SRS131EMTFF

If you want to be taken seriously, you need to act and write seriously. If you can not write out complete sentences without "text-speak" when address professionals, especially on a topic you feel so passionately about, then you will not be taken seriously or given the respect you desire. Effective communicating is just one part in the difference between adolescence and maturity. Another aspect is understanding your limits and the risk involved in your actions. At 19 and male, the insurance for your car is significantly higher than that of a 30 year old male, if you don't pay your actual bill, ask your parents, thats what I did. There is a reason for this difference, this reason is that people in OUR age and sex groups get into a significantly higher number of crashes causing serious property or bodily harm. These are the indisputable facts backed up by well documented and respected statistics. If you do not believe this also relates to driving fire apparatus, then I have no idea what facts will actually sell you on anything. One thing that needs to be understood is that no one here is saying you specifically are a bad driver, however the facts and statistics are stacked heavily against you. Additionally, no one is saying you will crash, however, odds are you will at some point before you turn 25. What people are saying here is that at 19 you have had a full drivers license for 3 years tops if your 20th birthday is tomorrow, if you have been a full member of your department since age 18 you have only been interior qualified for 2 years, if you have been driving, you may have been driving for a year, maybe a year and a half. If anything is even remotely true, how many times have you driven your ladder in the snow, the rain, the 40+ mph gusts of wind? How many times have you driven code 3 to a working fire with reports of people trapped? How many times in a year to a year and a half have you considered what crashed the $750,000 rig you are driving endangering the lives of yourself, your crew, the people on the road and the people who called for your assistance will do to you, your family, your department and the community? My answer, as well as the answer of those opposing your opinion on this topic is not enough...I am sorry we disagree but its not about your feelings or opinion, its about public safety. Not public safety in terms of police/fire/ems, but public safety in the form you of driving a 20+ ton piece of high tech firefighting equipment 30+ miles an hour down a busy street while school is getting out. Sure outliers do exist, but statistics dont lie. You factually and statistically are not a safe driver nor experienced driver. You are right, you need experience to get skilled, just not at 19...

If you just joined you shouldn't be driving anyway so I fail to see how that is relevant. Additionally, there are at least a dozen activities I can think on the fire ground that do not require an interior certification, throwing ground ladders, rehab, running the kinks out of the line, traffic duty, etc etc that all need to be completed on a fire scene that do not require you to have even attended probie school let alone complete it. If you are fresh out of your probie period, someone with more bugles on their uniform than you decided believed that you had the brains, balls and knowledge required to be an interior qualified firefighter. With that in mind, you better be fighting for that nozzle otherwise you are no use. Even if you have nto seen one fire, you are still expected to do the job you were trained to do. You must crawl before you walk and learning how to be a firefighter is crawling to the driving a firefighter to a fire (the walking). As I said above, you maybe the most mature individual on the fire scene, but that does not mean I want you driving me code 3 to the scene and pumping my handline. I would much rather take the 75 year old 50 year vet in the department who still has smoke in his lungs from the war years and has been pumping since my father was getting his drivers license operating that engine or aerial. Unless you have ever experienced an pump operator failure inside a burning building or had to try to stick a line in the back of an ambulance, anyone under 21 has no idea what is like to have a driver fail you and your crew. How many fires has a 18 year old actually pumped at, how many time has an 18 year old had to fly the aerial to rescue a person from the middle of a 6th floor inferno, how many times has an 18 year old had drive code 3 in winding back country roads while CPR is being performed in the back of the rig? Not nearly enough for me to justify allowing them to drive for me. I know a lot of the younger people here will not agree with me, in fact I was one of you guys years ago. But then I had the privilege of experiencing what a young driver can have the potential to screw up, and that changed my mind. Driving is a promotion (or should be) in every department I have ever heard of. I don't know of one department that allows someone who didn't deserve it to drive. If you at 18 feel that you are mature enough to drive, I commend you, but wait another 3 years, actually learn what it takes to drive, learn what responsibilities you have and the dangers you are exposing yourself and your crew to, if that doesn't change your mind, then you will never drive for me, period.

21+ no question, then you can take EVOC or CEVO and pump ops, ladder ops etc. then get checked off by your department chief training officer. SMC in Colchester (The town next to Burlington where I go to school) has had numerous difficulties with their drivers to the point where they usually have an alumni member drive the pumpers, the ambulances are driven by upperclassmen drivers in their 20s. No offense to the posters under 21 who think they are qualified to drive a pumper or ambulance, but I don't trust your abilities. Regardless of what your department says, you have not had enough experience behind the wheel driving code 3 or using the pump or flying the aerial. I commend your desire to drive, but your skills are of better use inside tending to the patient or manning the hose line. This has been a point of contention in several departments I know of but it takes that one avoidable accident by a member under 21 to change the policy. Additionally, it is significantly less expensive to insure a 21 year old driver than a 18 year old. However, that point is secondary to the point where I don't feel safe with a driver younger than I am, for a time I would have disagreed with me, but I have learned that age actually does mean experience over the years. Don't drink the kool-aid, you are not a better driver, there is a reason why males under the age of 25 are the most expensive group of people to insure...we get into more accidents, plain and simple...if you need an 18 year old to drive your piece of apparatus, look into getting paid drivers.

I was told cancelled as well via facebook, however not being in the states I really would have no idea.

I have some form of question for all departments career and volunteer. Who among us is willing to convert 95% of their parade budget funds into training funds? Additionally, who here actually thinks despite their desires to do so, their intrepid beliefs will actually be listened to and implemented?

51k miles is not that many for a 15 year old TL, especially one from one of the largest and busiest city in CT.

Excellent point, just look at the position Vermont is in, while the state legislature failed to renew the license for another 20 years, the federal government approved it and now there is a show down in court that the state is almost promised to lose. Additionally Cuomo can't have his cake and eat it too. If he wants green energy fine, I totally dig that but you cant oppose nuclear and be for green energy, one is the other. We as a nation get 10x more energy from nuclear power than we will from any other form of green energy out there for the next 50 years. There are trade offs with every form of energy: coal, oil, wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, draft animal etc; I for one am all for trading the damage of coal with the risks of nuclear.

Didn't FDNY get a real eye-opener on their need for drafting capabilities on 9/11 when many of the hydrants around ground zero were not functional and Fireboats were required to get water on the pile?

Or they had enough manpower of scene that they didnt need to special call FAST....FAST is just the name you give to the people providing the 2 out when you got 2 in. Around here we have special call teams called FAST or RIT, other places just use anyone else not doing anything.

Nice looking Truck, best of luck with it. I do know I never ever want to be behind that truck when all those lights are on.

I actually went to two YMCA camps back in my camper year. One in Putnam County when it first opened that was a day camp, (I was also their first camper needing hospitalization, but that is a different story) and another one that was a sleep away camp on Lake George. I ended up actually being a CIT at the sleep away camp before life called I started getting real jobs. Some of the best memories from my childhood, nevermind its brevity, were at these places. The whole C aspect of the YMCA gives it an undeserved bad-rap. I never felt pressured or belittle due to my opposing beliefs. I highly recommend sending ones kids to a camp like this so that they can reconnect with the natural world around them. We live in a concrete or suburban island, the deer in your lawn or the pigeons on your window do not count as wildlife. Unless you get moose charging through your backyard, we all could use a little more nature in our lives. There is nothing like living in a cabin for 4 weeks with 9 other kids your own again surrounded by absolute silence and nature. No cell phones, no internet no nothing but mountains, lakes, streams and animals was one the best part of it, I cant even explain the joy that everyone felt reaching the top of the mountains during hikes or the sadness one felt when leaving. I learned how to shoot, fish, hike, cook, clean and love nature of over the course of almost a decade of summer. I climbed the 46 highest peaks in NY, I canoed from Lake George to Canada, I explored a wilderness 250 miles NORTH of monteral, I rock climbed in Acadia National Park, in the White Mountains, I did the 100 miles Wilderness in Maine, Backpacked from NH to VT...I have a t-shirt from one of my summers that says.."what did you do with your summer?''. What will your children's answer be...what did they do with their summer? Did they sit on your couch playing xbox, or did they spend it outside, living, learning and exploring?

Is this on top of the 15 they ordered earlier this year? Is there any additional word on the tiller contract also from earlier this year.

If you check seagraves website they have been making a few Heavy Rescues... My guess, either the department want the chassis but not the body or Seagrave could provide the chassis but not the body. I don't think it would help Seagraves bottom line selling only the chassis and not a body attached if they could avoid it.

Clearly you have never owned a boat. They are really expensive. This 64foot Viking with an enclosed bridge from 2007 is 200K more than the boat in question. $2.4 million is cheap considering all of the safety and other life saving devices and appliances on it... http://www.sea-rays4.../specs2007.html

Great looking rig, best of luck with it. What is this, the third sutphen to Somers in the past 2 years and the second this year?

I discussed this article with my medical control doctor/director up in Vermont back when this article came out and his words were along the lines of "use your best judgement and follow your protocols and let me worry about the rest". The take away lesson I got was that while this is potentially ground breaking research, it should not get in the way of following protocols that are set in SOP/SOG and you have been trained to use within an existing standard of care. But then again, I am new to this, I am not a doctor and I may have misunderstood what he really meant.

seconded.

It may have been Pelhams Ferrara but I distinctly remember several conversations here about someone's Ferrara being FDNY something or other.

The county cannot even run its amusement park. Playland has been operating at a loss for the past several years, roughly at a cost of $4 million annually. Not that your idea can't work but playland is a bad example if you are looking for an example of a county run service. Obviously EMS is not supposed to be a profit driven industry but if a contractor was going to bid on an EMS contract it would have to prove to be economically viable, something that the counties amusement park is not.

Yes, exactly, thats what that box was called.

I hate to throw my hat into this ring but I happen to like at least the heads up. I remember when the Bravo had a status bar essentially that people could post unconfirmed for developing incidents. If you saw the update in the bar that Department ABC was operating at a 10-75 or MVA you could turn on your scanner and listen along. While obviously an IA should have all the info, it definitely is nice to get the heads up about developing incidents as opposed to simply reading about the incident from start to finish 15 minutes after it wrapped up. Maybe we could bring back that status bar?

Not that I have much experience in hospital administration but sounds like we are talking about the Triage or Fast-track patients, thus wouldn't free standing ED be a misnomer?

A 2 minute google search revealed the Cessna P210N holds a standard of 90 Gallons of Avgas....

Happy Fathers Day to all those fathers out there, or all you filling that role for your loved ones. An especially happy fathers day to those on-duty today, whether career or volunteer...including my own father. Be safe out there tonight.

Wow....looks great. When is delivery due and when is it expected to go into service?