M' Ave

Sadly NONE! And this is much to the detriment of the public and the firefighters. No one else has 5 man trucks and everyone else wishes and should. What is your angle man? You don't seem to get it. You could close half the firehouses, but you'll never voluntarily get that staffing.....it's that important. If it takes us longer to get there, that's on the city's hands. I wouldn't volunteer the position that allows us to do our job effectively and safely. Like I said, not my job to adequately cover the city, it IS our job to be the best unit when we get there. A fire engine/truck is nothing more than a tool box. The men inside are the tools. What good is a big fancy tool box with no tools.....

The previous HazMat 1 was built on a stock Ferrara chassis, the Inferno I believe. That rig is 8 years old and will serve as an excellent spare, which that company needed. 10 years is the norm, but I believe that they wanted to bring the HazMat rig more into conformity with the fleet. It's not really accurate to call it at rescue. Other than the chassis, it shares nothing else. It's a rolling chem lab and by far the most expensive rig in the fleet.

There isn't a job on this planet that doesn't want more manpower. Fire's would go out without fire departments too, after causing just a little more damage......who in emergency services thinks this way?! There are loads of jobs operating with 3 and 4 firefighters. They do this wishing they had more men, they do this at greater peril to themselves and they do this at a disadvantage to the public. Studies show that 4 firefighters take twice as long as 5 to get a hose line in operation. Take a position away from the truck? That'll leave you needing 2 trucks to begin the same operation that is now started with the arrival of the first due ladder. What's your agenda here? Do you want to see staffing reductions? Last year we had fewer than 100 fire deaths. This is in a city of 8.5 million residents. Do you think this is directly related to staffing levels? It is.

Msot of the important things that needed to be said were already said above. I'll just add that, we don't want to see any companies close, NONE. However, it's not our job to provide an adequate blanket of coverage. It's our job to maintain the staffing level that we have, the staffing level that allows us to do our job to the best of our ability. Sacrificing staffing for company closings is robbing Peter to pay Paul. That might keep response times a little lower, but it will ultimately limit the speed and extent of our operations on the fire ground.

No, they have not and this would be an issue of far greater concern to us as firemen. No, that was not an O/T spot, it was a regular spot in 60 engines. However that was 60 more bodies the city needed each tour.

Well, luckily no one is going to lose there job, as we are under head-count at this time. However, it would represent a tremendous blow to our ability to continue to provide service at the level it's being provided now. Response times would go up as unit availability drops. Some units slated for closure respond to over 4,000 runs a year. Those will all need to be picked up by surrounding units who are already doing 3 and 4 thousand runs themselves. In other cases, such as Ladder 53, they do not have a lot of responses, but the next closest truck is almost 10 minutes away. That next unit could easily be on another run which would result in a response time of 15+ minutes to City Island. This is a battle that the NYC residents should take up and fight for dearly as it will impact the service they pay for in a dramatic way.

It was a good show over there at GCT. Well done by Amtrak and MNRR. I hope this is repeated next year.

At this point, we dont know if any companies will be closed. We're working with the city council to make sure that they budget the money for those companies for a 4th straight year. There is a list of proposed companies, it is the same as last year. 16 engines and 4 ladders. If this miserable scenario should come to pass, the members assigned to those companies would be sent to other companies to fill holes, as you said. Right now, thanks to the selfishness of the Vulcan Society, there are many more hole than could be filled.

I'm with you.

Where does he land when he goes to Smalbany? Does he land right in Albany International?

Word is that the KME story is a rumor. Until you see a manufacturer toting the bid on their website, ect, I'd be skeptical.

I hear you loud and clear! This is the trouble that we face. While the Bush Justice Dept. initially filed this suit at the behest of the Vulcan Society, it is the Obama Justice Dept. that is pushing this agenda considerably further. You're absolutely right about republican's assaulting our rights and pensions. It's a pretty serious double edged sword. This is going to sound like a bold statement, but it might just be a reality for me. I'd rather spend time fighting to keep my benefits than watch the job I love turn to sh!t because we're bringing people through the door who don't deserve to be here because they couldn't put in a lick of effort. I'm not doing this to get rich, not to say I don't need to earn a decent living. I do this because I love it and I don't want it to turn into a place I just go to every day to work. I did that once and while it paid a lot better, I'm never going back!

The only way we know a hydrant is out of service is trying to get water out of it....very infrequent is a formal notification from the DEP. We put a white disc over the threads so that we and other companies know that one is no good in the future.

www.meritmattersusa.blogspot.com This viscious justice department is showing amazing signs of racial preference. Go ahead, vote for Obama again.... ....and this is coming from a guy who hasn't voted republican too often. Ah how things change....

For better or worse, the city will choose the least costly option, as long as it meets the spec. There is no "choosing quality". It doesn't work that way. As for who's the "best of the best", well, I really don't think the maker matters. In my house we have a Seagrave engine and a new Ferrara ladder. The build quality on the Ferrara is fantastic. Heavy welds, heave materials and the fit and finish seems to be quite good. It's laid out well and the ride is smooth like a Cadilac. Time will tell. The Seagrave is a rough riding rust bucket that has it's share of problems. Many of the recent Seagrave apparatus have spent plenty of time O.O.S. Some of the 2006-2007 tower ladders have more time in the shops that on the road, so lets take it easy on lavishing praise on Seagrave. I can say this until I'm blue in the face; the builder matters very little compared to the spec. My experiences have shown me that when building a large apparatus order to a particular city spec, the builder matters less and less.

This is the rumor floating around....do you have a source?

You could wait a long time for a response from MNRR with a tank car. I mean hours. You assume that the railroad even has a crew around to take it to you. You might have to wait for them to return from another job before being available for this type of response. The tank car is most readily available as a preplan option. If you have some event, such as a water main shutdown or something, you might request this in advance.

FD/PD/EMS Ride NYC transit for free while on duty and in uniform. PD is officially extended this courtesy while riding Metro-North under the guise that they'll provide assistance in the event of an emergency. That's it, end of discussion. Any other talk of professional courtesy is not for a public forum, it doesn't read well to the uninformed general public. I for one always carry a ticket with me on Metro-North.

In the past, Yonkers has offered a practice run-through of the physical test. GO TO THIS. You need strength, but technique is a big part and you want to be familiar with the events. As nfd stated above, don't put all of your eggs in the same basket. I took several tests and I was lucky to have a choice. Trust me, that's a good feeling. Open as many doors as you can then choose the one you want to go through. Yonkers is top shelf, but that's the very same reason that youll face stiff competition. Be prepared, leave yourself many options and work hard to get what you want.

This isn't news to anyone who works in one of the three (FD, PD, EMS) response agencies in NYC. Ever since the UCT program began, the quality of the information we receive has declined. This coupled with the Bloomberg administration's push to lower response times has negatively impacted our operations. Companies are turned out with little more than an address and then we are, hopefully, given additional information over the air while responding. The idea here is, get them on the road, then fill in the missing info. Stupid...we need all the time we can to get ready, begin size-up and prepare for what might greet us at the box location. Initially, the UCT program really cut the legs off of the dispatchers. That has since improved with the program of the UCT call taker conferencing in a FD dispatcher, but it's not as good as it used to be. We have some really good dispatchers on this job, real old school guys who know the job and the boro they work in. To hear a guy give turn by turn (Beef of Redlight and others, some of you'll know who they are) directions into a box for a re-locator from out of boro is pretty impressive. Some people in the Bronx CO know the boro like the back of their hand without a map insight. I'm sure this is true for the other boro's as well. For the Mayor and his cronies, this is all a numbers game with the hopes of reducing companies or staff or ambulance tours. They've done nothing to improve operations. All they've accomplished is hollow, meaningless numbers that don't tell the real story.

I have to agree, I liked the rep point system. It's still in your profile though.

The new site doesn't seem to work well with Google Chrome. The drop down menu's in the upper right corner don't work. I'm not sure I care as much for the appearance vs. the former.

Spartan, a period or a comma won't kill ya Listen, traditions and the past are not lost. You're too young to be so jaded. Look up, the future's brighter than you think. You know what else they told me when I got on the job? "This is a great job, but it ain't what it used to be". Well, they told my grandfather the same thing in 1951. That's a silly line of crap that doesn't need to be true. This job is great and can continue to be great if we want it to be. We can all make little adjustments without ruining the purity of our jobs and the relationships we have there.

Depends, how thin is that person's skin... Nothing is sacred at the kitchen table. All kidding aside, you can't put your finger on one topic or another as being over the line. Somehow, it's all in how it's delivered. Some are just nice guys, good buddies and TERRIFIC ball busters. No matter what the topic, you don't mind being in their barrel. Other guys might just rub someone the wrong way. When you work in a firehouse with a lot of different personalities, there are bound to be some you don't like. If I have a touchy relationship with a guy, I'm not going to break his balls. He's not going to take it and odds are, I don't care enough to want to engage him. Someone you have a great re pore with, that's another story. The best guys to see "go at it", breaking chops and such, are the two who are terrific friends. There's a lot of truth to what they tell probies as they come through the door, "if they're breaking your balls kid, it's cause they like ya".

Thanks for clarifying "fair". I must say that's disappointing. Lets set the record straight on one topic....you DO NOT get extra points for being a minority. Disparate impact, the thing anyone who doesn't try hard enough hides behind, needs to go away, but we need to fight it with fact.