After 15 years with the Jacksonville Fire Department, B-shift Lieutenant JD Latta has found himself living between two metaphorical altitudes as a firefighter and a supervisor.
One is the street-level view of firefighting. As an officer, Latta still dons protective turnout gear, screams down the highway in fire engines, climbs into burning buildings and saves lives just the same as the other firefighters and engineers on his shift. But his other view is “the one from 10,000 feet,” Latta calls it, where the administrative tasks of leadership are reckoned. From here, Latta coordinates the city’s emergency medical services, keeps supplies stocked and handles controlled substances kept on the ambulances, ensures that department and staff licenses are up to date and manages the needs of his shift crew.
There are odd moments that come from flying between those vantage points. He knows the market price of any drug administered in an ambulance (not cheap) and what’s happened to the cost of emergency vehicles since COVID (they got worse), but he’s also going to treat EMS patients regardless of the cost, and the department is still going to pursue the best equipment, because that’s what it takes.
“I think there are two qualities that make a job a good job — leadership, and the people you do it with,” Latta said. “People will do a lot of things for good leaders and good coworkers … If you’re out there in the trenches with them and don’t forget where you came from, that’s the difference between a leader and a boss.”
Latta got his start in emergency services as a volunteer firefighter in Center Point in 2006, where he also worked as a dispatcher, just a year after his high school graduation.
“I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn’t want to sit behind a desk,” Latta said, but he found firefighting work to be interesting, challenging, and even fun. It didn’t take long to realize he’d actually walked into a career.
He came to Jacksonville to attend Jacksonville State University and joined the fire department as a volunteer in 2008. When he was hired the next year, he was the sixth man on the crew, hired with money from a grant.
Now the shifts are 10-strong as a matter of course, as call volume has kept pace with the growth of Jacksonville’s population, and Latta is in the lead. You can see some of his management style reflected in his encyclopedic knowledge of his crew’s hobbies and habits; who will be gone on the weekend to the ball fields, who’s going to take off to hunt turkey when the season starts, who has a goofy sense of humor and who’s a stoic.
The time spent bonding is rewarding on a personal level, but in situations where trust is key, it’s also vital. Latta has the stories you might expect, about going into burning houses where smoke takes visibility down to zero. Others are more unusual, like crawling into wrecked, flipped cars through the rear windshield to start EMS for drivers still hanging upside-down in their seatbelts.
“You have to have camaraderie to have a successful shift, and what better way to do that than to laugh and learn and get to know each other and build this essential bond?” Latta asked. “It’s nice going in when you know that’s what’s behind you.”
When he’s not with his shift at the fire department, Latta spends time with his family, including wife Chrissy and kids Ella, Henry, Aidan, Connor and Mary. The family resides on a farm where they raise livestock and keep up a garden. Chrissy, who works in an emergency room, just got a freeze dryer, so they’ll be able to bolster their homesteader lifestyle.
Latta said his ultimate goal is to become a department chief, though he has mixed feelings about being promoted off the trucks and into full administrative mode.
“A chief doesn’t always get to fight fires or get hands-on with a cardiac arrest. But in order to stay in your career longer, you have to get further and further away from what got you into it,” Latta said. “But nobody wants to be 60 on the back of a truck; it’s a tough job at that age.”
