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A Decherd police officer has been fired, and a fireman fears for his job stemming from recent comments made on social media about cutbacks and a reduced number of firefighters per shift.

Police Officer Ruslan Tucker said he was fired last week after he had posted comments on Facebook that were deemed derogatory by his superiors about the city’s financial predicament, and he said, “The fire chief and mayor lied trying to make the firefighter look bad to save the city’s image.”

Fireman Ryan Steele had made Facebook posts about how he thinks a reduction in overtime hours and a reduced number of firefighters per shift have placed the city’s fire safety in question.

Steele said he has been placed on administrative leave with pay until the Board of Mayor and Aldermen reviews the issue at Monday’s 6 p.m. meeting at City Hall. He added that he doesn’t know whether he will also be fired for his actions.

“We’ll see,” he said.

 Mayor Mary Nell Hess and Fire Chief Chuck Williams agreed Steele was out of line for statements he made on Facebook on Aug. 19 and said that Steele would receive a letter of reprimand to be placed in his personnel file and would be required to make a public apology for his actions.

However, Steele has not made an apology and said he has no intentions of doing so.

“I will not give it,” he said. “What I said was true.”

Steele’s initial post said:

“Decherd does it again … they cut a position from each shift in July due to budget constraints, leaving the fire department down to three men on shift at a time. This is below the NFPA guidelines of a four-man minimum, making our job a lot more dangerous. Now they have decided to cut us by 14 hours per pay period, which will drastically cut an already below-average firefighter salary but, more importantly, leave only two men on shift a lot of the time. The city has chosen to put our lives and the public’s lives in great danger. The standard for firefighting is that to make entry into a fire, you have to have two men inside and two men outside ready to go in. We were already operating below that. Now we will only have two men available most of the time. The fire department has faced the biggest cuts this past year, which has absolutely killed morale, so relying on people to come back in for calls is virtually nonexistent. They claim this is temporary, but so were the cuts last year that turned into layoffs … I urge everyone to call their elected officials and let them know how they feel about this.”

Hess said the statement was inaccurate and led to harsh criticism being posted on Facebook.

“There were a lot of problems related to what he had done, and if he has a problem, he should have gone through the proper channels instead of going ballistic over something that’s not true,” Hess said.

Williams echoed Hess’ assessment.

“Don’t believe everything you read on Facebook,” he said, referring to Steele’s post. “What he said is false.”

Williams said there will never be fewer than three firefighters on duty per shift.

“We used to have four. Now it’s three with four during the day with me on shift,” he said, adding that at least three firefighters will always be on duty “24/7, 365 days a year.”

Steele later posted a legal interpretation of a standard determined by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration — a U.S. federal agency under the Department of Labor that sets and enforces safety and health standards to protect workers and ensure workplaces are free from recognized hazards — that says at least four firefighters should be present to handle structural fires when entering buildings.

It says:

“The safety of firefighters engaged in interior structural firefighting is the major focus of paragraph (g)(4) of the OSHA Respiratory Protection standard. The provision requires that at least two employees enter the immediately dangerous to life or health atmosphere and remain in visual voice contact with each other at all times. It also requires that at least two employees be located outside the IDLH atmosphere, thus the term, ‘two in/two out.’ This assures that the ‘two in’ can monitor each other and assist with equipment failure or entrapment or other hazards, and the ‘two out’ can monitor those in the building, initiate rescue or call for backup. One of the ‘two out’ can be assigned another role, such as incident commander.” 

Williams said the Decherd Fire Department always goes beyond the two-in/two-out standard.