velcroMedic1987

The bottom line is that the IC has the authority to request any resources he wants from the next town or the next county if he or she wants to. Bitching about it here is just that, bitching. It doesn't accomplish anything. Now I will say that a standard response matrix would benefit the county greatly and is used in many other places successfully. Instead Westchester has individual department run cards and there is no consistency or commonality. Look at the MCI in Chicago at the airport for the plane with pressurization problems the other day. A level 1 MCI was declared sending a standard package of resources. What do we have here in Westchester? NOTHING! Fiefdoms and egos preventing any kind of system development!

My original answer to this got caught in the thread split so it's not here. Yes, there was a serious accident on the TSP that pushed a lot of traffic off the parkway and onto Commerce Street.

To what incident are you referring? Bus drivers (public and private) aren't emergency personnel either but they are part of many evacucation plans. Did someone plan on using wheelchair vans in advance and contact them to develop an agreement or contract? If that were the case, they would have a contractual duty to act. We rely on lots of people that are not bound by any kind of "duty to act" so the failure is probably failure to plan more than their lack of "duty".

And NYC's can be used in an MCI so it was a decision by Westchester to limit the uses of the resource.

Right, no loca/regional tax dollars. Just federal tax dollars. So we paid somewhat less for something that may be used once in a decade vs. making minor modifications so it could be used more frequently to support our already strained EMS system.

One fire a week is nothing like E82 in the hey-day when the "Bronx was burning".

Can ventilator dependent patients be transported by METU or do they require ambulances?

This whole discussion should probably be split off this topic because it hasn't really got anything to do with the train accident but it is still interesting (at least to me). So did Westchester evacuate nursing homes pre/post Irene? Or Sandy? Which ones? How many ambulances did it take? Not all NH/SNF patients need ambulances. Many of them can probably be transported in wheelchairs or even just regular buses so it may not require that many ambulances.

Why is asking questions perceived as bashing? You can learn from asking questions so why isn't that encouraged especially when run numbers are so low and actual experience may be lacking. I don't think many of the discussions were "bashing" or "career vs. volunteer". If someone has a different opinion it doesn't mean they're bashing yours. It means they have a different opinion. There used to be some great insightful discussions here but now they're few and far between!

We don't need police and fire on the same frequency but if they were on the same system we would all be able to communicate when operating at the same incident. This is preferable to having two, three or even more different radios in your vehicle or weighing you down as portable radios. Pinellas County, FL had a system back in the 90's when I worked there. It was a trunked network and you were put in a talkgroup with whatever units were responding to your incident - car accident with injuries, police, fire and EMS all on the talkgroup for the incident. Tow truck, DOT, whoever else could be added as necessary. If it was a major incident and you needed to break out for further talkgroups. Onondaga can also get almost any frequencies licensed they need. They're more than 100 miles from any other big cities (especially NYC) and far from the Canadian border so they don't have to worry about that.

As vividly illustrated by the cop hit by a car in Yonkers that had to go to Jacobi today.

I don't know why you'd have to give a phone number over the air.

Then it isn't 8400 per FF. It's 3000 per FF and 5400 x the number of FF who actually show up and are interior qualified. Substantially less than the total number I'm sure.

Nor is spelling apparently.

I doubt very much that more people die in fires or water related incidents than from heart attacks, strokes, and other medical emergencies in Northern Westchester or Putnam yet we sit here debating about how a 20 minute response time for a dive team may be too long while at the same time accepting that for an ambulance response time. 3rd tones, going mutual aid. Tick tock, tick tock. The hypocrisy and misguided priorities astonishes me. If dive teams are so important, put one in every department. Then do the same for haz-mat, tech rescue, etc. etc. etc. Pretty soon everybody doing nothing and we are revisiting this thread when everyone is selling their gear like Somers. It's a pity that Somers has to disband their dive team. They had invested a lot of time, resources and effort to maintain it.

They're insured, right? Tragic and unforeseen but they should be able to get back on their feet rather quickly.

Crash tests aren't supposed to be pretty. Vehicles are supposed to deform to dissipate the energy of the crash. Crushed beyond recognition but how was the passenger compartment? What was the force remaining that could be transferred to the occupants? Physical appearance doesn't have anything to do with survivability.

Everyone is slamming the FF for suing. Maybe this was their last resort. Maybe they tried to get headsets for years and the city shot them down. Do we know that? To demean the firefighters fighting to protect themselves seems harsh to me. Would you have reacted the same to the FF suing over Nomex or SCBA 25 years ago?

"RE" dedicating it? Why? Just two weeks before election day. Maybe I answered my own question.

So contact a commercial provider for the transportation to a designated center if the patient is stable and doesn't require immediate emergent treatment. It is absolutely an option since nobody says you have to do the transportation yourself.

Has the NYPD museum reopened yet? I know it was closed after Sandy.

Does that take into account the regular village posts that they need to cover?

That's what I mean. It's easy to underbid the county when you don't have the ten or twelve cops on your payroll. The county has them. Imagine how many paramedics could be put in service for the cost of 10-12 cops? Wow!

Typical politics. The village doesn't have to hire all the cops from the town like the County did (including the chief) so they will save all that money. This is just like the EMS contract days when one day you were wearing one patch and the next day you wearing another because contracts changed. Never saw it done with police though.

The dealer may pay for coffee and donuts at the visit but they are definitely not paying for the trip. They build that cost into the cost of the apparatus and you're actually paying for it. You just circumvent the budget process by concealing it in the apparatus cost instead of a line item in the budget.