- March 17, 2025
After 15 years, the City of Ormond Beach has reestablished a fire prevention team.
Composed of Fire Marshall Ken Gaines and Ormond Beach Fire Capt. Michael Rannie and Fire Inspector Rebecca Whidden, the team reviews new construction pans for fire safety, inspects existing buildings for code deficiencies, conducts fire investigations and educates the public.
Gaines has been working for the city for a year, and Whidden for a couple months, but Rannie has been a firefighter for over 18 years.
"It's definitely been something that has been needed and we're very thankful to have this department back under the fire department," Rannie said.
The Observer recently spoke with the newly formed team about fire safety and what fire prevention can do for the city.
Where would you say fire prevention and fire suppression meet?
Rannie: I would say on incidents. If there's a fire incident that happens — the fire prevention side, if they've done their job, it's going to make the actual incident a lot safer and the scope of it's not going to be as big as it could be. What we do on the fire prevention side, that ultimately is going to make the line side a lot safer, and the incidents a lot more manageable than what they would be otherwise.
Whidden: It also does on the flip side. So when they go out to an incident and they find that there are certain hazards present, they can notify us, and we can follow it up.
Rannie: We haven't had that mechanism in my career. So that's a very good tool to have for us to be able to go both ways on that.
Gaines: Firefighters are minimally educated in fire prevention activities, and so that's where it falls back into our realm of knowledge. They tend to have a gut feeling anyway, because of the fire suppression side, going into buildings and stuff. When they do, if they're not sure, they'll just forward that to us and we'll do a deep dive on it.
On education, what are some of the important things for the community to keep in mind when they're thinking of making their homes safer?
Whidden: Electrical safety — it's a big thing. You've got your extension cords, surge protections needed in them, things like that. Businesses: fire extinguishers, exit signs, emergency lights.
As we go out in the community, we're going to learn more and more of what's specific to our community, and then we can tailor a little bit more safety messages.
Gaines: We find that most fires that occur, occur during in residential communities — homes, apartments, those kind of things. The big things we we hope for that people have, especially at the residential level and single-family homes, is that one, they have a smoke detector.
Most of the fire deaths occur, and larger fires occur, at night when they're asleep. That they have a fire extinguisher in case they do have a fire. They're aware of it and they can try to extinguish it or at least keep it contained until the fire department can arrive, and that they have a plan of action.
Have you seen the positive impacts of having a fire prevention team in other cities?
Gaines: I came from New Smyrna, so I know for a fact that we averted several fires down there from occurring and we know that a couple fires that did occur, if we had been able to get in there in time to inspect them, we would have been able to avert those as well because it was very common sense stuff. One went back to an extension cord.
Another was a restaurant cooking fire.
Would you say it was time for the reintroduction of the team?
Rannie: We've definitely been needing this. We've been without this vetting system for a long, long time.
This job, the fire prevention side, makes the city safer. It's almost like an insurance policy type thing. It's a very good thing to keep incidents from happening, or when they do, it takes them down to as small of a scale as possible.
