Public Safety Depends on Listening: What Troy Must Learn from its Former FIrefighters

During World War II, Allied bombers returned from missions riddled with bullet holes.

Engineers rushed to reinforce those areas, until statistician Abraham Wald said something that everyone else missed:

This became one of history’s greatest lessons in survivorship bias.

And right now, Troy is making the same mistake, just with people and not planes.

🔥 A small group of firefighters sent out a survey (not the City).

After almost 3 years of begging the city leadership to send out a survey, a small group of firefighters took it upon themselves to do it. These are firefighters doing everything they can to get a seat at the table because:

Troy Fire is not unionized (well the Troy Fire Administration employees are),
the City has already said it will not negotiate,
and leadership has shown no interest in hearing from firefighters directly.

They’re trying to help the department with the only tool they’re allowed to use. They deserve credit for stepping up.

But the survey only went to the firefighters who stayed, not the 30+ who left.

That’s studying the planes that survived, and ignoring the ones we already lost.

⭐ The firefighters who stayed deserve enormous respect.

They’ve carried the department through low morale, increased workload, and constant turnover. They are the backbone of Troy’s public safety.

But we cannot understand why a quarter of the department left without listening to the firefighters who walked away.

So I created my own survey and am reaching out to all 30+ former Troy firefighters to gather the information the City refuses to ask for. To find out why they left and figure out how to convince them to come back.

Ignoring missing voices is how we lose even more.

This part matters for every resident of Troy:

If we continue down this path, where firefighters hit City-created milestones and then leave, we are putting Troy’s entire model is at risk.

We are already sliding that direction.

The new “incentive plan” isn’t an incentive, it’s a disincentive that pushes people out earlier.

If the volunteer model collapses, Troy will face:

higher costs,
longer response times,
and fewer experienced firefighters.

This should worry every single resident.

📣 And yet, no one on City Council has come to the stations.

Not one councilmember has met with firefighters at our stations to hear what’s happening. But every election season, we get mailers saying they “support public safety.”

Support isn’t a slogan.
Support is showing up, admitting they were wrong, and fixing a problem that they created.

Residents must demand transparency

• Demand the raw results of the firefighter survey, not filtered summaries.
• Demand councilmembers actually visit the stations.
• Demand a real plan to fix retention.
• Demand accountability for the artificial milestones pushing firefighters out.
• Demand a strategy to save the volunteer model before it collapses.

Losing experienced firefighters at predictable milestones is not an accident, it’s the direct results of how the system was built.

📢 This is about public safety.

This is about your family.
This is about the future of Troy.

If the City won’t seek the full truth, then I will.

And I’ll share what I learn, because the public deserves the whole picture, not the filtered version.