16fire5

The FDNY voice dispatch is the secondary system which is used when the Computer Aided Dispatch system is down. The primary system is by computer which is accompanied by a two tone commonly refered to as the be-boop followed by .wav files for engine, ladder ect. The firefighter on house watch duty is responsible for acknowledging the alarm on the computer and reading it off over the PA. Computer voice dispatch is quite common and in use in some very large departments including Indianapolis and Houston.

I used to get mad about this sort of thing but i realized that it's just some peoples way and most mean no harm. I many times wish I took a picture of somethings but it's never the first thing on my mind. I was in Rockaway a few days ago and took 2 pictures total. Kinda felt guilty taking a picture. Plenty of work still left to do many members lost almost everything. The bright side is you see the brotherhood in action doing the right thing.

There are thousands of examples across the country where volunteers report to a career chief. It can work and will work for the volunteers who want to serve. If your sole motivation is preserveing your fifedom then this is bad but unfortunatly it's worse for the taxpayers.

We have a training video that just came out and one good tip that I got from it is the practice of moving the eductor from can to can is bad. It's much better to pour the cans into a pail or garbage can since suction can be maintained. The foam bin looks interesting.

Brother, you're comparing apples to oranges. This is not a hands on basics class I agree you can get that plenty of places. This is for the complex stuff we experience more than the next guy but big city or county (imagine that) departments need to be prepared for. Believe it or not we have some real sharp guys on the job that spend a lot of time putting together a great presentation on unique topics. Imagine you are the special ops chief for a large fire department with over 1000 career firefighters and you are charged with evolving your programs. This is the conference for you.

Hopefully someone who's been to the excellent symposiums held there cares to weigh in otherwise all i hear is sour grapes. The foundation does so much good for the department and they have nothing to do with the helmets aside from the money being directed that way (so they say funny the check isn't made out to them).

What I think is this is the biggest bunch of union bashing being endorsed by the keynote speaker of the GOP. Give me a break. Look at page two the county says the new department will cost about the same amount as the old department. So why are they doing this? This is a great idea get rid of the veterans who know the streets and lets put a force predominatly made up of rookies in one of the most dangerous cities in the country. If this isn't destined to fail I don't know what is. I pray they come to their senses before it's too late. Rant over.

RIP

I for one agree with retirement after 10 years. I find it hard to justify keeping a helmet more than 10 years in the environment we work in. Numerous times my helmet had been struck by falling objects and been exposed to significant heat. If you compare how long we are keeping our head protection compared to any other industry it shows how we still refuse to accept the facts on some issues. Too many people think their helmet reflects their experience. It doesn’t and there are way to many ways people artificially age their helmet (I refuse to even mention the ludicrous methods I have witnessed and heard about because I'm sure some will attempt them). It should also be noted that plenty of members have gone to change out their helmets and serious defects have been found that would have necessitated retirement of the helmet regardless of age. As for the NFPA I agree with the sediment I'm sure manufactures are heavily represented and frequently recommend retirement goals that benefit their industry. The NFPA has a hard time getting good fire service representatives so part of it is the fault of the fire service. My biggest beef is what they usually call standards are not that. They are utopian goals. If 1% of the fire service has any chance of obtaining the standard it's not a standard. This has already been seen in 2010 South Carolina DOL issued violation to North Charleston based on what they read in NFPA standards. What followed is how numerous fire service leaders had to write letters to support North Charleston basically admitting that no one completely complies with NFPA 1500.

One thing you didn't bring up but is worth considering is if you keep single role vehicles can you staff them? You very well may have been able to when you make the purchases back 20 or more years ago but what's your manpower these days? During the day? If staffing is no issue and you ran lots of fires single role vehicles might be the way to go but lets face it no one has the manpower to get all those rigs out. If some of your stations are not going to get two rigs out i may be better to replace the pumper and tanker with a pumper tanker. Maybe your main station has more manpower they could have a pumper and a pumper tanker there that could also be the spare for the other stations. As for the rescue pumpers I think the designs over the last few years have really done a good job of getting a lot of space into the new rigs. Also staffing again comes into play. Can you get an engine and a rescue out at 1000 on a Tuesday? All the time? 50%? Only if Joe is home? If not you are not alone. If you are only getting one rig out and it doesn't have both tools and a pump and water eventually you will be caught with you pants down. In the rural setting this can be a busy rig if you plan it right. It can not only handle all the MVAs but if it has a pump it can fill tankers and do supply and fill in for front line pumpers out of service. One thing I commend you and your department on is actually having the discussion. Many places are increasing the number of rigs or replacing without thinking about this. Single function rigs may be better but they do no good if they are sitting in the firehouse.

Probably the most common in this area. It is the system NYC went with. Many companies with FDNY instructors pushing the system. Since the FDNY went with this system and the law was passed there has been lots of other competitors and new systems. Don't fall into this is the best because FDNY has it. Remember when you go with Petzl you have to use their authorized instructors. Some of us did full days of jumps while our system was being developed and tested. Bruised and tired. There are other expensive bags out there including the new lumbar bag which gets mixed reviews. It comes down to this You can not hide 50 feet of rope. This is a problem with most systems that are on the harness. The other option is putting the rope in one of the leg pockets. I believe this is what Yonkers does. They have the leg pocket custom designed to carry the rope. The two problems I have with this is that if the pocket is down by the knee it is a lot of leg work to lift the weight (more work than if you carried the same weight in your coat pockets). The other thing is that you then need a lanyard which is just another thing to catch on the bicycle inside the door to the apartment. The best system I have seen (my opinion only) is the Yonkers style pocket on the turnout pants just below the harness at the point of harness attachment this way it is low enough for the coat to not get interfered with and high enough that you are not lifting it with your knee. Take the time and set your pants up and you can eliminate this. I put my suspenders on top of the pouch and bunch some between my legs so it will not catch on anything. I store my pants with the harness snapped which I find keeps things more neat. As for GBFD the F4 is nice and I probably like it best but it is not perfect. One nice thing about it is it actually slides a little when released instead of shocking the body. The Illinois Fire Service Institute has been researching these systems head to head and the F4 did extremely well in their tests.

I love the stuff about officially issued keys. Members have been making the keys for themselves for years. The 1620 in question is used to recall elevators and operate the car. I have been aware of situations where residents in some public housing projects have gotten keys. It did cause limited problems but in the past phase II operation of elevators in NYC public housing projects was shaky at best due to the vandalism. They seem to be better about it now but it's not uncommon to find one or both of the elevators out of service.

It's also rare that things like this occur the first time. Chances are he did this before. Chances are somebody in his department knew about it. So my lesson to the leadership out there is show some and police your people. Have zero tolerance for idiotic driving. No where does it say you have to authorize those blue lights. It's incredibly delicate for someone who needs to get elected every year to dole out discipline but surely niping things in the bud can possibly prevent tragedies like this.

And then promotions...

I am going to stand up for the Altair. I think it works well for a 4 gas meter for operations level firefighters. I hear your complaints about O2 sensors but in my experience every meter that gets used will require O2 sensor replacement. I'm sure the new demo looks interesting but it two will probably need some work after 2 years.

I know I am entering a whole new realm by quoting myself here but I had the opportunity to view the operation of some departments in Minnesota. I won't call them volunteer because they are not and they do not call themselves that. They are paid on call but it's not much money in the end. But one thing they do and is pretty common in that area of the country is they have a radius around each firehouse and you must live in that radius to be a member. It helps them get out quick. That among other things showed how squared away they were.

I just read an incident alert from Westchester where a volunteer department requested a farther away volunteer department as a FAST and later on called for the closer career department FAST. It appears the closer career department beat the volunteer department called 5 minutes before them. I don't understand why these departments don't have those departments on automatic response. I speculate it's because they don't want to get beat in to all their fires. I'm sure the person who's house on fire would disagree. In the volunteer system where the firehouse is not staffed driving distance dosen't really mean anything. There are so many variables like. How many members they have, when they are available, and how far they live or work from the firehouse. Some spread out districts take 10 minutes to get on the road and other dense village departments get out in 2 minutes.

Took me a while to figure out what your beef is but now I got it. You seem to have a problem with CIty of Newburgh calling the Air Guard and West Point. Maybe you should take it through the channels and let them know you will will be able to respond within a certain amount of minutes with a full interior crew everytime you are called. Then you might have a beef but right now it appears many department "hit and hope". Didn't Newburgh have to rotate mutual aid anyway because the closest departments complained about being called too much? Did you have complaints about that arrangement?

I disagree. In most cases it is not dealt with by the union or the house. Ask the NYPFFA 5th district. And now that Cassidy got beat badly in the IAFF race he will not care a thing about what goes on outside the borders of the city.

I think this is a good SOP and would work well for most departments. The 35 is a good number to go on air if you are encountering it by the door. From my experience when I get 35 at the door it will be above 100 somewhere inside. I would also add that I never really like to rely on 1 meter. We wear ours all the time and even the ones we have now have a tendency to get saturated at times because we wear them into fires. I feel much more comfortable giving the all clear to the occupants when it's confirmed with two independent meters. I also like to make sure I get someone to the heating plant. Many times just viewing it can let you know what happened. Here's a story of a run I had a few months ago. 3 AM run for CO detector activated. More than 1 detector activated. Readings in the teens. Rain and damp outside. Occupants have no symptoms but are drunk. They say the alarms went off earlier in the day (more than 12 hours ago) and the landlord changed the batteries. Some of my guys think it is the rig parked outside so we move it. With doors opening and closing readings go down to single digits but the voice in my head says something is not kosher. So I make sure the OV gets into the basement to see the furnace even though it requires him to force the door. And he finds the flue detached from the furnace. Would it have killed anybody? Probably not but would we have done our job if we left? Not in my opinion. Be thorough resist the pressure from the troops to go back to bed quick. Many officers at one time or another have gone back to the firehouse and laid in bed wondering if they did everything they should have. I have and it's not a good feeling so I learned from it.

My thoughts going into it are always the same. Thinking of the families of those that we lost. Sometimes it seems like only yesterday until I see the kids. Those that were toddlers are now teenagers and those that were young kids are now driving.

I agree. It's a different animal and since it's almost always type I construction there is almost no threat of speading fire in void spaces. Additionally it is so tried and true many large commercial high rises have stairwell presurization systems.

I like to totally separate the two with PPA meaning positive pressure attack which is using the fan prior to knock down. PPV is using the fans to clear the smoke. I'm not a PPA fan (Sorry the pun was to easy) and can even point to some NIOSH reports that show it was a contributing factor in a LODD. PPV on the other hand can be very useful. We routinely use it at fires in high rise multiple dwellings which are a very common occurrence in the City of New York. They have been very useful in keeping the attack stairway virtually smoke free. History has shown that many civilian fatalities in these buildings were from smoke inhalation in the stairways. Unfortunately the gas powered fans are not perfect because they themselves introduce CO into the building sometimes over 100 ppm. This is very acceptable during a working fire but not really when you are trying to merely remove CO. Plenty of experimentation going on to address the issue from exhaust hoses, catalytic converters, to newer more powerful electric fans. We send an Engine and Truck for CO responses. When I have high readings I call for the chief and may transmit the box if I need more help.

Did it always have an automatic transmission? Or did that get done on a refurb?

After all this you urge the citizens to vote no to a resolution. Let me get this straight you really won't endorse anything unless the volunteer fire service has veto power over what goes on? Also I don't see how anyone starting from scratch would model anything off PG County. There are much better models out there.