Village Of Tarrytown Loses PESH Appeal in 2010 Double TFD LODD

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The Village Of Tarrytown lost (real bad) to their PESH appeal contesting the LODD of Tarrytown Firefighters John Kelly and Anthony Ruggiero on September 6th, 2010.

Here's the decision, in .PDF format, also containing details of the incident and what went wrong:

pesh apeal.pdf

[Bnechis 3,961]

Interesting issues.

1) The case proved that the Village of Tarrytown clearly has no defense again its willful violation of the law. I suspect the next and final step in this story will be the litigation against it by the families of those who died. I suspect the payout will be very large.

2) The Village has "NO CONTROL" over the actions & operation of the fire department is no defense. If you have an FD, you are responsible for its actions.

3) If your Fire dept. does not have a written policy that clearly instructs all members that they must understand what a confined space is (confined space awareness) and they are never permitted to enter or if they are permitted, they must have the original & annual training, equipment, and the written procedures or you are violating the law.

For 18 years before this incident, OSHA has used this exact scenario to describe how workers and rescuers die in confined spaces. Hopefully the many depts. that do not comply with the law have taken notice and corrected the situation. This incident should never have happened, but I am sure it will again in some community that fails to learn from this.

[Dinosaur 844]

This is another interesting development in the never-ending saga of "you can't tell me what to do" because we're an independent fire company. Not true in the eyes of the law and all those citations prove it.

For the discussion about whether FF are employees are not, this highlights the point again, volunteer FF's are employees and you can't ignore OSHA, PESH or other regulations.

RIP!

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Not to distract from this thread, but on a related note, here is a link to an article regarding an LODD upstate. Once again, a failure to have proper training and policies/procedures in place.

http://www.pressconnects.com/article/20140308/NEWS01/303080060/Watchdog-Report-What-went-wrong-Newark-Valley-fatal-fire?odyssey=mod|dnmiss|umbrella|1