Meet The 2009 Award Winners

TOM BRENNAN LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD: JOHN W. NORMAN III

John Norman grew up in the fire service. His father was a past chief with the Inwood (NY) Fire Department. Norman joined that department in 1970. That same year, he majored in fire protection technology at Oklahoma State University. While in college, Norman worked as a student firefighter with the Stillwater (OK) Fire Department, living in one of the fire stations. He completed the required fire protection courses for an associate’s degree.

After returning to New York in 1972, he resumed active service with the Inwood Fire Department. He also worked as a fire protection engineer with a New York City contractor for seven years; he was responsible for all phases of a project, from cost estimating to system design to coordination with other trades to overseeing installation to obtaining final Building Department approval of each installation. Among some of the better-known structures he worked on were parts of the World Trade Center complex and the Top of the Sixes Restaurant at 666 Fifth Avenue in NYC. As part of the design process, he performed extensive hydraulic calculations of these systems to ensure sufficient volume and pressure would be available to allow the system to function.

In 1979, Norman was hired as an instructor with the Nassau County (NY) Fire Academy. The same year, he became a firefighter in the Fire Department of New York (FDNY). His assignments included very busy engine and ladder companies; Engine 290 and Ladder 103 in the East New York section of Brooklyn; and Rescue Company 3, which covered Harlem and The Bronx.

In 1984, he was selected for FDNY’s new Hazardous Materials Company, since he was a New York state hazmat instructor for Nassau County. He remained with Haz Mat for 15 months, getting the unit up and running and everyone trained. Then he returned to Rescue Co. 3.

In 1987, Norman was promoted to lieutenant and eventually was assigned to Rescue Company 2, which covered all of Brooklyn.

In 1993, he was promoted to captain and was later assigned as the company commander of Rescue Company 1, in the heart of the midtown Manhattan high-rise office building and hotel district. He also worked with the Safety Command and the Fire Commissioner’s High Rise Fire Safety Task Force, investigating and then developing high-rise fire safety legislation in the wake of the fatal Vandalia Avenue and Macauley Culkin fires, which killed three firefighters and six civilians.

Norman then spent four months at FDNY headquarters developing the department’s contingency plan for the Millennium New Year’s Eve Celebration/Y2K, which was an extensive logistical and planning effort involving every branch of the department and numerous outside resources.

In March 1999, he was promoted to battalion chief, covering Battalion 10, until he was permanently assigned to the 16th Battalion in the “Heart of Harlem.” He stayed at Battalion 16 until the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11, after which he was designated as the search and rescue manager for the WTC site. He remained in that assignment for nearly two months until taking over the role of chief in charge of Special Operations full time. The chief of Special Operations is in command of three major branches of the department--Rescue Operations, Marine Operations, and Hazardous Materials Operations--and responds to major incidents as a technical advisor to the incident commander and/or functions as a Branch or Group director during operations.

In 2004, Norman was promoted to deputy assistant chief of operations for the FDNY and again was designated chief of Special Operations. In this capacity, he served as a citywide command chief, in charge of the response and operations of the entire department on a rotating basis, working every 13th day for 24 hours at a time. This included responding to and commanding all multiple-alarm fires and major emergencies in New York City during that 24-hour time frame.

He retired from the FDNY on January 25, 2007.

Over the past 38 years, Norman has done extensive work in numerous fields, in which he is certified as an instructor by New York State and/or New York City in a number of them. He received his NYS State Education Department Certificate as an adult education teacher in 1979. He completed a bachelor of professional studies at the State University of New York, Empire State College, in 2005.

Among the courses he teaches or has taught as an adjunct faculty member are New York State Hazardous Materials I & II; Confined Space Awareness and Safety; Rescue Operations II: Confined Space; Building Construction and Collapse Rescue; the Foam Coordinators Course; parts of the Chief Officers Development class; and the Captain’s Management course. He has certificates from the National Fire Academy in Building Construction Principles-Non Combustible/ Fire Resistive and Wood and Ordinary Construction, Instructional Methodology, Instructional Techniques for Company Officers, Emergency Response to Terrorism, Hazardous Materials Tactical Considerations, and as an instructor in Hazardous Materials Recognition and Identification, and Hazardous Materials-The Pesticide Challenge.

Since 1994, he has worked for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) as an instructor in the Rescue Specialist course, which is given to the nations 28 Urban Search and Rescue Task Forces. He was a Task Force leader for New York TF-1.

Norman is the author of a well-known firefighting textbook used throughout the country, Fire Officer’s Handbook of Tactics, and its Study Guide, both published by Fire Engineering.

This award is named for Tom Brennan, who was the editor of Fire Engineering for eight years and a technical editor. Brennan had more than 35 years of fire service experience, including more than 20 years with the Fire Department of New York and five years as chief of the Waterbury (CT) Fire Department. He was co-editor of The Fire Chief’s Handbook, Fifth Edition (Fire Engineering Books, 1995) and the recipient of the 1998 Fire Engineering Lifetime Achievement Award.

Award Presentation: General Session, April 23, 8:30 a.m.-10:00 a.m., Sagamore Ballroom

FIRE ENGINEERING/ISFSI GEORGE D. POST INSTRUCTOR OF THE YEAR AWARD: DANIEL MADRZYKOWSKI

Daniel Madrzykowski, PE, is a fire protection engineer in the Building and Fire Research Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland. His duties include developing fire research and grant programs of national interest, generating support for the programs from other federal agencies, providing oversight on several research projects, while overseeing other projects. He serves as liaison with the U.S. Fire Administration to co-ordinate NIST’s  and USFA’s research efforts and implement the transfer of the research results to the fire service/protection community.

Madrzykowski has brought NIST into the limelight as a source of information, data, and assistance to the firefighting, fire prevention, and fire investigation communities. His innovative outreach and technologies transfer efforts have brought significant positive attention to NIST and, by partnering with a variety of other federal agencies and stakeholder groups, he has created means to maximize the impact of NIST research results.

Madrzykowski noticed that when he went to give presentations to fire service groups, they did not know what NIST was or what it did. Starting in 1996, he took on the personal mission of changing that. He developed working relationships with a large number of federal partners, including the U.S. Fire Administration, Department of Homeland Security, Consumer Product Safety Commission, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives, and the National Institute of Justice. 

He has also developed a network of contacts with NIST stakeholders such as the Society of Fire Protection Engineers (he is on the Board of Directors), the National Fire Protection Association (he is chair of the Research Section, serves on four technical committees, and is a co-author of two NFPA handbook chapters), and the International Association of Arson Investigators (he is the chair of the Engineering Committee), to name a few.

Madrzykowski has worked with the USFA’s National Fire Academy to update many of the courses with NIST research results. As a result, the NIST Web site, fire.nist.gov, NIST fire models, NIST fire data, and videos are distributed in 13 of the on-campus courses. He has been assisting the USFA Degrees at a Distance Program with the conversion of its curriculum to a Web-based system curriculum. 

Madrzykowski is currently working on the following research programs:

• Advanced Fire Fighting Technology–Fire Fighter Safety: Wind-Driven Fire
• Structural Collapse–Residential, Hose Stream Characterization, Computer-Based Firefighter Trainer, and
• Technology Transfer (NIST/USFA); Fire Burn Patterns–Fire Investigation (NIST, U.S. DoJ); and Improvements in Residential Fire Safety (NIST/USFA)

According to Madrzykowski, “I have had a number of unique opportunities in my career such as measuring the flame height and heat flux from oil well fires in Kuwait; examining the post-earthquake fire destruction in Kobe, Japan; and analyzing the Station Night Club and the Cook County Administration building fires. At NIST, I also have the opportunity to conduct fire experiments. Many of these experiments have been conducted in labs at NIST and many of these experiments have been conducted in acquired structures. The experiments in acquired structures could not be conducted without the support of the local fire departments. The fire department always greets the NIST team with an energy and can-do attitude that is infectious. The fire service’s desire to learn seems to be a fundamental requirement for the job.”  

Madrzykowski has been involved in the review and analysis of many LODDs. In these cases, the focus has always been on what happened and how can it be prevented. All of this has given him a broad range of fire behavior experience, which has resulted in more than 60 publications. More important than the reports themselves are the CDs and DVDs that have been created to distribute to the fire service for use in training--videos of flashovers, wind-driven fires, and simulations of tragic fires available for the next drill. NIST and partner USFA have distributed more than 250,000 disks to fire instructors across the country and around the world. 

Madrzykowski has a bachelor of science and a master of science degree in fire protection engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park, and is a professional engineer in the state of Maryland. 

The award, which incorporates the Training Achievement Award previously given by Fire Engineering at the FDIC, is named for George D. Post, who was a long-time member of the International Society of Fire Service Instructors (ISFSI). Post was a member of the Fire Department of New York, an illustrator of fire service publications, and a developer of instructional materials and is considered by many to be the father of visual training material used to train fire service personnel around the world.

Award Presentation: General Session, April 23, 8:30 a.m.-10:00 a.m., Sagamore Ballroom