OoO

Now this is funny!
http://youtu.be/xVrJ8DxECbg
More info: http://blog.ctnews.com/hottopics/2013/01/09/drive-thru-prank-leaves-victims-speechless/

The thing that confuses me about the logistics that all of the manually operated train systems in many countries with this system this place disprove that as an issue. I think it is a great idea.
1. It improves straphanger safety with such a long population of NYers with mental illness, racist tendancies like the woman from the other day, suicidal people. This improvement takes alot of liability off of the MTA's hands significantly.
2. Track safety will be greatly improved and the cleanliness of the tracks will increase now that there is no direct access to the tracks. If you belong there you will have access otherwise you won't.
This would be a great investment. The installation and purchase of these devices can stimulate job growth and support local industry. This is definitely a smart move. Now to keep the stations and the trains looking sharp and keeping employees motivated.

Do they advocate violence? No. Has the church or any prominent member of the church been accused of violence? No.
Do they speak unfathomable hate? Yes. Do I fundamentally disagree with their speech? Yes. Do they have a right to their speech? Yes.
What will labeling this group as a legally recognized do? Absolutely nothing, they will still be able to protest funerals and spew their hate speech. Do I agree with it? No, but god damn it they have a right to speak it and you better believe that they can and will defend their right. We can condemn their speech in the strongest terms but we can not limit their speech no matter how extreme it is. So long as their speech does not violate any law, there is absolutely no choice but to accept the fact that they are entitled to their speech.
What you see as "push the 1st amendment to the extreme" I, as well as the Supreme Court of the United States, see as simply exercising their right to 1st amendment speech protection. If you don't like what they say, don't listen but they have not broken any laws and thus you have no right to limit their speech.

You guys must be crazy if you think that twinkies or any other Hostess Brand product is going anywhere. Someone is going to buy the manufacturing and marketing rights and make sure that we all have plenty of twinkies when the zombies come looking for brains.

It is a firetruck not a sports car... Who cares what it looks like if it gets the job done safely?

EMD saves lives. With some of the response times in this county, pre-arrival instructions can make a critical difference in the outcome of a call.
It's nice to see a progressive move like this.

One of the very first things OoO posted is this:

And.... We did!
As easy as it is to bash an agency or one of it's members let's not forget
that (errors/mistakes/incidents) also happen in Westchester County.
I can name a few over the years BUT I WON'T.
Let's be EMS Professionals!
Hatzolah EMS does have ALS and BLS units.

Does Hatzolah work with FDNY or another agency to provide ALS to their patients or is it a strictly BLS only service?
I have heard all of the stories about Hatzolah and I fully understand their negative reputation in the EMS community - please, let's not go there. My elderly Jewish grandmother feels most comfortable calling this agency when she needs help. She has always been very satisfied with the care she has received from them and takes comfort in receiving care from individuals with her background and whom she can relate to. Despite all the negative things I have seen and read I though that this mental comfort for her was important and never raised any concern. However, today I was thinking about whether or not they can provide ALS care. If not, this would certainly be enough of a concern that I would suggest to her that they would not be able to provide the most appropriate care for her and that she should call 911.

So I just finished up an incredible week out in the Outer Banks of North Carolina; for those of you who have been there, I really don't need to say more, and for those of you who have not been there, be sure to put it on your future vacation bucket list. I have never been one to take photos of apparatus, but with the help of my sister's new Nikon D60 camera, I figured I would give it a shot. I know some of the pictures didn't come out perfect, but I hope the majority are worth looking at.

I disagree, whats on the street is public for everyone, what's inside your home is private. Everything inside of your home is not in public view and shouldn't become so just because you called the fire department.

How do privacy concern play into this?
I know the fire service is not obliged to the same privacy standards as EMS, but how would your community feel if footage of their home is posted to youtube? I know I wouldn't be happy.

I disagree, whats on the street is public for everyone, what's inside your home is private. Everything inside of your home is not in public view and shouldn't become so just because you called the fire department.

I wholeheartedly agree with you and your assessment of this topic and the importance of working together and being better prepared to respond to these types of unique and overwhelming incidents. I get it, I agree with it, and I support the notion.
That being said, it's not a question of if we need it, it's how do we implement it? This is why I'm curious about the 3E program. The benefits issue aside, are we going to be able to "force" volunteers to take on this responsibility? For a career crew we can make this a part of the job responsibility, but what about Susie Homemaker who volunteers 6 hours a week to get out of the house? How do we prepare an EMS agency who has a crew with the average age of 65 to respond to this type of incident? How do we prepare certain EMS providers who may have a hard enough time managing a BLS patient in a nice controlled environment, and now expect them to operate in a more austere environment?
We need to be brought into 2012 with the mere BASICS of EMS, such as disability benefits, comparable wages and financial benefits, professional standards, competent/well trained providers, better training and educational programs/opportunities, more advancement opportunities, changing the mindset of your typical EMS provider to go from being a stagnant, lazy, uninterested employee whose priorities are sleeping and what they're eating for lunch and instead fostering employees who are motivated; motivated to train, motivated to expand their scope of practice, expand their responsibilites and professional capabilities and so forth. With a lot of EMS providers, I just don't see it. In the Fire Service and Law Enforcement there is some level of motivation to excel or put in the extra effort because doing so leads to professional/career advancement, either through promotion or through reassignment to a desired specialized detail (SWAT, Rescue Company, etc.), which then leads to other perks (i.e. increased pay, future advancements, etc.)
Before we can charge ahead and add this huge responsibility onto an already fractured and disorganized service, we first need to address the basic issues/problems that plague the EMS service.

T John, are there more resources out there to get more information about the 3 Echo program being rolled out in Minnesota?
I don't think that anyone can argue that a coordinated PD/FD/EMS response to these incidents is necessary, and I agree with you wholeheartedly T John that we do need to take a better look at how we respond to a hostile event. But there are a few factors, like them or not, that are going to hinder the type of aggressive coordinated response to these incidents we would all like to see.
No matter how necessary it is, no matter how much it will benefit the victims of a hostile incident, there is still one rather significant issue at hand that would need to be addressed before we can even consider placing non-sworn EMS providers in a hostile environment and task them with the extraction of wounded victims... LODI/LODD benefits for EMS responders. I understand this can vary from state to state, even agency to agency. I'm going based off my "local knowledge" of EMS systems in the Metro NY area.
There is a plethora of training programs to prepare EMS providers to work in a hostile/tactical environment. There is a plethora of high speed tactical medical equipment designed for EMS responders to operate in a tactical environment. We can supply EMS providers with ballistic protection and other specialized PPE to operate in the midst of a tactical assignment. The training and the equipment is readily available, and incorporating EMS into these types of responses is not an unrealistic or impossible venture.
Now try convincing a volunteer or even commercially paid EMS provider to don such equipment and go charging forward with PD into a potentially hostile environment. It is easy to have our judgment clouded by the thought of throwing on this high-speed equipment and go forth to render aid to our victims in the tactical theatre of operations. It sounds exciting, looks cool, has the CDI (chicks dig it) factor associated with it, and so on. But what if things go south, and now the EMS provider ends up a victim him/herself?
I know as an LEO, if I am seriously injured in the line of duty, I will have the financial security through a generous line of duty salary to pay my mortgage, my bills, etc. If I am killed during the scope of my employment as an LEO, my beneficiary will be well taken care of financially by my employer, union, and numerous police foundations. Now if I switch patches on my shirt and act in Paramedic mode, serious injury leads to basic workers compensation, and if I'm a volunteer who now can not work and provide for my family and pay my mortagage and bills, I have to hope the generous public will donate money to alleviate any financial strain I have endured as a result of a serious injury. Killed in the line of duty... maybe some donations for my family, but nothing guaranteed. Like it or not, these are issues that need to be raised first before we can expect any EMS provider to take on such a task. Anyone who says it's a selfish way to look at things or just doesn't care and is going to go charging in there anyway cause "it's the right thing to do", then go for it. When I was younger I had that mindset that I didn't care. As I've become more informed and a little more experienced, my mindset has changed a bit. It's not about being a coward, it's realizing that if we're going to take on this great responsibility, then take it on with addressing ALL of the variables and issues, not just the obvious issues of training and equipment. We are all adults who hopefully understand the dangers and magnitude of certain incidents and are therefore capable of making our own decisions about our fate, whether it's running into a burning house without PPE to effect a rescue, or entering an unsecured location that may contain a potential armed threat to render aid to the injured. Most times these are split second decisions made within a moments notice as an incident is rapidly unfolding in front of us; but if we're talking about a coordinated, pre-planned response, we need to look beyond the obvious operational and logistical issues.
And for those of you who are going to say, "well I can get injured or killed at the scene of an MVA as an EMT", you're right, you can get killed at an MVA, responding to a "fall down go boom", dealing with an intox in the back of the ambulance, and so on. That's why we take certain safeguards to make these scenes safe; road flares, blocking lanes of traffic, PD escorts, safe driving practices, etc. While we can't can't control every single variable at these "routine" incidents, we can control and mitigate the majority of them. Hostile scenes have so many variables that as Helicopper pointed out, it can take hours for a scene to be deemed safe. Is the shooter identified? Contained? In custody? Threat neutralized? Are there multiple shooters? Explosive/secondary devices? There are a lot of variables to process that typically require specialized PD resources (SWAT, bomb squads, aviation, etc.), and it may take time to mobilize such resources and then time for each resource to carry out its function. So I fully understand that anything can happen at any time, and that's why these issues of LODI/LODD benefits for EMS providers shouldn't just be limited to active shooter or hostile situations.

Here comes the Monday morning quarterbacks. Was the scene secured and deemed safe for EMS to operate? If so when and how long after the first call? Could answer a lot about the "delays" in EMS response.

Also FD/EMS radio traffic:

Would you change how you do things if they denied any infectious diseases even though you suspected one? Chances are someone with a disease that has a stigma attached to it, will not give you an honest answer if they don't think it's pertinent, best to try and treat everyone the same and protect yourself all the time, many people may have infectious diseases but not know it.

The other issue is you rarely see triage (aside from drills) done properly e.g assess, tag and move on. You see many units arrive at incidents that are technically MCIs and getting tunnel vision. Stopping at the first patient and treating, working up the traumatic arrest on the MVA with 5 plus patients and only one unit on scene, etc. Tags are great but they need to be used with the philosophy behind their use: assess, identify, classify, prioritize then treat.Stopping mid stream at the first black tag to start CPR defeats the triage system unless you have multiple units on scene and the red and yellow tags will not suffer for it.

No offense but who cares?

Totally thought this was going in a different direction....

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2112732,00.html
this article explains why

Who is paying for tens of thousands of gallons of water if it's coming off a municipal hydrant ?
(*)

I always used to get ours filled at Stew Leonards in Yonkers. They always had the best price.

This is all I could think of while reading this post:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzYxz_uvtSI

This is all I could think of while reading this post:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzYxz_uvtSI