cbfire25

Time exposure photo taken by New City Fire Chief Ken Flynn of the fire as viewed from Iona Island.

This is the NYCT Hazmat Rig...

Photo Courtesy of MTA.info
Full MTA.info Article
NY Times Article about this truck

Hey All-
Yesterday we had an incident involving Metro North rail lines, and as part of the MTA response this 'MTA Police ESU' vehicle responded. The incident turned out to be minor in nature, but I was wondering what this unit is for and what its capabilities are? Is it designed to be similar to NYPD ESU units? Does it have an rescue capabilities? Where is it coming from? My company covers a stretch of rail and we seem to get incidents involving the rails or trains on a yearly basis, so it would be beneficial to know what resources are available and their capabilities for response planning. Thanks in advance!

Hey All-
Yesterday we had an incident involving Metro North rail lines, and as part of the MTA response this 'MTA Police ESU' vehicle responded. The incident turned out to be minor in nature, but I was wondering what this unit is for and what its capabilities are? Is it designed to be similar to NYPD ESU units? Does it have an rescue capabilities? Where is it coming from? My company covers a stretch of rail and we seem to get incidents involving the rails or trains on a yearly basis, so it would be beneficial to know what resources are available and their capabilities for response planning. Thanks in advance!

Ahh, another young inexperienced guy who only thinks inside Westchester County, as if thats the only county there is...Think outside the box before you make blanket statements like that.
I have been involved in pre-plans in every volunteer department I belonged to, even my current one who only has residential and rural areas, we pre-planned our only two sites in our area including a repair garage and an under ground natural gas pipeline pumping facility. As a Captain, I take our crews out on drill nights in the rescue and we drive to a house, and I have them tell me everything about it including construction type, exposure issues, water supplies in the area and other details. This is always a big hit on drill nights and it works.
Not every department is the same, each one is different and has their own strengths and weaknesses.

I am going to have to agree with firedude... This is an "awesome" video, but perhaps not for the reasons stated.
Lets face it, runs are up for all of us but fires are down. The vast majority of us will only see a fire or two a year, depending if we happen to be working a particular shift or happen to be able to respond to the firehouse that day. Most firefighters, especially the younger members in our ranks, simply do not and can not have the necessary fire experience to be effective, intellegent firefighters on the fireground today. I see a disturbing trend, especially among the volunteer fire service, of increasingly young junior and chief officers that do not have the benefit of heavy fire experience. Whenever we do have a fire, we need to allow the majority of our fellow firefighters from our own department to gain some of the benefit of the experience that the members on scene had. The helmet cam is a very powerful tool that we have at our disposal for training. Hear me out for a minute.
I lived at a firehouse while I was at college, and last year was a lieutenant for my last year of service. One of my fellow live-ins aquired a helmet cam and we made a pact among ourselves that we would use the footage for training and that none of it would find its way to the internet. We were trying to get as much experience out of each fire to benefit ourselves and to improve our quality of service to the community. We did, after all, join to provide professional, quality fire protection to the community. All firefighters share that common goal, and it is our duty to constantly improve ourselves throughout our careers. We managed to get several fires on video from the perspective of the backup man on the first due engine where I was the officer. This was a very important tool for my self evaluation to observe my actions from someone elses point of view so that I could improve my own effectiveness at crew managment and fire tactics. For the guys who missed the fire, these videos became a great tool for 'coffee break' training any time around the fire department, as they could see the conditions presented to the first arriving units and understand what they should be looking for, the decisions that were made, what worked, and what didn't work.
Before I go on, I will openly admit that the helmet cams do have some downfalls, especially when interior on a job. Helmet cams can't give you the experience of high heat, how to feel your way through a smokey job, or the pucker factor of having a floor sag on you. That is what good, quality hands on training and real fire experience give you. However, there are many little things that you can take from these videos.
Tactics aside, lets take a look at this video. It is from the perspective from the first arriving special service officer, who takes initial command. Now, hopefully, when the boys went home after this one, they weren't still patting themselves on the back. I think we all agree that this video was a cluster. Thats not my point though. Lets take the officer's control of his men under inspection. I am in no way a Monday morning quarterback, rather this is the way that I would evaulate myself if I was the officer in this video. Lets take for example his giving orders around 2:50. He gives the order to 'Go VES upstairs'. This order lacks specifity, we can all agree that is not an effectively communicated order. VES is a directed manuever, you are supposed to narrow your search down. Blindly VESing may or may not get the desired result of finding a victim. So this officer takes away from this video that he needs to more effectively communicate with his crew. They can sit down afterwards and go over what they need to improve on so that next time their customer service will be better. These are the sort of things that should be taken away from these videos.
The most effective members to have helmet cams are company officers and the IC. Heres an example of quick training that an instructor can make from helmet cam footage to help instruct future IC's on what to look for at a fire to help them develop their own strategy. Again, we have to face the fact that most of our officers, unless you run in a major city department, dont have a great deal of experience learning first hand how to be an effective IC

This sort of training can be run through quickly between runs, and can be very effective.
I will say, however, for all the firefighters who post these videos up so that they can feel like bada$e$, they are clearly missing the point. We are in this line of business for the good and protection of the general public, no matter what department we are employed by or volunteer at. Posting these videos on youtube is just asking for a kick in the rear, the rest of the world doesn't care how great of a firefighter you are or the things that you've done. We have all been there, keep it to yourself and learn from the footage. Help yourself and your brothers become better at what we do, don't post these for personal gain. And for all the internet firefighters who take their time to pick apart these videos for PPE violations, etc, please, the rest of us are not stupid, we see all see the same things. I feel that this is where helmet cams get a bad rap in the first place.
Thats just my 0.02. I'm young, and clearly invincible, so I would welcome if someone could knock me down to size on this issue. Am I missing something, or is this not a great tool to improve our customer service?

and for the light hearted...

Engine 113 was the source pumper at the dry hydrant on Oscaleta road. E113 fed E112 and E140 that were the relay pumpers in line up to the fire scene. During the operation of the Tower Ladder 57, Tanker 2 was used to supply the master stream. I hope this clears everything thing up for the brothers that were not on the scene and are monday morning quaterbacking rural water operations...... Us up here in the North county do not always have the luxury of having those red things every 500 feet. Sometimes we need to get down and dirty and actually lay out an entire bed of hose.

Do any departments around the area run duty chiefs? This usually clears up the issue of who is command at minor incidents and usually clears the radio of all unnecessary chatter... Chiefs x, y, and z don't all sign on the air for wires down. It also clears up who goes to the scene and who doesn't; if chief x has the duty than everyone else goes to the station to staff the apparatus, so there aren't 5 fire SUVs and no fire engines on scene..
This also allows some of the prospective chiefs and senior officers to get command experience. If you give the duty shift to a captain or lieutenant, a chief can keep an ear open for calls that may need a more senior officer in charge but allow a captain or lieutenant to run most of the minor incidents. This way you breed more independent line officers who can gain some confidence in themselves so one day they don't get caught up in the fact that they are in charge of 'the big one' and forget that they need to focus on decision making. A lieutenant or captain should, by nature, be able to handle most minor incidents and common emergencies without a chief's supervision, else they should never have attained that position. Of course, we all know that the popularity contests don't always lead to that, but I digress...

Do any departments around the area run duty chiefs? This usually clears up the issue of who is command at minor incidents and usually clears the radio of all unnecessary chatter... Chiefs x, y, and z don't all sign on the air for wires down. It also clears up who goes to the scene and who doesn't; if chief x has the duty than everyone else goes to the station to staff the apparatus, so there aren't 5 fire SUVs and no fire engines on scene..
This also allows some of the prospective chiefs and senior officers to get command experience. If you give the duty shift to a captain or lieutenant, a chief can keep an ear open for calls that may need a more senior officer in charge but allow a captain or lieutenant to run most of the minor incidents. This way you breed more independent line officers who can gain some confidence in themselves so one day they don't get caught up in the fact that they are in charge of 'the big one' and forget that they need to focus on decision making. A lieutenant or captain should, by nature, be able to handle most minor incidents and common emergencies without a chief's supervision, else they should never have attained that position. Of course, we all know that the popularity contests don't always lead to that, but I digress...

Do any departments around the area run duty chiefs? This usually clears up the issue of who is command at minor incidents and usually clears the radio of all unnecessary chatter... Chiefs x, y, and z don't all sign on the air for wires down. It also clears up who goes to the scene and who doesn't; if chief x has the duty than everyone else goes to the station to staff the apparatus, so there aren't 5 fire SUVs and no fire engines on scene..
This also allows some of the prospective chiefs and senior officers to get command experience. If you give the duty shift to a captain or lieutenant, a chief can keep an ear open for calls that may need a more senior officer in charge but allow a captain or lieutenant to run most of the minor incidents. This way you breed more independent line officers who can gain some confidence in themselves so one day they don't get caught up in the fact that they are in charge of 'the big one' and forget that they need to focus on decision making. A lieutenant or captain should, by nature, be able to handle most minor incidents and common emergencies without a chief's supervision, else they should never have attained that position. Of course, we all know that the popularity contests don't always lead to that, but I digress...

I just recently responded to a basement fire in a one story residential at a pack rat house, hopefully I can learn from this thread as much as I did from the fire.
We were fortunate to have been met by the homeowner and knew where the access to the basement (it was a blind basement with the only access being interior) was so the strech was much easier than it could have been. However, the line was covered/kinked several times due to the junk and made the push into the basement a little dicey. In order to monitor the floor conditions I tried to use both a TIC and sounding with a bar, but the junk on the floor made sounding difficult. It was also difficult to maintain orientation due to the fact that the walls were unreachable and with the piles of junk falling any landmark that you might have had to begin with was sure not to last. However, we knew this was a packrat house before we entered so I strictly kept everyone on the line (we were very fortunate that everyone was confirmed out) which helped. It was very hard to judge what the extra loading on the floor may have been doing to the integrity floor joyce which were involved with fire in the basement, so I kept my engine crew in the bottom stairwell and hit it from there (not ideal for a basement fire, I know, but this was as much a place of refuge as I could find). And of course, the normal basement fire concerns came into play. Has anyone had a similar experience? How should I have dealt with not being able to get a good sound on the floor?

I just recently responded to a basement fire in a one story residential at a pack rat house, hopefully I can learn from this thread as much as I did from the fire.
We were fortunate to have been met by the homeowner and knew where the access to the basement (it was a blind basement with the only access being interior) was so the strech was much easier than it could have been. However, the line was covered/kinked several times due to the junk and made the push into the basement a little dicey. In order to monitor the floor conditions I tried to use both a TIC and sounding with a bar, but the junk on the floor made sounding difficult. It was also difficult to maintain orientation due to the fact that the walls were unreachable and with the piles of junk falling any landmark that you might have had to begin with was sure not to last. However, we knew this was a packrat house before we entered so I strictly kept everyone on the line (we were very fortunate that everyone was confirmed out) which helped. It was very hard to judge what the extra loading on the floor may have been doing to the integrity floor joyce which were involved with fire in the basement, so I kept my engine crew in the bottom stairwell and hit it from there (not ideal for a basement fire, I know, but this was as much a place of refuge as I could find). And of course, the normal basement fire concerns came into play. Has anyone had a similar experience? How should I have dealt with not being able to get a good sound on the floor?

I just recently responded to a basement fire in a one story residential at a pack rat house, hopefully I can learn from this thread as much as I did from the fire.
We were fortunate to have been met by the homeowner and knew where the access to the basement (it was a blind basement with the only access being interior) was so the strech was much easier than it could have been. However, the line was covered/kinked several times due to the junk and made the push into the basement a little dicey. In order to monitor the floor conditions I tried to use both a TIC and sounding with a bar, but the junk on the floor made sounding difficult. It was also difficult to maintain orientation due to the fact that the walls were unreachable and with the piles of junk falling any landmark that you might have had to begin with was sure not to last. However, we knew this was a packrat house before we entered so I strictly kept everyone on the line (we were very fortunate that everyone was confirmed out) which helped. It was very hard to judge what the extra loading on the floor may have been doing to the integrity floor joyce which were involved with fire in the basement, so I kept my engine crew in the bottom stairwell and hit it from there (not ideal for a basement fire, I know, but this was as much a place of refuge as I could find). And of course, the normal basement fire concerns came into play. Has anyone had a similar experience? How should I have dealt with not being able to get a good sound on the floor?

No more then fire labor unions catering to politicians to pass legislation favoring their causes. Sauce for the Goose.