New fire chief is feeling ‘at home’
“I like to use my brain and my body ... and I love a good crisis.” Jeanine Nicholson, San Francisco fire chief
It’s the rare San Francisco leader who seems universally respected and wellliked and talks openly about the city’s biggest challenges, as well as her own.
When new Fire Chief Jeanine Nicholson dropped by the Chronicle offices the other day for a recording of our San Francisco City Insider podcast, she asked our security guard about himself, talked easily with the photographer taking her portrait and kept calling me “sister.”
Was she just pouring it on for good coverage? By all accounts, no. She’s just that way.
Nicholson’s predecessor, Joanne HayesWhite, who clashed with Mayor London Breed and the firefighters’ union, announced last fall she’d retire in May and wanted her replacement to come from within the department. Finding a replacement supported by HayesWhite, the union and the Fire Commission seemed nearly impossible, but NichNew Fire Chief Jeanine Nicholson remembers her fascination with a firehouse set up as a polling place, which her dad took her to as a girl in Pelham, N.Y.
olson was widely backed.
The 55yearold was sworn in as the city’s first openly gay fire chief in May.
A native of Pelham, N.Y., Nicholson grew up across the street from a firehouse — and her dad would take her with him to the polling place set up inside the firehouse to vote on election day.
“I was fascinated by the place, but I never thought a girl could be a firefighter,” she recalled. “But it’s really a perfect fit for me because I like to use my brain and my body ... and I love a good crisis.”
She joined the Fire Department in January 1994 — back when few women held the job and some fire stations didn’t even have women’s bathrooms. She worked as a firefighter and a paramedic before becoming a lieutenant, captain, battalion chief and HayesWhite’s deputy chief of administration.
In May, Breed’s chief of staff called Nicholson to tell her she’d been selected as chief — a call Nicholson said was “kind of surreal.” She said that while being the city’s first openly gay chief isn’t a big deal to her, it is a big deal to others in the queer community, which was clear when she marched with the department in the Pride Parade in June.
“My command staff, usually we walk together, but they were all behind me sort of letting it be my parade,” she said. “It was sweet. Just a lot of of love from the crowd.”
That was the love she felt when she moved to San Francisco 30 years ago.
“I felt at home right away,” she said. “As a young, queer person ... this was the most welcoming, easiest place to be me.”
Now three months into her new role, Nicholson discussed some of the biggest issues facing the department. To hear the entire interview, visit sfchronicle.com/insider.
On emergency preparedness:
Nicholson said the Fire Department is “always ready” for an earthquake, terrorist attack or other major emergency.
That said, there are improvements that could make the department more effective. A $628.5 million bond measure planned for the March 2020 ballot would earmark $153.5 million to expand the city’s aging emergency firefighting water system. Created after the 1906 earthquake, it’s a network of highpressure pipeline, castiron hydrants and reservoirs used to access large volumes of water in an emergency — and it’s particularly essential if the main water pipes break.
But it doesn’t reach the city’s west side, so Nicholson said she’s funding fourwheeldrive tankers carrying 6,000 feet of large hose that can connect all parts of the city to emergency water supplies.
That’s especially important, she said, considering that the department expects a major earthquake to cause 80 fires throughout San Francisco.
She said she also wants to beef up her incident management team so multiple people can trade off on leading the city through a 72hour or weeklong response to an emergency. She’s also working with the Coast Guard and ferry companies to ensure many firefighters — who increasingly live elsewhere due to the city’s exorbitant cost of living — can make it to the city if a bridge fails in an earthquake.
On the city’s homelessness and drug addiction crisis:
Also at the top of Nicholson’s agenda is helping the department better deal with the city’s growing drug and homelessness crisis.
Eighty percent of the Fire Department’s calls are medical in nature — and of those, up to 40% are for homeless people.
“That’s not necessarily that new,” she said. “What’s new is there are a lot more people, and there are a lot more behavioralhealth and opioid issues than ever before. We definitely have a crisis on our hands.”
She said the call volume just keeps rising, fueled partly by what the department calls “Good Cellmaritans,” people who call 911 on their cell phones when they see a homeless person lying on the sidewalk even if they’re “literally just sleeping.”
“We get sent there, lights and sirens, because somebody thinks they’re dead,” she said. “We do run low on ambulances quite a bit of the time, and that does really concern me. It’s really stretched our resources more than I’m comfortable with.”
The department’s community paramedicine program, EMS6, is widely praised for serving as outreach workers to not only treat homeless people’s immediate health crises, but also to gain their trust and nudge them into housing, services or back home to their families. But Nicholson said the team — which targets the city’s highfrequency users of medical services — has had only three staff members recently and has secured money for five more.
She’s also in discussions with other department heads about setting up a van or tent in the Tenderloin or Bayview so homeless people could access a paramedic, social worker and Homeless Outreach Team workers “right then and there.”
She said it’s also clear that the city needs to be more proactive in treating mental illness on our sidewalks. A recent report showed San Francisco is far less likely than neighboring counties to compel someone into treatment who says he or she doesn’t want it.
“You need to have some type of stronger policy or law in terms of being able to conserve some of our people on the streets,” Nicholson said. “They can’t take care of themselves, and it’s not humane.” On her own cancer battle: As Nicholson works to respond to the misery on the streets, she also wants to care for her own ranks. She spoke frankly in her inauguration speech of fighting a very aggressive form of breast cancer in 2012 and undergoing a double mastectomy and 16 rounds of chemotherapy.
She said it’s important for her to speak out because the Fire Department has a much higher rate of cancer than the general population, due to the toxic materials the staff comes into contact with on a regular basis. That became especially apparent, she said, in 2012 when the department noticed a lot of premenopausal women getting breast cancer.
Back then, firefighters had to prove that their cancer was related to the job to be covered by workers’ compensation and receive other benefits. But now laws have changed to put the burden on employers to prove the cancer wasn’t linked to the job.
“At that time, we didn’t have that presumptive law, so I said to the union, if you need to use me as the poster child, I’m happy to do it if it will make somebody else’s life easier,” she said.
She has since become a teacher for other firefighters locally and around the country on taking steps to protect themselves, like how to decontaminate themselves after a fire.
“I think it’s important to be real about what it’s like,” she said. “I don’t want anybody else in my Fire Department to go through anything like I went through.”