x242Steve

Whoa, and it wasn't DMX this time!

Fun with definitions!! (From dictionary.com) hobby 1. an activity or interest pursued for pleasure or relaxation and not as a main occupation... * * If anyone finds that their position as a FF, EMT, PO, etc. is generally "relaxing" or is "pleasurable" beyond an adrenaline rush or the satisfaction of helping people and getting a job done, please let us all know where you work and when they are hiring. volunteer 1. a person who voluntarily offers himself or herself for a service or undertaking. service 1. an act of helpful activity; help; aid 9. the duty or work of public servants duty 1. something that one is expected or required to do by moral or legal obligation. obligation 1. something by which a person is bound or obliged to do certain things, and which arises out of a sense of duty or results from custom, law, etc. bashing 3-b. verbal abuse, as of a group... (Usually by an ignorant individual or group thereof.)

Is that a custom made 2" trailer-hitch mount for the manifold? Never seen that in any catalog... pretty clever.

Around the second week of April I will be moving into a new apartment, and seeing as how I am currently 4 levels up from the street with no elevator, and most of my furniture was assembled here (a.k.a. it is heavier now that it is not split into two dozen boxes, thank you IKEA), I am strongly considering hiring a moving company (My ridiculously heavy TV and the thought of it tumbling down the stairs also factors into this) Anyone have any recommendations for a reliable, insured, reasonably priced moving company that covers Westchester? I would need about 7 large furniture items and the TV moved, no appliances or boxes. Also, having never hired such a service before, I have no idea about what pricing should be like... I see ads online for between $75-125/hour for a 3-4 person crew, which sounds pretty reasonable... Any help would be greatly appreciated! PMs are welcome.

...as well as the recent all-nighter Clairol chemical incident.

I don't really see how this will be any more or less helpful to Emergency responders than the current OnStar system, which already detects rollovers and airbag deployments. I cannot see a day when a little computer in a vehicle is going to determine what type of care facility a patient is sent to. I would hope that will remain to be determined by the Medics on scene based on mechanism, patient condition and nearby facilities/resources. OnStar related question: Do you send Fire/EMS on an OnStar airbag/rollover notification without phone-call backup? Or do you send PD first to investigate? Would it depend on the place and time? In other words, if its noon on a Wednesday and you get an OnStar airbag/rollover notification that shows coordinates in the middle of your business district, wouldn't you expect the phones to start lighting up? On the other hand, at 3am in the middle of the woods, would you start out Fire/EMS? For dispatchers: Does your CAD or GeoMapping system have the ability to plug in Latitude/Longitude coordinates that you receive from OnStar so you can confirm the approximate street location that they give you? And do you make sure to get the vehicle information (Year/Make/Model/Color and VIN) from the OnStar operator? Two OnStar stories... 1) I have taken a few phone calls from OnStar for activations from the area of a Stamford car wash, which were apparently caused by the guys detailing the interior pressing the emergency button. 2) Supposedly, one department received a rollover activation that turned into a Stolen Vehicle... Apparently the car thieves knew of the OnStar system's tracking ability, and therefore ripped out the OnStar box and threw it out of the car (causing the box to rollover, activating the rollover switch... I suppose the OnStar box has built-in battery backup) I was told that officers sent to the area found broken glass and the OnStar box sitting in the road. (This could certainly be an EmergServ Urban Legend)

What parts, specifically?

"Wack-Pack", eh? I'm not so sure I want Beetlejuice and Daniel Carver strapped to my helmet... (Couldn't resist that one... But the Fire-related "Wack-Pack" looks like a good deal...)

I think Cablevision is already feeling the heat from FIOS... My one-year "Triple-Play" deal is coming due and the mere mention of FIOS to a Cablevision Customer Service Rep. was enough for them to extend the first-year pricing for another go around...

A brief search of Internet forums yielded only speculation about these two topics... However, you should definitely check out the recent issue of Motor Trend where they did a comparison of the Crown Vic, Impala and Charger police packages... very interesting! Some of the same info available at http://www.motortrend.com/photo_gallery/11...parison_gallery No mention of a possible Caprice in the article, however it wouldn't be a stretch for them to throw it on the same base as the '09 Pontiac G8... On a personal note, I learned to drive in a '96 Caprice Classic, which was an awesome car... The only downside was that with my dad being a volunteer FF and having a blue light (Whelen Cadet) on the dash, people ahead of me in traffic tended to slow down to slightly under the speed limit. My mom had made a little black fabric cover for the Cadet for out-of-state driving, so that helped alleviate the problem (This was before the days of clear LED's that magically turn blue) (Edited to fix hyperlink)

This goes hand-in-hand with what I was talking about this morning... By DAVID B. CARUSO, Associated Press Writer Fri Mar 16, 6:30 AM ET Fire fatalities have steadily declined in the U.S. since the late 1970s, thanks partly to improved building codes requiring safety measures such as sprinkler systems, multiple fire exits and fire-resistant construction materials. But a deadly blaze in the Bronx served as a ghastly reminder that many of the country's big cities are packed with homes that have none of these safety features. The March 7 inferno claimed 10 lives when flames ignited by a space heater ripped through a century-old town house inhabited by two immigrant families from West Africa. Investigators sifting through the ashes found a bunch of things they wish had been different about the building. The three-story house lacked a fire escape and had only one stairwell, giving residents no way out once those steps were blocked by flames. There were no sprinklers. The house had only two smoke detectors, neither of which had working batteries or was hard-wired to the electrical system. The modest home also was crowded with 22 residents, most of them children. And yet, none of those deficiencies appeared to violate the city's building code. As is the case in most cities, one- and two-family homes in New York are more lightly regulated than larger dwellings. At the doomed Bronx house, neither a sprinkler system nor a fire escape was required, city officials said. There are thousands of homes just like it throughout the city, building experts said Wednesday. "In most cities, there will be a stock of buildings that don't meet the current standards, and they are accidents waiting to happen," said Richard Custer, a fire safety expert at Arup, a global design firm. "The problem is, a lot of owners don't want to spend the money to bring these things up to speed." That wasn't the case in the Bronx. Homeowner Moussa Magassa had recently filed an application with the city to divide his house into three apartments and install sprinklers and a metal fire stairwell. The project had yet to be approved at the time of the fire. Architect John Ellis, who drew the plans for the work, said Magassa was intent on improving the building — something many owners of the crowded dwellings that house immigrant families never bother to do. An unknown number of one- and two-family homes have been illegally chopped up into a warren of one-room apartments and rented to poor families struggling to deal with New York's astronomical housing costs. "You go into these homes, you see the attic occupied. You see the basement occupied," Ellis said. "People are packed into these homes, the place is classified as a one-family." City building inspectors served 4,256 violation orders for such illegal apartment conversions in 2006, up from 3,142 three years earlier, according to the Department of Buildings. Glenn P. Corbett, an associate professor of fire science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said similar violations occur in the suburbs surrounding the city. "There's this much larger group out there that is not following the law," he said. "Believe me, there is no incentive for a building owner to say, 'Yes, Mr. Building Inspector, come in and enforce the code and make me install these stairwells and sprinklers.'" Corbett called the illegal use of single-family homes as apartment houses a "gigantic problem" for fire safety, and he cited recent fatal blazes elsewhere, including one that killed two people last summer in Englewood, N.J. The National Fire Protection Association, a public safety advocate, said 2,570 of the 3,675 civilian deaths in fires in 2005 occurred in one- or two-family homes. Those deaths are down considerably from 1978, when 7,710 civilians died in fires, including 4,945 in one- and two-family homes.

With today's fatal/close-call fire on St. Mary's St and the recent double-fatal fire on Aberdeen St, when is the City of Boston finally going to crack down on the slum lords that rent shoddy old buildings to (mainly) college students? As a former card-holding member of the teeming party community in the Allston section of town, I have seen first hand the incredibly dangerous conditions that exist when 9 to 12 (sometimes more) students/young adults occupy a 3-story wood-frame. The standard set up is 3 floors, 3 apartments, main common stairwell running up the front from the porch, smaller common rear stairway running from the basement to the 3rd floor, and usually wooden decks built off any number of floors in the front and/or back. Fire escapes required? No. Colleges reminding students about smoke/CO detectors? No. Land-lords making speedy repairs to dangerous situations? Unusual. How about fire marshals patrolling certain areas on Thursday/Friday/Saturday nights? Unseen by me from 9/99-5/03 I guarantee you if you check 4 houses on Wadsworth Street this weekend, you will find at least 2 basements filled with dozens of kids dispensing a green beverage for $5 a cup... and the only way in is the same way out: A narrow wooden staircase. I used to frequent one house where they had lined the ceiling of the basement with aluminum foil to enhance the disco-type lighting that was set up. I dunno about you, but when I clean a gas grill, I throw aluminum foil over the grates to intensify and seal in the heat so the grease cooks off. I personally have attended house parties where the "standard" bldg that I mentioned was literally overflowing with people... Floor loads, anyone? I went to school in Boston when the Seton Hall fire occurred... as I recall, the university sent out a mass e-mail with a few fire safety reminders. I don't want to be a kill-joy about the house parties, although its amazing that there hasn't been a Coconut Grove-style incident at a Boston house party. My point was originally about the absentee landlords and the fact that leases turn over every September and no one is checking the integrity of these abused buildings. Anyhow, that's what I have to say about that, for now. I realize problems like this exist everywhere, and that "college students" could easily be replaced with "immigrant families". Just using personal experiences to try and get a nice snow day discussion going.

Ah, my bad 414... (original post, in which I stated that K78 WAS a former oil truck, has been deleted to avoid confusion)

Reminds me of a great game I had for Windows 3.1 called "The Incredible Machine"... ...which I just found for free download at http://www.dosgamesonline.com/index/game/T...%20Machine/381/

JBE- How do those bay doors work at Ft. Lauderdale Station 2? It looks like they accordion... or are they just well-painted overhead doors?

Don't these specs qualify it as a Mini-Attack?

http://s161.photobucket.com/albums/t202/Fi...Greenwich%20Av/ From psd8109, who is the SFRD Photographer, and has also been a Fire/911 dispatcher with the City of Stamford since the mid 1980's... Some great pictures of how the siding on one or two of the involved houses had been re-done over the years by just layering new lathe and siding over the old/original stuff... Also some great shots of flame movement (yes, they are stills, but you certainly get the idea)... Over 280 shots in all. Nice work, Frank!

From nyjournalnews.com New Rochelle, North Castle get firefighting grants (Original publication: March 7, 2007) The New Rochelle and North Castle Fire Departments have each been awarded federal grants for equipment and other operations and safety improvements, Congresswoman Nita Lowey, D-Harrison, announced today. New Rochelle will receive $112,000, and North Castle will receive $63,441 under the federal Fire Operations and Firefighter Safety Program. The funds will be used for equipment and other essential firehouse operations and safety improvements. "These fire departments have sought to provide their firefighters with the best training and gear possible under a very tight budget. This grant will help bridge the homeland security funding gap and ensure that our communities have the best protection possible," Lowey said in a statement.

4 Guys, it is... http://www.4guysfire.com/longridgearchive.asp

If you look further down the page, they used the exact same pictures for the Torrington, CT rig...

Greenwich Ave pics are up. ...many more added since last night.

Matt, you make a good point. Anyone not familiar with the Springdale/SFRD arrangement would read this article and assume that the Springdale district relies solely on volunteers. In reality, when there are structural-related calls in that district, two SFRD engines are often assigned to the box (E7 and E6). This is basically done so as not to have a situation where you pull up to a fire with only 1 officer, 1 MPO and 2 firefighters, all from E7... Bring it up a notch to a working fire and you will have another SFRD engine responding as the RIT. You now have a scenario where 2 of the "downtown" engines are committed in Springdale, along with E7. That leave Engines 2,3,4 and 5. Now lets say that while the fire is burning up north, there is an MVA w/ injuries in the downtown area. E5 goes and will be assisting R1 with extrication, and you now can have a situation where Engines 2, 3 and 4 are all that is left. This brings us to the magic minimum number of 3 engines... I say magic minimum number because once we are down to only 2 SFRD engines left available, the Fire Communications Supervisor and the Fire Dispatcher now have to consider re-locating an Engine from Glenbrook to Fire Headquarters. At that point, Glenbrook's "paid engine" (E32) is brought into the SFRD mix, and we tone out Glenbrook volunteers to stand by in their station with E34... Whether or not they show up in a relatively quick manner and inform dispatch that they have a crew for E34 is a whole other issue that goes right back into what the article is talking about. Is there a working fire in Springdale's district every day, or even every month? Historically speaking the answer is no. I am only trying to shed light upon different scenarios that can occur and have occurred so that it makes a little more sense to readers of this forum that are not entirely familiar with Stamford's mutual aid/RIT/re-location procedures. Leave it to the "Stamford Aggravate" to leave out one of the most important pieces of this complex story. If I have made any glaring mistakes regarding procedure please (762 or 152 perhaps) let me know. I have zero problem admitting when I am wrong... how else can we all learn from each other's mistakes?

[attachmentid=2031] Electric-wise My favorite is the SG-ripoff (the darker red one). It's actually a Sigma (made my Martin) from sometime between the late 70's-early 80's that I bought on eBay. It's heavier than a Gibson or Epi SG and the tailpiece is further down, which are both good specs for my over-sized self. Trivia: The orange sticker on the headstock reads "VIOLATION" and is from a Boston parking ticket. The bass pictured is a Fender Jazz Bass Deluxe (w/ active electronics) that I paid off by working for my dad during the summer between 9th and 10th grades. The blue electric was assembled, painted and custom headstock by yours truly from a kit... It still needs some tweaking in the action department. The sticker-covered purple (!) Ibanez was my first electric that I got for my 13th birthday... Best part was that on that same day I broke the ring finger on my left hand... So basically I could only stare at the guitar for a while.) Not pictured are my black Sigma acoustic, which was a gift, my nylon-string classical guitar (which used to be my dad's, and which I snapped the bridge off of when I tried to put steel strings on it) and my Fernandez 12-string acoustic that I bought for $50 because there's a hole in it (and I don't mean the sound hole!) Dream guitar: Gibson ES series... Maybe a 175 or a 335.

pwning n00bs (Andorhal server) c'mon, I know some of you are part of the 8+ million (Does 300/300 First Aid count for the American Red Cross?) On a less dorky note, I also enjoy listening to Howard Stern and Car Talk, traveling with my girlfriend and playing any one of my seven guitars.

I'll take a bite... First off, since I am Mr. Disclaimer, I will say that there is nothing in my job description that says I need to stay informed on Police Union issues or on relations between the 5 volunteer fire departments and the Stamford Fire and Rescue Department (SFRD). However, over the past 1.5 years that I have worked for the City of Stamford as a Public Safety Dispatcher, I have kept a close eye on all goings on in the City that are in any way tied to my job and to the public safety world as a whole. Note, also, that I am a volunteer firefighter. With that being said, it is my strong opinion that at least 3 out of the 5 volunteer companies in Stamford are facing some very serious issues that have a large potential to put personnel in harms way. I have both personal and professional relationships with members of all 6 fire departments in Stamford and I feel that I have truly heard all sides of the story. I know for a fact and from experience that volunteer staffing on calls in Glenbrook, Springdale and Long Ridge is usually slim to none. Statistics also show that the average resident of North Stamford (where houses are rarely priced under $1 million) is not going to become a volunteer firefighter. So you have an area where the existing personnel don't show up for calls, and where recruitment is difficult... and yet the local fire department sues the city for trying to help? Frankly, this makes no sense to me, and I'd like to think that I am a sensible guy. Most departments that are faced with staffing issues flounder around for a long time before something bad happens and they are forced to get their act together. The residents of the Long Ridge Fire Company's coverage area were lucky enough to have a mayor who tried to help, only to have their safety compromised by their fellow citizens/firefighters/volunteers when the city called their bluff and pulled the Engine company back downtown. Its no secret that volunteer rolls in upper-middle class areas are dwindling, yet whenever the idea of paying someone to make up for that lack of manpower comes to the table, there are always a bunch of gray-haired ex-chiefs who grumble and shake their liver-spotted fists in the air. Don't get me wrong, I respect the fact that they used to fight the same beast with less protective equipment and with more volunteer allies, but you know who doesn't care whether you're paid or volunteer: The fire. You know who else: The victim that you prevent from become a fatality. Oh, let's not forget the men and women who go home to their families instead of ending up a LODD. Its high f-ing time that all this career vs. volunteer BS was thrown into a big Bronx-style barrel fire along with tail-board riding and rubber coats. This is the fire service, and if you're in it for anything other than the love of it, whether its money, trophies or god-forbid beer, then please do us all a favor and join a yacht club or a sewing circle. --------- The opinions expressed above do not reflect that of the City of Stamford or any of its agencies, one of which was nice enough to hire me so that I can actually afford to live close enough to Rye that I can still be a firefighter in the City where I grew up.