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In this episode of In Service, Jason Falvey sits down with Wayne Sandford for a wide-ranging conversation on leadership, scale, and service across more than five decades in the fire service. From his beginnings as a firefighter in East Haven, Connecticut, to leading the Connecticut Fire Academy, serving 15 years as fire chief, helping build Connecticut’s Department of Emergency Management and Homeland Security, and later teaching at the University of New Haven, Sandford reflects on the lessons that shaped his approach to leadership.

A central theme of the conversation is Sandford’s belief that the chief is not the “chief firefighter.” Rather than stepping in and taking over every incident, he saw his role as developing officers, strengthening decision-making, and preparing others to lead. He shares a pivotal early fire as chief that reinforced the need to coach officers in real time and build their confidence and judgment instead of rescuing them from responsibility.

The episode also explores how leadership changes when incidents grow in complexity and scale. Sandford explains the shift from tactical problem-solving to broader system thinking: recognizing when a scene is outgrowing the first plan, calling for resources early, protecting life safety, and seeing the incident beyond the immediate flames. He discusses why smaller departments can struggle with this transition, and why experience, education, and intentional teaching matter so much in preparing leaders to think ahead.

Sandford also reflects on major events that shaped emergency management, including 9/11, the evolution of incident command, regional coordination, and the creation of state-level systems for resource deployment, intelligence sharing, and incident management. He shares powerful stories from the fire service response to 9/11, the contamination risks firefighters faced, and the operational realities of trying to protect a local community while also answering a national tragedy.

Throughout the episode, one word keeps surfacing: relationships. Whether between chiefs, public works, law enforcement, neighboring departments, or state agencies, Sandford argues that large-scale leadership is built on trust long before the crisis begins. This is a conversation about leadership maturity, officer development, interagency coordination, and what it really means to serve at a higher level when the stakes keep rising.

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