House fires — and fatalities — have become much rarer in the U.S. over the past 50 years. But that positive trend makes incidents like the deadly Dec. 24 house fire in Needham all the more shocking and traumatic for the family and friends of the victim — and for the first responders.
At the Woodward Road fire, firefighters faced a dangerous, out-of-control blaze knowing someone was trapped inside and then eventually recovered the remains of 21-year old Kayla Corrigan.
It’s perhaps no surprise that firefighters, who experience traumatic events repeatedly, have elevated rates of PTSD compared with many other professions.
Knowing this, many public safety departments, including Needham’s, rely on a state peer support system after fatality incidents because of the known psychological impacts.
That support comes through the state’s Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM), a mostly volunteer-staffed program operated through the state Department of Fire Services working in coordination with the Massachusetts Peer Support Network.
Charlie Popp has been state coordinator for the network’s CISM teams since 2009 — meaning he helps organize and lead peer support and CISM responses for emergency service personnel, including firefighters, police, EMS, and dispatchers, across the state.
“I could not comment on anything related to any intervention that may or may not have been done in Needham,” Popp told the Observer. “Everything that we do is blisteringly confidential.”
He was willing to discuss the program generally, describing it as “a collection of mostly group interventions that are done to help mitigate the effects of job-related stress.”
“More importantly, it facilitates that natural drive to healing that all first respondents possess.”
The network has more than 20 teams across the state. A ‘team’ consists of first responder peers and clinicians, all of whom volunteer their time. The peers are all police, fire and EMS professionals trained in treatment of trauma. The clinicians can be psychologists, therapists or licensed social workers.
“I cannot overemphasize the importance of the fact that it is peer-driven,” Popp said, citing the value first responders place on sharing with others who are also doing or have done their jobs.
“Most first responders tend to be pretty stress resilient,” he said. “Whether it’s cumulative in nature or related to one particular event, sometimes that process might get a little bit disrupted. A big part of CISM is just getting people back on track.”
“It’s normalizing the reactions and helping people to realize that there’s nothing wrong with them,” Popp said. “They are reacting normally to an abnormal event. The problem is the event, not the individual.”
Part of the trauma comes from the fact that such events are rare. The incidence of house fires has dropped significantly in the United States, roughly by half since the early 1980s, and fire death rates in the U.S. have dropped by roughly two-thirds.
This is attributed to the widespread adoption of smoke alarms and better building/fire codes. In 1977, only about 22% of U.S. homes had smoke alarms. By the early 2000s, coverage exceeded 90%, and this has correlated with significant declines in fire deaths.
Popp notes that a common obstacle is a predilection among first responders to be resistant to admitting weakness or vulnerability. “There’s been a mentality to just suck it up, tough it out. It’s been that way since the first fire trucks were rumbling down the street, maybe being drawn by horses.”
“When I came on the job — back when the devil was a boy and dinosaurs were roaming the earth — that was the mentality,” said Popp, who was a Boston firefighter for 36 years, retiring as a lieutenant. During his tenure, he earned his master’s degree in social work with a focus on trauma.
“It was ‘don’t talk about it. Don’t bring it home. Don’t let anybody know what happened.’ Sometimes people rely on alcohol as a means of facilitating that process, and that is hugely disruptive to the process.”
“We now know that there is a better way than doing that because, generally speaking, sucking it up or toughing it out takes a toll.”
In addition to leading the Peer Network, Popp worked since 2020 at On-Site Academy, in Westminster, a non-profit residential treatment and training center for critical incident stress management that offers more in-depth treatment to first responders “temporarily overwhelmed by the stress of their jobs, what they have seen, and what they have been through.”
Popp said events where a loss of life has occurred are especially challenging, perhaps exacerbated by unrealistic depictions in movies and TV of firefighters rescuing people from burning buildings.
“Fear of failure weighs heavily on all responders,” Popp said. “But there are times you cannot enter a building based on the fire load and based on what’s going on. I mean, we’re not flame proof.”
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