Raz

How do you propose they go about increasing their staffing? If writing a letter is considered bitching and complaining, do you have some other alternative? It's not like they're picketing on city hall's steps, they only wrote a letter. Asking for one glass of milk at a time (I'm assuming you meant hiring one guy at a time, correct me if I'm wrong), won't fix staffing issues. You'll need at least four new hires to fill a full time position. I'm not trying to call you out, I'm just asking you to clarify some points.

Good luck to them. One man rigs should be a way of the past at this point. Unfortunately, it seems like the city management isn't going to be so receptive to the proposed changes.

My department has something along those lines. Care to elaborate? Also, your strawman argument in most threads is "you don't know what it's like over on the volunteer side of things" as if you think that most career FF's just spring into existence one day. Most of us were volunteers, or still are. We have experience with the LOSAP program. What about guys like me who have a few years invested in the program, but will never see that money? Who does it go to? Well, to people like this: http://www.penflexinc.com/index.html. Not only do they get to hold on to that money for the next 60 years, making all that interest and returns on investments, but the poor governments who got rooked into giving it to them will actually pay them to administer the account. Just to reiterate, these people get the gov't to give them money, use it to make more money to keep for themselves, and pay them to do it! And since nobody wants the bad publicity of voting "against volunteers" it's the perfect scam. LOSAP is a mutlimillion dollar business, not a pension plan, and it benefits those companies a hell of a lot more than volunteers. Poke around their website, they have specific instructions on how to fight if your LOSAP plan doesn't allow you to accrue points after your entitlement age. It borders on farcical Are you just making these stats up? I think you are, and that's ok. I don't expect you to have hard numbers because there's absolutely no oversight to the program. BFD, you make some excellent points.

First off, I'm well aware of how LOSAP is supposed to work. However, in my experience, there is a large difference between how it's supposed to work and how it actually pans out. Like most things in the fire service, there isn't much oversight, if any. So your department elects someone to watch over LOSAP points, that's great, but who watches the watchman? I've seen some departments talk about implementing barcode scanners to ensure people are actually at calls and geared up before they give out a point. Unless your department has something along these lines, you can't say there's any true oversight to the LOSAP system. That also means there's no way for the state to investigate fraud, so there's no fear of repercussion for fraudulent practices. As for rational people having no argument so long as those eligible to receive LOSAP "meet the requirements set down by the state", we've had many threads discussing how there are barely any requirements set down by the state to be a "firefighter." I'm not beating that horse again. Age does matter, I'm sorry. I have to retire at age 62, it's a law. Apparently the state feels that the level of service I'll provide at 62 is inferior to what I'll provide at 32, and I'm inclined to agree with them. Yet I know a guy that gets a monthly LOSAP check that's equal to about a fifth of what I make at my job. Almost all of his accredited years come from service rendered after age 62. Not only is he collecting, he's out there adding more points while he does it. It's ridiculous. I also find it funny that you keep mentioning "the desire to serve one's community" before going on to discuss this benefit or that benefit given to volunteers. Last time I checked, volunteer meant you did it for free, and that the service you provided was reward enough. I'm sorry, which is it? The program is here to stay, so we should just move on and not question it? So are training standards, but you questioned them in all the other threads I've seen you in. You have your hot issues, I have mine.

You being the LOSAP Admin for your F.D. only qualifies you to speak about in on behalf of your F.D. I'll trust that you may have a scrupulous view on handing out LOSAP points, but the sad truth is that many people don't. In many departments, LOSAP is exactly what bil14ga said it is, a giveaway. Furthermore, it does absolutely nothing when it comes to recruiting young firefighters. I've never met a volunteer under the age of 35 that joined up because of the LOSAP program. I have, however, met many 60 years and older (including a bunch of wives of members, who are now "active" themselves) who make sure to make company meetings and events, all to get their precious points. LOSAP is a travesty, a good idea gone horribly wrong. I'd like to see more programs like this phase it out.

I wouldn't know, I've yet to see a car pass me that has just one forward facing blue light.

I'm a little young to have worked with Mike, or known him anything more than superficially, but he was a good man.

I see what you're saying, and indeed I'll admit to being one of those guys that would rather cover a vacancy with OT than see a new guy hired. After all, this is how I pay my mortgage and put food on the table. However, I would also like to see an increase in manning. I don't believe those issues to be mutually exclusive of eachother. When we "complain about these ever so important issues" of staffing, we're not asking our department to hire a guy here and there when someone gets injured, promoted, or retires. That only serves as a stoploss to the standard attrition of running a fire dept. Instead, we're asking them to increase the minimum allowable staffing, putting an end to riding shorthanded or placing a rig o.o.s. That has nothing to do with overtime. Sure it will increase it, but it will directly increase everything related to the department, including quality of response and service. Also, when you consider things such as ISO ratings and grants, the taxpayers shouldn't even have to shoulder the majority of the increase in cost. Look at that, paid guy and taxpayer advocate. Another two things that don't have to be mutually exclusive.

A true increase in manning shouldn't mean less O.T. After all, it creates a new position that needs to be staffed 24/7. It works like this: "OT Shifts" divided by "Number of Staff" multiplied by "The Minimum Manning Requirement" If your dept runs a rig with one man, that's a total of 4 guys on the job. Obviously, they'd each get 1/4th of the OT. If you added a second position, hiring 4 more guys to staff it, you'd be increasing staffing to 8, giving each man (obviously) 1/8th of the overtime. However, the overtime is now doubled because of the need to fill a second position at all times. Therefore, their 1/8th share of the doubled OT is equal to the 1/4th share of the OT before the staffing increase. I hope didn't butcher my point.

OK. Agreed. Agreed. ..And you lost me. Why would you ever want politicians making FD choices? They have no idea about anything having to do with the actual fire service, and those that think they do have usually been given all the wrong information. Scarsdale's truck still rolls with one man. All of their engines and the command car roll with two.

I knew we just had a thread about this, so I looked it up and lo and behold, it was actually started by you ("NYS Training Standards Need Change" over in the Firefighting forum). I think your first post in that topic shows why any perceived "levels of firefighter" are meaningless, due to a lack of uniformity in terms and titles. Hell, I've seen departments that can't even figure out what to call the guy in charge.

I can't tell if you think I was offended personally by the posts in this thread, or if you're just responding using "you" and "your" in the general sense. Either way, it seems that we're in agreement on the chauffeur subject. If I seemed offended with the "paid driver" topic, it's because I've seen 18 year old volunteers without so much as Firefighter 1 under their belt referring to Academy graduates as being beneath them, and in that case, you're damn right that I'm offended on behalf of my brothers. As for the staffing issues that you and Captain Glover bring up, I'll respond by saying this: I'd feel safer working in the busiest FDNY house than in some of these Westchester departments that only staff one man on a rig. You might see a 500% increase in fires and other dangerous activities, but at least you know that you'll have 4-5 other fully trained and dependable guys showing up with you. You hear stories like this from WWII, when guys would sign up for more dangerous assignments because they knew it meant that they would have a good unit around them. It beat taking your chances with a less dangerous assignment and getting stuck with an unproven or no good unit.

This might be a simple difference of opinion, but I don't equate the words "driver" and "chauffeur" with eachother, as you do. A chauffer is a firefighter who has done his time and paid his dues, having risen to a level where he is considered worthy of being trusted with being the backbone of the team. He is the one solely responsible for maintaining a water supply or maneuvering an aerial. It is not a job to be taken lightly, as it requires a higher level of critical thinking and the ability to sometimes "think outside the box." If anything, I'd trust a chauffeur over a line firefighter anyday, and if I use it, I mean it as a term of respect. I'll be the first to admit that I don't think I possess the cognitive ability to be a good chauffeur. "Driver", on the other hand, is a derogatory term used by (usually older) volunteer firefighters to describe paid firefighters in combination departments. It stems from the fact that pre-1980 (or maybe a few years before that), NYS had no academy or enforcable standards to be considered a professional firefighter. Because of this, and due to the fact that volunteers were plentiful at the time, the sole purpose of the career staff in many depts was to drive and operate the rig. Thus, many older volunteers grew up with actual "fire drivers" and are ignorant of the difference between the career guys of their department circa 1975, and the career firefighters of today. Of course, a few malcontents of the younger generation of volunteers have latched onto this slur and still use it, ignorant of the fact that the ones they call drivers are trained and held to vastly superior standards than themselves. As for your hypothetical scenario, unless a person is hanging out of a window and waiting for a ladder, I'd stretch a handline. There's no good answer here, but it's a fact that regardless of anything else, a handline put into operation will improve every possible outcome at that fire.

I'm happy with how much I pay for my fire protection. However, I'm not happy with how that money is spent. There's so much waste and pork spending within the local F.D.'s budget that it's really laughable. Yet, whenever someone tries to change things, they get brow beat with the same (blatantly false) arguments. People (both politicians and laymen) seem to have it in their heads that more services=more money and less services=less money, and that's simply not the case. If you already have the budget in place, you can work within that preexisting budget to reallocate funds, taking them away from non-producing areas and utilizing that freed up money in a place where it will actually make a difference. Of course, I don't have to tell anyone on here what "tradition" means to the fire department. And yes, school taxes are out of hand. Especially when you live in a place where you wouldn't feel safe sending your kids to public school.

I'm inclined to agree. Any competant IC should be able to handle calling in mutual aid, while still running the scene. Hell, calling in mutual aid is part of running a scene, there shouldn't be a division between the two. If you're doing all the things you should be doing (Checking for hazards, delegating properly, keeping a managable scope of command), then is it really that hard to get on the radio and say "give me so and so's ladder to the rear of the structure"? Of course, if you're doing the things you shouldn't be doing (playing firefighter, not giving orders at all or trying to command every single person on the scene), then you might need a coordinator. Of course, if you're doing those things as an IC, you'll need a lot more help than just a coordinator. Maybe I just have a lot of faith in the dispatchers at 60 control, but I don't think calling in mutual aid is this huge burden that needs to be taken off of them and shored up by a part time county car. 60's dispatchers have proven themselves more than capable of handling the worst conditions.

I think we agree on a lot of points. Primarily that emergency services tend to be "out of sight, out of mind." It's that old C.I.A. mentality: If we're doing our jobs correctly, you don't hear about us. When we screw up, it makes the front page. That fact, combined with the fact that the average person has absolutely no idea how their fire department operates and what its responsibilities are, tends to leave us out on the periphery when it comes to public accountability. As long as a department head stands up and says "all is well", that's good enough for most people. Even if they wanted to press the issue, they wouldn't know what questions to ask. Does that give us carte blanche to do whatever we wish when it comes to setting training standards, supplying adequate manpower for alarms, etc.? I'd like to believe that the answer is a hard no. In my opinion, "exterior firefighters" like VAC "attendants" just give department heads yet another way to skirt accountability. I love my profession, but I'll be honest, I tend to dislike the words firefighter and fire department. It tends to invite the statement "well what do you do when there's no fire?" Which inevitably leads to me explaining "well, we also take care of heart attacks, car accidents, injuries, flooding, hazardous conditions, transporting the elderly, and pretty much anything else you can think of." I think the public would "care" a lot more if they realized everything their "fire" department is actually responsible for.

That must be the same jail where these guys ended up:

Lots of things to resond to in that. First off, the car fire thing. The primary reason for disqualifying someone from interior status isn't training (unfortunately), it's the fact that the person is unable to wear an SCBA. If you can't wear an SCBA, you shouldn't be fighting car fires. Secondly, everyone that joins a volunteer department doesn't start out as an exterior firefighter. They don't start out as anything. They're just a guy who signed a sheet of paper, with no training to speak of. To become an exterior firefighter, one still needs to go through some training (I forget what the class is called). It's a common misconception that being a member of a fire department makes you a firefighter. Please, don't think that I have anything against "exterior firefighters", I'm all for people helping out. Having an extra guy to ring a hydrant can be the difference between a "room and contents" fire and a fully involved structure. My problem lies with officers, chiefs, commisioners, etc. telling people that they have "X" number of firefighters in the department, when only a fraction of them are in "fighting condition". Which leads into my next point: There's a difference between not caring and not questioning. Think of all of the services we take for granted on a daily basis. We turn on the faucet and water comes out, we flick a switch and the lights go on. We don't question how it all works, but that doesn't mean we wouldn't care if it all stopped. Likewise, we assume that when we call 911, we'll get fire/police/EMS because that's what we've been told. We take our public officials and department heads at their word, and we assume that they'd have no reason to lie to us. The sad truth is, hiding behind false numbers infated by "exterior firefighters" is exactly that, lying to the public about the level of emergency response they can expect.

Amen to that.

I'll agree to that. We can all agree on what makes someone an EMT-B, EMT-I, or Paramedic. Career, volunteer, municipal, private sector...if someone wears the badge of an EMT, they're an EMT. Try saying something like that about the fire service.

Peekskill's rigs roll on alarm with the career staff. Most of Peekskill's volunteers respond from home.

I think it breaks down like this: Essentials + Fire Behavior/Arson Awareness = Basic Firefighter Basic Firefighter + Intermediate Firefighter = Firefighter 1 Firefighter 1 + Firefighter 2 Course + Some form of EMS training (maybe CPR?) = Firefighter 2 Certification I could be totally wrong, but either your department stepped up it's requirements, or you guys still just need Firefighter 1. If any instructors want to correct me, please do.

Eh, what the hell, I'll touch that political football (it's going to get brought up eventually). You're right, the relocation and consolodation of resources shouldn't have a major effect on staffing levels in either direction, on either side. Making a statement that it will undeniably increase volunteerism is preposterous. On this site, we've pretty much agreed that volunteerism is down nationally. The reason that everyone seems to agree on is time and money, and the fact that nobody has enough of either to justify taking time away from their family or second job to devote to the firehouse. Peekskill is in an especially tough spot. It's annual median household income is $47,177. That's below the U.S. median of $50,821, further below the NYS median of $53,534, and left in the dust of Westchester County's median of $78,441. In black and white, that is the biggest hurdle facing Peekskill's volunteer firefighters. Who the hell can afford to pay Westchester cost of living expenses and then find time to donate to the fire department, while making little more than half the money that the rest of the county makes? Is building a new firehouse going to magically erase that fact? In a word, no. It may serve to improve the training and make better use of the existing volunteers (and career staff, for that matter), but it's not going drastically bolster their numbers in any impactful fashion. The statement that article reeks of wishful thinking by a beleaguered chief.

A deck gun takes up a lot less space than a booster line, and can be used in a lot more situations. A booster line is a luxury, a deck gun is a necessity.

I'd say that's the best reason I've ever seen for not placing a piece of equipment on a rig. Booster lines are a bad example to use when demonstrating this reasoning, after all, the primary reason booster lines were taken off rigs is because they don't have much of an effect on anything. So let's take something that does have a big effect on a fire, like positive pressure ventilation fans. When used correctly, there's nothing that can compete with one for clearing out smoke and gas. When used improperly, you'll burn the building to the ground in a matter of minutes. I've known a few fire chiefs who have specifically said "I won't get one, because I don't want the wrong guy taking that thing and using it improperly." Is it a piss poor attitude to have? Yes. Does it speak wonders about how you truly view the firefighters in your department? Absolutely, but it's a realistic issue that the chief has mitigated before it became a problem.