AFS1970

Government acts quickly when it suits them. Look at the so-called "SAFE ACT". Passed in under a month.
The government doesn't treat this as a priority because we continue to fight with each other rather than fighting for the issues.

Actually, they don't have to carry band-aids. It's not part 800.

I have often heard people question the wisdom of sending firefighters into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11th. It is not their fault, these people simply do not understand that firemen do what they do because they must, for without their actions lives would be lost. So much is made of the losses that fateful Tuesday 13 years ago and that is as it should be, but when looking back at that terrible day in New York let us not forget that the sacrifice of the 343 brave FDNY firefighters lost and the actions of their comrades who survived directly saved the lives of over ten thousand people, TEN THOUSAND!!!!. So in the midst of all the sadness and anger that comes with this day let us also remember that those 343 lives were not lost in vain.


I will never forget you, the 343, and all you gave, your sacrifice gave life to thousands, THANK YOU!!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gq_n_...ature=youtu.be

Most of the documentarys I have watched about the fire service tend to focus on more of the tragedy we encounter (atleast in my humble opinion). This however, I feel had a focus on the brotherhood and cammeradery found in the station. One example I can think of off the too of my head is the film "into the fire". A large part of that documentary was facing loss of life in the fire service. Again, this is how I perceived it. While there was quite a few mentions of loss of life both civilian and firefighter in "a good job" they were followed immediately by stories of how the firefighters involved in the incident found comfort in each other. Again, this is how I perceived the documentary. My question for you is: were you able to see "a good job" tonight and did you feel the same way?

Ok, so how does NCIS and Mr. Harmon then take over every investigation on the show????

you got my interest, you have staffing for 4 pieces of apparatus, but the truck isn't a priority. If it is sometimes last, and sometimes not at all, you don't need water, you need firefighters.

No fire TRUCK should carry water, that is what ENGINES are for.

It should be re-opened as 36 Engine.

There has never been an "official" EMT or Paramedic patch authorized by NYS DOH BEMS. It would be legit, however, for an agency or local government to adopt an official patch for their people, but that would only apply to people working within those agencies affected.
FDNY long ago had a modified version of the yellow or orange tombstone EMT patch. They pop up on Ebay once in a while.

The yellow/orange tombstone was the closest to an official patch that happened in the past. The NYSP look-alike patches are currently very popular, but again, not official, at least by DOH authorization.

I should take that comment about bigger balls in NY and run with it, but I won't. Put a guy in a room full of fire and he won't care what city he's in.

As for the original post and the article. We've seen what happens when a FD has a tank and pump on their aerial then fails to maintain them due to budget woes. Faced with major cuts, repairing pumps and leaking tanks on apparatus that functionally never used them didn't make sense, next thing you know you're Houston FD on 60 Minutes (mid 90's?) explaining why your truck company couldn't stretch a line. More primary systems require more upkeep and maintenance. Typically FD's aren't apparatus poor, their manpower poor. If there are holes in someone's response system that allow for long periods of time between a truck arriving and the next in engine, likely tossing a Quint in will create an even longer delay when that piece is tied up or out of service.
This reminds me of the Louis CK clip about "Of course, but maybe". Of course, of course we have to make due with the funding and staffing the public gives us, but maybe when they cut and cut until we're riding twice as far with half the members to a fire the public should get what they paid for... Of course not, but... While I wholeheartedly believe we must provide the highest level of service we are capable of with the resources we're given, we must educate the public as to the limitations these cuts make. It is our job to to assume risk to address the emergency needs of our communities, but it's also our job to ensure that we take every measure possible to return to quarters with the same personnel we left with in the same condition. There is a balance between acceptable risk to our members and the amount of risk assumed to save life and property, if the public doesn't understand that scale we are partially to blame. We understand that it's impossible to provide the level of service many Metro FD's provide in rural America, yet how many citizens really understand the difference?

No fire TRUCK should carry water, that is what ENGINES are for.

Let's flip this around somewhat, should all apparatus have an aerial ladder? I mean what if you are on the road in your engine and you get a call and you pull up and you see a confirmed live victim in a high window? What will you do?
This is the flaw in the process, no matter what you do you can come up with a scenario where you have not done enough. Should all tanks be 1,000 gallons or more? What if there is a water main break? What if you get called mutual aid to a rural area? While we all have to think of the "what if's" we also have to also think of the probabilities and really how many times have you pulled up first due in the truck at a working fire that you normally would have been in the engine for and had no close engine coming?
In my old department we used to take the rescue on EMS calls. Now this dates back to the rescue being much smaller, but even with the current one it is smaller and lighter than the engines. The only time we took the engine was on reported burns. A few members wanted to start taking the engine on EMS runs instead of the rescue. In my opinion this was entirely based on the fact that the nearby career department did this, but let's face it the reasoning is completely different in the two settings. However the argument was made that we might be in the rescue when a fire came in.
As an officer at the time, I ran the report on simultaneous runs. I discovered that sue to our busy automatic aid system that called for our truck on numerous boxes, we were statistically more likely to be on the road in the rescue and need the truck. I showed the chief the numbers and argued that we should put the EMS stuff on the truck as that was were call volume says it was needed. That went over like a fart in church, as nobody really wanted to take the truck out for EMS runs. The engine cult won and started taking the engine on runs, and due to space limitations now was responding with far less EMS gear than the rescue carried (although most of that was rarely used). As a side not it was not long before the same genius who brought up this issue advocated selling the rescue as it was not doing a lot of runs. I think he just hated the rescue.

No fire TRUCK should carry water, that is what ENGINES are for.

This was the quarters of Eng. 36, "Skells Angels". A busy and storied company shuttered by the Bloomberg administration. Thanks bloomy.....and thanks for 4 years without a contract

That would be great! Paint it white with dri-erase board paint and the side of the water tank becomes an IC Board. You won't have to put sandbags in the back for better traction in ice storms either.

No fire TRUCK should carry water, that is what ENGINES are for.

No fire TRUCK should carry water, that is what ENGINES are for.

No fire TRUCK should carry water, that is what ENGINES are for.

Should all fire trucks carry water?...NO

Interesting Article, Guess its been long enough since the last time we went down the stupid trail. They say the fire service is a 100 years of history unspoiled by progress.... Here we are failing to learn from history.
Back in the early 1990's we started with the every rig should have water....The Quint Concept. or even the Total Quint Concept. We even had the mini/maxi concept. We put everything we need on one truck and it 1) does nothing well and 2) add $100,000's to the cost of the rig.
St. Louis is now backing away since it doesn't really work as advertised. A couple of large VA depts. are now at the 1st replacement round and are asking why have the fleet costs skyrocked, and maybe we should not do this. Rochester went back to traditional units, because it too found it didn't really save money or work well.
Now if we cant get rigs on the road, adding another piece of equipment that somebody has to carry into a building is not going to help.
This week I heard 1 dept in the county paging out for any available interior firefighters to respond to an automatic alarm. Well if you can not handle a response to an A/A then equipment is not your problem. Every department in the county has taken millions in taxpayer money with the understanding of those taxpayers that when they call the FD, they will actually show up. If you can not do that, it is time to merge with someone else, hire someone else or hire your own staff.
Neat tool? do you put it on over or under your SCBA?
So this backpack weights about 45 lbs. So you use them on your initial knockdown but you have to leave your SCBA on the truck. Sounds like another toy that some depts. will buy with tax payer funds and it will sit on the rig till it no longer functions and its then thrown away.

I used the codes as an old example of scripting gone bad. However I know of a dispatcher that was so into her scripts that she had hand written ones she made in training and could not even do a nightly tone test without them. The rest of us figured that we could probably get her to order a pizza over the air if we inserted the words into her scripts.
As for business names that is an uphill battle. We try to have business names stored in CAD but there is a big problem with a) names that change often or are never updated & alarms that give a different name than we have because the alarm lists the property owner and not the tenant. So going to ABC Real Estate is not at all helpful when you pull up to the local Burger King. The information is only as good as we get, and frankly we don't get very good information most of the time. In some districts they want the residence name for the same reason, some drivers know where the Smith's live as just that the Smith house, not as 1234 Farm Meadow Dr.
We had a couple of issues with giving out cross streets a few years back. Now as one of the people that helped set up of street file, we got blocks down to the smallest segment possible.
I had one FF complain that we were giving the wrong cross streets on several addresses, but every time we checked the map we were right. I finally asked him what he meant. He thought the cross streets should be specific to the side of the street the call was on, so if the only two streets on the left were a mile apart he wanted those instead of any of the six other streets on the right.
We also had a service that was adamant about getting cross streets on every call, even when you had a business name or a well known building. They were so in the habit of requesting cross streets that when going to an incident on i-95 once they asked for cross streets. A very senior dispatch supervisor from the fire department got on the air and gave them cross streets of Maine and Florida.
These are examples of why while admirable such drives for consistency often ends up removing the thinking / common sense form the process which is the exact opposite of helpful. By all means we should give out all location information we have on hand, however mandating that the map number be given before the apartment number of that the business name be given in between the cross streets is nothing more than micro managing.

Here is the real problem with scripts (or what those who don't sit behind the console call consistency). Eventually you are saying words that you don't really understand. You get so used to reading the script that the words, like the example of 10-4, loose their actual meaning.
For years before plain language Stamford had some signals that were generally used together. THe two most common were 5, 7 & 9 or 1 & 5. These were so common that most units stopped using the word signal in front of them. However here is what they meant.
1 - In Service / On Air
5 - Returning to Quarters
7 - False Alarm
9 - Recall
However 1 & 5 was used so often as the generic signal that you were clear from a call that we started having EMS units who were not quartered at the hospital saying they were 1 & 5 out at the hospital. They can be 1 at the hospital but not 1 & 5. But they were being consistent.
There are also fads depending on who is reading what book at the time. We had a senior dispatcher with no field experience yell at a junio dispatcher who had been a member of 2 local departments and 1 out of town department because he didn't ask the color of the smoke that a caller was reporting. Also on a call with a report of a fire with children in side she yelled that the ages of the children were imnportant. The junior dispatcher asked why, did they rescue 4 years olds diferently from 5 year olds? But both of these theories were because of incomplete information given to dispatchers so they would be consistent with field units.
So if I dispatch a call and say attention all Turn of River Units and the next guy says attention Turn of River Fire Department, I don't see that is a problem. Trust me, we have lots of real problems to solve. We do not need to go making up more imaginary ones just so we can create a solution.

Date: 09/03/2014
Time: 00:18
Location: 29 Bittersweet Ln, Cross Streets
District: Turn of River
Units: Turn of River: E64, K68 (Tanker), V617 (LT)
Long Ridge: E72, E74, K78 (Tanker)
Stamford: E8, E9, E7, T1, R1, E5 (RIT), E3, T2 (2nd Alarm), E1 & LDH1, T3 (Reliefs), U4 (Command),U6 Safety, FM101, FM107, FM109
Belltown: T45, E41, E42, C411, V415 (LT)
Pound Ridge: E112, Tanker 3
New Canaan: Tanker 8
Darien: Tanker 45
Vista: Tanker 4
Stamford EMS: M4, M901 (Supervisor), U94 (Rehab), U91 (Field Comm)
Darien EMS: 312, 316 (Supervisor)
Stamford PD: 8D (LT), 8S1 (SGT), 8S4 (SGT), 4D295, 4C58, 4E16, 4A43, 3D33, 3C29
CT State PD: Fire Marshal Unit
Description: Multiple calls for house explosion with fire.
00:22 V415 on scene reporting fire in rear of a 2 1/2 story wood frame single family residence.
00:24 C411 Requesting Tanker Shuttle from Westchester. K68 Enroute special called Mutual Aid Tankers (Call for Round Hil & Banksville changed to Pound Ridge & Darien due to location). Initial call for Noroton Heights Tanker switched to Vista due to Tanker Out of Service.
00:51 U4 calls a Second Alarm
00:56 Red Cross Notified for victim relocation
01:02 2nd Floor has Collapsed - Exterior Operations.
01:06 CL&P requested Priority 1
02:14 Tanker Shuttle shutting down, most mutual aid units released except for E112. K68 remaining as sole tanker.
03:43 FM101 calling for State Fire Marshal
04:43 8S4 assuming Police Sector from 8S1
05:35 U4 requesting DPW with backhoe or payloader to assist with moving debris
06:40 T3 Responding for relief crew

Danbury is just the latest to be looking at this from entirely the wrong standpoint. With any job, but more so in the emergency services, financial concerns can not be the only factor looked at. However any time there is a move to civilianize a job, be it dispatcher, records clerk, parking enforcement or even jailer, it is always brought up that it will be cheaper. Very often the field units complain because the penny pinchers don't understand that you get what you pay for. You want cheap, you can get cheap, but don't look for qualiy also.
At least in this setting it looks like the private staff will be in a Danbury owned center. I am generally against privitization because even when it saves money it often includes hidden cost increases and is often hard to switch back from if it does not work out. I have heard of cities privitizing and selling off all their equipment which makes it very hard to get rid of a bad contractor.
As for the certification issue, the state has a class for dispatchers. It was originally an 80 hour class that they bought from A.P.C.O. but as times changed they dropped it to 60 hours and then I think down to just over 40. There was allot of stuff in it that you just didn't need, but in my opinion it isn't enough. Syaing that it is just answering a phone is pretty much like saying that being a cop is just walking around town and beign a firefighter is just spraying water. Each job has it's specific challenges and each job is diferent enough that there are few if any direct comparisons.
How interesting that if this is just answering a phone and anyone can do it, that when it was field personnel they needed to get extra money to do it, but now that your wife / kid needs a job this should be done for half the money. I have an idea, why certify drivers as firefighters? I can hire a guy with a CDL for less than a firefighter, after all it's just driving a truck.