FireMedic049

I'll have to disagree with you on this one as my experiences in a small career department who's minimum on-duty staffing is "5 guys" says otherwise. Now, I don't mean this as argumentative as it may sound and please don't mistake my comment as saying anything close to "5 guys" being adequate on-duty staffing, because it certainly isn't anywhere close to it when we pull up to a working fire. However, we see a good bit of fire and just want to make the point that what we can and have accomplished with just "5 guys" (before reinforcements arrive) is anything but "useless". It's certainly not ideal, but unfortunately, it is our reality and that of many other small career departments out there.

Personally, I found this part validates much of Yonkers Fire union's claim. Despite criticism by its own union president in recent years that the department is understaffed, Davis said the department has an "adequate complement" of firefighters but that relying too heavily on overtime during occasional shortages was cost prohibitive. "The days are gone when we had unlimited budgets," the mayor said. "If we spend it all on overtime, we can't buy trucks, we can't upgrade (equipment)." The Mount Vernon Mayor is essentially saying that they could handle more of their own business, but rather than using overtime and/or having their taxpayers shoulder the financial burden to do that, they are consciously putting that burden onto the taxpayers of other communities.

Back in the early stages of my career in the fire service we had a big snow storm one night. I forget how much snow we actually got, but we started running calls in the afternoon and well into the evening and overnight. Mostly the low budget stuff that comes with a heavy, wet snow - wires down, trees sagging into wires, accidents, etc. We were a big volunteer department in a college town and at the time, only one big station. Figuring that the calls would keep on coming, a number of members camped out at the fire station for the night. There were no sleeping quarters at the time and not much in the way of alternative sleeping accommodations. The calls slowed down overnight and as the saying goes, idle hands are the devil's workshop, particularly within a group of college kids. The morning came and we learned that a few of our members has spent some time outside playing in the snow. They had completely covered another member's vehicle in a big pile of snow in the parking lot. The only thing visible was the top few feet of his big mobile radio antenna sticking out of this huge mound of snow. Needless to say, he didn't quite see the humor in it like the rest of us.

I've made this same point several times discussing this in my area. The public is often conditioned to think that when there's a fire in their community, the house will be a loss and anything short of burning the entire block is a "good job" and will praise their FD for their efforts. The public also doesn't always recognize the football fornicating monkey show when they see it. To some extent, this holds true for some of the departments involved. The amount of back slapping I see on social media these days on the heals of a fire in many of these communities is crazy. Everyone always did "a good job" and everyone going home safe is often used as the yard stick to measure the effort. They may have given 100% and done the best that they could, but that doesn't always mean that they actually did "a good job", did it in a reasonably safe fashion or that their efforts made the situation better.

You may be right. I just reread the article and it seems a bit contradictory. It repeatedly makes reference to the payout as being both an "award" (aka court decision) and a "settlement" (aka the parties reached an agreement to resolve the case).

Yes, a lot of people resort to lawsuits when not hired and many of them are essentially baseless since the reason they failed or got passed over is predominantly their own fault rather than some nefarious reason to exclude them.In this situation, a lawsuit was clearly warranted since the person hired wasn't within the normal selection range for civil service testing and there was the possibility that age was a factor for this guy getting passed over. Since, he prevailed in court and it was determined that age was a factor, the lawsuit was certainly an appropriate course.

True, but there's no guarantee on how fit that 19 year old will be in 15 years. There's a sufficient number of firefighters that are or were fit enough to work until mandatory retirement at 65 (in some states) that an employer can't legitimately reject an applicant (if fit enough currently) because he/she might not be fit enough to reach full retirement eligibility, especially when you already have no age restrictions for the position.

We aren't as involved with actual code enforcement as Bnechis' department, but we do a lot of building inspection activity throughout the year. Anytime a property changes owners we inspect the property before a new occupancy permit is issued. We also do annual inspections for various commercial occupancies like our hospital, personal care homes, nursing facilities, schools and any other business that the state requires to have inspections from us. We also do a lot of fire safety education in our schools and other facilities that need fire safety training for their staff, including fire extinguisher training. We do a lot of public service stuff. Right now we're in the early stages of a smoke detector giveaway program in conjunction with the Red Cross. We're going to residential properties and installing as many smoke detectors as needed. We also go to the elementary schools annually to read books to the lower grades as part of a program they run in which people from the community (us, the PD and other professionals) come in for "story time". We try to visit every building that has a knox box annually, particularly the ones we don't routinely respond to, to check the keys in the box and verify that they still work and see if there's new keys that we need. There's been many times that we've discovered that a lock was changed or added and we weren't notified about it so the new key could be added to the knox box. In addition to this, we have daily upkeep and some maintenance responsibilities for the stations, apparatus and equipment. We're also looking into some other stuff for the future.

There's always going to be disparities among related groups and those disparities don't necessarily indicate the presence of a true problem. There's disparity between a 20 year PD officer and one fresh out of the academy. There may be major disparities among police departments, but at least all of those wearing the police uniform are trained to a specific standard and can perform the core functions expected of a police officer. The same can't be said of the American Fire Service.

Right and with that (over time) came a huge increase in the care that EMS can now deliver to your doorstep. It also brought a level of standardization on what care one could expect from a BLS ambulance, an ALS ambulance and QRS/response units. Government involvement greatly improved the delivery of prehospital care in this country!

Are you even in the same discussion as the rest of us? Some of your responses seem like you don't have a clue about what we're discussing.

Right, just look what happened to EMS when the government got involved with that. Definitely don't want that to happen to the fire service.

Maybe if you would actually answer the questions being asked of you, we might be inclined to move on to a different topic.

Actually, the majority of suburban communities would save the property owners money if they 1) consolidated on a regional or at least a town basis. Why Westchester needs more engines than FDNY to cover a little more than a 10th of the population and in many communities to respond with only 1 ff per rig is idiotic. 2) Switching from volunteer to career actually saves property owners annual out of pocket costs. Since insurance savings are directly tied to your FD and the personnel typing/training. In my community we calculated that to keep the same ISO rating with 100% volunteers would require over 450 interior volunteers. In the meantime we are saving our property owners more money that the annual FD Budget. To bad most people both inside and outside the fire service have no understanding of the economics of fire protection and always fall back to volunteers are cheaper than career. And they are, but only if you leave out the most expensive components of fire protections (the FD is the 4th on the list, even for career depts.) You have no idea how involved some of us are in this. I also know how many depts. in this county can't get the most basic trained and staffed units on the road the majority of the time. I can definitely relate. The county I live and work in has over 200 fire stations. Roughly 30 of which belong to the 2nd largest city in the state. I did a comparison a few years back on station distribution (# of stations per square miles). I looked at PG County, MD and Fairfax County, VA and found that their distributions were in the area of 10 square miles per station. My county came in right around 3 square miles per station - both including and excluding that city in the calculation. Another thing I looked at was the cost of career fire protection in my city per household. Using my department's annual budget and the most current census data at the time, I found that as a homeowner, I pay a little over $200 per year for career fire protection. And that figure excludes anything commercial properties are contributing. Now, I'll readily admit that we have less staffing than we probably should have and aren't as fully equipped as we should be, but considering how much most people pay per year for "essential" things like cell phones, cable TV or the internet, we're a pretty good bargain.

While this may not be the norm, it does happen. A lot!

This is simply a question that really can't have a finite answer. First, the ability to transport more than one patient is heavily dependent on the situation at hand and the design of your ambulance at the incident. With the current trend in ambulance design to move away from the traditional bench seat style, the ability to transport more than one pt on a backboard is not going to be possible in those designs. If backboards aren't needed, then you're going to be limited in part by the number of seating positions available. Beyond that, the condition of the patients and number of providers that will be in the unit are going to be a big factor. If you have the seating for it, taking 3 people complaining of headaches with a single provider at a CO call may not be much of an issue, but in my opinion and experience, if one patient requires ALS treatment, you shouldn't transport a second patient regardless of condition unless you have a second provider in the back. If the second patient also requires ALS treatment, then they should be in a separate transport unit. To do otherwise, unless we're talking extraordinary circumstances necessitating it, you simply can't provide each patient the care and attention they deserve.

And then they have very short memories and things stay the same or more cuts come along.

Right, but there in lies the problem. Departments should not be doing it, but they are. Not only that, they are willfully allowing members who are underprepared to operate on the interior to do so. Some just aren't up for the job. It's somewhat rampant in my area and other parts of the country. My department runs very few calls outside of our city (not by our choice, most of the volunteers just don't call us, even though we're closer than some of the departments they use). A few years ago we sent an engine to a reported dwelling fire (basement) early in the morning in a small neighboring borough. As far as I know, dispatch added us to the call due to a slow response from the volunteers. Our engine was the third unit to arrive. It would've been first if on the initial dispatch, but that's a different conversation. They arrived to find 2 engines on scene, a supply line established, attack lines off and several people dressed up as firefighters around the house, but NOBODY had entered the building yet! Our crew entered and quickly determined that there was NO active fire. Just a good smoke condition from a lint fire. Is this what a local FD doing its job looks like? I don't think so. This type of stuff leads to low expectations from the public because they don't necessarily know what a good FD looks like. The fire trucks show up, people in firefighter gear show up, they squirt some water until the fire goes out, the building is destroyed, everybody pats themselves on the back on how good of a job they did. This repeats itself enough times that the public now praises them for their effort and just accepts that fires = destroyed buildings not knowing that a competent FD would've saved a good number of those buildings and/or their contents.