Purdue fire chief receives top Indiana honor
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Purdue fire Chief Kevin Ply, whose message of fire prevention education and safety has reached thousands of students at the university and at colleges throughout the United States, has been named Indiana Fire Chief of the Year.
Kevin Ply
Ply was honored Friday (Aug. 13) night at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Indianapolis during an awards banquet of the Indiana Emergency Response Conference.
Typically, Ply said, award finalists are told in advance that they might receive an honor to make sure they attend the event. However, Ply is on the board of directors for the Indiana Fire Chiefs Association and was to be at the banquet, so he was not told he might be honored.
"I was sitting there with my wife and other directors and then I heard the emcee say something about Purdue, which kind of caught my attention," he said. "As she went on, it became clear that she was talking about me. At that point, I was pretty much numb. I was shocked.
"But this award is not just me. It's our whole department. The last few years, we've been trying to reach out to other departments and really become involved in fire prevention. Since 2000, about 140 college students across the country have died in fires while they were away at school, and every one of those fires was preventable. So, one of my goals when I became fire chief was to get the message out to students to think about safety, and we're getting people to participate in classrooms, residence halls and online."
Ply has been with Purdue's fire department since 1989 and became chief in 2007. Under his direction, the department developed a fire safety outreach program for students. Lt. John Guerra regularly speaks and shows video in classrooms, residence halls, and fraternities and sororities.
Ply also helped develop content for the online fire prevention training video "To Hell and Back: The College Years," which was produced in 2008 by the People's Burn Foundation and is seen by college students across the country. The training video is updated regularly, and footage for the newest installment was filmed at Purdue. Students can go online to https://igot2kno.org to participate in the training.
He spoke about the video program in late July at the Vision 20/20 Model Performance in Fire Prevention Symposium in Baltimore and also did a presentation in March at the Campus Fire Safety and Risk Management Conference in Columbus, Ohio.
"This is a well-deserved honor for Chief Ply, and it's also great recognition for the department," said Carol Shelby, Purdue's senior director of environmental health and public safety. "Fire prevention and awareness is a very important part of our overall campus safety program, and we're very proud of the initiative Kevin and his staff have taken in delivering the message."
His award is for chiefs on career - or paid - fire departments. Volunteer departments were honored in a separate category.
Writer: Jim Bush, 765-494-2077, jsbush@purdue.edu
Sources: Kevin Ply, 765-494-6919, kmply@purdue.edu
Carol Shelby, 765-7504, cshelby@purdue.edu