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How do I feel? Well, truth be known all I really care about, personally, is my department and my district. Our department has changed our outgoing mutual aid protocol to responding on automatic mutual aid only to reports of smoke or fire. No more runs outside our district for smells and bells. The membership has shown tremendous commitment by demonstrating a very good turnout to the station when a machine goes out of district on mutual aid. I can speak from personal experience that pretty much every time I have left the barn there is another crew waiting there when I get back from the run. Why is this important to me, and worth mentioning? Well, it demonstrates that even when we go out of our district on mutual aid calls, we are not "stripped". As far as that picture on that website goes, I do not know who that is. That was taken at a training evolution. The guy with the light colored coat is wearing a black helmet. Are there chiefs that wear black helmets? Not very common. Not to mention the guy is wearing a 45 minute or hour bottle, which is not common in Stamford. And, he is not on air. makes me think he is a fire service instructor supervising the suppression evolution. What's your guess?

Mr. Strangio, It is quite a strong statement, and in my eyes, defamatory to the Belltown Fire Department to characterize that department's operations as "freeloading". And, as such, I think a retraction and an apology is owed. Yes, it is a given that a city engine is dispatched to just about every call in Belltown. However, in most instances the members of Belltown respond and cancel the incoming mutual aid unit as it is not needed. That city unit then goes back into service, in most cases in a very short span of time from the time they get on the road. And, there have been instances when city units have NOT been automatically dispatched, such as when the dispatchers knew we had the resources on hand to handle the call. Which is pretty smart, actually. You ask "how is a non guaranteed volunteer response better than a 4 person guaranteed response?" Well, now in the case of E8 or E9 responding into Belltown's district, it is a 3 person guaranteed response, is it not?? And, while Belltown cannot guarantee that there is a manned unit there 24 hours a day, many times when the call comes in, the rigs are headed out with MORE than the 3 or 4 person guaranteed by SFRD. You accuse Belltown of "stripping resources" ?? Why don't you explain to me then the justification for stripping the neighborhood in the western part of TOR when E9 gets in their rig and drives to Newfield Avenue to shop for their meal at the Grade A Supermarket there. By your logic, any time a crew is not sitting in quarters ready to roll out the door when a call in their first due district comes in, those taxpayers are getting shortchanged. Now, as far as I know, the amount of tax dollars collected by the city from the residents of the Belltown Fire District in the name of fire protection is more than the city doles back out to the BFD. The remainder is allocated to SFRD to support its operations in the volunteer districts. So, again, the "freeloading" term you used is inappropriate, and just plain wrong. Shameful, really. I think that, as Captain Hayes put it so well when he wrote, "Staffing volunteer apparatus like the BFD and making them part of the fully staffed career response makes the most sense."

Sorry, but this argument is flawed. Going to college doesnt equate to being better. A tart is a tart, know matter how many years they went to a place of higher learning.