Yesterday’s final posting about the screwball who pretended to be a Tulsa firefighter and inserted himself into an accident scene would make a good impromptu drill for your crew, both fire and ambulance.  Besides the amazement/amusement factor of the story, there is a lesson there as well.  This type of behavior is not as rare as you would expect, but it seldom gets reported because it doesn’t usually lead to such bad results as this one did.  You probably haven’t given it much thought while you’re working an incident, but once you’ve had one of these happen to you, you’ll forever more be cognizant of it.

It most often happens at accident scenes because turnout gear isn’t needed to “look like” an off-duty 1st-responder.  But you may recall that a little over a year ago there was a poser with some FDNY running gear showing up at fires in Long Island and getting in on the action.  It took a while for somebody to catch on and get the guy arrested.

My first experience with these strange people took place wayback when I was still a volunteer.  My fire company was first-due on a portion of the newly-opened Capital Beltway that encircles Washington, D. C.  It’s hard to comprehend now, but back then it was only two lanes in each direction and more than 80% of it went through open countryside.  When the beltway first opened it was such a local fascination that people would get in their cars on a weekend day and take a 62-mile, one-lap ride around it just for the novelty of driving in one direction and ending up where you started from.

This fascination extended to a couple of weirdo’s who had an old Plymouth station wagon, a Ferno-Washington folding cot and a bag of first-aid supplies.  They slapped a sign on the side that read, Beltway Rescue Squad and then proceeded to start driving in circles hoping to come across auto wrecks where they could be good citizens and render first aid and, if necessary, transportation.

We stumbled across them when we responded to a wreck and found them already there starting to wrap their roller gauze around the hapless victim.  We tactfully told them to shove off, but not until we asked a few questions and conferred with the policeman who was on the scene.  It turned out that they were not doing anything illegal.  They had their Red Cross first aid cards and were being Good Samaritans, all within the law.  A little investigation and inquiring around disclosed that they had on occasion transported people, dashing away before the responding companies arrived.  No cell phones then, remember, so it wasn’t unusual for quite a while to go by before a call was received.

To make a long story short, all of the jurisdictions involved quickly passed laws that said only rescue squads and fire departments recognized by the state/county could respond to emergencies and hold themselves out as “rescue squads.”  Thus the Beltway Rescue Squad was soon abandoned.

So now you have still one more thing to factor into your scene size-up.

Now we’d better get this (legal) equipment checked out.  I’m going to start a fresh pot of coffee now.

Yesterday afternoon we posted THIS ARTICLE about the mayor of Orlando, Florida, looking for ways to chop the fire department’s budget.  The story that was published by the Orlando Sentinel focused mainly on a plan to eliminate 46 uniformed positions mostly by eliminating the FD ambulances and moving the paramedics over to engine companies.  And the usual bit about shutting down a ladder company and instituting “brown-outs” if the citizens don’t give the city council all the money that they want to play with.  We’ve heard all this before.

But there was one sentence in the article that stood out for me and was left unchallenged.  The writer, perhaps paraphrasing the mayor, said:  “Because the Police and Fire departments are the city’s biggest expense, they face the biggest cuts.”  And to that I ask, “Why?  Why?  Why?”

The reason they are the biggest spenders is because they are the most important city services, along with the public health department.  That type of reasoning just irritates me no end.  It is illogical to equate the cost of operating police and fire departments with that of public parks, recreation and libraries.  And to say that they all have to be reduced equally (biggest budget = biggest cuts) is wrong.

Let me give you two hypotheticals.  First, If you take half of the city’s lawnmowers out of service, the only result is a greater period of time between grass cuttings leaving some grassy knolls a with longer blades for a while.  But if you take half the fire engines out of service, will the results be just as inconsequential?  Another hypothetical:  If you cut the branch libraries’ operating hours back to 3 or 4 days a week, will there be any damage as a result?  Or will people just plan their trip for a different day?  On the other hand, if you cut back fire stations to just 3 or 4 days a week, will people plan their emergencies a little differently?

Sure, those are extreme comparisons, but they serve to point out the logic of the argument.  Orlando has 17 fire stations – and 6 ladder companies – because it has been determined that they need that much equipment and personnel to protect the citizens.  When greedy politicians get miffed because their pet projects and vote-buying social welfare schemes face elimination, they always turn to the public safety agencies to “get back” at the citizens who have said that taxes have gotten too high.  Orlando has the country’s 6th-highest crime rate, yet the mayor wants to lay off police officers.

When somebody like Orlando Mayor Dyer makes threats like this, I believe that the firefighters Local should be out there pointing out to the taxpayers the irrelevence of comparing agencies just by the size of their budgets.  They should be comparing agencies by their priority of need instead.  It’s time to lop off some “nice but not necessary” governmental functions and get back to providing for the public health and safety properly.

And for us, that begins with getting this equipment checked out.  So let’s get going with that and I’ll get the coffee started.

Orlando Fire Dept. WEBSITE.
Local 1365 WEBSITE.

If you haven’t been there yet, make sure that you scroll down to the posting just before this one that tells you how you can win a 3-day pass to the Firehouse Expo conference next week.  The deadline for the random drawing is 10:30 am Eastern daylight time this morning.  So check it out and enter if you can make it down there.

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I’ve got a lot of things on the desktop this morning, so let’s go ahead and get the equipment checked out.  I’ll get the coffee started.

This morning I’m going to pass along the next item in my occasional series of tips on how to take advantage of tough economic times.  It’s not that I’m claiming to be any kind of a financial advisor or economic specialist, but as I said before I am passing along what I learned by experience in the late ’70′s when we had a similar situation.  In 1979 and 1980 our annual inflation rate was 13% and home mortgage interest rates were 18% to 22%.  Even if you had a good job, it was tough for a while.

Previously I mentioned that this is the time to lock in low interest rates on long-term purchases before prices shoot up along with the rate increases.  Today I want to clue you in on buying “stuff” that you may need or have just wanted to have.  Perhaps you need a new rug for the family room.

You can’t help but have noticed that a lot of businesses that were on the edge last year are going out of business this year.  Circuit City is one of the more recent of the prominent names that we’ve heard about.  CNN Money has an article listing 14 more major brands that are currently bankrupt and about to sink HERE, but it’s not always a good idea to flock to those “Going Out of Business” sales that the big chains hold when they close up.  Generally, when a major retailer folds, they sell all of their stock to professional liquidators who take over the store and run the final sales in an attempt to get as much cash as they can at the last minute.  But what these liquidators do is set the prices back to the highest each item has ever sold for and then slap on the 20%-off signs that just bring prices down to what they were the month before.

And something else you have to watch out for is the salting of the merchandise.  These liquidators will do two things:  First, anything of high value will be pulled out of the store (the liquidator now owns all of  the stock, remember) and later re-sold elsewhere, sometimes to other retailers.  Secondly, they will bring in several carloads of junk merchandise that was never sold by the original retailer in the first place and set it out in the aisles with very low prices and high profits.  Nope, stay away from the big chains sell-outs.

Instead, watch your local papers (if they haven’t gone out of business yet) for notices of small, locally owned stores shutting down.  That’s where you will get your best savings.  It’s a shame that you will be taking advantage of somebody else’s misfortune, but that’s the way it works.  And you’ll really hit the jackpot if a shop has filed Chap. 7 bankruptcy, has to stop all business immediately and must auction off all their property.  There’s where the bargains are and, to be honest with you, that’s how I’ve gotten some great deals on things like furniture.  Sometimes you even hit the jackpot when the bank that foreclosed on the business decides that they will “save money” by conducting the auction themselves instead of hiring a professional auctioneer.  Oh, I can tell you some stories on that ploy.

But we’ve got to stop now and get this equipment checked out.  I’ll go make the coffee while you do that.  See you in a little while in the day room.