abaduck

I'm not trying to be funny, but I really didn't understand that at all - what do you mean by 'no-fault state' and 'insurance tagged'? (I'm an immigrant and still get tripped up by US language sometimes!) To me, here's how it works: 1. I park my car with lights etc. as before. 2. Some idiot drives into it. 3. Last time I checked, it was the responsibility of the driver to avoid stationary objects - trees, signs, parked cars etc. 4. If there's any justice, idiot gets a ticket (back home in UK it would be for 'careless driving' at the least). 5. I fix my car. 6. I send idiot the invoice. 7. He/she pays, or their insurance company does. 8. No pay? You'll see me in court. What have I got wrong? Mike

If I'm parked with lights on, hazard warning flashers on, and blue light flashing merrily, and some idiot STILL drives into my car, the idiot behind the wheel of that car is damn well going to 'cover it'! Yeah, but as ALS once put it very eloquently in one of his classes, paraphrased slightly: 'you drive like an idiot and people will say "there goes another idiot driver" and forget about it. You drive like an idiot with a blue light, people say "there goes another idiot firefighter, I'm gonna complain to the FD"...' Personally, I'm MORE concious that my driving may be held up to inspection when I'm using a blue light, and drive accordingly. Possibly... hell, enough apparatus driven by career FFs gets in wrecks anyway... as I said, it was just an idea. Mike

1. Insurance... yeah maybe, but as I said I've read about other states where POVs with lights/sirens/emergency vehicle status are allowed. They must have solved the insurance problem somehow. I guess if you have EVOC training you're considered to be properly trained, and a better driver for it anyway. Maybe even it's a law in those states - other states have laws preventing employers from discriminating against vollie FFs (because it's in the public interest to encourage people to volunteer), maybe some also have laws preventing insurers from doing the same? 2. I agree, in suburban Westchester it would be of little benefit, but don't forget the blue light law applies to all of NYS. 3. Response time to the station isn't the issue when you have combination departments where the vollies respond direct to scene. Otherwise... yes duty crews make some sense, or at least some formalised driving rota based on availability. It was just a blue-sky idea... wondering how we could improve on the current blue-light situation. I certainly agree with a lot of comments made - especially re. blue lights at traffic lights, that's just dumb. If I have my light on at all, I turn it off when it's of no help - most especially at traffic lights! And I don't have any problem with a cop who decides to ticket a vollie who's driving like an idiot while responding to a call. In fact, by the time the Chief has finished with him, the ticket will/should be the least of his worries...! Mike

Yes, that's one. They're a little more useful than that: 1. They're useful if, as occasionally happens, we end up using POVs to close a road. 2. Once parked near the scene, they increase visibility and decrease vulnerability, IMHO. 3. They do occasionally work as advertised, in terms of getting slow-moving vehicles to move over. 4. They also serve to identify bad driving by members 'I saw this a****** firefighter...'. For general responding to calls, I would agree with ALS - they're mostly as useful as an ashtray on a motorbike. I wouldn't cry a river if they were abolished. Here's an idea which... I dunno, what do people think? Some states I know give FF POVs considerably more than courtesy lights; they're given pretty much the same privileges as any other emergency vehicles when running lights & sirens. So for NY, how about doing this: abolish blue courtesy lights, but allow FFs *who have completed EVOC or similar AND are passed to drive department vehicles* to use blue/red/white lights & sirens on their POVs, with the same privileges as any other emergency vehicle. How does that sound? Gets rid of the two biggest problem with blue lights - young inexperienced guys driving like yahoos, and Joe Public not knowing or caring how to respond to blue-light vehicles - whilst still giving appropriate privileges to the more dedicated and experienced members of the FD, who can (hopefully!) be trusted to use them appropriately. Just an idea... Mike

A local private road in our area which was previously ungated has recently been gated. The gates are alleged to be siren-activated so they open automatically on approach of emergency vehicles; one option you didn't mention. Don't know how well it works in practice! Mike

All good points, don't disagree with any of them, and I'd echo Paul J. in that this has been a useful discussion - I'm learning! Clearly you need to know where to make the trench - if it is in fact an appropriate tactic and you have the manpower to carry it out - but the inspection tactics might be decided by the time of day perhaps? If daytime, it's perhaps faster (and better - gives a more complete view?) to assess conditions in the cockloft by getting in there from the ceiling of hopefully-uninvolved units? If at night and everything is locked up tighter than a... tight thing, then roof inspection holes would be faster - then once you know where you're going to make your stand, you can make the trench, and do forcible entry (cutting shutter doors or whatever) on the appropriate unit(s)? Mike

Oh I doubt it *really* is a truss either - I was thinking more of mindset, you never know what might have been done with renovations at some point, my thinking was, until someone has pulled the ceiling and actually seen the construction, you should be alert to the possibility of a concealed truss - http://tinyurl.com/3ccomm Mike

Well I was a probie until a month ago but I'll have a hack at it, make a fool of myself... 1. As others have said, I have no idea why the 2.5" was still on the hosebed at the start of the video... 2. I don't know what their ventilation strategy was, but... this is a kinda mini strip-mall place? Should some truckies have been making a defensive trench cut further down the row for if/when things go pear-shaped? The blurb says they lost virtually an entire block... 3. It's a type 3 ordinary construction, with a truss roof (*). Safetywise I'd think about... the roof construction, heavy equipment on the roof, the possibility of hidden renovations (e.g. that truss roof, steel truss concrete floors) which could completely alter the hazards, parapets coming down, the nature of the occupancy/contents, and of course the amount of space above the ceilings and how it communicates... ( (*) - "every roof is a truss until proved otherwise"? )

A similar story a few months ago, which resulted in a fatality: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/7002076.stm

I'll stick my neck out and say that quite possibly that Lt. wouldn't have any say on which dive team gets summoned, or when. Why? Well... are we dealing with a hazard to life scene, or a potential crime scene? Who makes that call? Who has authority over the scene then? If the PD decide to put divers in the water, the divers will be in the water. If there's no rescue to be made, and the career dept. have no dive rescue/recovery capability, they may as well pick up and go home.

<putting on full-blown devil's advocate mode here> Hey, I put a lot of wear and tear and gas on my own vehicle responding to calls - who picks up the tab for that? Volunteering is a great thing to do, I don't expect to get paid for it (doh!) but why should I effectively have to pay to do it? So if after many years of service I get to be a chief, why in hell shouldn't I use the dept. vehicle for a few personal trips, especially if my car is in the shop... Devil's advocate as I say, but you *can* argue this both ways!

Careful what you wish for... you may get it. The truest test of free speech is whether you support the right of someone to say things you disagree utterly with. Are you really saying the ACLU should be somehow prevented from speaking out when they see something they think is wrong... including speaking to a judge? As for the Oregon situation described... it is of course an utter clusterf**k, *if true* (and my sceptic-meter pinged when I read it). What do the military do? Do they recruit people who can't speak English? Do they require officers to speak other languages to preserve the chain of command??!!

I'm seriously unconvinced by this. The lastest research in the UK shows that using a hands-free device makes little or no difference: it's the act of having a conversation that causes operator inattention and increases accident risk, not the physical act of having a phone held to your ear. So do a risk/benefit analysis and either ban ALL phone-type devices, hands-free or not, or decide the benefits outweight the risks and don't ban anything. Texting is, or should be, a no-brainer!!! (and is probably already covered under 'operator not in full control of vehicle' offenses?)

Nope. In fact if Congress makes any law abridging freedom of speech here I'll be amongst the first to man the barricades. But it's not Congress you need to concern yourself with, it's Seth - it's HIS train set!

Real names... oh dear. Not sure about that at all. I'm not hiding - anyone who knows me in real life will work out who I am in anything from five seconds to two minutes, depending on how well they know me. But.... 1. If you're going to make people use real names, you introduce a complication: you damn well HAVE to introduce a cast-iron method of ID verification. Short of everyone walking up to Seth in person and showing their FD ID, I'm not quite sure how that would be implemented. (The reason is obvious: if it becomes accepted that everyone here is using their real names, then what's to prevent any troublemaker coming on, creating an account using the real name of someone else, and posting ten kinds of s*** in their name?) 2. I disagree with some other posters who suggest there's no need for anonymity on the net - or on this site. Firefighting is hazardous, and on occasion political - both can lead to a need to discuss safety implications and that's sometimes best done anonymously. Aviation has CHIRP (Confidential Human Factors Incident Reporting Programme - http://www.chirp.co.uk/main/Aviation.htm), boards this this are sometimes the closest thing the fire service gets to such a thing!

Scotty gets where I'm coming from. But I'm not convinced about changing the driving age; if you can drive a tank for the army you can damn well drive a car! So why not raise the age to join the army to 21? In fact, why not raise *everything* to 21? Smoke, have sex, get married, sign a legal contract - make everyone a minor until 21? No-one would stand for it, that's why. Young people do tend to be immature. They'll be immature behind the wheel even when sober, and get in wrecks - that's why car insurance is much more expensive for young people. They'll get drunk and do stupid stuff some times. The key is to keep them from combining behaviours and getting behind the wheel when drunk, which is the especially lethal behaviour. In the UK it's become really socially unacceptable to drive drunk over the last 20 years or so - if people see a drunk driver, someone leaving a bar obviously under the influence - they WILL call the cops and turn them in. And the penalties are severe too - on conviction, you lose your license for year, mandatory, minimum. If there's aggravating factors, such as a high reading, or especially a previous conviction, you can be banned from driving for longer - 2-5 years even. And you have to sit an extended driving test to get it back again. So, I'd say the way to go is change social attitudes, combined with aggressive enforcement against drunk drivers (regular random stop & breathalyse, for instance), and leave the 90% or whatever of people who drink with no problems alone. NOT to have a nanny state attitude, prohibition for everyone under 21, even at the dinner table with parents - that's the state interfering where it has absolutely no place, IMHO.

Oh it was just by way of analogy with the fact that the USA is rather 'out of line' with most of the rest of the world in having a drinking age of 21. Similarly with the age of consent - I think it's 17 in NY? It's something else that varies widely - 17 or even 18 is not uncommon, but many civilized western countries are significantly younger... a little research surprised even me: 16 in UK, 15 in Germany, 14 in Austria and Canada, 13 in Spain. It's a matter of making a crime (and a serious one in the case of underage sex), purely on grounds of age, of something in one jurisdiction that's perfectly normal elsewhere. It's no big deal - mods, if you feel it's drifted the topic in a direction that this site isn't comfortable with, please feel free to delete the line from the original post, and followups, with no hard feelings - it was more an aside than contributing to the core discussion. Others have touched on smoking and gaming, seemed logical to point out that sex could be equally illogical!

100% correct. Same with smoking. Are there 'Sea Scouts' in America? We had them back home in Scotland - kinda like a navy cadet outfit, play-at-sailors for teenagers 12-16 or so. Well-known story of the Sea Scout troop (this was back in the 1970s I think) where they had a big problem with kids smoking. They tried everything - bribery, increased punishment for getting caught, all sorts, but the kids were still having illicit smokes. So they changed the rules: not only was smoking allowed, but the Scouts were allowed to draw a weekly cigarette ration, just like 'real' navy sailors. Guess what? Within a couple of weeks, virtually none of the kids were smoking.... And don't even get me started on underage sex and the age of consent!!!

(I had asked what other things, apart from drinking alcohol, were legal at 21 but not at 18) I'm pretty sure you're wrong there, or you misunderstood the question: AFAIK you don't have to be 21 to buy lottery tickets or smoke - you can do both at 18 in NY.

So much for states' rights. Well then it becomes a matter of money - federal highway funding versus huge influx of young tourists. I don't understand how it works anyway; if a state really wanted to comply with this, but still effectively let younger people drink, then make the sanction for underage drinking trivial - like a $5 on-the-spot fine, no record, no court date. And I do wonder what the federal (or state) governments are doing interfering with the rights of adults - I wonder if it's been litigated? Absolute prohibition I could understand (although I wouldn't agree with it!), that's fair to all... but prohibition-lite, for people of 20 and under only... I'm slightly surprised that's lawful. Just for information (remember I'm a fairly recent immigrant), are there other things which are forbidden at 18 but allowed at 21? (Forbidden by law I mean; I know, for instance, it's hard to rent a car under 21 - but that's a commercial decision, not a legal one)

Well what do we trust people to do at or before 18? Smoke? Quit school? Get a job? Join the army? Get married? Have kids? Vote? Run for office? Become interior firefighters? They can be trusted to do all that, and yet we daren't let them have a drink, even under the supervision of their parents? If anyone truly believes that... well, they're beyond reasoning with, IMHO.

Having been raised in Scotland, I shake my head sadly at American attitudes to this whole subject. I mean, what are we thinking? A kid can join the army, serve a tour in Iraq, come home, get married, have a baby - and his parents could still get busted for giving him a drink to celebrate because he's STILL 'too young and immature to drink'???!!!! Let's stop kidding ourselves. In Scotland a kid over the age of five can legally be given alcohol at home. Now that's intended primarily 'for medicinal purposes' in the case of younger kids - a parent giving giving a preteen kid any quantity of drink more than very occasionally would rapidly find themselves facing the Scottish equivalent of a child endangerment charge! But for older kids... 12, 13, 14... it's very common for them to enjoy an occasional small glass of wine with a meal at home. At 15, you can go into a bar or restaurant and legally be served beer or wine (but not spirits) if you're in the company of someone over 18. At 18, you can buy and drink anything, anywhere. 21... whose brilliant idea was that, and who the hell let that become law? I'll tell you one thing, the first state to break with what appears to be the universal pattern of having 21 as the drinking age will make a *fortune* - number one party destination! As for the notion that the police can interfere in how I raise my kids, in my private home... that's repugnant. Honestly, what do you think is the best way for a young person to learn to drink? With parents and older siblings, around the Sunday dinner table, and later with them in bars and restaurants? Or in the woods, in the company of dubious peers, with whatever illicit booze they've managed to get their hands on? As for the PD and priorities... well if you get a complaint you gotta respond, I guess - but otherwise... well I think practically any other priority should be higher - such as catching drunk drivers, for starters. IMHO. Rant over.

Wow. That's... astonishing. I had no idea that was the case. So even in the most egregious case of a cop assaulting someone for no reason, in the course of a totally unwarranted arrest, they're not supposed to resist? That's a real eye-opener. You lear something every day. In the UK, if the arrest is lawful, resisting will get you charged with assault on the police. If it's unlawful, the cop will get charged with assault, and false imprisonment, and the victim won't be charged, because it's lawful to use reasonable force to resist assault. I clearly withdraw my suggestion that anyone is within their rights to resist unlawful arrest, in NYS at any rate!!

Whoa there, wait a minute. Three of the four comments you consider police-bashing were made by me. So let's deal with this. I'm NOT saying it would be the right thing to do in this situation, or any specific situation, but surely a citizen has the right to resist any unlawful arrest? I don't see what your objection to this would be; very few cops would ever make an unlawful arrest, but there's always the odd bad cop (or outright psycho - like the cop I read about elsewhere who ordered a fire truck moved *at gunpoint*) - just as there are some crazy firefighters out there. Request, sure. But authority to *require* it to be moved? I've read elsewhere that he unequivocally did NOT. If I'm misinformed about the situation in Missouri I'll happily wind my neck in WRT this particular case, but certainly in most jurisdictions I would be right. And a 'request' to move the truck backed-up by threat of arrest is not a 'request'! You must have missed the smiley on the end of that post. Seriously, it wouldn't happen in Scotland because recent legislation there makes it crystal clear that the ranking fire officer is ALWAYS in charge of the scene. If a police officer did get out of line they would be reminded of that fact, but I don't seen the actual use of hose as being necessary or appropriate! Trust me, I'm no cop-basher - if I hadn't emigrated to the USA I would in fact probably be a cop back home right now; my application had been accepted before we found out we had to move over here. So let's have some mutual respect, and not be afraid to point out when *anyone* is out of line, cop or firefighter.

True enough but... now I'm only a probie but it seems to me that the police car alone doesn't provide a great deal of protection in the rear, especially not when parked straight-on to the scene as it appears to be. Wouldn't the ideal apparatus placement be, one in the rear *behind* the police car, angled appropriately, and a *second* rig positioned as the 'offending' one was, straight-on in the lane adjacent to the operation? As for "orders", the problem would seem to be that the cop was issuing "orders" without any lawful authority, since the FD were in command of the scene. That makes it an unlawful arrest, in my book, and the FFs would have been within their rights to resist. In fact if a cop had tried that back home in Scotland, they would have wound up on the back seat of their own car, wrapped in 50' of hose!