Tinhelmet is the brain child of Charles Bailey: I am Charles Bailey.

I began my fire service career at the Sandy Spring Volunteer Fire Department in Montgomery County, MD. In 1991 I was hired by Montgomery County as a firefighter and later that year I joined the Branchville Vol. Fire Co.

Currently I am the Operations Supervisor at the Emergency Communications Center. My job is to help coordinate dispatch procedures across  three shifts.

I am also the Volunteer Fire Chief at Branchville trying to coordinate the actions of some very distinct , mostly Type-A firefighters.

With regards to education I graduated (barely) from the University of MD with a degree in Art History and Archaeology (Yeah Indiana Jones!!!) . I wandered around for a few years with schools, including the University of Maryland Baltimore County (failed attempt at grad school), The Corcoran College of Art and Design (pretty cool), and finally got my Masters in Public Administration from Walden University (on-line is not easy, trust me.)

My purpose was to find a way to explore the fire service, how we think and how we behave from some different perspectives. Many times I think that we rely entirely too much on direct experience. There are many other fields of study: psychology, sociology, anthropology, and the like that we can learn from. At the end of the day the technology is neat, and the lectures on fire behavior are helpful , but someone still has to find a way to put water on the surfaces that are burning. So then in the end it is about the people.

I have yet to profess that I have the answers but I swear to you that I am looking hard and from what I know they (the answers) won’t be simple.