DFD Chief Bruce Satterfield shakes hands with new Training Division Chief Ricky Busby after Busby’s promotion was confirmed by the Public Safety Commission
At Tuesday morning’s monthly meeting of the Public Safety Commission the Dalton Fire Department promoted Captain Ricky Busby to the rank of division chief of the Training Division.
Division Chief Busby has led the fire department’s training program since 2005 when Chief of Training David Phipps retired. Since taking the reins of the division in October 2005 as a lieutenant, Division Chief Busby rose through the ranks to captain and now division chief.
Division Chief Busby joined the Dalton Fire Department in August 1998 as a Firefighter 1. He was promoted up the ladder to Firefighter 2, Firefighter 3, and then to Lieutenant in fire suppression before moving to the training division. He is certified as an emergency medical technician as well as holding certifications in trench rescue and rope rescue. He is a member of the Georgia Search and Rescue team and the Special Operations Team. Division Chief Busby is also a Georgia Smoker Diver.
Also at Tuesday’s meeting, the commission voted unanimously to change the title of the position from Chief of Training to Division Chief (of Training).
DFD Training Coordinator Keith Dempsey was presented with a framed certificate at Tuesday’s meeting in honor of his completion of the Executive Fire Officer Program at the National Fire Academy in Maryland.
Over the past four years, Mr. Dempsey completed a series of four 10-day classes at the academy in Emmitsburg, Maryland. Within six months of completion of each course, Mr. Dempsey was required to submit a written applied research project.
Executive Development, the entry-level course, emphasizes team development and consensus decision making to enhance organizational effectiveness. The next course in the sequence, Executive Analysis of Community Risk Reduction, is a mixture of philosophy and application--the value of the community risk reduction and the process of applying risk reduction to the community. It involves developing partnerships with the community to implement programs, initiatives, and services that prevent and/or mitigate the risk of human made or natural disasters. Traditional fire prevention programs are addressed. In the third year, participants complete the Executive Analysis of Fire Service Operations in Emergency Management course. This course is a very critical curriculum in today's incident response environment. The administration of incident response in light of the Federal Response Plan, the Integrated Emergency Management System, emergency operations center functions, planning, documentation, are some of the topics covered. The final course, Executive Leadership, examines all aspects of executive-level leadership and ties together the educational experiences of the three previous years, said officials.
"The intensive EFOP is designed to provide senior fire officers with a broad perspective on various facets of fire administration," U.S. Fire Administrator Ernest Mitchell, Jr. said in a National Fire Academy press release. "This program provides fire service officers with the expertise they need to succeed in today's challenging environment. It is important that these senior fire executives apply what they have learned in the classroom to existing situations in their own communities. This makes completion of the EFOP and the Applied Research Projects particularly valuable to these fire service leaders."
Chief Satterfield presents Keith Dempsey with a certificate honoring his completion of the National Fire Academy’s Executive Fire Officer Program