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(the subject being volunteers picking up trash) Say again? You never get Scouts etc. and other community groups picking up trash and generally patrolling the area? Mike

A perfectly good point. So... you have a FF from another dept. show up on scene, pair them up with one of your own members and get them throwing ladders. Needs doing, often neglected, not that difficult from an SOP standpoint. There's always work to do! I think (with respect) you may be misunderstanding ISO - but correct me if I'm wrong: with a career FD, you have a guaranteed response. If you send 2 & 2 to a scene, you know exactly what manpower you'll get. The '3 to 1' thing comes in when counting company *members* IIRC; it assumes that only 1/3 of the vollie members will respond, so you need three times as many active members in a vollie FD to equal the coverage you would get with an equivalent paid FD. It doesn't say that a vollie FF *on the scene* is only 'worth' 1/3 of a paid FF on the scene. As I said, that's my understanding; if someone who knows ISO knows different please correct me. Mike

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't there a general provision that a trained FF from any FD can offer assistance at any incident scene - offer their services and place themselves under the command of the IC running the scene? I can see problems with that, I'm not sure how keen an IC would be to accept the services of a FF they know nothing about, in terms of training, performance etc. - but I'm sure I've read it's possible. Mike

I didn't see the show, but did it mention the Peshtigo fire? Often overlooked because it took place on the same day as the Chicago fire, but it was by far the deadliest fire in US history, it killed between 1,200 and 2,500 people in a firestorm that destroyed the town. Mike

Great topic... surely there's at least one 'always' - try before you pry! One general observation; I've heard from quite a few people that through-the-lock tends to be a neglected and underutilised technique. Mike

That's a good point; I've seen a great FDNY forcible entry training video dealing with angle irons, and how to work with them not against them, using conventional FE. Do you really think there's a big problem with too much reliance on the rabbit? The last FE jobs I've been involved in have been, I think, something like 50% conventional, 50% thru-the-lock; I can't even remember the last time we took the rabbit off the truck. (that's not a point of principle BTW, of course there are places where the rabbit would be the first choice, I just haven't come up against one recently!) Mike

I'm not quite clear what authority they think they have to do this; who are they to determine ahead of time whether or not I should leave my car idling? And most idle running will be on private property anyway, warming up on cold winter mornings, rather than the highway, so I don't quite see what this is supposed to achieve...

The super, I'd say. You make the point that it's a senior residence. It's supposed to be geared to the needs of seniors. It's reasonably foreseeable that seniors will have falls and medical crises with some degree of frequency. If the building management don't make arrangements to have a key available, it's their problem if we have to force the door. At least that's my take on it. IANAL. Mike

I'm not far out of probation, so not long on experience, but.. how did we know it was a 'person down' situation? How did the call come in? AFAIK the PD would be dispatched to such a scene anyway, ahead of us, and the request for forcible entry would almost certainly come from the PD in the first place...??? Mike

Phone records only go so far; yes it proves a call was made, and when. It doesn't prove that the call wasn't made with hands-free or speakerphone, and it certainly doesn't prove who made the call, if there were other occupants in the vehicle. Unless you have just the driver on board, with a phone that doesn't have hands-free or speakerphone functionality, OR you have witnesses who can testify the phone was in use handheld, you're not going to have a case. Mike

Now I'm a relative newcomer to these shores. And I'm certainly not steeped in the great traditions of the American fire service the way many of you guys are. So can someone help me understand what the heck is going on in Mount Vernon? Either he was open about his criminal record before being hired, in which case those doing the hiring need their heads examined (IMHO), or he lied about his record and was only found out when the background checks came back, in which case he should *obviously* be terminated instantly, and be going to jail for the lies. At least that's how it would be handled in the UK - 'obtaining a pecuniary advantage by deception' would be the charge; lying on your application is fraud. The fact that the commish made a point of saying the background checks were not received until after he was hired suggests to me that this was the first they heard about the convictions. So what's this? Some kind of 'don't ask, don't tell' policy?

This brings to mind one of my favourite sayings, an old Scottish farming saying: 'Good judgment is the result of experience. 'Experience' is the result of bad judgment!' Survival and Hazmat Ops. absolutely... but... FAST? When discussing what course I might take next after FF1, with my FF1 instructor, I recall him saying that I should get a couple of years experience before coming back for FAST, I would benefit more from it then. Certainly in our department you need five years in to actually get on the FAST. I see your point, from what I've heard there's some good stuff in FAST which all interior FFs could benefit from - if the sh!t hits the fan and you're the one on the scene at the time it's a good to have a clue - but not sure about making it a requirement. Do any departments actually do that? Mike

The definitive comment: Onion Mike

Time to get into the stock market... I'm going to find out who makes vaseline, and buy it... Mike

I can't find you a link right now, but you might find it interesting to look at some of the latest European research. To sum up, what they've found is that hand-held or hands-free makes no difference. It's being engaged in a telephone conversation that causes attention to wander and that's when people get in wrecks. The law banning hand-held cellphones is bad and wrong and I think most people know this in their guts, and that's why it's so widely disrespected. I've said it before, the only logical ways to go, based on hard science, are to ban ALL cellphone use, hand-held or hands-free, or accept the 'hit' and allow ALL cellphone use. It's for society to make that call, and politicians to act on it. The present nonsense half-way house of banning only handhelds is pretty universally ignored, widely ridiculed, and almost never enforced, and that's never a good combination for breeding respect for the law. Mike

1. It's very obviously a dumb idea (texting while driving I mean) 2. Does it even *need* to be specifically outlawed? Couldn't it be charged under existing laws, on a generic 'careless driving' or 'failing to maintain proper control of the vehicle' law? (I don't know what the exact law would be from state to state of course but I presume every state has some such generic 'bad driving' law?). Mike

They also pull over because - I have to say it - by and large, Europeans, in particular Northern Europeans, simply are better, and better educated, drivers than we are. I learned to drive in the UK; when driving in NY I use the 'seven minute rule'; I bear in mind at all times that all those other drivers on the road around me got their license after taking a driving test that lasts around seven minutes and has a... what? 99% pass rate? (In the UK, the driving test lasts around 45 minutes and less than 50% pass the test first time) And I can't swear to Germany, but in the UK we have a lot of automatic speed cameras, fixed and mobile, and if a car is caught by one of these, the registered owner gets a *demand to name the driver*, not a bill or points or anything. I can't imagine Germany being much different. The points and fine go to the driver identified by the owner, not the owner themselves. Mike

I'll take two - one for the fire truck, one for the dive boat

This promises to be an interesting topic. I'm not going to touch on your actual question too directly, but there is some information I would like to have. As we probably all know, deaths due to cardiac issues feature most prominently in the LODD statistics. Now interior firefighting is bloody hard work, possibly (but not, I would suggest, probably) uniquely hard work, in terms of being physically demanding. I would like to see how many of these cardiac deaths are down to active interior firefighters, who succumb on the fireground or shortly after leaving the fireground, and how those figures relate to cardiac deaths in other physically-demanding occupations - construction, garbage collectors, etc. etc. I suspect the results would be interesting; I'd like to see just how deadly the fireground really is from a cardiac point of view, as compared to other workplaces. Mike

Disclaimer: I'm less than two years on the department and I don't know exactly what our SOPs are for this, if we have any. So this is straight analysis based on basic training. You don't state the time of day, if there is a car in the garage, or how the front door came to be open. 'Attached' garage could be anything from a structurally-separate lean-to, to a built-under-bedroom garage in a ranch-type house. So there may be some variability depending on these factors, and a bunch of other sizeup issues. Unless there's a family standing at the end of the driveway saying 'everyone is out' you're going to have to do a primary search, and the first line is going to protect the stairs, as usual, I would assume. As for the attack on the fire itself... well if there's moderate smoke from the front door the the fire may be about to, or already is, extending to the house - the first line may be able to make an attack on that. For garage fires, presumably the last thing you want to do is push the fire into the house, so the initial attack should be through the interior door to the garage if possible, right? Concerns... garages frequently have utilities, and I'd be thinking Hazmat... propane tanks maybe... that kind of thing. Is that a reasonable start? Now wiser heads can chime in and tell me where I'm talking nonsense Mike

Follow your dept. policy yes, but what's wrong with seeking additional information and asking whether people feel it's a good policy? As they said: "It seems excessive to take a 20 year member with 1800 calls off active status for almost a year for missing the date for a physical." Unless there's more - a lot more - that we don't know, that would indeed seem excessive to me. He's 16 days late, with something that sounds like a reasonable excuse: fair enough, place him on inactive or exterior-only status the day the medical runs out, until such time as the medical is passed - is that reasonable? Making a 20-year guy a *probie* again until he passes *next* years physical... what's that supposed to achieve? If there's a question mark over his fitness he should surely be inactive status, or suspended, not a probie - I presume qualified probies go interior and do everything else on the fireground a full member does? Mike

Looking at the rest of the charges he's facing, I think DWI is the least of his worries, felony or not! Mike

Maybe you need a better photo. Take a look at: LoHud photo That's taken a pretty serious hit. And the driver was 90 years old remember... JFLYNN nailed it in his earlier post. Mike

Slight topic-drift, but a related heads-up... anyone come across SIP at a job? Structural Insulated Panels. OSB sandwiched with foam. This stuff: http://www.prowall.com/structural_insulated_panels.htm This is what you can do with them: http://www.countryplans.com/raby.html Note the cathedral ceiling; there isn't even a truss there, let alone dimensional lumber joists or rafters; the whole thing relies on the rigidity of the glued-together SIP to stay up. Mike

For serious shooting I use a Nikon D3. Expensive but worth it; I have never ever regretted spending money on good cameras, and often regretted not having spent more. Don't hold back on the lenses either; good glass is even more important. For general use I always have an Olympus Stylus 1030SW in my pocket. Solid metal. Shockproof (dropped it 3ft onto concrete more than once with no problem) and waterproof to 60ft. Ideal for use on scene. I've even had it in the class A burn room at Valhalla! Cheap enough, and most important it's compact, pocketable; to take photos you must first have the camera with you! Very highly recommended - I have one, my wife has one, my son has one, my au pair has one! Mike