AFS1970

Date: 03/22/2015 Time: 04:13 Location: Scalzi Park - 120 Bridge St District: SFD (Station 5) Units: SEMS: M1, M4, M901 (EMS Supervisor), SFD: E5, R1 SPD: 1A50, 1B56, 1E37, 2A35, 2B28, 2B55, 2C46, 3C29, 4C58, 8S4 (Sergeant) Description: 3rd hand report from out of town caller for woman who fell in a hole and could not move somewhere in a park near Washington Blvd. When phone contact was made with victim she was able to describe crossing a bridge into a park near courts and falling into some type of hole. Victim did not speak English and all phone contact was through an outside interpreter service. Large police response due to need to search entire park. Engine & Rescue companies sent due to potential for technical rescue. Probable area for call was directly behind and across Mill River from SFD Station 5. Cell Phone carrier was contacted to provide location of victims phone during call. Units conducted search on foot and in vehicles. Patient was located inside fenced in skate park, and transported to hospital by SEMS.

I have a feeling that utilities on EMS calls will be a whole other discussion than utilities on RIT/FAST calls. However I like to think of it this way. Why do you choose between the Engine or the Truck on any given call? Because they each have specific equipment and functions. Now what equipment and functions will you need on the average EMS call? can the utility handle it? That being said in my old department we took the Tower Ladder to an EMS call once, because the call was for someone injured on the roof, and my department had a history of removing a patient by bucket a few years earlier. This was because the specific call needed specific equipment. For most of the EMS calls we were going on at the time, I needed a backpack. As for the what if another call comes in argument, our statistics clearly showed that we were more likely to need the Rescue and the Truck at the same time than either of those and an Engine. My last term as an officer we set our utility up for EMS and it went well. Generally only if there was no driver for something bigger in house. The only thing we were not carrying on the utility was a backboard. For some reason I could not stop people from following behind in an Engine, because they thought I needed it, even if it was just a driver bringing the rig to me. Never once have I had to stretch a line at an EMS call.

I don't think anyone said that the METU could not also be used for evacuating nursing homes, the key to this thread is the lack of response to MCI's. I suppose if you had a multiple alarm fire at a nursing home at the same time as a train vs car collision with fire, then a decision would have to be made about which to do, but then again if you have two fires in teh same district that choice has to be made for every rig.

And by issuel rule he did not mean paying for it out of city money, at least not when he was mayor.

Rest in Peace

There is no question that there would be some benefits to consolidation. The benefits probably would outweigh the costs. However I reject the idea that there would be more tankers in a consolidated department. Sure the number of engines will probably decrease, but to say that Engines Trucks and Rescues will decrease but Tankers will increase is simply foolish. As for the number of Rescues, like with all apparatus two things should be taken into consideration, call volume and geography. With Rescues you have one more factor to take in and that is duties. In most suburban departments the Rescue handles extrication. In NYC that is handled by the Ladder Co. How many Rescues would they need if all pin jobs got a Rescue? For that matter how many would they need if NYPD ESU stopped doing MVA's? Comparing FDNY to just about anywhere else is far too often a great example of apples and oranges.

Actually I can see where consolidation might hurt an incident like this. This is because the principla reason for consolidation is saving money, which is generally a good thing. Imagine a county with 25 Fire districts. Of those, 15 have Tankers. Now you consolidate and as part of teh reduction in apparatus, you go down to 10 Tankers. Now this fire that required 8 for a given flow, is using 80% of your Tanker fleet. Not only can't you fight another fire at the same time, you are severly limited in how much you can increase without going right back to using mutual aid.

I have talked with people who served on honor guards and I think they are better when run by individuals or unions simply because when they are department run, two things always seem to crop up. First is the department mandating who can and must be on the detail, as well as deciding to send the honor guard to places it really shouldn't go. Secondly these become funding nightmares, as someone will always want to know why tax money was spent to go on some trip, even an honor guard school.

I thought it was until there is no longer an IDLH atmosphere, which is why Safety Officers actually have to go into the building to evaluate. That being said, I think there are many hazards that are still present even when the air is breathable, but these standards have their root in respiratory standards. I once saw a Safety Officer go inside with no helmet, he had a pack but not wearing the mask, and he was metering the air telling other guys to mask up it wasn't safe yet. So maybe that's not the best way to see how long to hold FAST.

I remember back when Suffolk County had a large brush fire and had many Nassau units relocated for coverage and work, FDNY relocated into Nassau County. Granted in that one they ended up moving up to Suffolk and working at the fire, but they did start out responding for mutual aid and not expecting to go to work. Of course I heard stories of Boston rigs coming accross on a ferry, so that may be too strange an incident to use as an example.

Wow, interesting story.

It seems to me that it could actually be more cost effective to hire someone older, as long as they passed all the various tests. They would likely spend less years at top pay before retiring, and might not have as much time vested in the pension when they do retire. Some might not even be maxed out as most who are hired at young ages will be. Where I work as a Dispatcher (I started at 19) I will max out on my pensions contributions before I am old enough to retire. Of the people who have retired so far, none of them were maxed out, as they were all hired at a higher age than I was. Granted we are not talking about the same risk of physical injury, but each of our retired dispatchers has essentially cost the city less than I have.

If the sole purpose of this unit is to evacuate nursing homes, then why wasn't it paid for by the nursing homes? Most of these are private facilities being operated for a profit. At what point does somethig become the government responsability? Here in Stamford we have 2 matching command post units, 1 bought for the police and 1 for the fire department, under the same grant program. Now since most of these grants seem to require NIMS compliance (or at least the illusion of compliance) why would we need two units for a single unified command structure? I actually heard someone say we would have got a third one for EMS but our EMS service is not city run.

I know of one town in NJ where EMS is sent on all reported MVA's regardless of reported injuries. The ambulance gets there and the police will say they want everyone checked out. From what I have heard this is some sore of perceived liability issue where the police want EMS to be the ones to say there are no injuries. So in this case even when people say they are not paients they seem to be patients none the less.

Rest in Peace

That is a cool rig. Especailly since I only remember the current Patrol 1 which is a much smaller rig and not as pretty.

The only one in our area that I can think of is North Hudson Regional Fire Department in NJ, I think that was a merger of 5 departments, all career. I remember reading some news about it when it happened, but again I don't know the internal details. It does seem to be working though. I know they closed at least one station due to two towns having stations a few blocks from each other. I think however the staffing was only reduced by attrition to accomplish that. So while there was an overall reduction, nobody lost their jobs that I know of.

Although I don't know the internal details, I can think of two Police consolidations that have happened in our region. The most prominent would be when NYPD, NYC Housing Police and NYC Transit Police all merged. However one that included more departments would be the MTA PD merger that consolidated Metro-North PD, LIRR PD, and several smaller departments like Staten Island Rapid Transit PD.

Even if the primary use is to evacuate hospitals and nursing homes, I see no reasons why they could not also be pressed into service in a MCI for treatment. In the past we have used school buses or transit buses to transport large numbers of people. I am old enough to remember when every U.S. Mail truck was convertible to an Ambulance and all had the "CD" logo on them because they were Civil Defense resources. How is it superior to put an EMT on a school bus than on an METU?

Rest in Peace.

We all have our agendas, but not all agendas are bad. It is just that we often find ourselves in competition because our agendas may not mesh together seamlessly. Consider these: Department A runs apparatus with 2 career firefighters each. In order to meet 2 in 2 our rule this requires multiple rigs. Now this says nothing of NFPA 1710 or 1720 requirements. Department B a single engine on automatic alarms, some big buildings get an engine and a truck. Department C has a single 4 man Engine that goes on all calls, but gets automatic Aid on all box alarms of at least a 3 man Engine and a 2 or 3 man Truck from different neighboring departments. Department D send at least 4 rigs with 4 man crews on Automatic Alarms, sometimes more are sent. Now all of those departments are either career or combination departments. Do you think they all have the same agendas? I would bet they do not. For the smaller staffing levels, I think increasing manpower is probably the #1 priority. I would also bet that the better staffed do not want the penny pinchers to know that other departments in the region do the same with less. I could list a similar scenario with dueling volunteer agendas but I think you get the point. I think that article is good, as it tries to get us to focus on the larger picture. However there is a saying that all politics is local, and I think that applies to the fire service as well. We spend a great deal of our time looking inward trying to limit ourselves to our own little area and never look at what goes on even one town away, let alone one state away.

I have a feeling that many communities have these issues. I remember going on a medical call where we walked up the driveway to find the house extended way into the back, had a second porch with two more entrances on the side and a large room with what was formerly an indoor pool. The door I went into for the medical call lead to a staircase that lead to the attic which was divided into a few rooms with a common bathroom at the end and no second exit. From the front the house looked like a small house, even thee picture the tax office had did not show the truth. I sat down with the housing code enforcement boss at the Health Department who started an investigation. A second house in the district was the subject of a landlord tenant complaint, I took at work. It just happened that it was in the fire district that I was an office in at the time. I knew that it should be a single family house so I asked the tenant complaining about his landlord how many units there were and he said FIVE. This included the landlord who lived there also. Thankfully for one of the rare small town moments we still get occasionally the police officer was a veteran member of the fire company and understood the implications, so I was able to make sure he forwarded copies of his report to the fire marshal, health department and zoning enforcement. I am guessing that those two were not the only ones, just the two I found. As our district is a small part of the city, this has to be a bigger problem. Now reading about Spring Valley, this is probably an issue in most communities. Construction issues like these have lead to LODD's. We need to be aware of them, train for them but also not be afraid to call for enforcement when needed.

It is not always bashing. I agree that asking questions is a good way to learn things. The specific bashing I was talking about was not even bothering to masquerade as a question. On that other forums there was open criticism in the incident thread about how many rigs got on the road and how soon they got there. Mostly valid points, but not really for an IA type of thread. There are the remarks that don't help like I see you had six Engines on scene, I guess that means you had six members there, good job! On a positive note, we have the beginnings of an educational thread going about the recent train crash, although that could go south at any moment.

There was another similar themed forum that I was a member of. I left that because the flame wars were even worse than they have ever been here. I posted an incident alert, and that thread turned into an unrelenting bashing of the fire district that the fire was in. Now I will not defend that department, as they had an abysmal response, however there were multiple automatic mutual aid companies that got there quickly and handled the call. A group of "professionals" from one department quite a bit away from my city decided that it was their job to repeatedly bash this one department, which frankly got to be a bit over the top. When I complained to the administration of that board, I got a PM saying they agreed but would not lock the thread. Oddly enough, I saw almost the exact opposite here once. A thread was posted about an incident where a member was injured. A few people started asking tactical questions, no different than have been asked in numerous other threads on here. Questions that were not offensive but seemed to be directed at learning about the incident and how not to suffer similar injuries and a flame war started because nobody should ever dream of questioning the actions of those on scene at this incident. Partly due to this thread, I posted an IA last night. The fire itself was not all that remarkable, but it had some interesting factors. I was surprised to see that almost 24 hours later, with a winter storm in the middle, it was still the most recent IA. I normally would not have posted about an incident that small, but now I am kind of glad I did.

Date: 02/02/2015 Time: 05:01 Location: 28 Westover Rd (Between Palmers Hill Rd & Coachlamp Ln) District: Turn of River Units: E9, E64, T3 (Special Call), FM104* Weather: Snow Storm Description: Initially reported as a 30 gallon trash can on fire in the driveway of a house. Homeowner was reportedly attempting to extinguish this by shoveling snow into the can, E9 arrived and called for E64 (already enroute on initial call) to lay in a supply line from the hydrant due to this being a 30 yard roll off dumpster. A Fire Marshal was also requested. E9 special called a truck company for ventilation due to smoke in the house from the exterior fire. Fire did not extend to the structure. Response slowed by ongoing snow storm. *Fire Marhal not responding due to weather conditions and fire being a minor exterior one.