Somebody asked me the other day what I thought about these new barricade-style paint jobs that they’re putting on the rear of firetrucks and ambulances now.

I’ll answer that by backing up a few decades and reviewing what happened starting around 1970 or perhaps a couple of years before.  There was a member of an all-volunteer FD in upstate New York whose occupation was an optometrist and appointed himself as an expert on visual acuity.  He wrote a report for one of the fire magazines detailing how the color red was the absolute worst you can use to paint firetrucks because at nighttime it doesn’t show up.  Hence creating a terrible hazard for automobile drivers who are also unable to see flashing red lights and commotion occurring around the invisible firetruck.

The article was full of charts and scientific diagrams having to do with light refraction, etc., and led to the conclusion that the absolutely most-visible color, and therefore the safest, is that which we now refer to as lime-yellow (or slime yellow, if you will).  Naturally, since it was published in a prestigious magazine, people started experimenting with the paint spectrum and a plethora of assaults on the eyeballs were introduced on fire apparatus here and there.  But the accident rate didn’t go down any.

Just as it was dying down about 10 years later, another volunteer FF whose day job was a lawyer entered another essay in the fire magazine telling everybody how they were exposing themselves to the most crushing liability and face fiscal ruin if they are not painting their fire engines in the most visible color available.  How lawyerly.  He explained that any incompetent driver could sue the Halligan off of you if they steered their car into your fire engine while it’s on the hydrant and it turned out that this sneaky firetruck was red!  Never mind those flashing red lights, road flares and traffic wardens.  It’s the paint, dammit.

This brought a resurgence in the luminescent paint schemes as a new wave of lawsuit-wary FD’s tried out these oh-so-visible colors.  But despite all that, the accident rate didn’t drop at all.  And not only were bad drivers continuing to drive into the firetrucks, but the departments found themselves with paint that started fading within 3 or 4 years and needed a complete, and very expensive, paint job after only 6 or 7 years.  And when it came time to sell the old rig and buy a new one, they couldn’t get the price they had hoped for.  So the safety-paint theory more or less died off.

But the vision experts didn’t go away.  Being absolutely certain that they had a valuable and irreplaceable spot in the grand scheme of things, in the late 80′s they convinced the fire and ambulance services that the answer to stopping accidents was to mount a huge vehicle-wide light bar across the front and the back that was made up of a complicated design of yellow and white lights (no red!!).  Suddenly we had ambulances, and some fire engines, that were putting on a light show that rivaled Nathan’s Coney Island Hot Dog stand for impressiveness.  But still the accident rate didn’t go down.

Now we’re seeing the latest theory being advanced, but this one was generated by some people with the authority to write regulations and standards.  And now the new can’t-miss-it design is becoming prevalent across the country.  You can’t deny that it’s very visible.  There certainly isn’t any harm being done by doing this.  And you have to admit that people who sell paint and reflective tape will certainly benefit from this latest scheme.  But will the accident rate go down?  I’m not holding my breath on that one.

But when are the “experts” going to recognize that the problem doesn’t lie in whatever color you put on your truck.  The problem is, and always has been, bad drivers.  But as long as there are many more bad drivers than there are police/fire/rescue workers, the onus of accident prevention will be on us.

So let’s get this equipment checked out -and those lights! – while I go start the coffee.

If you want to see somebody literally tearing his hair out, all you have to do is slip over to Cincinnati and check out the city manager’s office.  The non-stop parade of bad-boy firefighters continues this week as still another one makes the headlines for non-fire dept. related activities invoving the law.

Early Wednesday morning a 30-yr.-old FF with the CFD was piloting his motorcycle while juiced up with a socially-unacceptable blood alcohol content.  While aiming the bike down an onramp leading to an Interstate, he drove right into the rear end of a state police cruiser that was positioned to protect a highway work crew doing repairs on the roadway.

Not much more needs to be added.  In fact, the mishap in itself isn’t particularly considered major news.  This sort of stuff happens all the time and the miscreant could very well be a plumber or an accountant.  But since the CFD has been trotting out wayward firefighters at the rate of one every 3 weeks for the past four years now, the news accounts all point out that this poor sap is a Cincinnati firefighter when he’s not out biking.  It doesn’t matter where you are, you are always a representative of your department, paid or volunteer.

Meanwhile, out in Vallejo, California, currently America’s largest city that is in bankruptcy, the city council has effectively fired their city manager who has been slashing city services while trying to work within the budget.  While the current and past city councils are directly responsible for the disastrous financial situation that they’re in, the city manager has been taking a punishing attitude toward the fire department that is excessive compared to the other city agencies.  He has closed 25% of the fire stations and threatened to close more, and laid off 24 firefighters.  He has consistently argued that the police officers and firefighters are overpaid while he’s earning $341,000 annually.  He offered to set an example by taking a 10% pay cut, but he never implemented it.

The ISO has alerted the city that about half of the city’s fire protection area will be downgraded from Class 3 to Class 10  (see Firegeezer report from April 28 HERE).  Police cars that need repairs aren’t getting fixed, instead they are just “parked out back.”  And so it goes.  After notifying the city manager that they were going to fire him, the council has been in “buyout” negotiations with him.  Monday night they voted to send him packing on June 1 with a buyout package of $390,000 in contract settlement.  (complete details HERE.)  Wow.  That would have paid to bring back two firefighters.  The guy really is valuable.

And so is our equipment.  Let’s get it checked out now while I go start the coffee.  We’ll get together later in the day room.

Once again the high-tax, budget busters are trying to shift the blame for looming deficits from themselves to firefighters.  Not the police or the paramedics, just those guys who sit around waiting for a fire and don’t do much otherwise.

On Tuesday I saw one ideologue on a tv news channel who was talking about California’s budgetary crisis, which is massive.  And of course, he jumped right on the firefighters with the outrageous claim that the “average” firefighter in California is paid $175,000 per year in salary and benefits.  Naturally he conveniently left out the reasons for those inflated figures, which are dubious in the first place.

First of all, he made sure that he slipped in the words “and benefits.”  You know, those things like the hidden costs that bring the social security tax up to 15%.  And the fact that California has a crushingly high Workmen’s Compensation tax on the employer, that is so high that it’s one of the prime reasons private businesses are fleeing the state.  And you can bet that he was adding in the salaries of the top-level chiefs and other high-ranking administrative people that will tend to skew the “firefighters” average.

One thing that these “blame the Fire Dept.” people never tell you is that many firefighters are making higher wages because of both voluntary and required overtime pay.  Many, many municipalities have adopted the policy of leaving vacancies open and filling the minimum staffing assignments with overtime callbacks.  So they are effectively cutting their total employee costs by shunting some of the expense into the overtime budget where an individual firefighter is for all intents and purposes working a 2nd job at the firehouse.  And of course raising the ”average wage” for the entire department.  These facts are never entered as part of the discussion of these tv reports and newspaper editorials for obvious reasons.

Lately another filtered fact has been showing up in these anti-FD rants.  The person who is trying to shift the spotlight away from the politicians will close out his spiel with something like, “And these guys get a full retirement for the rest of their life after just age 50!”  Disregard the silly add-on that full retirement for anybody means the rest of their life.  But here’s where the distortion gets particularly misleading.

To begin with, the age 50 bit is often, but not always, the earliest age you can go by taking a reduced pension.  Also, if you work in an active department, then by the time you get into your 50′s – let’s face it – you’re pretty well used up, both physically and mentally.  The exceptions are people who slide over into administrative positions.  But it’s the nozzleman who’s being laid off.

Now here is one very important point that is never brought out, even by the labor representatives.  Almost all FD’s work a three-platoon schedule that works out to a 56-hour work week.  At the end of 25 years a firefighter has worked as many hours as a 40-hr.-week employee puts in after 35 years.  That’s right, 35 years of labor, a broken body with the probability of looming health issues facing you in your last years, and somehow these budget deficits are all your fault.

The fire chiefs and the labor representatives are really dropping the ball in this debate.  In fact, they’re not even showing up to play ball.

But we’d better show up and get this equipment checked out.  The day is starting and I have to get some more coffee.

Yesterday I came to grips with the fact that General Motors is done, gone.  I didn’t want to for a while, but I’ve made my peace with the fact.  All this double-talk and two-step going on publicly is just a show to make it look like they’re pulling it out from the abyss, but GM is gone.

Over the years most of my cars have been GM products.  Not all of them, I’ve had some Fords and one Dodge, all good cars, too.  But GM supplied at least half of them, including my current Buick LeSabre.  This current collapse was not hard to see coming because it was obvious that the corporation has been awfully mismanaged over the last 20 years.  The only reason it lasted this long is just because it is – used to be – so huge.  Forty years ago the GMC Coach dominated the bus market, both transit model and over-the-road.  Now that division has evaporatated.  Detroit Diesel?  Another industry leader, including fire trucks (after they switched from gasoline) that is now just a shell.  In fact, I think GM sold it off a while back, didn’t they?  Are they made up in Canada now?  I’m not sure.  Their ancillary businesses like Delco have been spun off long ago.  The firm has been in a death spiral for a long time and it’s finally crashed.

My first car, that I bought for myself, was an old 1947 Pontiac that I bought when I was in high school.  I scraped together $300, mostly from my working nights as a movie theater usher, and bought this ready-for-the-grave gunboat that must have weighed close to 4,000 lbs.  It was a 2-door sedan with what we called a torpedo back design (as opposed to the traditional sedan roof) and it was powered by this massive inline-8 engine that must have gotten all of 6 miles per gallon.  The heater didn’t work.  Those post-war cars didn’t have built in heaters like you’re used to now.  They were options that you added on when you ordered it and it was just an electric heater box that was bolted on to the firewall.  Like I say, it didn’t work, but so much heat from the engine poured through the firewall that I didn’t need it.  Of course, that wasn’t so great during the summer time, but you lived with it.  But that old wreck got me around town and the windows rolled all the way up when it rained.  My, my.

I never had enough money to be able to afford a Cadillac, I’m sorry to say.  Now I could probably pick one up at a good price, but they’ve done away with all the big sedans.  They’re all sports car-sized now and I want ROOM inside.  It looks like I’m going to be switching back to Ford products now.  I think I’ll go check out those Lincoln Town Cars.  They have good heaters in them.

Speaking of checking out, let’s get started on this equipment for today.  I need to get some fresh coffee going.