looked at me, I go, I'm not known for being gentle, dude. I don't know what you want from me. You know? But I'm not trying
Kate Kapalo: That's awesome.
Mickey: to make the depart or the fire service, you know, weak, weaker. We're still
Kate Kapalo: Right.
Mickey: all type A personalities. We're still gonna go in and destroy
Kate Kapalo: yes.
Mickey: stuff and break stuff and you know. you know, be macho, but it's okay to say you're not okay. It's not a weakness to say you're not okay. It's actually a strength
Kate Kapalo: Exactly.
Mickey: because then you're not out of the game as long as you would have if you let it sit and bleve. Now you're out of the game for a long time, versus being out of the game
Kate Kapalo: Exactly.
Mickey: for one mental health day where you talked to your therapist and took a nap. So I just want to clarify that 'cause I I don't want people to think like, you know, I'm all into my feelings and stuff.
Kate Kapalo: No, I and that that's that's what I was trying to get at too with the biology piece of this is it's it's not an individual weakness to seek out mental health resources, behavioral health resources. Like to your point, that's a strength because that shows that you are self-aware and that you want to be good at your job. And and rest is a piece of that, right? Rest is an important piece of that. Like, I mean, I was not successful in you know like eradicating energy drinks from fire houses and i don't
Mickey: He never will be.
Kate Kapalo: want to be that person either but what i'm saying is like we have to look at this as like a big picture and if and if you look at it like a scientist like all of these parts fit together to to like determine whether or not certain things are gonna like trigger you if you haven't slept very well I mean that sleep is such a huge piece of this staying up to date on your your annuals and and
Mickey: Yeah.
Kate Kapalo: you know if you feel something wrong with your body that doesn't mean that you're weak. Go to the doctor. I went to the doctor, I thought I had a gallstone and it turned out I had a form of pancreatic cancer. And if I hadn't caught it that early, it might have spread. so I'm very grateful because I had an amazing team, amazing medical team that figured it all out. But like those are the things that I wish, you know, more of the macho firefighters would focus on is like listening to yourself and your body. It's not weak to do the things that you need to do to show up as a father, as a firefighter, as a as a son, uncle, you know, any of those things.
Mickey: Husband as a son, yeah. Yeah, and we're getting better. We're listening when I was a kid, they rub some dirt on it, kid, you'll be fine. You know, you know, we power through
Kate Kapalo: Sure.
Mickey: a lot of stuff, you know, except for a cold. If you give a guy a cold, we're done. We're on the couch for a week. But everything else, I could have an arm falling off and be like, it's just a flesh wound, I'm okay.
Kate Kapalo: I know. The funny thing is, like when I like my personal cancer story, I ended up going to the ER and I was diagnosed in the ER and I called all of my paramedic friends beforehand and I was like, Do I really need to go? Like, these are my symptoms. Like, I don't think I'm that sick. And they're like, Well, if a gallstone ruptures, because that's what I thought it was at the time, then yeah, you you might be in in serious trouble. So I ended up going and I'm grateful I listened to my body in that situation because it could have been really bad if I didn't. yeah, so so in those situations, if you're feeling pain, it's it's not a weakness to go get that looked at either. Because I would rather you go and have it be nothing than go and find out, you know, months later when there isn't as much of a intervention available.
Mickey: Yeah, exactly. So this is the Why Project Nine One One presented by the Ford Paul Foundation. Our mission is to honor, support, and educate first responders. We give away about fifteen scholarships annually at the Heroes Dinner in Weston Florida. So maybe June next year you can come down and meet everybody. That would be awesome.
Kate Kapalo: I would love that. Yeah, that'd be amazing.
Mickey: but I always ask everybody on every episode what is a why that we can take away from Kate Kabbalah? Being a doctor, being model simulation,
Kate Kapalo: so.
Mickey: human factors, like what is a why? What's your why?
Kate Kapalo: my why is it's it's a long story, but I'll I'll just you know condense it for the purposes of this. when I was in, I won't say what grade I was in, 9-11 happened, and my class wrote letters to the Walking Street firefighters in Brooklyn. And they sent me a letter, From the firehouse with a picture of their engine and their ladder. And I just thought that was the coolest thing. So I still have that letter framed. it's in my office at school. And it's one of those things where I look at that, you know, and when I'm having a really terrible day, it's like, what's your why? That's my why. That's why I do this. It's because, you know, In these situations, we need to stick together as a fire service. We need to be able to advocate. We need to be able to do these things. And so when I feel frustrated because I'm having a bad day, I look at that and like, well, you know, I have no excuse. They did it. So you need to do that.
Mickey: That's an amazing why. You gave me goosebumps. That's an amazing why. if you watch the first
Kate Kapalo: It's yeah, it's
Mickey: episode with Joe Minahan, he has a is part of he doesn't have a he's part of a foundation where angels play, where they build they build playgrounds. And a lot of it was like, you know, we went through this tragedy and the kids wrote us letters. So how do we give back as firefighters and first responders? We're gonna go build playgrounds
Kate Kapalo: I love that.
Mickey: for him. So if you get a chance to look that up, it's called Where Angels Play. It's a really cool foundation.
Kate Kapalo: I had no idea. That's amaz yes, I am totally looking that up. That is so cool.
Mickey: Yeah. I think it started like in Connecticut after the Hurricane Sandy and and Sandy Hook shooting and all that stuff. So very cool. Very cool.
Kate Kapalo: Yes, that's amazing. Yeah.
Mickey: I I am honored to have you on here, Doc. You did a great job. It's so cool. I'm so I wanna introduce you to Catherine Lamb from the UK and I wanna talk to you more about your simulation training and see if we can involve it with Tenacity Saves Lives. I think that would be amazing. Is there a
Kate Kapalo: yes, I'm s so up for that. Yes.
Mickey: Is there any final thoughts you'd like to share with everybody?
Kate Kapalo: I d off the top of my head, I think like just the last thing I'll say is every single paper that I've written on the fire service has been dedicated to a fallen firefighter, whether that's from cancer, whether it's from a training accident. And so I think, you know, we have to keep these stories alive because this is what saves lives, right? we can't go back and change the past, but we can change the future. And it's cheesy, but I really do envision a future in which we can get everyone home safely.
Mickey: You know, another thing I'm thinking of, and I'll talk to Walt Lewis. I gotta introduce you to Walt, but in the Orlando Fire Conference every year in February, we have a lecture series as well. And I I think you would be a great addition to the lecture series. So I wanna introduce you too as well.
Kate Kapalo: I'd be honored. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
Mickey: Yeah.
Kate Kapalo: you have a a star-studded cast, so I was honored to be part of this too.
Mickey: I I have to give a shout out to Chief Gene Landers because he's the one that introduced us too. So it was it was good. And
Kate Kapalo: He's great. He's awesome.
Mickey: I'm very honored to have you on again. Thank you for coming on. Everybody have a great day.
Kate Kapalo: Thank you so much. Have a good one.
Mickey: you're involved with the fire service and doing research and all that stuff and you went and got your EMT, right? So talk about a little bit about getting your EMT.
Kate Kapalo: Yeah.
Mickey: Like, did you ever spend any time on a truck? Did
Kate Kapalo: Okay.
Mickey: you did you work as an EMT or you just got it for research? Like, why do you get your EMT?
Kate Kapalo: Yeah, so that's a that's an excellent question. So going back to that philosophy, I started my career as a civilian research psychologist with the Navy and I was working with F-18 top gun pilots. and what that really taught me is that you can't really be a good researcher unless you're immersed in the field. So I went and got my EMT as a way to better understand what first responders deal with, but also kind of just as a way to You know, with the way that things are in the world right now, I didn't want to be one of those people standing on the sidelines that couldn't help. so it's one of those things where if you're a researcher and you're good at what you do and you want to design simulations that really help firefighters and EMS professionals, you have to know what they do. So I went and got my EMT as a way to kind of, you know, live that philosophy. I'm the person that really puts my money where my mouth is in terms of I've done a lot of different types of research. I've been outside with wildland firefighters. I have, you know, been on the been on doing ride-alongs with structural firefighting throughout my dissertation and afterwards. And I think really that philosophy is you have to know what firefighters do in order to be able to help train them for that job or to look at the research in a way that really like resonates. and so I think that's one of the key things that we struggle with in the fire service is. adoption of some of this research. And so that's what I really was focused on getting that EMT was how do I actually add some credibility to the background here. I have done, you know, some work on a tr I wouldn't say that I'm like an expert by any means. obviously that's you know something I didn't go into this, you know, with the mind of, I'll be a full-time EMT. But it was one of those things where if I need to help out, at least I I'm not going to be the person standing on the side of the road like hoping for the best
Mickey: honestly, you know, first responders in general, but especially firemen, we don't really take well to outsiders. Like, you know, if you're gonna come do therapy with us or you're gonna come talk to us about research and you don't know anything about being in the fire service, people are gonna kinda like, yeah, whatever. You know? So it's a great thing that you did that and you
Kate Kapalo: Absolutely.
Mickey: can you can bring that to the table and tell them, like, hey, this is you know. This is why I'm doing this research and this is what I've done to prepare for it. I think those are great things. Have you ever put any bunker gear on?
Kate Kapalo: I have, yes. so at NIST, they made all of the researchers do that. I am a proud graduate of Citizens Fire Academy in Seminole County, Florida.
Mickey: Yeah.
Kate Kapalo: and I also have worn bunker here as part of my previous role. I was a deputy director of health and safety at DC Fire. And so my first task there. when you start in a new department, the last thing you want to do is start changing things. As you mentioned, firefighters hate two things the way things are and change. so
Mickey: Yeah, exactly.
Kate Kapalo: I did a ton of ride-alongs. I I don't know, like when I first started doing my dissertation research, I was working with a battalion chief and doing some ride-alongs with him. And I was like, Wow, maybe I should have been a firefighter. This makes me feel alive. And he was like, Okay, that's just adrenaline. But I really
Mickey: Ha ha ha.
Kate Kapalo: do, I think it's important to, you know. Feel the weight of the gear, try to understand how you're dealing with all of these things. And my background's in human factors research, which is really focused on like how do people, it's really the science of people at work in simple terms. So for me specifically, I kind of came up the ranks in the same way that someone like Gary Klein. his training is similar to mine in the sense that. We have that background in human factors, and we're focusing on like what information are you taking in when you're under stress? How does that work in a military environment? How does that work in a paramilitary environment like firefighting? And so, really, like you can't understand the research until you've actually done some of those tasks. and I don't claim to be an expert, you know, it's funny when people You know, when I walk into a room, they're like, you know, like what do you what could you possibly know about firefighting? but I do do my homework because I learned that very early on with with the Navy pilots, with Navy aviator aviators, like trust is everything. And if you can't build that trust and show that you've done your homework, then you know, it it's a waste of time for everyone. So
Mickey: Yeah, I know. I I was gonna wait a little bit to talk to you about the the human factors research. But how like how does that actually relate to us being better, safer, you know, doing our job better? Like how obviously you're very good at it 'cause I've read all of your stuff and watched all your articles.
Kate Kapalo: Ha ha.
Mickey: So talk to a little bit about the human factors stuff. A little expand on
Kate Kapalo: Yeah.
Mickey: a little bit for us.
Kate Kapalo: Okay. Yeah. So I think I think the easiest way to probably do this is to kind of I I know the fire service likes stories and I think like narratively, like on a podcast, it's easier than like talking about all of my, you know, background, but really essentially human factors is understanding how people interpret information and cognitively kind of take that in through their through their work. so a lot of what I've done is looking at technology in the fire service, specifically with pre-incident planning. And I'll tell you, I'll I'll I'll walk back a little bit. so when I was starting my dissertation, I was focused on working with a battalion chief who told me that he had to keep a flash drive of the local schools in his command vehicle, because in the event of an active shooter, he would not be able to pull up a floor pan easily. And so that was like a light bulb moment for me that was like, my goodness, you know, this is this is pathetic that we can't do this. Like there's technology out there. I work in a computer science lab. Like we can make something happen to where you can you don't have to do this. You don't have to find all these workarounds. And so really that human factors piece of it is looking at how do I get you the information, the right information at the right time. And you can do that in a variety of contexts. You can do it in structural wildland. The interesting thing about wildland firefighting is they've they require in their leadership courses for wildland firefighters to take human factors classes. So there's a component in it that really focuses on like if you're under stress and you're making decisions, what does that look like? how do I design interfaces and technology that aligns with that? Because when you're under stress, you don't need everything all at once. You need curated information that helps you get to where you need to go.
Mickey: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And the pre-fire planning you talk about is it's come a long way. You know, we used to just do
Kate Kapalo: Yes.
Mickey: pre-fire plans kind of for the ISO rating for, you know, better insurance
Kate Kapalo: Yes.
Mickey: ratings and, you know, so we could be a class one department or whatever. And, you know, we walked around with some paper and a wheel and and walked around the house and didn't really do anything. Now there's programs I don't want to pitch anybody, but we'll you know, in Miramar we used first do and first do is real time and and you can pull it up. Yep. Probably not the first unit going to a fire is gonna pull up first deal and look at these things, but the second or third engine, definitely the battalion chief
Kate Kapalo: Exactly.
Mickey: can pull up and find everything. And the crews when they're running calls can put stuff in real time, like, hey, there's a propane tank, hey, there's a hazard here, there's an empty pool, there's a elderly female that needs help when you get there. There's all these things that you can
Kate Kapalo: Okay.
Mickey: put in there real time notes. Really helps us be better.
Kate Kapalo: Which is perfect because yeah. Well, and and there's like challenges too, right? Because with human factors, we we focus a lot on cognition and cognition under stress. So like that's why I started with the Navy was looking at, you know, decision making of these naval aviators. Like, how are they able to make some of these decisions? What are their processes? How do I how do they think about things? And so understanding that is really critical when you're designing technology because In human factors, we do everything from nuclear power plants to firefighting and disaster response. So it's it's thinking about like what what demands are placed on you as the person that's taking in this information. And then for things like those hazards, working memory is really important. But when you're under stress, working memory can be very taxed. So thinking about how do we show that information. And first does a great example of that because that was like their bread and butter. They started out with free planning. We did a podcast a very long time ago with verse two. they're
Mickey: Yeah.
Kate Kapalo: great. We've I I've worked with them before. They're awesome. But I think I think that piece is really important because it might not be such a big deal on a pretty simple fire. But for my dissertation, I looked at a big box fire at a big box store. and that that a pre-plan is really necessary for that in a lot of cases because you don't always know where things are hidden or where things might be. Occupancy is a big deal, like thinking about all those different Things that you take into consideration when you're doing your size up. Sometimes you need that critical piece of information that could change the outcome of an incident.
Mickey: Yeah, and and you know, what you talk about is coal as wealth when we're looking at a size up and we teach it all the time. We we'll get to our incident command stuff in a little bit, but we teach coal as wealth all the time and why it's so important to do size ups. we tend to as firefighters, most firefighters that are not used to running into commercial structures. We we treat like single story, single family residential structures and we do what we taught and we do what we did in Fire Academy and we pull our line through the alpha side structure and the host team goes right and search team goes left. But when we get into those big box that's where we get problems and that's when we get people hurt or worse, you know? So it's good to have those
Kate Kapalo: Ja
Mickey: tools and th those human factor stuff. I like that a lot.
Kate Kapalo: Absolutely. And I and I think it's helpful to like connect this to different stories too. So, like one of my dissertation committee members, like as part of your PhD, you present to a committee that decides like whether or not your research is sufficient enough to move forward to show that you're an independent researcher and that it answers the questions methodologically. one of my dissertation committee members actually has his PhD and he's a captain at Phoenix. And so you know, early on I was a big fan of Brunicini, but kind of looking at that, he really opened my eyes to the Brett Tarver incident. And that's really when I started to delve down and and think through, you know, like, okay, this is this is sadly common. And the reason that I bring that up is because in it was either in 2016 or 2018, there was a young firefighter. that died in a similar incident. He ran out of air, got confused, wasn't able to, you know, really focus on what's going on because of all those things around him happening. And he unfortunately lost his life. And the reason I bring that up is because both of his parents were firefighters. He was not a stranger to the fire service. He had just been hired on in a career department. So it wasn't like he didn't know what he was doing. It happens to everyone. Like Brett Tarver was really experienced. and so looking at those things, that's why human factors is so important because we're trying to understand like not only how do we present this information, but when we go back and we review incidents, like what actually happened and how can we mitigate that in the future? Because the last thing that we want is to see the firefighters dying of the same causes over and over again when we could potentially introduce something or intervene in a way that would have helped.
Mickey: Yeah, and and we we read the line of duty deaths and we read the Nyash reports and and we read all these things and we go and we teach these classes, what you're doing is actually putting research into it and we we just go speak firemen talk. But I think what you're doing is really important and I'm I'm very excited to learn more about it. but we go and we do these classes, like we just got back with Tenacity Saves Lives. We just got back from Jacksonville Fire Department. We were teaching Maydays. and You know, we were talking about the Vendrome fire and we're talking about Brett Tarver and we're talking about, you know, Michael Begg and how do we prevent these things from happening in the future? You know, we're very limited when we run our Mayday scenarios. We really have a couple options. We can use a a program that we put a picture in there and make fake fire and smoke, which is, you know, it's okay. we can use
Kate Kapalo: Right.
Mickey: still pictures of fires. Where it doesn't change, or we can use videos and videos have kind of like that audio simulation. But I'm really curious about your modeling and simulation software and your AI stuff because maybe we can make that experience for those people even better. Because we're running them through an organic scenario with radio role players on the other end. And these people sweat
Kate Kapalo: I love that.
Mickey: they sweat more in the classroom than they do when they're actually running a fire
Kate Kapalo: Principle.
Mickey: because they're now they're not only having all of these stuff happen, but they're doing it in front of their peers. which is often harder than it is to to do it in real life. but to have a better a better forum would be awesome. So talk to us about your modeling and simulation. I'm very excited to hear about this.
Kate Kapalo: Yeah. So a lot of what I do is kind of like agnostic. And what I mean by that is it's like not specifically tied to a technology vendor. when I was at NIST, I was working with a group of researchers and scientists who are actually like really skilled video game developers. and so they are amazing at creating fidelity, understanding, and so by fidelity I mean like how realistic the simulation looks and And there are new tools coming out every day. So I don't want to like, you know, harp on something that will be obsolete in a few years. But really what we're finding is that gaming engines actually offer that ability to kind of think through things more dynamically because you're right. If you show someone a static picture, it's not the same as a fire. And that was something that I that's that's challenging to run through in simulation based training is finding something. that can be changed dynamically by the instructor to make it a little bit harder. making sure that we're not seeing like learning effects because somebody has already seen this scenario before. So like, you know, say you're you're sitting there and you're watching someone else go through the simulation and then you do it. You already know the steps to take if it's not dynamic because it's seen what they did or what they didn't do. So those like different learning philosophies have to go into how. We think about simulation. And that's something that I think is really critical. I find gaming simulations work because you can customize them. So like there's a variety of different tools you can use. They're they're Unity, Unreal, they're typically free. and there are a like a couple of actual firefighters who have gone on to study these things and design simulations themselves, which I think is really cool and really important. an example of that would be Blake and Claremont. He he actually designed, he he went and learned gaming engines so that he could design a better training tool. But really what we were looking for in this is to understand, you know, how how exactly can I present something to you in a way that resonates with what you would see in real time on scene. So NIST actually created with FirstNet a facility. It's almost like a giant green screen. And so you can use different modular props. Like I can make it look like the back of an ambulance bay, or I can make it look like the front of a residential structure fire. I can make it look like a commercial space. And so being able to like change out those different dynamics and use a space in that way, I think is really critical in the sense that you can get a lot more bang for your buck if you're able to design a facility that offers that. And I think the hard part is in the fire service, there is so many, I guess you could say like there's a lot of diversity in how people think about things. And there's a lot of diversity in hazards too. Like you look at Florida, we have a bunch of hurricanes, we also have wildfires, there's a bunch of other things going on. that looks a little bit different from the West or from Texas or, you know, other places. So thinking about that, being able to design simulations that match the needs of firefighters. That's kind of like where my research comes in is looking at if we're talking about a certain scenario, how do we design that? And so at NIST, we did one that was focused on a basement fire and someone fell through the fell through the the floor into the basement. And I think that's, you know, if you look at line of duty death reports, that's unfortunately something that is pretty common to fall through the the structure and being able to you know, understand how to run that Mayday, how to talk on the radio, how to how to coordinate all of that. That's something that I think simulation is really helpful for because we don't want to be putting people in dangerous scenarios if we can simulate it sometimes. Not saying that you should replace live rider training with simulation, but there are opportunities to practice that more often.
Mickey: Yeah, well it's a good point that you bring because you should definitely not get rid of live fire training. We have to do live fire training and we we do these things
Kate Kapalo: Absolutely.
Mickey: we throw ladders and we do writ and we do search and we do all these things. And then once you make an
Kate Kapalo: Yes.
Mickey: officer position and especially like a battalion chief, you you s you lose that training because there is not a lot of training for it out there, which is one of the reasons why,
Kate Kapalo: Right.
Mickey: you know. We teach our class with Tenacity Saves Lives. Anthony Castros teaches a class. a few
Kate Kapalo: cool.
Mickey: other people teach command classes, but twenty years ago there was no command classes. And the only time you did it is when you got on scene and you were expected to be this all-star that could just, you know, do incident command with no training. Well, you know,
Kate Kapalo: Right.
Mickey: everything is a diminishing skill. So you have to practice and you have to train, which is why we do it. we did a class in Indian River State College a year or two ago. And this lady came over from the UK. I think her name was Katherine Lamb, and she has virtual reality training. and you
Kate Kapalo: So cool.
Mickey: put the thing on and you run a scenario and you're talking on the radio, but you're you're watching everything happen through the virtual reality. And it was really good. It put it up on the screen. It was really good training. They do it over in the UK and they certify their officers on it, but it was gamey to me. It was really good, but it wasn't like, you know, it was it was like a video game. I I love the the modeling and simulation because pilots have been using simulators forever, right? They've been
Kate Kapalo: Yes.
Mickey: landing airplanes way before they ever get in the cockpit of a delta plane. They know how to land and
Kate Kapalo: Yes.
Mickey: do everything about a delta plane. You know, why can't we do that with firefighting? police officers, soldiers, they have shoot no shoot videos, you know? We
Kate Kapalo: Right.
Mickey: need to get better with the simulation. So I'm very excited for that as well, too. I'd like to figure out how we could kind of meld our training in with some of your your simulation stuff.
Kate Kapalo: Absolutely. No, I I think you you bring up a really great point. And I don't want to backtrack too much, but what you mentioned about the it feeling gamey. So I was at I've done a lot of work with the Florida Hazmat Symposium. I'm a hazmat nerd. I was I served on the IFF hazmat advisory training board for a little bit. but essentially we were I was sitting in a session with one of my friends who works in Ocala. And he was watching, you know, someone present a simulation and it was supposed to be for an anhydrous ammonia scenario. And immediately he was like, that's not how anhydrous ammonia looks. Like that looks like water and anhydrous ammonia doesn't look like that. Like this is gamey, I'm not into it. And so I think that's a really important point is in my research, we look at, you know, how how do we get you to suspend disbelief. Like what do we need to think about in terms of cues and clues? Cause if you think of size up, we teach you how to investigate the clues. We teach you all of that in training. Similarly for simulators, we can't simulate everything and there might be scenarios where we shouldn't, right? and so it's kind of finding that that medium or that happy balance between, you know, what looks realistic enough and then how do I introduce that temporal time you know, stress feeling that you would have at the actual incident, where your heart rate is up, you know, you're thinking through things, you're projecting into the future, the situation awareness model, all of those things come into play. And so I just wrapped a study with NFPA. It was funded by the Fire Protection Research Foundation, and we were really looking at if you're gonna use simulation based training for three different scenarios, so a pump panel operational scenario, driver simulator. And a highway incident, because that could really be anything that could be EMS, that could be hazmat, it could turn into anything. what how are we actually showing transfer of training? So, like that's part of it is like, can we actually measure that you're learning what you need to learn from the simulator? And that's what the defense community has done for a very long time and they're they've really matured that model. But in the fire service, it's not as easy because again, you know, when you're When you're thinking about it, each state kind of has different qualifications or things to focus on. And even though we're all trained to a similar standard, it's not always the same from region to region. So I think modeling and simulation offers a lot of different depth to the things that we can do. We haven't unlocked it all yet in the fire service. So I'm really glad to hear that you all do that training on the radio because I think That's a huge gap. How do how do you expect someone to know how to do that if they've never done it before? That's crazy. We wouldn't ever do
Mickey: Yeah.
Kate Kapalo: that in the military. We wouldn't throw someone in a cockpit to your point and have them fly a plane without knowing what they're doing.
Mickey: Yeah. Well, you would prepare to fly the plane, right? And then once you were prepared to fly
Kate Kapalo: Yeah, it's
Mickey: the plane, you never train again. That's it. Just fly the plane. You know how to do it now. That's kind of what we do with incident
Kate Kapalo: Thank you.
Mickey: command. And we're we're you know, Walter Lewis is a deputy chief of the Orlando Airport. He was assistant chief in Orlando Fire. He put this whole group together and it's Jerry Tracy, Anthony Avillo,
Kate Kapalo: Wow.
Mickey: Bob Krause, myself, Rick George, Larry Doling, there I mean, there's so
Kate Kapalo: So cool.
Mickey: many amazing people that are Candy Ashby there's so many amazing people in this group that all come together and teach incident command, because we're all incident commanders all over the country and we see the value and the
Kate Kapalo: Yes.
Mickey: importance of it. I do a lot of the scenario stuff, which leads into your stuff, and you know, I do it with still pictures or I do it with videos, and I write the scenarios organically and and the people kind of have to do a little bit of imagination because it it's not gonna change. Normally you would see
Kate Kapalo: Right, right.
Mickey: a change in conditions, but the radio role players really adapt to your point of you know different tactics and different stuff. The radio role players react very, very well. They're awesome to how people are are running the scenario on the radio, you know? So and it's eventually going to go down the path that
Kate Kapalo: Okay. That's so cool.
Mickey: we want them to go down. But they'll be like, okay, we're doing this. And we're like, okay, cool, you're doing that. Mayday, made it, made it. I just fell through the floor and they're like, my God, what the heck happened? You know? So It it's really cool training. I just think with w the visuals, if we could get the visuals and there's, you know, fire softwares that that are out there but they just like again, they look gamey. They don't look real, you know. I I think a real
Kate Kapalo: Right.
Mickey: fire picture or a real fire video with that audio and visual simulation is better.
Kate Kapalo: Absolutely. I th and I think we're getting there. I mean, like part of it is accessibility too, right? Like, you know, you're able to put on these classes, but like making sure that like people in more rural parts of the the country have access to this, it's hard. And it's also like I I always find it funny because we expect chiefs or leadership to be experts in technology and like know how to purchase these things. We
Mickey: Yeah.
Kate Kapalo: just kind of like force it on them. And you know, that's where I think it's really important to work with researchers and and like have this dynamic because I'm more than happy to, you know, like help people understand the cost benefit analysis of purchasing a system or thinking about these things. And that's something that we looked at in that project that we just wrapped was, you know, like how do we think about this in terms of different budgets, different department needs, different state training academy needs, because I wish we could just give every department, you know, an unlimited training budget, but it doesn't work that way, unfortunately.
Mickey: Yeah. Well, you know, with our class, if you want the full experience of our class, it's, you know, three, four days and you're flying instructors in from all over the country. It there's a cost to that. It's worth its weight in gold, but there is there is
Kate Kapalo: It does, yeah, of course. Yeah.
Mickey: a a cost to it. And, you know, when people look at that and are like, Well, we would love to have you guys come to our department, it it it you know, there's a there's a price for it. It's you know, it's not free. So that's a limiter in a lot of departments, but
Kate Kapalo: Right. Well and and you shouldn't and
Mickey: You know, money shouldn't be a factor in making us better.
Kate Kapalo: Right. And I and I mean like you should be compensated fairly for your expertise. I don't I don't want to come across as saying that I don't believe that. I think it's just hard to standardize. And I think that's why we're at the point we are, because like when you think about the military, like it's a very homogenous, very like population. They have a different budget, it's a different structure, right? So training naval aviators looks a little bit different than training firefighters. There's there's a joke. when I first, you know, started with the Navy, I went in to run a study. And one of the pilots told me, well, you're just not gonna get that information because the Navy has paid millions of dollars for this brain. And like I just I just can't give that to you, just like out of the blue. It was funny. but the reason I say that is because I think the fire service has a little bit of that same mentality in the sense that like When you're a gifted incident commander, you don't always think about everything in every single step that you're doing, right? Like your experience, you know what you're doing. You don't have to always enunciate or explain or talk through each step unless you're teaching someone else. And so being able to like capture that expertise and put it into a simulation that can be shared across the country. I mean, that's super important. Like that's phenomenal. I I'm really I'm I'm in awe of you guys being able to do that because I think it's so important. you know, to be able to have access to different levels of expertise, different areas of the country, different incident commanders who have ran all kinds of things. I mean, when I was at NIST, we talked to the to the men and women that ran the Aurora Colorado shooting. and you know, like unfortunately those incidents are pretty are becoming more common or are more common now. So it's thinking about like how do we handle active shooter in different situations, all of that. But I want to get too off topic.
Mickey: Yeah. No, it's good. It's good stuff. I want to talk about your experience with the IFF and Washington. So you you worked with the IFF doing occupational safety and health, right? And then you were the deputy
Kate Kapalo: Yes.
Mickey: director of safety and health for Washington, DC fire and EMS. So talk a little bit about that. Like what what did you do? Did you do a lot of like mental health stuff? Did you do and obviously I everybody knows you're a cancer survivor, so I'm sure you were involved in the cancer stuff, right?
Kate Kapalo: Yes. So at IFF, I helped out with cancer cases. So we would have, you know, different firefighters that would come to us, either their families or, you know, through the union members, and they would be fighting either, you know, currently they're they're in treatment or unfortunately they had passed and we were trying to secure benefits for their family. So I worked with a a really great group of people there, Neil McMillan, amazing, Raquel. Pat Morrison. we we were focused on understanding how can we best situate this in a way if like presumption didn't cover it or something along those lines. So thinking of like appeals. So I was part of that legal process and that scientific process to help write those letters of support so that we could get those families the benefits that they were entitled to. it was really Huh, rough in the sense that like I personally, when I was going through my dissertation, lost three of my friends got occupational cancer in the fire service and they were all in their early 40s. so looking at this, you know, you see you see some patterns in the data, I guess you could say. And one of those things that really stuck out to me was like how many times they would go to the doctor. And they would be misdiagnosed with like a muscle strain. And then months later it would turn into like metastasized stage four cancer. one case really, really hit me hard. it was a firefighter originally from Nevada. He had a very rare form of bile duct cancer. and he was 44 when he passed. it's just one of those things where When you're sick, the last thing you have the energy for is to fight the administrative battles like this. And so I really have to hand it to President Kelly and the members of the union for creating a program like this because you don't you need all the support you can get when you're sick and and having that support system or having that resource is really critical. I hope eventually one day we don't need to write those letters anymore because we've expanded presumption and expanded. the law, but I mean there's always gonna be that that one-off, you know, situation where you might need help. And so the union has really provided a really awesome resource for that.
Mickey: Yeah, it's way better than it used to be, right? Like it used to be, you know, now
Kate Kapalo: Okay. Yes.
Mickey: they have the cancers and there's what, twelve, sixteen of that are covered? I don't remember the exact number.
Kate Kapalo: Yeah, it depends on the it depends on the state. But yeah, I mean they're they have expanded coverage so much more than than it used to be. because I I had a friend that passed, I believe he was 42 of colon cancer. And like he he died literally like two weeks after his benefits were denied. so it's just like watching that happen to people that you know, you're close to and their family suffering is like one of those things where, you know, I hope to turn something that I went through into something that could benefit people more just because obviously I'm not a firefighter. I didn't get cancer from an occupational setting, but knowing that process and knowing what it's like to go through the initial diagnosis. you know, you're Your mind is spinning. You're like, how much time do I have left? Like, what does this look like from an imaging perspective? Your hurry up and wait game. It's just really taxing. And so it was really a true honor to be part of that process and to to help where I could. and then I ended up transitioning to DC Fire as a result of that because I had been working so much with NFPA compliance and thinking through like different standards and health and safety and occupational. So I'm more on the, I would say like the occupational health side of things. I do do some behavioral health, but I'm not a licensed clinician. so what I really focus on is more of like the if we're analyzing an incident after the fact, like what patterns can we pull out and then what scientific recommendations. So as an example, I wrote with a team, but I drafted the behavioral health after action review for the Potomac aircraft collision. That happened in January 2025 to better support members of the department with that behavioral health piece. Because I I think, you know, when it happens, it happens so quick. And you, you know, you guys are wizards. You can win and you do what you need to do and you always handle it. I mean, I the men and women of DC Fire amaze me every day. But it's one of those things where we have to be mindful that we're putting Things into place so that you know if you need those resources, they're there for you.
Mickey: Yeah. And with the human factors research, and and doing after action reports, doing pre-incident planning like that. It it reminds me of you know, Chief Dennis Riley was one of my guests and he he got me to read the David Grossman on combat book, which we I have his
Kate Kapalo: Yes.
Mickey: I have some of his graphs in my in my presentations, but I actually never read the whole book. I'm embarrassed to say. But I read the whole book and listened
Kate Kapalo: Yeah.
Mickey: to him done. And he talks about letting these people that are going into battle or being a cop that's gonna have an officer involved shooting. Like explaining to them before it happens the emotions that you could possibly feel. And then that way when you do the Sism and you do the CISD, which is so important, and you tell them like, Hey, I felt that way too, they understand it. what do you think about that? Cause you know, we just don't we don't prepare first responders enough for what they're gonna see for thirty years. You know, firefighters are gonna see,
Kate Kapalo: Yes.
Mickey: you know. shot kids, dead babies, you know, we're gonna see stuff that we shouldn't, humans shouldn't see, to be honest with you.
Kate Kapalo: Yes.
Mickey: we're very good at compartmentalizing it, we're good at dealing with it, we're good at moving on. We're not good at talking about it and saying, hey, it bothered me. I say it on a lot of episodes. We have to break that stigma when you never know that one thing that's gonna break you. And then now you bleve it and you, you know, everybody's like, what's wrong with Mickey? We have if we tell people, hey, You're gonna see these things. These are some of the things you're gonna see. It's okay to cry. It's okay to need to talk to a therapist. It's okay to be tired and take a nap when you come home from work. You don't have to push through and work details over time, your second, third job. It's okay to say, Hey, I'm tired, I need a nap and I need to call my therapist. That should be okay.
Kate Kapalo: Yeah, yeah. No, I I think what you you hit the nail on the head in the sense that like we do a really, excuse my language, piss poor job of educating firefighters and EMS professionals about the hazards of the job in the sense that Trauma impacts you biologically. It's not something that's like you can willpower your way out of it sometimes. And so I think we have this like, you know, it's changing. And I'm excited about that change, but it is a little bit slower than I would like. I think to your point, if we are better about providing that psychoeducation up front, that's something that's really critical. Like I know a lot of departments do like a family day. in Recruit Academy where they come in and like have your family, you know, actually pretend to be on the job or like, you know, see some of your training. I think that's that really goes a long way because educating your family about the things that you're gonna see or deal with, they need to understand that it's like not a nine to five job where you know you log in on a computer, you're yelled at by your boss and then you go home for the day. Like not saying every nine to five job is like
Mickey: Yeah.
Kate Kapalo: that. But I think like there's just some different hazards. And then also I think some of the some of the challenges we don't really do a good job of preparing people for either when it comes to like violence on scene or some of those other, you know, occupational hazards that we're seeing. So like if you feel burnt out or if you need to talk to a therapist, that's not a weakness upon you as an individual. That is the weight of the job and the the the biology of trauma that's actually, you know. impacting you. So it's not, it's not something that I think we should be faulting ourselves for individually because you're going to work and you're doing your job and you're showing up for your crew anyway. Like I can't tell you how much of this is all impacted holistically by sleep, by whether or not you're able to access there. Like all of those things kind of play a role into it. So my job at DC Fire was looking at like How holistically do NFPA standards fit in with compliance? And then on top of that, because NFPA is just one baseline, what else might we need to help people be their best on the job? And that includes things like, you know, bullying and harassment too. Like those are occupational hazards. Those things all happen when you're at work. So I think looking at that mental health piece, like I I think getting it into recruit classes is great. But like what I also really want to do is be there's not a lot of resources out there for people who are moving up the chain in leadership, right? Like for line officers, you have peer support, but it would be really great to have more of a support system out there for for leadership when it comes to the mental health piece too, because fire chiefs and captains aren't immune to Trauma just because you've done it for thirty years.
Mickey: I agree. I agree. I you bring up two great points I want to hit on. One, you just spoke about one of the hardest things that I ever had to do as a battalion chief was deal a mental health thing. You know, they don't prepare us that for that at all. You know, I can run into burning buildings, I can do
Kate Kapalo: Right.
Mickey: hazmat, I can I can, you know, call a Mayday, I can do all these things. The mental health thing I wasn't ready for. And unfortunately I had a few
Kate Kapalo: Right.
Mickey: few opportunities to deal with it and they all turned out pretty well, luckily for all of us. But, you know, that they definitely do not prepare us for. And the other thing is family.
Kate Kapalo: Right.
Mickey: Family is huge because I'm very lucky in the fact that my wife is a police officer. So our whole house is first responders. We
Kate Kapalo: That is cool.
Mickey: can come home, you know, have a cup of coffee and talk about the day and and you know, discuss, hey, this really bothered me. I saw X, Y, and Z today. But a lot of people don't have
Kate Kapalo: Right.
Mickey: that. Their wife is a librarian, they got young kids. they're not gonna come home.
Kate Kapalo: Right.
Mickey: They're gonna isolate, they're gonna have some beers, they're gonna go outside and work in the garage. You know, the the family's like, You don't talk to us, you're you're you're not you're shutting us out. And they don't know why they're doing it, you know?
Kate Kapalo: Right.
Mickey: They don't even know that they're doing it. So if we have that family interaction before and we say, Hey, these are the things to look at in your spouses, maybe that conversation opens up to like, Hey, you don't have to talk to me because I don't wanna know about dead babies, but you need to go call your therapist, you know?
Kate Kapalo: Right. Yeah. And and I think I think, you know, it's good to have it in the recruit class, but like even as you get promoted, like we don't have, you know, a conversation when you at least to my knowledge, they don't do that. when you get promoted to captain, lieutenant, battalion chief, it's not like your family comes to your promotional ceremony and they're like, hey guys. Things are about to get a lot nastier for
Mickey: Yeah.
Kate Kapalo: everybody because now you're in charge of everyone on top of dealing with like just responding to the incident. And so I think there would be, you know, I there's a lot of groups out there that are working towards this. So, like just to to name a few, like the Florida Firefighters Health and Safety Collaborative, they put on webinars all the time for family. And I think like that's the right move in the sense that Just just get those resources out there if we can. And you don't have to use them if you don't want to. But I think, you know, being the person that's like, I can just willpower my way through this, that's not that's not a healthy thing for you or your family. And so, you know, being able to come to them and say like, hey, I'm just having an off day. I need to like, yeah, I need to call my therapist or I need to, you know, maybe I need to find a therapist. and making that resource more accessible, I think is important. that's like a really big piece of it. And the peer support side of the I mean, I can't say enough about peer support in the sense that that's really like your group of people that you can you can vent to, you can talk to and they get it because they're they're doing it too.
Mickey: Yeah. And and listen, I'm not trying to syssify the fire service because I'm an aggressive interior fireman. I like to break stuff. I'm not gentle.
Kate Kapalo: I know. I know. I know you
Mickey: I was teaching a class in Jacksonville and I poured the Cokes in the cooler and them all of broke. They looked at me, I go, I'm not known for being gentle, dude. I don't know what you want from me. You know? But I'm not trying
Kate Kapalo: That's awesome.
Mickey: to make the depart or the fire service, you know, weak, weaker. We're still
Kate Kapalo: Right.
Mickey: all type A personalities. We're still gonna go in and destroy
Kate Kapalo: yes.
Mickey: stuff and break stuff and you know. you know, be macho, but it's okay to say you're not okay. It's not a weakness to say you're not okay. It's actually a strength
Kate Kapalo: Exactly.
Mickey: because then you're not out of the game as long as you would have if you let it sit and bleve. Now you're out of the game for a long time, versus being out of the game
Kate Kapalo: Exactly.
Mickey: for one mental health day where you talked to your therapist and took a nap. So I just want to clarify that 'cause I I don't want people to think like, you know, I'm all into my feelings and stuff.
Kate Kapalo: No, I and that that's that's what I was trying to get at too with the biology piece of this is it's it's not an individual weakness to seek out mental health resources, behavioral health resources. Like to your point, that's a strength because that shows that you are self-aware and that you want to be good at your job. And and rest is a piece of that, right? Rest is an important piece of that. Like, I mean, I was not successful in you know like eradicating energy drinks from fire houses and i don't
Mickey: He never will be.
Kate Kapalo: want to be that person either but what i'm saying is like we have to look at this as like a big picture and if and if you look at it like a scientist like all of these parts fit together to to like determine whether or not certain things are gonna like trigger you if you haven't slept very well I mean that sleep is such a huge piece of this staying up to date on your your annuals and and
Mickey: Yeah.
Kate Kapalo: you know if you feel something wrong with your body that doesn't mean that you're weak. Go to the doctor. I went to the doctor, I thought I had a gallstone and it turned out I had a form of pancreatic cancer. And if I hadn't caught it that early, it might have spread. so I'm very grateful because I had an amazing team, amazing medical team that figured it all out. But like those are the things that I wish, you know, more of the macho firefighters would focus on is like listening to yourself and your body. It's not weak to do the things that you need to do to show up as a father, as a firefighter, as a as a son, uncle, you know, any of those things.
Mickey: Husband as a son, yeah. Yeah, and we're getting better. We're listening when I was a kid, they rub some dirt on it, kid, you'll be fine. You know, you know, we power through
Kate Kapalo: Sure.
Mickey: a lot of stuff, you know, except for a cold. If you give a guy a cold, we're done. We're on the couch for a week. But everything else, I could have an arm falling off and be like, it's just a flesh wound, I'm okay.
Kate Kapalo: I know. The funny thing is, like when I like my personal cancer story, I ended up going to the ER and I was diagnosed in the ER and I called all of my paramedic friends beforehand and I was like, Do I really need to go? Like, these are my symptoms. Like, I don't think I'm that sick. And they're like, Well, if a gallstone ruptures, because that's what I thought it was at the time, then yeah, you you might be in in serious trouble. So I ended up going and I'm grateful I listened to my body in that situation because it could have been really bad if I didn't. yeah, so so in those situations, if you're feeling pain, it's it's not a weakness to go get that looked at either. Because I would rather you go and have it be nothing than go and find out, you know, months later when there isn't as much of a intervention available.
Mickey: Yeah, exactly. So this is the Why Project Nine One One presented by the Ford Paul Foundation. Our mission is to honor, support, and educate first responders. We give away about fifteen scholarships annually at the Heroes Dinner in Weston Florida. So maybe June next year you can come down and meet everybody. That would be awesome.
Kate Kapalo: I would love that. Yeah, that'd be amazing.
Mickey: but I always ask everybody on every episode what is a why that we can take away from Kate Kabbalah? Being a doctor, being model simulation,
Kate Kapalo: so.
Mickey: human factors, like what is a why? What's your why?
Kate Kapalo: my why is it's it's a long story, but I'll I'll just you know condense it for the purposes of this. when I was in, I won't say what grade I was in, 9-11 happened, and my class wrote letters to the Walking Street firefighters in Brooklyn. And they sent me a letter, From the firehouse with a picture of their engine and their ladder. And I just thought that was the coolest thing. So I still have that letter framed. it's in my office at school. And it's one of those things where I look at that, you know, and when I'm having a really terrible day, it's like, what's your why? That's my why. That's why I do this. It's because, you know, In these situations, we need to stick together as a fire service. We need to be able to advocate. We need to be able to do these things. And so when I feel frustrated because I'm having a bad day, I look at that and like, well, you know, I have no excuse. They did it. So you need to do that.
Mickey: That's an amazing why. You gave me goosebumps. That's an amazing why. if you watch the first
Kate Kapalo: It's yeah, it's
Mickey: episode with Joe Minahan, he has a is part of he doesn't have a he's part of a foundation where angels play, where they build they build playgrounds. And a lot of it was like, you know, we went through this tragedy and the kids wrote us letters. So how do we give back as firefighters and first responders? We're gonna go build playgrounds
Kate Kapalo: I love that.
Mickey: for him. So if you get a chance to look that up, it's called Where Angels Play. It's a really cool foundation.
Kate Kapalo: I had no idea. That's amaz yes, I am totally looking that up. That is so cool.
Mickey: Yeah. I think it started like in Connecticut after the Hurricane Sandy and and Sandy Hook shooting and all that stuff. So very cool. Very cool.
Kate Kapalo: Yes, that's amazing. Yeah.
Mickey: I I am honored to have you on here, Doc. You did a great job. It's so cool. I'm so I wanna introduce you to Catherine Lamb from the UK and I wanna talk to you more about your simulation training and see if we can involve it with Tenacity Saves Lives. I think that would be amazing. Is there a
Kate Kapalo: yes, I'm s so up for that. Yes.
Mickey: Is there any final thoughts you'd like to share with everybody?
Kate Kapalo: I d off the top of my head, I think like just the last thing I'll say is every single paper that I've written on the fire service has been dedicated to a fallen firefighter, whether that's from cancer, whether it's from a training accident. And so I think, you know, we have to keep these stories alive because this is what saves lives, right? we can't go back and change the past, but we can change the future. And it's cheesy, but I really do envision a future in which we can get everyone home safely.
Mickey: You know, another thing I'm thinking of, and I'll talk to Walt Lewis. I gotta introduce you to Walt, but in the Orlando Fire Conference every year in February, we have a lecture series as well. And I I think you would be a great addition to the lecture series. So I wanna introduce you too as well.
Kate Kapalo: I'd be honored. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
Mickey: Yeah.
Kate Kapalo: you have a a star-studded cast, so I was honored to be part of this too.
Mickey: I I have to give a shout out to Chief Gene Landers because he's the one that introduced us too. So it was it was good. And
Kate Kapalo: He's great. He's awesome.
Mickey: I'm very honored to have you on again. Thank you for coming on. Everybody have a great day.
Kate Kapalo: Thank you so much. Have a good one.
