AFS1970

If I remember correctly, I think Hartford still had pull up boots until some guys got burned on a ladder a few years ago. Sadly in the fire service we learn from other peoples misfortune.

Just looking back at my 3 most recent IA's. Only one was a structure fire. ! was a search for a missing person that required a lot of resources and one was for a dumpster fire that turned out to be bigger than originally reported and had some special called units. I know that last year I posted an MVA that had special considerations due to being on an elevated highway and having debris over the side. Maybe we all define interesting differently but I try and keep mine to things I think other would want to read about, even if they are not working fires.

I got it off the website and did not check it against a calendar. It is probably last years date then. Sorry.

Village of Mamaroneck Fire Department Annual Parade,Tuesday, July 1st at 7:00 PM ,on Mamaroneck Ave (from Mam'k Ave School to Harbor Island Park)

I will still post here, although I am not as active as I once was. To some extend I don't have the same frame of reference I did when I joined this site. As for Incident alerts, I like to read them and occasionally comment on them, but it does seem like too many of them either get no replies or turn into the usual battles. One reason I left another forum was over an incident alert I posted that turned into a bunch of guys from a certain department repeatedly bashing the members of one of the departments that responded to the incident I posted. The funny thing is had I done a less detailed post, they would not have had their cannon fodder. From that I learned less is more. I now list responding units by agency and usually in numerical or alphabetical order, not in the order they responded in. I try to make my IA's more about the incident and the circumstances than about who did what when and for how long. Look at the recent thread about a big brush fire, there were replies debating on if it qualified as big by some departments standards. I have to assume that it did by the local department's standards and that is really all that matters.

I post a few incident alerts, but I generally have a high threshold for what I think is interesting enough to post here. To me that is working fires, or incidents that involve a large amount of resources or contain some sort of unusual circumstance. These days the ones I hear about like that are few and far between.

Do not fool yourself, taxes will not go down. Just because those local taxes are no longer paying for the fire service does not mean that they will come back to the people. Governments are very good at finding more things to pay for with existing money.

I just checked all the RR bridges in Stamford, it would clear them all, and by more than a foot on all but one. I think Darien might be another story, they have a couple of low ones. Welcome to New England.

So we are to believe that the test included questions about baseball players wearing overalls?

Rest in Peace

To take the idea from a few posts ago or combining 2 5 man departments that handle 2 calls each a day into one 10 man department handling 4 calls a day. Yes numerically this will work. However it assumes that the calls are never simultaneous. If they are then we are back to the original topic or having to depend on mutual aid from the next town over, although because we already merged those two towns, we are now potentially waiting for a department to come from two towns away.

Some of the over reliance on mutual aid happens slowly and almost organically, so we end up like the frog in the pot of water, not realizing it is getting hotter until we boil. When I joined my old department we had 3 Engines, 1 Truck and 1 Rescue, for a relatively small district (less than 2 Sq. Miles). Some people would periodically ask why so much equipment, couldn't we just call a neighboring district? This was borne out of the current attitude of using automatic aid to provide basic services. However many departments did not object because call volume = manpower and that made the manpower available in the home district as well. Two of the districts that came into our district had recently given up ambulances which accounted for the majority of their runs, so they saw automatic aid as a good thing, it kept the numbers up and people employed. Yet a quick look back at a department history document that listed notable fires, mentioned a fire so big that a single engine had to be called from a neighboring district. This was at the time an exception to the rule. By the time I joined we were routinely rolling on box assignments with 3 or more districts going to automatic alarms, as the exception had become the rule. When and why did the change happen? I don't know exactly, but I bet it was slow and somewhat subtle. I know that my department used to just get a single automatic aid engine on all boxes, but then started with a truck on a few target hazards. One of the adjoining districts generally got an automatic aid engine and a truck on all boxes then added a second engine and truck to one large building with a large fire potential. Then two of the districts started adding automatic aid rescues on all MVA's. Very slowly you could not really tell which district a call was in, unless except by the first due Engine.. which even then was problematic because of where some borders were in relation to the stations. So looking at the Mount Vernon / Yonkers situation, I don't see some nefarious plan. I do see a slow change that has occurred overtime that many are suddenly waking up to notice is a bad thing and may not be sustainable in the long run.

Just to stir the pot a bit, here we are talking about two municipalities that have fairly large busy departments. If this were two small towns with smaller departments there would have been about a dozen posts (at least) calling for them to consolidate. Instead the calls are to increase both separate departments. I am not from Westchester so I have no horse in the race, but if a major urban department can't handle calls, perhaps the C word should be thrown around here too.

Can anyone explain to me how a written test can be sexist? I have heard and do not agree that they can be racist, but I just can't wrap my head around the fact that men and women somehow speak different languages? Understand different words? Use different alphabets? Last time I checked the test was given in English, the same language that all men and women are educated in (at least for the time being) in the country.

In my old station we used to test the horn at 4PM. We would periodically get complaints but we always told them it was a required back up to the pagers. We eventually changed it to noon time due to a child in the area with a specific problem with loud noises, then went down to a weekly test. If I remember correctly, once you designate the horn as your back up, the FCC requires daily tests, but hey why follow standards. As for the horn being a thing of the past, most of us would hit the horn button if it was a report of a working fire, this was of course mostly a historical practice, but it did send a quick message to anyone in the area. We got a call for smoke in the house once and I knew there was a member in the area that never carried a pager. So I hit the horn. He was across the street at the pharmacy. came running, made the second due piece and got to the house to find that his dad was the landlord and the tenant had a small fire in the motor of an appliance. So horns do have their value. I guess the air raid sirens have gone the way of automatic text alerts, but I find that sad. The one time I was outside when I got a Tornado warning, everyone in the crowd seemed confused by what to do next. I don't think getting rid of the sirens helps one bit. Plus the fact who among us, that had the switch for the Take Cover - Air Raid horn would not have sounded it on September 11, 2001? I think that attack certainly met the definition.

Wow, how is it that an April fools joke (and a good one at that) can lead to more replies than a serious thread?

Stamford abandoned their sirens years ago, although I remember testing them on the first Monday of the month when I started working. We no longer have the buttons for them in dispatch. As far as I know they are all still standing, the ones on private buildings were left to the building owners to deal with, I think 2 of them are still there but now I have to go look. Either way they would likely not be functional. As for the fire horns, I too remember those being a signal to us as kids. On school nights the 8PM test meant bedtime for a few years. On summer nights when all neighborhood kids were out and about, the 8PM test meant time to come home. I don't know if they still do it, but New Canaan CT use to have specific "boxes" that they sounded for school cancellations and delays due to weather.

I noticed that all these units now have an 8 in front of them but the pictures still show the numbers like 33 or 28. Is this something new that PGFD is doing?

Playing packman over your own house is fun. For those that play Ingress the scanner was changed to reflect this yesterday.

The old NYC EMS green was a different (and better IMHO) green than what Sanitation wears. Interestingly enough in Stamford the same change was made and the exact opposite reasoning was sited. Stamford has a long history of divisive uniform colors (which is more or less coming to an end), but our violations officers used to wear the same light blue shirts and dark blue pants as the special police officers they worked along side. The issue was brought up that someone looking to hurt a police officer would think they were police officers and since they were unarmed they would be more at risk. They now wear tan shirts and green pants, as do our animal control officers.

Funny!

Are there any standards for police like the multiple standards for fire? I don't think there are even any bodies that make such standards. Police responses vary widely, maybe even more than fire responses. In Stamford we send two officers to a burglar alarm, it is not unusual for such a call to wait until there are two nearby officers available to respond. I know of a smaller town not to far away where a friend who is a part time officer there laughed at that, as they handle burglar alarms as 1 officer calls. Of course their minimum is two officers per shift, and any part timers that are working add to that minimum. So sending both officers to any given call means tying up 100% of your resources. That being said, would consolidation help between these two municipalities? Perhaps not as that small town might find that call volume causes them to loose one of their two officers, where as on most shifts call volume would deploy more officers to a city like Stamford, paid for in part by that small town. I can't see that it would be any different in Putnam than it would be in Fairfield, except that we have more of a commercial base in many places. There are definitely benefits to consolidation, there are places where it has worked well. I am not sure that it is right for everywhere, but that is often not what such studies are looking for. In this case it is being pushed by towns that already want it, so the study is unlikely to point out any flaws.

Let's not also forget the Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire. This is also the anniversary of that fire.

I forwarded it out also. By the way, what is wrong with rotary phones?

If the lawyers and insurance agents who try daily to handcuff public safety actually had to ride a few shifts in any related field, I think their heads would explode.