Raz

Obama does something right

More like a step in the right direction. There are some other parts of SAFER that should be overhauled before I'd call it a fiscally responsible bill.

But we are to take the study you have talked about incessantly for 3 years as gospel. Right barry?

I'd believe a study done by an accredited institute over "a bunch of stuff looked up on the internet" (even if it is by the police chief) pretty much everytime.

Thanks for all that info AA

To my knowledge the volunteers do not have to go through the same fire academy as the career firefighters. I am sure that there are people on this site that can speak more on the specific operations of the PGFD then I can. How can any volunteer commit to a four month, nine to five, five day a week academy? The answer is they can't. I do agree that there should be standards, but how can volunteers match the hours of training a career academy produces.

I did it. Then I went out and got my EMT cert. Then I passed the civil service test. This is why I don't respond well to most of the times when people cry foul when it comes to training.

Everybody's main complaint about the bill is the lack of school district inclusion. In my opinion, not including school districts was the greatest idea to come out of this. Let's crawl before we walk, here. School districts have the biggest issues facing their dissolution, so I'm glad that we can give this bill a shot at passing without involving the myriad of problems that including them would bring. It would've torpedoed the bill before it had a chance to get going. We can always revisit the issue after proving how much tax money could be saved by consolidating other districts.

It says majority, I could not find 50% in the bill.

Apologies, I wasn't referring to the bill, I was responding to this post:

The funny part about this is that the machinery already exists in NYS law to change, disband, or merge fire districts. The current standard of more than 50% of taxpaying residents is too much for some politicians.

Adding my two cents to the IAFF vs FASNY debate, I've always seen it like this: The IAFF will be for every piece of legislation that will increase service to the community and improve safety and training, but if you want it, be prepared to pay for it. That's capitalism, pure and simple, and the IAFF is a labor union. I see nothing wrong with saying "You want that? Fine, here's the bill. If that's too much, look for another option."

FASNY, on the other hand, seems to be against every bill that will increase public safety, the safety of their members, and take power out of the hands of fire departments and place it in the hands of the people who bankroll them.

Hey all... I hate to dispel rumors especially when its getting so many people all fired up but the legislation is not limited to fire departments/districts. It applies to any local government entity - water districts, sewer districts, lighting districts, TOWNS, VILLAGES, and fire districts. Opposing this legislation doesn't insure the safety of the volunteer fire service, it insures that NYS retains more than 1500 special districts including countless duplicate ones.

THANK YOU FOR THIS.

Damn, I've never seen the truth get twisted so fast as I've seen with this bill. I just spoke to an obtuse "firefighter" who was livid because "Albany is trying to push a bill that would require paid departments every x amount of miles. They're trying to end volunteer departments!" Honestly, there's no use talking to these guys, they fall in lockstep behind anyone who says there's a threat against them. This kind of fearmongering by FASNY is sickening.

Given typical turn out for local elections, school districts etc - I don't think turnout is anywhere near 50%.

That's the thing, requiring the vote of "50% of all taxpaying citizens" is the same as writing "don't worry, it'll never happen." I think voter turnout in my town is something like 15-20%, and that's for mayoral elections. It's inconceivable to think that 50% would magically turn out to an election, regardless of how bad they're being fleeced. All this bill does is send a message to underperforming/overtaxing districts, saying "change or we'll make the change for you."

Does the bill specifically limit it self to only volunteer districts or just districts in general? Because if it is for any type of fire district this would be a fire service issue and not a Volunteer or FASNY issue.

The bill applies to all fire districts, it is undoubtedly a fire service issue. The reason there are people in this thread speaking out against FASNY, is because once again they've hijacked a legitimate issue facing the fire service and turned it into a struggle to maintain power without oversight.

For an organization claiming to serve, support, and educate volunteers throughout NY, they seem to do an awful lot to fight everything that could improve service to the citizens that ultimately foot the bill. Can't train for 8 hours a year,? Don't worry, thanks to FASNY, you can now complete your OSHA training in about 15 minutes online. Want to drive a 50,000 lbs vehicle? Any other service would require a CDL, but not here in the NY fire service, thanks FASNY. I'm pretty sure they fought the adoption of FF1 classes here in NY as well, leading to the short lived creation of Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced FF classes, instead. Which served to put more unqualified "interior" firefighters into the ranks.

FASNY

You just answered all of your own questions with one word.

One of the knocks against the Fire Act grants is that they often don't go towards equipment used in day to day operations. Depts use it for the specialty equipment. SAFER grants have a direct and immediate effect on both the community the dept protects and it gets people employed.

That isn't exactly true. I don't want to open the same can of worms as last time, but you can do a forum search for SAFER grants and see what I mean.

^

Actually, IFSAC and NFPA test to the same standards, so their certifications can be viewed as somewhat interchangeable.

There is a lot of talk about Unions and representation. I've thought that some day this may be part of the solution, but i have never heard good things about EMS unions - and that is coming from men and women who work union EMS. It's not like we have an equivalent to the IAFF or PBA that has any sort of political leverage in DC/locally and authority at the bargaining table.

Things will no doubt take time. Since the recession hit, some people have noticed that cops and firefighters make a decent wage. People also complain/brag that a majority of East Coast emergency workers are Irish or Italian. Some of those people don't put two and two together to realize that 150 years ago, being a cop or firefighter was such a low paying, crappy job that only the immigrants wanted to do it.

Now, I don't think we'll have to wait 150 years for EMS to start paying out a wage that can support a family, primarily because the groundwork has already been laid out. As more and more municipalities branch out into fire based EMS, the IAFF will naturally absorb those numbers and gain their leverage in DC. Some municipalities (Greenburgh) have proven that policed based EMS is a viable route, and the PBA will take additional members under their wing. As for the rest, they'd probably be best off joining a catch-all union. It's not the best option for them, just the most viable. In this day and age, I can't see a major labor organization rising from nothing. At least the unionized medics would be able to collectively bargain, which is number 1 on the list of things that need to happen if they're going to see a decent wage.

I don't believe the Taylor law applies to private EMS employees, which could work to their advantage, if everyone is willing to stick together. Something has to change, paramedics are the most trained/least paid out of all emergency workers.

I too do not feel that this is a union issue. In one aspect, Paramedics choose to put themselves through the schooling necessary to perform the job and take a spot in a commercial ambulance agency for average pay. In another aspect, the oppertunity to be a civil service medic in this area is slim to non-existant.

We (north of NYC) have the luxury of having enough commercial ambulance agencies that it isn't necessary to hire municiple paramedics. This keeps the cost down, which keeps their pay minimal.

Consider a volunteer FD. If you can get people to volunteer their time, why spend money to pay people for it? In my opinion the same is true for EMS. If you can contract a commercial agency for a marginal cost as opposed to paying your own (mainly unionized) people much more for the same job, then why not?

I think it is an abomination that medics make as little as they do. Maybe the question isn't why is it so difficult to make a living as a medic, but how can we make medics more appreciated in order to earn a better living?

You're talking in circles. Especially that last sentence.

First off, the volunteer FD analogy is full of holes, because EMS has clearly definied guidelines as to what's acceptable and what's unacceptable when it comes to certification. While a volunteer FD can get by with the old smoke and mirrors of "we have X amount of members", a VAC has to have documentation of every single EMT under their umbrella (including recert dates, etc.). The strain of maintaining qualified people makes any comparison to the Fire Service unreasonable.

Also, unlike the Fire Service (discounting the grey area of code enforcement), EMS has a bonafide available revenue stream. After all, commercial services wouldn't exist if there wasn't money to be made, right? I'm not saying that municipalities will see a profit, but a rather sizeable portion of the cost of running a service can be recovered and offset if you do your own billing. Further reduction in costs could come from integrating EMS into your existing FD, after all, you're already paying the guys to train and wait around for emergencies, right?

I'm not saying that every podunk town should go out and get a municiple EMS system, but there are places with paid PD's and FD's that have no municiple EMS, and that just doesn't make sense to me.

Of course, when you have someone who's willing to go to school and do the work for pay that puts them below the poverty line, while saying they don't need a union and praising the low cost of commerical EMS, I don't expect anything to change.

possibly because you can be 17.5 years old to take the test?

You can be 17.5 years old to take almost any Civil Service test, and they'll require you to have a H.S. diploma at the time of appointment. The real reason for this is very *wink* *nudge*, so I like how Lad12derFF said it

Try again

According to the Homeland Securtiy grant seminar I attended in Irvington about a month ago, when a volunteer department is given a SAFER grant, it's treated as a "free lunch." That's exactly how the guy described it. I was floored at the discrepancy in fiscal responsibility between career and volunteer departments. I wouldn't have believed it, if I didn't hear it straight from the source.

It's an outrage, quite honestly.

Despite strong opinions to the contrary expressed in this thread, I believe that the underlying issue here is that of training and response times not whether or not someone's receiving a paycheck for their service.

The thing is, those two things go hand in hand. There are only so many hours in a week. Once you subtract sleeping, working, commuting, meals, and time with your family, the number of free hours in a week can start to look slim. Personnel that are compensated for their time gain an extra 30-40 hours a week to train, drill, maintain equipment, educate themselves, and be available to respond. That's well over 2,000 extra hours each year of dedicated time, and there's no way that someone can be expected to give away 2,000 hours of their time annually, no matter how dedicated they might be. There's nothing wrong with that, and nobody is faulting volunteers. However, it is a simple logistical impossibility that an all volunteer team could attain the same level of cohesion that an all paid team could.

Someone is going to take that as an insult, and I'm sorry because I don't mean it as one (and, in a way, I'm playing volunteer advocate here), but it is what it is. Even FASNY agrees, which is why they constantly fight the increase in mandatory training levels. It's unrealistic to place such lofty expectations on someone who's giving their free time.

There's nothing wrong with that. The odds are so stacked against volunteers that we have a ton of exemptions to state law when it comes to them, but instead of accepting the fact and working within realistic parameters, we get ridiculous bullheaded statements like "a volunteer is a professional, doing a professional's job for free." So in the end, who is disrespecting who?

Why don't we hear more Dropkick Murphys?!

I love Dropkick, I really do, but that last album was rubbish.

This isn't true...

http://www.cbsradio.com/stations/index.html

Looks like they also own 1010wins, 660WFAN, 101.1 and 102.7

I stand corrected, my friend works for Clearchannel, which owns all those other stations I listed (and WXRK, I thought). Either way, I still believe the switch is happening.

Hey I was wondering if any one has offically heard of the change over? rumor has it that is will be within 48hrs so enjoy the only rock station you can get clearly in the area... I did a search on google and couldn't find too much.

A friend of mine works for 92.3's parent company (they also run Z100, Power 105, KTU, etc.) It's happening, enjoy it while you still can.

http://www.flame-sim.com/features/product-video.php

Anyone ever heard of this before? Looks like good old hands on training and hard physical work are trying to be replaced with computer simulation now. Hopefully this doesn't replace the way we train now, any time in the future.

I look at something like this, with the house layouts and tactical discussion, and think "there's a pretty good tool." That's all it can ever be, however. Unfortunately, there are idiots out there who think that "virtual" and online training can easily replace actual hands on training, and are working to undermine the training standards set by the NFPA and OFPC. It's ridiculous, would you go to a surgeon who only learned and practiced online? I played Call of Duty on my Xbox last night, does that qualify me as a soldier?

It's yet another example of common sense getting thrown out the window once the words "fire service" are mentioned.

Congratulations and good luck.

Stop using IE and get a real browser. Firefox, opera, etc. They're all free, and you won't have to worry about security holes you can drive a truck through.

If you're looking to fix your copy of IE (though really, it's not worth it), Hijackthis will work for you.

Red has the longest wavelength, lowest energy and lowest frequency at measured value of between 675-750 nanometers while blue has a much higher energy, higher frequency and shorter wave length at between 510 to 430 nanometers.

What this means is that one sees blue much quicker because it travels faster with more cycles per second than red, at a greater energy. In addition, it has been noted many times that the human eye sees the color green the best (meaning there are the most defined shades of green), the color blue is closer to the color green on the electromagnetic spectrum.

All this information is based off of the assumption that the equation C(speed of light in meters per second)=V(frequency in hertz)/Lambda(wavelength in meters) is how one determines wavelenght.

Blue doesn't "travel faster" than red, anymore than blue travels farther than red. It's light. It travels at the speed of light. It's a constant (hence the "C" in e=mC squared). That's the whole point. Otherwise things like this and this wouldn't happen.

Very nice website, guys. I like the simple layout, too many fire websites are cluttered to all hell and end up looking like someone's myspace page.

How many career departments run with less?

Apples and oranges. According to ISO rating, 30 full time career FF's is the equivalent of 90 volunteers.