AFS1970

I would guess that the reason for separate organization is because the fire company/department was formed first. They were probably a group of citizens who got together in response to a need and operated as a single organization for many years. At some point a fire district was formed for the purposes of taxation. That new entity, instead of reinventing the wheel simply collected taxes and then contracted with the existing company/department to provide services. As for why there are administrative officers and line officers, that is partially due to the requirement to have certain titles represented when forming a company and probably also to divide the work between multiple people who are doing this part time. Could the Chief also be the President, sure it is possible, but sometimes you have members with very different skill sets. This is no different than having staff chiefs and line chiefs in a large career department. As a matter of fact, I have often thought that many volunteer departments do not have enough officers, because they are based on outdated formulas or average responses as opposed to total membership. Oh and as for wasting money on parades, yesterday I saw a nice new career engine in a parade, as well as the various antiques. It looked good and has some interesting new markings on it. I am not sure that it cost much to put it in the parade, but in my city it is fairly common for the newest career rig to be in local parades. In a way I think it is a shame that after all the work put in by the design committee that career departments don't send rigs to more competitions, as some of them have nice features built in to them.

Date: 11/25/2013 Time: 07:00 Incident Type: Protest at Construction Site Location: 66 Summer St (between Broad St & Main St) District: Stamford Units: Stamford Police Description: Three protesters have climbed a construction crane (approximately 15 stories up) at the site of the Park Square West Phase II building. This is on very narrow section of Summer St next to Majestic Theater. SPD on scene, evaluating incident. There is at least one protester on the ground that may have radio contact with those on the crane. Will likely call Hostage Negotiation Team to deal with individuals. Governor Malloy is due at site for event later this morning for an event. UPDATE: Media now reporting that 2 out of 3 protestors have been brought down and that the reason for the protest was some sort of union issue. (no reports on if it was pro-union or anti-union). UPDATE 2: This was not a union related protest, it was a part of a larger protest of UBS's involvement in strip mining in PA. The same group protested at the Parade, had lookouts on nearby buildings and then charged the UBS HQ, eventually chaining themselves up on the 5th floor.

The original article kind of makes it seem that the FD pulls up sends in a demo team and breaks whatever they can. This is not the way to do it. VES is all about venting the areas you are working in, which ultimately helps other areas also. I wonder what the difference between this 90 second cool down and what was being pushed as a "blitz" a few years ago is? They seem pretty similar. As for the video that Cogs posted, what is in that magic milk crate they seem so concerned about?

Seeing some of the signage, I wonder if some of the white surfaces could be made in other colors too. Although it does seem that it is mostly just an ambulance with entertainment features, anything that makes the kids more comfortable is a great idea. Oxygen bears and ice packs shaped like penguins and turtles are a good start but about all we get here.

Garbage men still ride the back step, and one was recently killed doing so. While allot of the safety requirements we deal with may seem bothersome, we are told time and time again that what others do is no reason for us to do the same. I have heard of allot of agencies that go in with two meters just in case one malfunctions, this requires at least 2 people. I once kept a mutual aid unit coming in because I wanted a second meter ready and was blasted by the Chief for doing so. Funny thing is the mutual aid company (which was very close to the call) blasted me for taking the meter and a crew in a pick up truck to the call. I just didn't need anything bigger. I once questioned full turnout gear and SCBA on these calls to a senior officer, and his response was CO is the product of incomplete combustion, thus there is a risk of fire, however small, when investigating these calls. I really had no argument against him on that one.

My screen name used to be related to my department, well my former department. Seth was kind enough to change it for me when I left there so I could avoid any claims of misrepresentation. My current one is my initials and some numbers. However my name and town are my post signature and are on the left side of all my posts. Oddly enough while I have been part of some lively discussions here, I have never really had much of a problem with anyone here. That has not been the case on other forums where I had to leave because of a lack of moderation. On that one, much more was out in the open and there was a large group from one department that took it upon themselves to let everyone else know their shortcomings. Trust me, EMTBravo has nothing on the career vs volunteer issue compared to this bunch. So there are sometimes benefits to being a bit more anonymous. Then again, I joined here when you could be anonymous, but had to be recommended by a current member and fill out a form with your real information on it for Seth. I was a volunteer at the time and was recommended by a career fire officer. You also used to have to be willing to have your identity confirmed, although I don't know if anyone ever checked on me. One interesting thing about being anonymous, There used to be a very local (Stamford-Greenwich) forums and my user name there was a fairly well known nickname. I think everyone on the forums knew me because I used that name in real life also. One of my posts was quoted in a newspaper article about firefighter safety and the reported basically said I was hiding behind a screen name. I had to laugh because they probably could have asked anyone in town who I was and they would have told the reporter.

This has been going on for years, I met a group of NYPD dispatchers at a conference quite a while ago ago and they told similar stories. I remember a news article of a dispatcher who was forced to work a double shift then arrested in the dispatch center when a complaint was made that her kids were home alone. I did have to laugh at the mention of an Armed supervisor. Considering they work for a police department, is there any other kind? Gotta love the lame stream media.

while we all have to be careful of our sources, if this were not true there would have been an official denial in the newspapers and the Post would have had to print it or look very bad in a market where print media is already suffering. While unnamed sources are a problem, being a municipal employee I can completely understand why someone would be such a source, when there are rules in place about who can talk to the media and what they can say. Sometimes these sources are not legitimate, but often they are.

I think you are way off base here, because where I hear this most over the radio and there is only one electrician that I know of and no High Schoolers who are police officers in my city. However traditionally my city refuses to refresh the police officers CFR, which runs out 3 years after the academy, they carry no first aid equipment other than a defibrillator and generally make this call as one of two EMS options, the other being cancel EMS. I assume your statement is a dig as some volunteer fire department but at least around here the units going to Medical calls have some base line training, although experience is sometimes lacking. That is being corrected with each refresher course now that some old attitudes are going away both in fire and EMS.

What it really means is this. There is nothing I can do, but people are watching, so I will say something meaningless into my radio so that the public thinks I am in complete command and control of the situation.

There have been several attempts to combine equipment, but for some reason the Quint gets the brunt of the criticism. I am no fan of Quints as I have rarely seen them done well. But was there this kind of response to the Quad? I agree that Rescue Pumpers generally can not do much more than be an Engine with a little bit of rescue tools. As for the name, I guess that, like the issues surrounding pumper-tankers, will depend on which it is equipped to do more with? Squads are a whole other matter because I don't think any two regions use the term the same. In Stamford we had a Squad that was a Pumper and ran as such, then we had a short lived Squad that was a manpower rig but could depending on the day be in an engine, rescue or passenger van. In Greenwich I saw a Squad that was just a suburban, but now they have a squad that is an mobile cascade and lighting truck, which in some places would just be called a utility. In New Jersey a Squad is generally an Ambulance.

I am surprised they were willing to take on the liability of someone else's prisoners. We had a Desk Sergeant suffer a fatal heart attack and the officers working with him in the jail did do CPR. No question manpwer needs to increase on the road, but this is more robbing Peter to pay Paul than anything else. I had also heard this about Pound Ridge PD. There are some in our state government that want to go back to county government, although they have much prettier sounding names for it. THis is mostly because they figure they can add an additional level of taxes on us. Decisions like this are rarely about efficiency. THey are usually about saving money and more often than not only concerned with the short term and not the long term. Even the Ambulances? lol.

They have a petition drive and a 28 minute long video about their history, there must be some kind of challenger.

I am not a big fan of the flu shot, as I know too many people who have become sick after getting the shot. My old department offered it most years, I never took it. I rarely got the flu. That DOH mandate makes for an interesting employment issue, as the Nurses guessed. However I wonder about another aspect of it. The employer offers the shot, you decline. Because you decline, you must wear and change masks often. Who pays for the masks? One the one hand they are safety equipment and the employer should have to provide it, but on the other hand the employer offered you a choice and you elected the mask, thus you do not have to wear them if you take the shot. I have no idea if enough masks would be involved that they might become more expensive than the shot, but obviously employers are seeing the shot as less expensive than sick leave. What happens when some employer decides that masks are cheaper than the shot and decided not to offer them to employees? It seems to me that the employment aspects of this mandate have not been fully explored.

At first I thought this was not going to be useful for me, but then I found myself not to far from the scene of an incident but with spotty wireless so I did not post an IA. I was thinking that if someone was on the channel at the time I might have been able to relay information to another IA writer.

Is this still being tested/used? I have been on it a few times and never seem to see anyone online. It might just be that I am on at odd times of the day and night.

So wait you mean phrases like "in the area" don't equal a fast response? I am shocked! One thing that has changed the way that arrival times are calculated are MDT's. Since there is an arrival icon (button) on the screen, it gets hit before getting out of the rig. In that highrise scenario you gave there could be allot of time between that and patient contact. Since many EMS contracts require a certain percentage of calls be handled within a certain time frame, I doubt you will ever see any change that extends enroute times, even if it might lead to better patient care standards.

I always thought Smeal built their own ladders, and actually built them for a few other manufacturers. Any specifics on why this is a Smeal / LTI?

I haven't seen it yet, but Not counting Cop Rock, this might be the first show since Barney Miller to treat police work in a comedic way and make it work. Everything the "last precinct" was not.

I looked into EMT reciprocity there a while back, but never got it. You had to do the usual of sending information in but also take a few of their state classes, not sure if it is the same for Paramedic. I did find the staff there very easy to work with over the phone. THey did want you to have a sponsor department to take the classes but were flexible about that.

Granted all we have is a news story to work off of, but the story brings up several questions. First the idea that the bodies may have been put there after the blaze or firefighters may have missed them. I know forensics is good but since the bodies were burned could they really tell if they were burned somewhere else? Then there is the quote from the department spokesman, who said both "there was no indication anyone was inside" and "It’s a known location for squatters" those don't seem to be consistent to me. I get that FDNY has to deal with this sort of command decision more than most department, older buildings, in bad repair, apparently abandoned, In no way am I saying that the IC made the wrong decision to make this an exterior attack. I do find the news coverage to be a little sensationalist (hoping there will be more to this story than there probably is) and the spokesman's choice of words to have been not what they could have been. I also don't think it is fair to even speculate that the bodies were missed by firefighters when there was no interior search, no matter the reasons. Something never looked for is not generally considered to have been missed and using that phrase really makes a good job by FDNY seem like a bad job.

Wow, that's a little more that I was expecting when I saw the title kit-bash.

Another perspective on the paid-volunteer aspects of a combination department came from a career FF I was taking an EMT refresher with several years ago. He is a unique individual but in his own way is dedicated to his department both as a volunteer member and a career member, he served briefly as Chief while working there. He was adamantly against rules that limited the roles career FF's could have, as he said it did more to drive wedges and create different classes of FF than anything else. In my dept (as I said earlier) we limited how many career FF's could be officers. This guy bought up the point that if the best qualified guy was a career FF why force a less qualified officer. In a station where the officers are elected, why limit who the membership can vote for simply because they get paid? Especially when at the time the majority of career FF's were long time volunteers in those stations.

When my city first did DWI checkpoints (before DWI became OUI) they used to have a fire stand by. This was new and they were just learning how to do this and the thought was that there would be some horrible crash as someone tried to run the roadblock. Instead of just stopping cars on the street, they took a really wide section of roadway, one of our only 6 lane stretches. They directed all traffic into a parking lot / driveway where the actual checkpoint ran. They had bails of hay set up behind the barricades. It was quite a show. The Engine crew that was there watched all the action from the cab and said it was very entertaining. Fast forward a few years and these are now done with a few cars and a truck full of cones and sawhorses. The command post is there as a mobile office. The PD also has their own light trailer now. No on site fire component at all. However I can see where a sloppy reporter seeing firefighters at one of these would write a story like the one that started this.

More than a few years ago, talking with someone from a different department than I was in, he told me of a plan to renovate part of their meeting hall into a new day room. I asked why as the building had recently had an extension put on that added a new day room as well as other rooms. His answer was so that the volunteers would have somewhere to hang out. I had been to that station and sat in the day room with both volunteer and paid firefighters, so this was kind of confusing. However the clear sentiment was one of building a wall of separation. This is not brotherhood. The idea that you might have two groups in the same firehouse hanging out in two different rooms then meeting in the dark of night on the apparatus floor and expecting to work as a cohesive crew makes no sense to me. I suppose this is a slightly more dramatic form of everyone off on their own with cellphones or laptops. However the guy who told me of the two day rooms plan plan is a brother. We have been to training together and later at fires and other calls together. I would work side by side with him again any time. He is now a career firefighter.