trauma74

This topic has been discussed numerous times and has gotten pretty heated at times. There are MANY different styles and shaped badges, some gold, some silver, some with NYC seal in the middle, some with the NYS seal in the middle, some with the star of life in the middle. If I had to take a guess, the most common badge would probably be the New York City Detective style in gold and maybe a few in silver. Many EMS badges are purchased privately by the individual EMS workers. Some get them for identification to go long with their ID card. Some get them to increase the chance that professional courtesy from a police officer will be extended to them. Some EMS agencies issue badges to their members to be worn as part of their uniform. Some of these members keep these agency issued badges in their wallets when they are off duty for reasons that I stated above. As mentioned in another post on this topic, I have seen EMS badges used to get better parking at some baseball stadiums.

Accidents can happen while you have flashing lights on or not, but making yourself visible will help to lessen the chance of an accident happening. As far as the color of lights is concerned, it has been proven time and time again and it is taught by EVOC instructors that blue and amber are the two best colors to have on the rear of an emergency vehicle. Red lights actually draw tired and intoxicated drivers to the vehicle bearing the red lights. Amber and blue draw drivers away from the vehicles bearing these lights. Since January when the NYSP and other agencies began using blue lights on the rear of their vehicles, you can see them pulled over to the side of the road a lot further away from before. Think about the rear of every car on the road...amber or red turn signals and red tail and brake lights. From a distance emergency vehicles get drowned out in the sea of lights. You do not see blue tail or brake lights or turn signals on any vehicles. The blue stands out better in the sea of lights.

Rotorays look weird, but they do catch your attention!

Originally, I wanted all of the outer lenses to be clear. I like the look of the clear outer lenses. I wanted the fact that we had some blue lights to be kept on a low profile. When they did he lighting they made some lenses clear and some colored. Instead of making our delivery time longer, we just left the lenses they way they came.

We do have blue lights on the rear of our 2 new buses. There are 2 blue lights on the rear lightbar and the upper halves of our 900 series LEDs are blue and the bottom halves are amber. Our local PDs have no problem with this. They know th reason why we have blue is the same reason why they now have blue. The NYSP in this area also seem to not have a problem with us having blue in the back. A good amount of the new fire and EMS vehicles in this area are going with at least one blue light on the rear of their vehicles. I will not say who, but a few of our local agencies have been testing the waters with blue in the front. I think that in some areas blue in the front will be accepted and you will see it more and more.

Even though the cops can "legally" have blue lights facing toward the rear, I have seen many new ambulances and fire trucks with at least one rear facing blue light. On a few occasions I saw a few EMS vehicles with one forward facing blue light!

I think it is just a matter of time and we will see blue along with red on the front of PD cars. There are already some PDs that are sneaking in a single blue light facing forward. I have seen numerous new EMS vehicles with blue on the rear and even a few with one blue light in the front. In my opinion I think that NY should take NJs lead: Fire/EMS & PD Vehicles: Red, White & Blue facing forward and to the rear EMS & FD Volunteers: Blue facing forward NY is the only state that I know of that has green for EMS vollies. The problem with using green on EMS vollie's vehicles is that it can lead to confusion at a large scale incident because green flashing lights signify a command post according to NIMS.

On our t-shirts we have "EMS" on the back because it take up a lot less room. On our First Response Vehice we have "EMS" instead of Volunteer Ambulance Corps. This is because we are limited to the amount of room for the lettering.

Up here in Orange County, Mobile Life Support Services EMS provides Tactical Medics for the City of Newburgh SWAT, Town of Newburgh SWAT and the Monroe-Harriman-Woodbury PDs REACT Teams. They sent some of their medics to a TEMS Course a few years ago. They provide this service free of charge to these teams. I think this class being discussed here is a good class for anyone to take because you never know what kind of situation can happen. You could go to a routine MHL job and it can turn ugly for the PD in a matter of seconds.

I am guessing that Pittsburgh EMS runs pin jobs and other rescue calls like some places in NJ?

I like the look of their new bus. We have two brand new ambulances that are the same size. To see these new buses, take a look at our website: www.chesterambulance.com

66, I am not sure how long they keep the tapes for. Also, We have never asked for a copy of the tape or to listen to the tape at the ER.

I usually look at the gray shaded areas on the PCR and that is the info I give to ER. I always keep it short and sweet. Our local hospitals perfer us calling in on the radio. They actually record our radio transmissions to them. In our SOPs we have a section on what info the hospital should be provided with. All my members know that a patient name must NEVER be transmitted over the HEAR radio.

The Orange County Emergency Communications Center has recently starting using new software that sends out text pages for FD & EMS calls to members of these agencies that are signed up to receive them. The software is called Emergent and can have up to 10,000 users entered into the system. It sends EMS or FD call info to any device capable of receiving text messages such as cell phones, Blackberry & Treo devices, AlphaNumeric Pagers and it also can send to email addresses. In the recent test phase of this system, everything has been working well and the text pages have been coming over seconds after the voice page for the call is done being transmitted. This system is available to ALL members of any of the FDs & EMS agencies that are dispatched via the Orange County Emergency Communications Center. It will serve as a secondary means of receiving fire and EMS jobs. It will come in handy for calls that are sensitive in nature such as bomb threats or anything that is not normally dispatched via voice page. Also in the works is the paging of all times for EMS agencies and for Duty Chief/Duty Officer notifications. After seeing that several other counties in our area had this type of system, I made a written request about two years ago for the County to look into getting this type of system. The credit for the research, purchase and implementation of this new system goes to Supervisor Emmet Garnham.

Awesome colors and even more awesome is the DOT striping on the back. Best of luck with your bus.

I have yet to hear about this from any of my friends in the NYPD or NYSP, but there have been a few times throughout the years that NYPD Highway wrote either a NYSP or someone who is a cop up here in Orange, Rockland or Westchester. There have been times when local cops wrote NYPD or NYSP. Either way, this goes to show that "PROFESSIONAL COURTESY" does not exist the way it did in the past. I have a family member that was given a speeding ticket out on the T-Way a few months ago. She just went to court the other night. The Trooper that wrote my family member did not return a phone call from an SP Investigator who I know and did not care that my father was retired from the job. $150 and 4 points later and my father who has been retired for almost 15 years was pretty livid. Back in his day, NO COPS WROTE OTHER COPS OR THEIR FAMILIES OR FRIENDS. I had to explain to my father that professional courtesy does not exist the way it did back in his day. I hope that all this stuff is only rumor and does not lead to a war of the NY PDs.

In NYS, the Vehicle & Traffic Law (not sure of the exact section) exempts the occupants of emergency vehicles and taxi cabs from wearing seatbelts. I have read this section in the past. Sure, it is not a good idea to not wear a seat belt, but the law states that you do not have to wear it. No matter how wrong it is for government officials to be driven around in vehicles going Code 3, it is not going to change. It has been done for so long and it will not change.

I can sympathize with these communications problems! Westchester County is not the only County in the Hudson Valley Region that has these communications problems. I have experienced these problems first hand in my home County of Orange and when I worked as a paid EMT in Rockland County. I am into COMMUNICATIONS. I constantly slam people who hinder inter-agency communications. It is the pissing match where you hear "No way are we going to permit anyone to talk on our channels but our own members" "We do not want everyone else to know what we are doing" etc, etc, etc. I took the effort within my own agency to make sure that we have the ability, when needed to communicate directly with our local PDs, our FD and our DPW workers. Although we are technically not allowed to use the County FD channels to communicate with our FD, I said "F*** IT". I would rather take the heat for transmitting on an FD channel in an emergency, then to be scared to use these channels. I rolled up on a structure fire a few years ago and instead of having contacting the EMS dispatcher who would yell across the room and tell the FD dispatcher to tell the FD Chief that I was on the scene of a working house fire and that all residents were out of the house, I just turned on my lowband radio and told the Chief this information directly thus saving over a minute of playing the "telephone game". I agree with passing out radios to other agencies when we are all working together. You do not need these crazy $5000 digital trunking portable radios. Keeping a dozen Chinese made Infinity portables that can be purchased for $150 each on hand could work out perfect for many incidents. If a few of these radios do not make it back to you or they get damaged, it is worth the price you paid for them and you had good interops which you cannot place a value on.

Here is some dirt on Sharpton regarding the Tawana Brawley case! http://archive.recordonline.com/archive/20...16/kwpagone.htm

I think the whole Tawana thing was in Sullivan County. Sharpton was all over that "incident" like stink on sh*t. He made this big production in the media and it ended up being all BS. She lied about the whole thing!

I have never been an Imus fan. I always thought he was somewhat of a moron, BUT, he has the right to speak freely. Look at all of the things that Howard Stern has done and said over the years. Look at Opie and Anthony, yes they got the boot from free radio and now they are on XM. Imus should not be suspended or fired. He should receive an award and a raise in pay! LOL! Everyone is correct about the things they say about Shaprton and Jesse Jackson. The guy that stabbed Sharpton many years ago should have done us all a favor and either used a longer knife or a gun. Sharpton is more of a racist then the leader of the KKK. The media bows down to the black community and makes them out to be innocent. Sharpton made a reference to shooting police officers during one of his interviews about the Sean Bell case. He said it was a mistake and it came out wrong. That is a big giant load of SH*T. He meant to say it!!!!!!! We all know that. He likes to act all innocent, but behind the scenes he is in bed with the gangs. Sharpton always talks about the black community being poor and how the government should do more to help them. Every time you see Sharpton he is in a nice suit, in a nice car and I am sure he has a nice house too. He does not live in the ghetto. It is a fact that any member of the black community can make something of themselves. Look at Barack Obama. He has done well for himself and he is not a racist scumbag like Sharpton is. On one final note, if Sean Bell and his group of felons were not at a nightclub engaging in prostitution they would have never had to deal with the PD. The fact of the matter is that they were doing illegal things and the PD was watching them. Once they started to use their car as a weapon against police officers and their vehicles, they again broke the law. The PD had every right to shoot as many times as needed to stop the threat against themselves and any innocent civilians who were near by.

Just a reminder to anyone planning on attending, the hotels are getting booked up very fast. If you want to go, make your reservation ASAP. I have been going to this Expo for 5 years and I have to say that it gets better every year. In the past they really did not have many classes just for EMS. Many of the classes had some EMS related material. Last year they had a 9 session track of EMS Special Operations classes that were given by some Medics and a Doctor from Albert Einstein Medical Center in PA. This year they are doing the same the same thing again. In addition to the classes, they have a HUGE exhibit with just about anything you can think of. If you have never attended I suggest you check it out. It is nice to see how things are done outside of NY.

I bought a half dozen of these at the Buff Show in Long Island back in January. These are far better then those cheap plastic green ones that many of us carry. The guy who came up with this O2 wrench is a medic for one of the NYC Hospitals. We are supporting one of our fellow EMS workers by purchasing these.

LOL! I was just going to say that this kid looks like RWC!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! LOL!

Getting older and UGLIER by the day!