dwcfireman

Yes Barry it is not an acceptable response.  I've read the studies. I've pissed more people off over the years by challenging their worldview and fiefdom than I can shake a stick at.
 
My point is that the closest piece of manned apparatus that is capable of proving some form of legitimate assistance should be dispatched regardless of crappy lines drawn in the sand. The people who need help don't see, care or understand mutual aid agreements or district lines nor do most know whether or not a volley or career rig is coming. I'd bet that 75% or more households in Portchester have no clue that the career staff was killed off.
 
if the closest Scarsdale station was closed then the run card should have changed to reflect it and even if it meant that a two man rig from Eastchester was coming because it was the next reasonable piece then that is how it should be.
 
In the rest of the country where dispatchers actually have discretion over response based on staffing you actually hear apparatus mark up with how many interior firefighters they have.  If not sufficient the dispatcher will alert the next due while allowing the understaffed rig to continue because it provides some form of incremental benefit. 

 
The Officer is still in the shotgun seat.  A TDA just requires a second driver in the rear, and usually the drivers and officer are connected through headsets so they can communicate about upcoming turns/traffic/directions.
 

That's a great video showing how pre-planning your area before purchasing a rig is always a great idea. I think that while great, most departments don't have the man power to operate the tiller. In Westchester, most are lucky to get one guy on the rig. Does the Officer drive the front or the back? It sucks to bring up staffing but its the hard truth when it comes to these apparatus.

 

Why is this always a surprise... The PA answers to NO ONE...never has and never will.....

I understand that mutual aid plans around the county (heck, around the state) are either broken or just strange, but there are some good plans out there.  The airport has an overkill plan for an Alert 1 (Light General Aviation Aircraft, generally carrying 4-6 souls): 3 engines, 1 ladder, 2 rescues, 3 ambulances, and 1 tanker, all from the overlapping districts surrounding the aiport.
 
I only point this out because there is a way to make mutual aid work.  It involves working with your neighboring departments and determining what you can do for each other in a myriad of incidents.  Department A has a heavy rescue, Department B has a boat, Department C has a tower ladder....you get the picture.  If you plan your "what if" moments appropriately, you won't get the "Monday Morning Quarterbacking" from everyone else, AND you get the job done!  The above airport response for light GA is because some serious sh#t can happen with what seemingly could be a simple crash but is actually something quite significant (think a single engine Cessna rolls off the end of the runway and hits a fuel truck filled with 9,000 gallons of JetA).  I am by no means saying that we should activate the cavalry on every call or directly upgrading every structure fire to a second alarm to get extra resources, rather just to say to plan appropriately.
 
**Yes, I know the airport does not give mutual aid back to the county, but that is a discussion for another day.**

We have similar issues in my area.  I agree, more is definitely better.  Just pointing out that many of us on the career side don't have the option to wait a couple minutes for more personnel to arrive before responding.  Some of us are fighting just to maintain the understaffing that we already deal with.
 
I've read up on some of that research, but I don't recall reading about any scenarios where they studied two 2 man crews.  Would you happen to have a link or something off hand for that part?  I'd be interested in reading that.
 
I don't dispute the findings of that research, but I also have a good bit of experience with responding to fires understaffed and know what we're often able to accomplish while the cavalry assembles.  So while not ideal, a crew of 2 (experienced, competent FFs) is not pointless like insinuated above.

I understand that mutual aid plans around the county (heck, around the state) are either broken or just strange, but there are some good plans out there.  The airport has an overkill plan for an Alert 1 (Light General Aviation Aircraft, generally carrying 4-6 souls): 3 engines, 1 ladder, 2 rescues, 3 ambulances, and 1 tanker, all from the overlapping districts surrounding the aiport.
 
I only point this out because there is a way to make mutual aid work.  It involves working with your neighboring departments and determining what you can do for each other in a myriad of incidents.  Department A has a heavy rescue, Department B has a boat, Department C has a tower ladder....you get the picture.  If you plan your "what if" moments appropriately, you won't get the "Monday Morning Quarterbacking" from everyone else, AND you get the job done!  The above airport response for light GA is because some serious sh#t can happen with what seemingly could be a simple crash but is actually something quite significant (think a single engine Cessna rolls off the end of the runway and hits a fuel truck filled with 9,000 gallons of JetA).  I am by no means saying that we should activate the cavalry on every call or directly upgrading every structure fire to a second alarm to get extra resources, rather just to say to plan appropriately.
 
**Yes, I know the airport does not give mutual aid back to the county, but that is a discussion for another day.**

I understand that mutual aid plans around the county (heck, around the state) are either broken or just strange, but there are some good plans out there.  The airport has an overkill plan for an Alert 1 (Light General Aviation Aircraft, generally carrying 4-6 souls): 3 engines, 1 ladder, 2 rescues, 3 ambulances, and 1 tanker, all from the overlapping districts surrounding the aiport.
 
I only point this out because there is a way to make mutual aid work.  It involves working with your neighboring departments and determining what you can do for each other in a myriad of incidents.  Department A has a heavy rescue, Department B has a boat, Department C has a tower ladder....you get the picture.  If you plan your "what if" moments appropriately, you won't get the "Monday Morning Quarterbacking" from everyone else, AND you get the job done!  The above airport response for light GA is because some serious sh#t can happen with what seemingly could be a simple crash but is actually something quite significant (think a single engine Cessna rolls off the end of the runway and hits a fuel truck filled with 9,000 gallons of JetA).  I am by no means saying that we should activate the cavalry on every call or directly upgrading every structure fire to a second alarm to get extra resources, rather just to say to plan appropriately.
 
**Yes, I know the airport does not give mutual aid back to the county, but that is a discussion for another day.**

While 2 is better than 0. This is not an acceptable response. Read the NIST studies that show a four member or more crew that takes minutes longer to arrive still performed significantly better than a fast arriving two man crew. 

 
Bingo.
 
Consolidation was a great idea, so great, it wasn't implemented. Why? Archaic NYS laws. Remember Westchester2000, that large loose leaf book that resulted from an expensive study. Made a pretty good door chock.
 
Isn't the SFD station in question closed due to structural problems ?
 

If I am not mistaken the Consolidation Plan submitted several years ago consisting of around   10 willing Departments and District would have put as many as 26 men and on the scene in 6 minutes on three engines, two ladders , a heavy rescue and Incident Commander , the location of this fire was a perfect example.
The craziest part of the whole plan would have been the closest firehouse to the call responded, despite municipal boundaries could you imagine that ?????

 
Assuming that another rig with more staffing was on its way, a rig with two is still better than none.  Establishing continuous water supply, throwing ladders to a known point of entrapment, extended walk around and size-up to the remaining incoming units, among many other activities can be completed by a crew of two and if nothing else, they're geared up and immediately fill out the "two in two out" requirement when the next arriving apparatus marks up. 

You have brought up two different issues.
 
1) is it cheaper to use ot? This one varies greatly. What is the union contract require? I have seen some that pay straight time for prescheduled "ot" others pay double time on Sundays and holidays. In NY some retirement tiers require pension payments for ot, not for other tiers. We have also found that seniority has a factor, if the job has mostly Sr members it is cheaper to hire, mostly Jr members and ot is cheaper, so it's fluctuating over time.
 
2) You must define "peak hours". We are busiest during the day, many of these calls are slip and falls, alarms from workers, cooking, showers, changing co batteries, and so on. At night our volume drops dramatically. But the calls are more likely cardiac, respiratory, (I'd call earlier, but didn't want to bother you, so I waited till 2 am), drugs, serious mva's, and most working fires and almost all fatal and serious injury fires.
 
also in some cases the contract requires 10 - 24 hour shifts.

 
Peak hours is always going to be a disputed factor. Most of us used some kind of reporting software that can run a report for this. Way back when I was in a VFD one of the career guys did this, figured out what our busiest days were and posted it. He was trying to encourage more volunteers to be in the station on days they were more likely to get calls. Not sure why but we stopped posting the list after a while. At work in Dispatch we used to have a potential drop in manpower at 3AM but that was until they lowered it all the time. This would be the biggest fear of any right thinking union, that management would put more guys on during peaks but at the cost of less guys on during lulls. Then there is the fact of minimum pay. Most city employees in my city get a 4 hour minimum call back. Would the city want to pay this if the peak was less than 4 hours?
I think it is an interesting concept to look at staffing this way, but I would be afraid that the same data could be used to cut positions. I have seen two factions in a debate use the same data to make conflicting suggestions before and it never works out well for the rank and file.
 

 
Barry, I love these two points because one leads to the next.  I remember from my Physiology of Flight class (one of my aviation electives) that it's the same ordeal in the airline industry.  The drop in the number of pilots requires the crews to fly additional legs each day, which leads to fatigue, a lack of spatial orientation, and confusion.  These are the three most common reasons that planes crash/deviate/etc. when the determination is pilot error.  The same is happening to the fire service, where a drop in the number of firefighters is making us fatigued and frustrated.  We end up overwhelmed trying to pick up the slack of not having the extra help on scene, and we get caught up in some sort of incident .
 
But I want to jump back to the OT portion.  When I took my economics classes there were a few points that brought out the fact that in many cases overtime costs are less expensive than hiring additional manpower (this wasn't fire service related, but just a general overlook into budgeting for personnel overhead, as overtime reduces the need to pay for another employee's benefits, healthcare, etc.).  Would paying firefighters overtime to fill a few extra seats during peak hours be effective enough to help mitigate incidents and prevent injuries?  Or do you think it may result in more injuries because firefighters will end up working more hours?  I know it's hard to say one way or the other because every department is different, but I'm just looking to pick peoples' brains to see what you and other may think of adding overtime shifts to help cover the busier hours of the day.

As a resident of the city, it would be fabulous to have a third ladder company staffed at all times.  Unfortunately, given the times of doing more with less, I don't see it happening on a full time basis.  Having adequately crewed apparatus these days seems to be an anomaly.  Heck, even FDNY only has an extra person on a handful of engines!
 
As a union rep myself, and as a concerned citizen, and as one to have some sort of common sense, I advocate every department to have the proper staffing for what "could happen."  I just don't see it happening as governments continually slash emergency services budgets to fill woeful gaps.  To pay the firefighters you have to cut money from somewhere else or run a deficit, and we all know budgetary deficits are bad.  So where is the money going to come from?  All too often the people siting at the desks crunching numbers forget that there are grants (SAFER is a prime one) that get more people on the rigs to get qualified personnel to the scene of an incident.  It just irks me as a professional in this service and as a citizen that we can't put enough firefighters on the front line!  Yes, we can do the job with three firefighters per rig....But we can do a heck of a lot better with just one more person apparatus.  We can do even more with a whole other truck!

Let's look at these key points
 
1) we have actually gotten to the point that we are doing less with less.
 
2) it's not an extra person, it's the majority of companies are running with what the department standards say is sub standard 
 
3) great question, but has anyone considered that the injury rates have exploded as manpower has dropped? What are the medical cost, the OT cost to cover the injured member and the increased pension and disability costs gotten us?
 
4) The University of Rhode Island School of Economics did a study on the Providence FD about 25 years ago and determined that 3 man companies cost more than 4 man companies after one calculated the above injury costs.

As a resident of the city, it would be fabulous to have a third ladder company staffed at all times.  Unfortunately, given the times of doing more with less, I don't see it happening on a full time basis.  Having adequately crewed apparatus these days seems to be an anomaly.  Heck, even FDNY only has an extra person on a handful of engines!
 
As a union rep myself, and as a concerned citizen, and as one to have some sort of common sense, I advocate every department to have the proper staffing for what "could happen."  I just don't see it happening as governments continually slash emergency services budgets to fill woeful gaps.  To pay the firefighters you have to cut money from somewhere else or run a deficit, and we all know budgetary deficits are bad.  So where is the money going to come from?  All too often the people siting at the desks crunching numbers forget that there are grants (SAFER is a prime one) that get more people on the rigs to get qualified personnel to the scene of an incident.  It just irks me as a professional in this service and as a citizen that we can't put enough firefighters on the front line!  Yes, we can do the job with three firefighters per rig....But we can do a heck of a lot better with just one more person apparatus.  We can do even more with a whole other truck!

Since almost every dept is requiring EMT. Doing CFR and then EMT a few months later is a waste of time

I heard that CFR (Certified First Responder) training is no longer given in Westchester's career fire academy. I remember when I went through the academy in 2005, it was required by the state to pass.  I also didn't find it in the required courses on the NYS website:
 
http://www.dhses.ny.gov/ofpc/training/fire-academy/state-certifications.cfm
 
Since a majority of career departments call volume are EMS, over 80% in some districts, I really feel that being an EMT should be a perquisite, or training should be provided in the academy.

This was regarding the fire yesterday at the Sports Page Bar:
 
 

White Plains Ladder 34
 
Ladder 34 - RETIRED
1995 Ford/Smeal 1250/500/75ft.
Served from 1995-2013
**NEVER RAN AS A QUINT**
Ladder 32 - FORMER
2012 Spartan/Smeal 105ft. - NON - QUINT
Served as Ladder 32 from 2012-2016
Now Serving as Ladder 34
 

 
I'm having a little trouble wrapping my head around this statement.  I understand it's in reference to the need for larger drive-thru bays, but what exactly are the front line and secondary apparatus?  My research has turned up two engines, a tower ladder, and a rescue.  I imagine that one of the engines is considered secondary, therefore the front line engine, ladder, and rescue will occupy the three drive-thru bays.  The boat and several utility vehicles I obviously understand are secondary and would go into the old bays (not the aforementioned museum).  I guess the question I'm reaching for here is what is considered 1st line and what is 2nd line in the eyes of the Board of Commissioners?
 
Additionally, I have to ask about the location of Chappaqua VAC.  Are they also located in HQ?  I'm asking because if they are, do the new plans incorporate space for the ambulances and crews, or is there a CVAC building that I am not aware of?

Does anybody remember what Barry said about 3 years ago on the tax cap , WELL!