THE SAN FRANCISCO PLANNING DIRECTOR’S CRAZY BOYFRIEND who started a fire in the city’s historic Fire Chief’s Residence last Friday night (reported on Firegeezer HERE.) has had his bail on the arson charge set at $1 million.

S. F. Fire Chief’s Residence

The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting today:

Lance Farber, 47, pleaded not guilty to felony arson and vandalism in a brief appearance at the Hall of Justice, shortly before Superior Court Judge John Conway set bail.

“I am concerned that this is a public safety issue,” the judge said.

Farber was ordered to return to court Friday after being evaluated for migraine headaches. His lawyer said the headaches have worsened since Farber was arrested Friday night.

Farber is a chiropractor who moved to San Francisco from Seattle in January with incoming Planning Director John Rahaim. He was presented in court with a stay-away order forbidding contact with Rahaim.

Farber’s lawyer says that the dispute that led to the arson was a “lovers’ quarrel.”  While Rahaim was at a function Friday night, Farber set their bed on fire and then proceded to trash the historic-landmark house by smashing some of the antique furniture and smearing canned tomatoes on the carpets and walls.  The damage estimate has been upgraded to $30,000.

Lance Farber
(San Mateo County Sheriff’s mug shot)

On a Web site that was copyrighted in 2003, Farber, who Rahaim had said was a holistic chiropractor and nutritionist, referred to himself as a doctor and listed numerous credentials.

He also stated, “I am committed to improving the quality of people’s lives, healing the planet.”

The Fire Chief’s Residence was built in 1923 and used by the city’s fire chiefs since then until the current chief Joanne Hayes-White  took the job.  She has a family with school-age children and chose to live in her own home where the schools are preferable.

The home has occasionally been used during Mayor Gavin Newsom’s administration as temporary housing for newly arrived city officials. His office said Monday that practice would end.

Read the full story in today’s Chronicle HERE.

Beware the publicity hack.

The Fire & Rescue service got a little bit of a break yesterday.  Through some persistent efforts by Dave Statter and WUSA, coupled with a recent house fire in their own area, the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) have opened the door to public discussion about modern “lightweight construction” methods.

For years, we have been complaining loudly about the cheap methods of throwing up homes that came into full practice about 20 years ago.  Initially it included those plywood floor joists, chipwood and glue sheathing, and lightweight trusses held together with gusset plates.  They have continually been degrading their construction practices by using more flimsy materials such as vinyl siding and close-clearance chimneys.

Now, when a fire begins in a home, the time span between ignition and total-involvement has been shortened tremendously…. to a few minutes, in many cases.

The NAHB and other groups that represent the home building industry have largely run from the spotlight and hidden behind the cloak of “code compliance” claiming that they are duly following the approved practices.  And that’s true.  But…. it’s the approved practices that are the direct cause of these catastrophic failures during what should be room-and-contents fires.  And the NAHB chooses to push that inconvenient point aside because these current practices allow them to use much cheaper materials and methods, thus inflating their profit margins.

I presume that by now you have read STATter911’s response from NAHB’s spokeswoman, Carri Schmidt.  Let’s look at what she is really saying, or not saying:

“Homes are, in fact, significantly safer today than 20 years ago because of advances in technology and changes in building codes.”  

She starts off with an old debating trick by saying that her claim is a “fact.”  No, it’s not.  If it was a “fact” then there wouldn’t be any controversy going on.  But by starting out with such a statement, an observer tends to sub-consciously think that it must be true then.

Then the next trick of the debater (and publicity hacks) is to ignore the premise if you can’t defend it and talk about something else:  The claim that homes are significantly safer can only be true if you are talking about the things in the homes, not the buildings themselves.  We don’t have tv sets bursting into flames anymore.  Furnaces are being built much better and safer now.  Gas appliances don’t have pilot lights anymore.  And so on.

We are - and have been - talking about building safety after the fire starts.  But she ignores that and insists on talking about building safety before it starts.  And to keep the debate focused on something other than firefighter safety, she threw out some links to reference sources.  Again, this is another debating stunt that relies on people accepting your word on face value and hoping that they don’t actually check out your references.  But Firegeezer did. 

Here’s one statement from one of her references:  Engineered building components may provide adequate strength under normal loading; but under fire conditions, these truss systems can become weakened and fail, leading to the collapse of roofs, floors, and possibly the entire structure.

That’s exactly what we’ve been saying.  And the NAHB is using this as a rebuttal?  We will get into this phase of the discussion some more tomorrow.

But now it’s time to get this equipment checked out.  I’m going to get the (much safer, these days) coffee maker started.

WUSA Channel 9’s DAVE STATTER (who also publishes the fire & rescue blog STATter911) has been doing on-the-air follow-ups on the escalating problem of “lightweight construction” of North American home building practices.

Before you read on, take a couple of minutes to view his televised report on the situation HERE.

Between their on-air interviews with the public and the newsroom’s persistent prodding of the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) for comment, they have finally gotten the NAHB’s attention on the matter.

But the NAHB’s spokeswoman, instead of answering the questions, has only fueled the controversy by making some rather bizarre claims.

Read Dave’s report on the NAHB’s response and justifications at STATter911 HERE.

Firegeezer will chip in his two-cents worth on tomorrow’s Morning Lineup.

FROM RUSSIA, REUTERS IS REPORTING:

Six people have been killed in three days by icicles falling from buildings in a central Russian region, ITAR-TASS news agency reported Tuesday.

Plummeting chunks of ice is an annual hazard for pedestrians in Russia during the spring when the sun finally melts thick layers of ice and snow which build up on roofs over months of freezing temperatures and darkness.

Medical authorities in the region of Samara told ITAR-TASS that five people died in the city of Samara and another person died in the nearby town of Otradny between February 23 and February 25.

Icicles hang from the roof of a building in Gulmarg, 55km (34 miles) west of Srinagar January 30, 2008. 
(Reuters / Fayaz Kabli)

THREE NASHVILLE, TENNESSE, FIREFIGHTERS ARE FACING DISCIPLINARY CHARGES following an incident on February 2.

Shortly after midnight,  FF’s Brantley and Carpenter, stationed at the Second Street South fire station, were driving around in the station’s Chevrolet Tahoe “fast car” when they met two women outside a downtown nightclub.

WKRN photo

After agreeing to take the women for a ride in the truck, they offered to take them by the station for a “tour.”

The Nashville Tennessean reports further:

Lisa Huffman … called Mayor Karl Dean’s office and later the Fire Department to say she and a friend got on the fire truck and rode to the station on Feb. 2, some time after midnight, after talking with a few firefighters outside the Graham Central Station nightclub.

While there, Huffman told city officials that they were taken into a bedroom and offered beer. She reported feeling “trapped” when a firefighter stood in the doorway of the room while she was inside, according to a report by Metro’s Human Resources Department.

Huffman also said pornography was playing on the station’s television.

After a police investigation found that no laws were violated, the two firefighters will be disciplined internally and eventually transferred to other stations.  The shift supervisor, Capt. Michael Crum, who has been with the department for 24 years, is on administrative leave with pay pending a hearing, according to Nashville Fire Department spokeswoman Kim Lawson.

According to news sources, it is believed that the fire engine was also used to transport two additional women to the station at the same time.

Read the full story about the investigation in the Tennessean HERE.
WKRN channel 2 has a VIDEO REPORT.

Nashville Fire Department WEBSITE.

IN NELSON, NEW ZEALAND, A 19-YR.-OLD was sentenced to seven months in prison Monday for stealing an ambulance while he was drunk and driving recklessly before he was caught.

New Zealand ambulance photo by wicken

The medics were in a home working an unconscious and unresponsive patient when Anthony Minto climbed into the idling ambulance and drove away.  After going off the road several times he stopped and attempted to run off, but the police caught up with him promptly.

In court he admitted that he was so drunk that he didn’t even realize that it was an ambulance that he took. 

Minto had earlier pleaded guilty to charges of unlawfully taking a motor vehicle, dangerous driving and driving with excess breath-alcohol. On Monday he also pleaded guilty to unrelated charges of assault and resisting police.

Fairfax New Zealand has the complete STORY.

A FIRE EARLY THIS MORNING IN THE SOUTH CHINA city of Shenzhen has left at least 15 dead with several more critically injured.

Xinhua News agency reports that the firefighters rescued six people from the factory that works with foam products.  There is no report yet on how many people were in the building when the fire started.

Accurate information is normally slow getting out in China.  Any further news will be updated later.

This is one of those mornings where I’m having trouble getting all the body parts to function in a coordinated manner.  I think you know what I mean.  If I have an idea of what I want to do, the rest of me doesn’t quite hook up and go along with it.  As a result, my typing goes slowly because I keep misspelling the words and have to backspace over and over to do it again.  Couple that with my blurry eyes refusing to focus in on whatever I’m looking at, and you have a real clown show going on here.

I’ve never used those “spell-checker” features that are usually built into the writing programs now.  I tried one out several years ago and it was so distracting that it drove me crazy and slowed my writing down almost to a standstill.  Every time I’d type a word that wasn’t in the approved vocabulary of the computer demon, it would suddenly become underlined in red and make me stop and growl at it.  This was always the case when writing out a proper name or place and I didn’t know how to get the underlines to go away.  So I turn the bloomin’ spell-check feature off and do what I’ve always done…plug along and go back over it when I’m done.  Even then, I mess one up every now and then.  But, so what?

Of course, there are some words that, no matter how many times I write them, I still have to double-check before I set them loose.  I think everybody has a few words in their cranial databank that they have a problem remembering for sure how to spell them.  I’ve pretty well got “occasion” settled in firmly now.  (Shouldn’t there be two “s”es in there?  No… shut up.) 

 But one that will give me fits until my dying days is “bureaucracy” or “bureaucrats.”  I use those a lot in this forum, and yet I always have to double check with the Webster’s before I press the Send button.  I guess everybody has a stumbling block over a couple of words like that.  No matter how hard you try, they just won’t let you control them.

Well, while it’s understandable that you have trouble with a few words and maybe drop an apostrophe in the wrong place,  just make good and sure that you don’t forget your wife’s birthday.

All right, let’s get the equipment checked out.  I’m functioning well enough to run the coffee now.

BACK ON FEBRUARY 6 WE RAN THIS POSTING ASKING IF anbody could identify this pumper:

The source of the story was a newspaper in Nashua, New Hampshire that had a columnist who was asking his readers if anybody knew about the picture.

Well, one of our readers, Ed Hass came through.  A leading expert on the Ahrens-Fox nameplate, he sent us a detailed history of this antique.  We’ve moved his comment up to here so that everybody will see it.  Ed writes:

It is indeed an Ahrens-Fox fire engine, made in Cincinnati, Ohio. And bought at the same time as #907.

I have spent over 40 years researching the history of every Ahrens-Fox fire engine ever built. I have written and published numerous books and articles on this tyoe of fire engine, and I own a 1953 Ahrens-Fox fre engine of my own.

Here are the details of the one in your photo.

Registered Number 851 – Model M-11 – Nashua, NH 1918

Model M-11 booster and hose car. Six-cylinder Ahrens-Fox T-head Motor #859, 5-1/2″ bore x 7″ stroke, 72.6 horsepower. Front-mount “booster” rotary gear pump, 250 gallons per minute. 60-gallon “booster” water tank.

January 16, 1918: Fire & Water Engineering magazine, p. 53-Nashua, N.H.-It is reported that council will spend $24,000 for motor fire apparatus. [Ahrens-Fox Reg. Nos. 851 and 907]

June 12, 1918: Shipped to Nashua, NH.

June 19, 1918: Fire & Water Engineering magazine, p. 475-During the past few weeks, the Ahrens-Fox Fire Engine Company, of Cincinnati, Ohio, has made deliveries of fire apparatus to Nashua, N.H., two engines [Reg. Nos. 851 and 907]; Cincinnati, Ohio, 3 engines [Reg. Nos. 674, 675, and 677]; Anamosa, Iowa [Reg. No. 655]; and Dutch East Indies [Reg. No. 684], one engine each.

July 10, 1918: Fire & Water Engineering magazine, p. 32-An Ahrens-Fox motor fire pump was given a highly satisfactory test at Nashua, N.H., recently. The apparatus is equipped with two pumps, one of which pumped 350 gpm and the other on the supreme test pumped 1135 gpm. Besides the local officials there were present Chief John B. Gordon of the Haverhill fire department, members of the Haverhill board of aldermen, fire officials of Manchester, and others. The demonstration of this make of pumper made a favorable impression upon the spectators. [The 350 gpm refers to Reg. No. 851; the 1135 gpm was Reg. No. 907].

July 17, 1918: Fire & Water Engineering magazine, p. 50- The Ahrens-Fox Fire Engine Company, Cincinnati, Ohio, has recently delivered one of their motor pumping engines [Model N-2 #907] to the city of Nashua, N.H., and also delivered to the same city one of their booster pumping engines [Model M-11 #851], and both pieces of apparatus have been tested and placed in service. The motor pumping engine can flood the top of the highest building in Nashua with ease. The official test of this motor pumping engine was witnessed by a number of fire department and other officials from out of town, including Chief John B. Gordon and the Board of Aldermen of Haverhill, Mass.; Chief John R. Doyle of Wellesley, Mass.; and Chief Charles F. French of Manchester, N.H. The engine delivered 1155 gallons per minute through four lines of hose, 150 feet each, with one and one-eighth inch nozzles. The draft was eleven feet from the canal of the Nashua Manufacturing Company. It was stated that had the engine been attached to a hydrant at street level, 1400 gallons per minute could have been delivered.

Feb. 23, 1940: Ahrens-Fox supplied new Delco elctric generator/starter parts to Nashua for Model M-11 #851.

1944: Replaced. Had been serving as Hose 3. Junked.

Ed Hass
Elk Grove, California

TAKING ADVANTAGE OF THE SPEED AND CAPACITY OF COMPUTERS, there is a very handy website that you can use to convert things like sizes, distances, measures and so on from one scale to another.

For instance, metric conversions such as kilometers to miles.  Or weight in pounds to kilograms.  But it isn’t limited to metrics.  They do all kinds of conversions.

For example, comparing clothing sizes.  These vary from country to country.  And with so much commerce being done online now, it is normal to be ordering things from anywhere in the world.

Take, for instance, a men’s sport coat size 44.  In the UK it is also called a 44, but in Continental Europe you will ask for a 54.

Shoes are even more complicated.  American men’s shoe size 10 is ordered as:
9 in Mexico
28 in Japan
44 in Europe
9½ in Australia and UK
45 in France.

 And so it goes.
Put this website in your Bookmarks because I can promise you that you’ll be glad to have it some day.

http://www.onlineconversion.com/ 

WHEN A LADY IN WENTWORTH, NOVA SCOTIA, GOT HOME from a trip early Friday morning, she found her house filled with smoke.

At first she ran down to the basement to check her furnace and saw that the smoke was coming from her flue and no flames were visible.

The Halifax Herald tells Leah Palmer’s story:

The 911 operator took her information and stayed on the line with her until she was turned over to the Amherst dispatcher.

“She asked the same questions as the 911 lady did. When I hung up I expected her to call out the Wentworth fire department, which is about a 10-minute drive.”

“We waited and waited. My sister just got finished saying that it was taking the fire department a long time to get here when I got a call back from the Amherst (dispatcher).

“I couldn’t believe it. It was 1:04 a.m. and the dispatcher was calling me to see if everything was OK. I told her it wasn’t. She asked if I wanted her to call the fire department and I told her, ‘Of course I want you to call the fire department.’

“I couldn’t believe that 29 minutes had gone by and that she hadn’t called the fire department yet.”

After confirming that she positively, absolutely needed the fire department, they were dispatched at 1:06 and arrived at her home at 1:15.  Fortunately the fire never got out of the flue pipe and they were able to extinguish it and clear the smoke out of the house in a couple of hours.

The dispatcher claims that she forgot to dispatch fire because she was busy sending a police officer after a drunk driver.

Miss Palmer wraps it up nicely:  “This should never have happened. It makes me think that maybe it was better back in the days when the fire call went directly to the fire chief’s house and he called out his firefighters.”

You can read the full story HERE.

THE MONTREAL GAZETTE IS REPORTING:

Three people were injured in the Duvernay district of Laval late Monday when a car collided with an ambulance.  A 24-year-old driver lost control of his car on Marcel Villeneuve Ave. about 10:30 p.m. and hit the side of the ambulance.

The driver had to be extricated from the vehicle with Jaws of Life, police said. He suffered serious but not life-threatening injuries.

Both ambulance technicians were slightly hurt. The ambulance had been transporting a 92-year-old woman to a hospital in a non-emergency, police said. She was not injured by the impact.