Bnechis

The problem that presents itself is a paradox.........The real solution to the problem is going to eventually be the addition of a few paid chauffeurs to get the trucks out during the day, then eventually going to full-time staffing during the day. Then the volunteers can take over at night when there are more guys around who come home from work.

Your entire post was Spot on, with one exception, the sentence above.

Paid chauffeurs also hide the problem. Wow look how fast the FD got on scene but still no one to take care of the problem. And as you said full time staffing is not financially viable based on the call volume. And many of these VFD's are doing no better at night.

When their are 2, 3 , 4 departments in town.....consolidate. then not everyone is trying to staff 2 engines and a truck and rescue. Then if needed add a paid company to handle all the BS that is a problem. Then and only then if you need to go fully paid, you can do it with fewer rigs covering a larger area and it becomes cost effective.

no we do just fire calls!

Thank you. And how many are actual fires?

Sounds like they need one of those giant snow melter's they use in NYC

More like 750 ems runs and the rest is structural.

If this is accurate, then the remaining 300 or so calls per year including automatic alarms, co calls gas calls, MVA's, fluid spills, cats iin trees etc.

So if 5% of the non EMS calls are actual structure fires, that's 15 fires or a little more than 1 per month. Do they have more or less than that?

Now lets compare them to Engine Co 82's district in the 1960's/70's If memory services they were doing around 6,000 calls a year with more than 1/2 working fires.

Nice to see some Municipalities still hold the Bar high for hiring and won't hire pos! I still say Departments should require a candidate to know how to swim especially New Ro! Never understood why they got rid if that part of the Agility?

Because the Federal courts said so

Every snow storm folks run out ad buy new snow shovels, what happens over the summer to last years shovels ???????

High quality Chinese plastics of today are no comparison to the "low" quality American made steel shovels of years gone bye.

Its not about the fine, its about the finding, which will be used against the village in any civil litigation from the families.

The lesson is ignorance of the law is no defense (particularly when DOL can prove you knew the law at some point in the past)

Westchester Special Operations Task Force Departments bought a number of them.

Just curious - at 45W how long does the battery last?

A couple of hours

If I recall correctly, a "Squad Company" in Westchester has specific requirements regarding special operations training (HAZMAT, Rescue, etc.) Capt. Nechis can probably provide more details.

SQUAD COMPANY (TEAMS)

Valid Prefixes (SQ = Squad)

A vehicle(s) consisting of at least an Engine with or without other support vehicles (i.e.:Rescue, Ladder, or Utility Type), equipped with additional and specific equipment to handle

hazardous materials / WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) and/or technical rescue, that will respond with a minimum of six (6) trained and certified members, included a company officer.

For hazmat and WMD the minimum training level shall be Haz-Mat Technician (as identified under OSHA1910.120) and the squad shall have the equipment necessary to perform air monitoring, level “A” suit and decontamination.

For technical rescue the minimum training level shall be based on NFPA 1670. All members shall be at the technician level for structural collapse, trench rescue and confined space rescue and at the operations level for rope rescue. The squad shall have the equipment necessary to initiate a response, safely size up and identify additional resources required to safely mitigate these incidents.

A helmet makes a great wheel chock in a pinch.

Wow, lets use a $200 - $400 wheel chock, when we can just get a $2 4x4 from Home Depot.

What Westchester needs, is

F) a radio system that everyone uses.... Fire, Police, EMS.

Why do we need police & fire on the same radio?

Its bad enough now, 3 the volume of activity on the radio and find that running a plate is more important than person trapped

well it just so has it that onondaga county operates like this and it works fairly well

And they have less than 1/2 of the population of Westchester. (500,415 less)

Housing Units: 169,000 more housing units in Westchester

Land area is 340sq miles more in Onondaga (trees not people)

Persons per sq miles: almost 4x more density in Westchester.

This all means their system might not work so well here

That was really my point, albeit reading back on it, it didn't come out clear at all. Run numbers mean absolute jack. It's stats like BFD1054 is asking for that really matter.

Actually what the run numbers mean is we have way to many rigs in Westchester covering 1 - 2 calls a day. And since most depts. can't properly many the rigs they have, all we are doing is fooling ourselves and the public.

Port Chester , nobody left to do reports ?

Not like you left at the beginning of the year. You could have done most of them

Now next years going to be different....

Sounds like the contracts should be written differently. I would think the contract would be written by the customer and the proposals would address time associated with change orders.

And then if the customer accepts the reason for delay as reasonable, then who are we to object?

1) How experienced are most depts./municipalities at this vs. the manufacturers?

2) The big problem is how much time is needed for a minor change vs. a major one? What if what the customer wants is a minor change (i.e. will take the factory 5 minutes to change out a switch), but it will take 2 weeks for them to order it and receive it? Should they have to pay $14,000 in fines (based on $100 a day)?

Wonder if Yonkers has any production delay penalties written in their contract (they would be smart if they did)?

The version of the contract I saw had $100.00 day after one year or agreed to delivery date.

Its often meaningless.

1) Most depts. put that in so it does not matter to the manufacturer which dept is delayed.

2) All manufacturers require that every change order be signed by the dept. rep. Many have a hidden clause saying that each change order comes with a 5-10 add time to the final delivery date. Even if the "change order" is to correct errors that the manufacturer has made.

So you go for the prepaint inspection and find they installed something wrong, If you want it fixed, it adds time.

Can anyone answer this question. I thought that the Bid awarded to Ferrara was to replace Engine 303 and Engine 313 (as well as to replace Tower Ladder 71). It appears from the latest "In Production" section on Ferrara's Web Site that they are producing a "Rescue Pumper" for Yonkers. Is YFD changed up their request and are now replacing Squad 11? (Doesn't seem to make sense, but you never know). Maybe someone in the know from within YFD can update us all

Technically, all a rescue pumper is, is a standard pumper with upper compartments that are double deep. Just because of the design, does not mean they will be used as one.

NRFD Engines 21, 23 & 25 are of this design and only E-25 carries additional equipment, beyond the standard engine. The new engine 22 is of the same design with some very minor modifications will be operated as a squad company.

http://www.emtbravo.net/index.php/topic/47583-high-volume-foam-f500-drill/?hl=%2Bfoam+%2Bdrill

This was a foam drill that we did at DES at the request of ConEd. They wanted to see different ways to deliver foam to a burning substation (in particular the one that just burned). We were able to test a number of systems.

The DES trailer carries F-500 (it was donated by ConEd and refilled by them), DES has order a new trailer with Universal Gold 1-3% AR-AFFF.

We carry 24 gal Universal Gold 1-3% AR-AFFF on every engine and 3 55 gal drums as seen in the pictures.

1) That's a fair point that tax paying residents should be given a preference. But then shouldn't these districts implement a residency policy during employment? If a kid grows up in his parents house, gets hired and buys a house up in Dutchess the day he graduates the academy how were tax payers helped at all?

2) And why is it a complete preference to residents, NYC residency is only worth 5 points?

3) Personally if I were a commissioner I'd rather hire off the open list simply for the quality of candidates. I'd rather be protected by (and work with) someone from the top of the list than someone who barely passed the written.

1) They can't implement it, it is either not legal or would require a union agreement, which would cost a ton. Particularly in some of the communities that only have very high end housing.

2) Its not a complete preference....for example NR must use up the residence list before going to non-residence (federal court decree) and with hundreds on the list, we just never get to the non-residence. The list I was hired off of one candidate was accidently placed on the non-residence list as # 130's (or so), he was able to prove that he actually was a resident (tax records on the house, showed it in NR, but had a Larchmont postal address) and moved up to #17. we hired 50 or so off that list.

5 points is the difference in hired not hired for NYC

3) Commissioners are elected officials and people from other districts do not vote for them.

This subject is being discussed in January 2015. I'll check in again in January 2020. I'll bet not much will have changed.

I thought the feds will force us all to change by then

I think it just stinks that a person who lives in a community that does not have a paid force has much less opportunity to get "on the job". Fair? Not! System needs to change so everyone has "equal opportunity".

So lets play devils advocate:

I pay taxes to support my local FD, why should someone who pays nothing to support my protection have the same opportunity? Would that be fair?

1) So far this is the answer I like, and it seems to make sense. It now baffles me that the county would purchase a radio system that they KNEW wouldn't work throughout the entire county....then again, it would make entirely too much sense to purchase a system that covers the entire county .

2) Another question I have is what ever happened to switching the low band to high band? Or am I thinking of another county that was trying to do that? I recall vaguely that Westchester was trying to convert to high band radios, by my memory of this is vague.

1) Westchester is the hardest location in the USA to get FCC Licenses, Their are more licenses in NYC than anywhere else and we can not interfere with that. We also have to deal with Long Island and NJ. So within a 15 mile radius at the southern end of the county you have 100's of radio systems. And you must remember its not just emergency services.

When they were developing it, they were trying to cover the best they could with the limited availability of frequencies.

2) I do not think that was Westchester

I don't know your county and can not speak to your personal experiences but generally speaking your arguments against a regional 911 system are flawed.

1. Accountability at the local level is a joke. I have heard incompetent local dispatchers and they worked for decades because there was zero accountability.

2. Protocols get established by the dispatch center and the agency. There isn't a take it or leave it line in the sand. Although some completely unrealistic expectations may not be met.

3. If local dispatchers were moved to a regional 911 center they would still have the local knowledge. It isn't like Yonkers would suddenly be dispatching Albany or vice versa.

1) Yes it may or may not be a joke on the local level, but we have no say in the accountability in another agency

2) You clearly do not know our county. Their absolutely is a take it or leave it on many issues. Many are locked in because of the programing of CAD, which can not always be modified to deal with the needs of local agencies.

3) Local dispatchers for the most part can not legally be moved because of the civil service system. When we moved to the county only 1 of our retiring dispatchers went to work for the county and that helped till he retired.

One problem with relying on maps is pronunciation of street names. Many of our streets were named after the family farms that were there in the 1700-1800's and most were French Huguenot names. They get butchered regularly, even with primary dispatchers assigned to us. This is not a slight on the dispatchers, but when you go from 100's of streets to 10,000's you can not expect them to know it.

1) And why do so many departments choose not to be dispatched by 60 Control? Wouldn't a consolidated e911 system work for us?

2) The way I see it is that the trunk system has all of the technology to do what we need it to do, which is COMMUNICATE (albeit I don't know if you can be dispatched on it....refer to the question above). I just find it ridiculous that the radio communication system for Westchester County is incredibly complex. I'd really love some good answers on this, because this has been boggling my mind for almost seven years now.

1) Yes it would, but a consolidated system needs to include all e911 not just fire/ems. If the cops are not on board, then this will never work properly. And the cops are the ones who set up the e911 system to protect their little fiefdoms.

2) Before we set up our radio system, we met with the county to discus the "proposed" trunk system. We were told the trunk system as designed would a) not cover 100% of our district and unless additional tower licenses were obtained, it would never work properly in the southern part of the county and It was not designed for the day to day use that our department needs of its radio system. So we built our own and for our purpose, ours is vastly superior.

A lot of places take in people who end up being their biggest problems. Happens all over, the system can't stop every problem from occurring, it's a shame though.

Its not the "system" its the desperation of many departments to take anyone with a pulse.