antiquefirelt

Huh, still here... Oh crap, what time zone were the Mayans in?

36 minutes to go and I'm really starting to sweat. Maybe it was the Lieu's chili, I guess he thought it'd be funny to eat Mayan today!

So is the assertion that a single medic is better than a company of 4? I'd be surprised if any union would advocate for their personnel to be allowed to respond alone, seems like a dangerous situation in many cases. Maybe Yonkers doesn't have the drug or crime problems we have?

They call that an unattended intervention!

Just like so much else in this business it depends on how they're used in a given area. The term "Structure Fire" is often just a dispatch description, though a few years back there was a movement to make this a benchmark type term denoting the fire had actually begun to attack the structural elements of the building. This didn't seem to take off in many places, but I suspect there are some who utilize it this way? "Working Fire" is often a alarm level between how a building fire is dispatched and the next full alarm level, often bringing a reduced number of units. For example a building fire in our area is most often dispatched as a first alarm assignment getting what the FD places on their first alarm list. A second alarm may bring another 3 engines and 2 truck, but often the fire does not require 5 more companies, thus a "Working Fire" declaration may bring just 1 and 1. Like I started with, these examples may vary greatly from locality to locality, standardization in the US fire service is nearly nonexistent.

Clearly I have little knowledge of the workings of your local FD's and the politics, but in reading 628's website I see them being honest about something that affects city residents. First Respnder EMS ties up FD units, for how long is determined by the number of buses on the street at any given time. Like it or not, For Profit EMS services generally have to have all their units in constant motion to remain profitable, therefore they're like the airlines, they have fewer seeats than customers. This is not a reflection of the dedicated individuals who staff these buses, who likely feel the pain of constantly rushing call to call, knowing that the delay of their own definitive care may be detrimental to their patients. These people don't make the decisions on how many ambulances are in a given area, but in fact must work with what their given. This short staffing of EMS units is how a fore profit system stays afloat in times like these and how they pull in profits in better times. For YFD or other FD's that have similar First Responder systems, the programs are double edged swords: they're clearly out on the street more often positively interacting with their local citizens, but they're also tied up unavaible for other emergencies, a real issue when you're already short staffed and have fewer apparatus and stations than your city and incidents indicate. This is big boy rules, peoples livliehoods are threatened and those who remain after cuts jobs' just get more dangerous. Less personnel, less companies mean, longer times for ventialtion, or water on the fire. Fewer personel make tough work even tougher as the same tasks must be completed by fewer people. While I'm not looking to stirs this further, I've yet to see anyone that was incensed by the website actually state that the delayed response times are not an issue?

Many interesting and valid points here. I'd agree we'll never know the root cause of this or similar tragedies, but like so many other problems we must seek to identify commonalities and determine if there are factors that can lead to identification or prevention. Here's few things that have come to stick with me over the last two days: 1. How much does the media contribute to these heinous acts. I'm not blaming them, but it seems that in many (Most?) cases the perpetrators are most often described as withdrawn, quiet, "nobody's", or otherwise lacking a significant number of peer friends? Very often these people are also described as bright; genius; brilliant; etc. So we have smart kids going unknown or unrecognized. Add in some level of depression, and yes the "goth" style seems to typify the dark, quiet depressed nature of many kids. Do these kids starve the spotlight? Does the media making these tragic events so front and center provide the venue for them to be noticed? 2. While I'm an advocate for the 2nd Amendment and responsible firearms owner, I can't think of a scenario where my having to register my firearms would adversely affect me. I say this because I think that forcing some gun owners to be more responsible about how their firearms are kept would reduce unwanted use and stolen guns. Eliminating gun show loopholes to ensure all transfers were recorded and checked through NCIC (or whatever DB they use) again can't really be a huge inconvenience to legal gun owners are compared to the all out bans that are becoming more palatable every day as these tragedies mount. I fear not the U.S. government taking my legally owned firearms, I'm confident that if used against another human it'll be completely justified, but far more likely they'll never have a human in their sights. Those who fear the government will use LEO's to grab their guns fail to realize that cops, military personnel and federal agents are American citizens too, come from all walks of life in various sizes, shapes and colors and even political affiliations. 3. I too played violent video games, loved war movies and played army as a kid, none of which has made me a violent human being. That being said, there may be some merit to the point that the amount of violence seen by kids today contributes to their desensitization? We must remember that not all have the same capacity to handle what they're exposed to, hence Road Rage and seemingly these mass killings of innocent victims. Sadly, we can somewhat understand mass murder for a cause, but these total acts of senseless violence seem to prove a growing disregard for human life. Should kids be playing games that reward them for injuring and killing innocent people? 4. Lastly, maybe it's time to start meeting in the middle on some things. Our country gets weaker by the day as we deepen the great divide. Today it may be gun control, next week we'll be back to fiscal responsibility, national healthcare, religion, same sex marriage, you name it, we are so far from agreement on so many things we are a nation divided. Instead of seeing any middle ground every issue have become a larger fight. We rarely see any merit or listen long enough to hear the other point of view. It seems we all can agree that senseless tragedies need to stop, maybe we could stop the name calling long enough to see that even a few little steps toward the middle might help stem just one tragedy from ever happening. Problem is we can't see something that never happens thus we can't prove it'll work. Wow, this soapbox is pretty high, guess I'll climb down.

I'm not sure why one wouldn't consider LEO's trained in CPR to be equal to non-EMS firefighters at providing CPR? In our case, we do provide EMS, thus all firefighters are also advanced EMS providers (EMT-I or medics) but we always send extra hands on any unconscious/unresponsive calls to ensure the patient has the best chance at a positive outcome. This allows for far less interrupted CPR.

I don't have a FB account but was able to view the video yesterday?

I was going to give them the benefit of the doubt and figured they wanted to draw the fire into the space above the garage., It appeared maybe this would have reduced inevitable clean-up costs by reducing debris.

Sorry Seth, one of my "pet peeves": Ordinary construction isn't all gone yet, but typical or common construction is all but out the window. We have frequent size-ups where wood frame buildings are reported to be ordinary. Typical yes, but Type 3: Ordinary, no.

No F'ing way!?!(Sorry nothing else seemed to say what was needed!) Anyone who'd do that outside of a joke would be in the drink at best... That kind of abuse of personnel is not wholly admin's fault, stuff has had to have been let slide far too much for anyone to think that could be remotely OK. We have a great Union/Admin relationship and I'm certain our people would have tripped on a "manhole".

Wow, tough spot. More thoughts and questions than answers here, but you know your FD best. Short of the anonymous tip to OSHA (if it was unanimous I'd advise you to quit ) maybe you know how well you FD is doing in regard to meeting standards and providing a valuable service to the community? Are there mandatory requirements being ignored? Money issues? Are the books completely transparent? I'd think it would be very difficult to prove your negligence as a new chief if something suddenly happened in your first few months or even year, short of things all citizens would believe every firefighter or officer should know. Sometimes the position that takes you out or your comfort zone is the most rewarding. That being said, I'm confident that over the past 27 years I've learned I don't want to be the Chief of Department yet and far less likely of a volunteer FD which I would consider more difficult to get right in many respects. There's a lot of responsibility and headaches in the chiefs ranks but likely you better than us can predict what will happen if another void goes unfilled. What are the potential outcomes if a lesser qualified person is put into the position and can you live with that? Good luck.

Let's be clear: SFRD Rescue 1 is/was an HME not a KME? Some post seem to blur the lines a bit?

This is little surprise to me, our HME chassis engine was problematic from day 1 to the point where at year 5 or so numerous floor cracks and wear were discovered. While this was corrected by HME after Rosenbauer (who'd acquired Central States the original manufacturer) turned their back on us (other body issues as well). But alas, the engine which is second string now still has numerous issues and soured our FD to anything HME. For what it's worth, the VFD next door has two "newer" HME's that have few issues, though see far less street time.

I can tell you from our small FDs' perspective it becomes a matter of time. We paid a local web developer to put up a site and install the requisite software to maintain it. Due to concerns about who was capable of site management from both an admin view and from the capability point of view the list of "updaters" quickly slimmed to a single person. Having a single person who has multiple other responsibilities ensures that updates quickly get moved to the back burner. We resisted a FB page and now are reconsidering due to the ease of management thus the only concern is who will manage it from a liability standpoint. Yet another issue that has arisen from budget cuts or not growing while the workload does.

If this can go ice to water and water to ice, I'd think it'd have a market with anyone with ice water rescue. Maybe water rescue where there is no normal boat presence? I can see a bunch of AFG's being filed now.

No misunderstanding, we're just pretty tough on this based on the department's past few bad experiences. Every alarm gets an RP regardless of occupancy is the policy. I know I like "turning the building over to an RP" but it could be that this is the only system I've known. I also know that on the other side of this coin, not requiring the RP when there's no issue would help sell many more businesses on Knox Boxes and make many RP's and owners much happier, but alas, at times it appears we're extremely liability adverse.

I suspect there are some difference between the first due areas? While we have plenty of single occupancies that are fairly "simple" we also run on numerous large warehouses and moderately sized industrial buildings where there is no on site security staff. I suspect those types of facilities in your area had more staffed security? It sounds like NYS laws require more responsibility on the building/facility ownership that up here? Not to mention that a good portion of the time we find an issue that must be addresses, such as bad water pressure switch or dead air compressor that floods the system, or detectors that must be replace or cleaned for a decent reset. But if it works and your governing body is OK with it, it would seem to make life easier.

We don't allow C. as we require an RP secure the building every time. In the last 10 years I think maybe a handful (only two I personally know of) of times we've not had an RP respond. In those case they most verbalize they acknowledge all risk and liability on a recorded line with dispatch. This stems from past incidents where things were reported damaged or missing by tenants or the owner, though none of which went anywhere. It seems like there's a lot of little things that might go wrong: which lights are left on, which are off, was that door locked or not, are their multiple tenants whom have no knowledge of our entry, etc. Best in our minds that the owner or their assigned RP take responsibility for the building, the Knox Box allows them to take a bit more time.

It likely depends on the form of government your municipality "enjoys". Where I work we must get a city councilor to sponsor the ordinance (new or change) and then take it through a multi-step process. The process includes a first reading before the council and public in attendance, where it likely becomes media worthy. The second reading meeting allows for public comments and question/answers. If there is no objection and the council is unanimous it can pass in second reading or if further review is necessary a final reading meeting/vote is held. Of course the number of forms of democracy city to city, town to town and state to state vary immensely, so who knows? Our Know Box Ordinance is part of our fire alarm ordinance that requires any building with a required reporting system to have a Knox Box if an RP isn't within a 10 minute response time. It takes very little convincing for most business owners, given the costs of just one door or replacement glass.

We've had this issue a few times over the years. Luckily in our state, we know that if a person is in police custody, the police officer has the authority to make all decisions for them. This may be a huge extension of liability for them, but takes any responsibility away from us. Since we like 99% of our police force and the few others we routinely deal with, we might explain to them the potential for injury/illness much like we would any refusal to ensure they too are making an informed decision. The only time "police custody" has been a significant issue was when the PD supervisor couldn't spare an officer to ride in the bus with the patient in custody, and wanted to un-arrest them so we could take them in without PD. This was not allowed to occur as the officers had already made a fairly big deal of how dangerous this guy was, thus we were forced to threaten to call in a state trooper of sheriffs deputy to transport with our crew, and the Sgt. decided not to take that option. The patient/prisoner had a minor injury, but the jail wouldn't take any prisoners with visible injuries without seeing the ED first.

Really? That's really what you think? It sounds like you are one of the younger members of our fire service that grew up in our new kinder gentler social experiment where everyone gets a ribbon, everyone's answers have value and no one is wrong. That may be OK (though I don't believe so) in grade school and on the play ground, but you quickly learn fair is really only part of Fairy Tale, and that when you're wrong, your boss isn't happy, the client isn't happy or in the case of the Fire Service someone ends up hurt or killed. Using the "there's more than one way to skin a cat" on fireground tactics is an excuse for being wrong, unless you can specifically detail why varying from tried and true tactics wouldn't have worked. Given what we know about the variation in the fire service hear in the US, is it so hard to beleive that a European country could have a few places where the FD performs subpar? I'll give them the fact that there's less choices and more standardization in many cases due to a nationalized fire service. As for the tactics employed in this video or any outside in firefighting, there is little doubt that the personnel will be safer if they never go inside, but what about the occupants? Is the fire service a property protection only business? Why have lights and sirens if our highest priority is self-preservation with little to no risk? More of us die on the road than from interior firefighting.

This works to satisfy the DOL, but does nothing to diminish the public perception that fire scenes are rampant with firefighters thus giving the illusion that staffing is not an issue.

This is the one that gives us some heartburn when M/A shows up with "extra" helpers. We're fortunate that we can count on most of our M/A companies sending adequate numbers of interior firefighters, but the extra exterior firefighters often don't have an officer and or a true company assignment. 95% of the time this isn't a real issue, they help out where they can, but our fear is that they've never been properly accounted for.As has been pointed out, and is especially true in this time of austere budgets, having a see of Nomex and shiny reflectors gives the public a vision that we have tons of firefighters basically standing around, leading them to believe staffing cuts are viable. Maybe these exterior folks need some sort of visual indicator that shows they're not fully classified firefighters? I know our State Labor Dept is always interested in how the IC can tell the difference between the various "levels" of FD responders, a real problem in most places where the system allows for less than fully qualified firefighters.