MAYBE THEY’VE GOT STRONGER GRAVITY OUT THERE.  Once again a light plane has crashed into a populated area in the West.  This time a single-engine airplane overshot the landing zone at the Bob Hope Airport in Burbank, California, shortly before 7 pm Pacific time Friday evening.

Los Angeles Times photo

Burbank FD officials say the Cessna 172 snagged some power lines and a utility pole on Clybourn Avenue before coming to rest on top of a car parked on the street.  Three people on board the aircraft, two men and one woman, were hospitalized with minor injuries.  No fire erupted from the crash.

The Associated Press has this video report:

Some of our video links are not working properly right now (11:00 am Eastern).  The problem is at the syndicator’s, not Firegeezer’s ISP.  They are working on solving it.  If you are unable to view some of the video’s, check back later.  We will update this posting when they are operational again.

…..FG

Update, 11:50:  They are back in operation now.  Let’s hope the digital devil has been sent away.

FIRE SPREAD AT THE MONTE CARLO HOTEL AND CASINO LAST JANUARY was accelerated by non-approved building materials.

The eye-catching fire along the facade of the upper floors of the hotel was limited to a relatively small area along the front of the building.

Las Vegas Sun

A recently released investigative report blames the cause of the fire on molten metal dropping from a welder’s torch onto flammable materials on the roof.  But once it started burning, the fire spread more rapidly than it should have because an improper and unapproved resin coating was used beneath the exterior surface.  The building was constructed 16 years ago by a previous owner, but the material in question was not permitted at that time either.

The Las Vegas Sun has the complete REPORT.

KVVU-TV has this video report:

THE RISKY PRACTICE OF SHUTTING DOWN FIRE STATIONS on a rotating basis (in order to “save” money) has been taken up by the Sacramento, California, Fire Department.

The loaded chamber came up on them last night when a house fire in a neighborhood that was left unprotected got out of control, advancing to three alarms and completely destroying two homes.

KXTV

The first arriving unit was a rescue squad truck that, naturally, doesn’t carry any hose lines or a pump.  But they did have plenty of time to make a good size-up while waiting for the first engine to arrive seven minutes later.

STATter911 has been on the story all night and has more details along with a couple of videos HERE.

Firegeezer will never stop being amazed by these screwball politicians who play firehouse roulette and shut down the fire stations, yet they will pay to have trucks come around and collect the trash and garbage.  Instead of expecting people to fight their own house fires, why don’t they open the firehouses and ask the citizens to carry their own trash to the dump?

Earlier related FG entires:  Detroit Fire HERE and  HERE, Baltimore HERE and West Midlands UK EMS HERE

LANDFALL OF A MAJOR HURRICANE, GUSTAVE, IS NOW A CERTAINTY and among the preparations being made for it are the deployment in advance of fire and rescue units.

The American Ambulance Association has sent an email to all member agencies calling for help in providing extra ambulances on standby.   Any agencies and services that are able to deploy to the targeted region in advance of the storm are encouraged to phone the NATCOM Operations Center at 866-219-9253.

In addition, not only are the nation’s urban search and rescue teams being readied, but an international US&R team from Liverpool, England, is being sent over to assist.

The Liverpool Echo is reporting:

Six firefighters from Croxteth Fire Station’s urban search and rescue team boarded a flight today to Newark before taking a connecting flight to Houston.

They are expected to travel to southern Texas.

Each of the firefighters from Merseyside, who will be led by senior officer, Paul Murphy, is swift-water trained and also have additional specialist training in areas such as technical searches, propping buildings and medical skills.

Assistant chief fire officer Bill Evans, said: “We got a call earlier this week from the Texas taskforce which is one of the groups that make up the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“We signed a memorandum of understanding with them in 2006 and agreed to mobilise a team wherever they are deployed.”

SHROPSHIRE, ENGLAND, POLICE HAVE DISCOVERED TWO BODIES inside the mansion house that was burned Tuesday morning.

The strange set of circumstances surrounding the arson at the 16-acre estate has caught the attention of people worldwide.  (See the Firegeezer reports HERE, HERE and HERE.) The Foster family has not been seen since the fire that was obviously an arson destroyed the 16th-century home, the stables and two other outbuildings.

Police confirmed this morning that the two bodies were discovered during the search of the main part of the house overnight, but the identities of the victims will not be known until later following forensic tests.

The Fosters, photographed just hours
before the spectacular fire.

Christopher Foster, 50, his wife Jillian, 49, and daughter Kirstie, 15, who lived at Osbaston House are all missing.  Foster’s recent bankruptcy and heavy debt along with an extravagent lifestyle coupled with associations with shady characters has led to much speculation about what happened.

This video contains the complete police announcement of the discovery and the progress of the investigation:

Firegeezer will continue to update this story as events unfold.

You know, I think that one of the largest hindrances to having a successful conclusion for many of our emergency events is what I would call our “comfort zone.”  Every day tens of thousands of fire and EMS calls are attended to with unremarkable yet satisfactory conclusions.  We go out, assess the situation, take the usual measures to handle it and come back home to get ready for the next one.  It’s all done within the parameters of our usual standards that have been developed over time to be effective for that particular emergency.  It was within the comfort zone of our operations.

Sometimes there is a unique or magnified problem that escalates the problem beyond the comfort level and we rely on the officers to adjust and respond to the challenge and force a good conclusion.  They can do this because their comfort zone is a little larger due to their experience and more advanced training.  If you have officers who have never learned from their past experiences or haven’t put the effort into learning more advanced methods, then you don’t have this expanded comfort zone to flow into.  And that can lead to disaster.

This expansion of capability can be taken step by step right up the chain of command.  And yet, there are still many, many departments that are content to never get prepared for this need to expand resources to fit the incident.  There are too many places that either refuse to implement an incident command system, for example, or if they do, they have never practiced it enough to operate properly and they get their disaster.

This can be as simple as wearing seat belts on the trucks and ambulances.  Or it can be as magnified as rolling up on a truck on fire carrying a hazardous cargo and nobody bringing a placard reference book with them.  They’ve been to so many truck fires before without needing the reference book that it became too comfortable.  And they always got there without rolling the fire engine along the way, so who needs seat belts?

The really big disasters are often found, during the post-incident investigations, to have become worse due to a lack of preparation and failure to follow recommended procedures on the part of the FD’s.  What I’m leading up to is to emphasize the need for constant training with mutual aid departments so that we can adapt to large and changing situations safely and successfully.

On Thursday we carried a story (HERE) on the 20th anniversary of the Ramstein Air Base disaster that killed or injured more than 500 people.  The extensive investigation into the causes and then the mitigations of the tragedy disclosed the following actions by the emergency crews that compounded the unhappy results:

• The American air base did not allow the German civil ambulances to enter the base until much later.
• The military’s rescue coordination center in the nearby town did not even know the extent of the disaster until more than an hour after it happened even though German civil helicopters had already arrived and left the scene with dozens of victims.
• The American ambulances and helicopters had large capacities for mass transportation, but they didn’t know where to take the victims after they loaded them up.
• More than two hours after the crash, a legion of German paramedics arrived at the air base hospital and found scores of severely burned patients that had not yet even been attended to.
• An American military bus carrying dozens of burn victims who hadn’t been treated or tended to in any way took three hours to arrive at a burn center because the driver couldn’t speak German and was unfamiliar with the area.

There were more, but you get the idea.  In the twenty years since, the American military has taken the lessons learned and been steadily upgrading the base fire and rescue services everywhere.  One of the major changes was to staff most of the military bases with civilian career firefighters instead of soldiers who are primarily trained for other things.  And now you also see a lot more involvement of the military FD’s in mutual aid programs.

How about your department?  Do you actually get out there and drill regularly with your mutual aid departments?  Do you actually follow those guidelines that have been painstakingly created to help you get through that once-in-a-lifetime disaster?  Or are you just taking it easy in your own comfort zone?

It all starts right here where we check the equipment.  Pay attention to what you’re doing and make sure you’re ready for something more than the usual.  I’ll go get the coffee going.

THE OHIO POLICE AND FIRE PENSION FUND manager announced Wednesday that the names, addresses and social security numbers of more than 13,000 retirees had been stolen.

A mail room employee had resigned on August 15, but 30 hours later it was discovered that on his last day on the job he had emailed the sensitive information to himself.

The pension fund officials are saying publicly that they don’t think he did it with any malicious intent and the relevant law enforcement agency has not been notified.  But not everybody’s buying that line.

WSYX-TV has this report: