Doggone if Yahoo! hasn’t gone and messed up my email page layout.  In the interests of progress and freshness, I suppose, they’ve completely rejiggered the mailbox pages and it’s confusing to start with.  I’ll get adjusted soon enough, but I wish they wouldn’t make such drastic changes like that. 

I had trouble figuring out how to compose a message to send for quite a while.  They don’t have a button marked Compose any more.  It took me forever to find out that in the upper left corner there is an icon labeled New that will bring up the composing page.  As in, “New mail,” get it?  Well, I didn’t for a while.  One feature that might be a little handier to use is the log/listing of all the messages sitting in the Inbox.  Previously they had about 25 on there and you would have to press next to get to the next 25.  Now they’ve got them all on one list.  You can just scroll down as far as you need to retrieve an old incoming mail that you haven’t deleted or moved to a folder.  Oh, well.

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There is a continuing flap about funding formulae for the SAFER and Fire Act grants, and how much should be allocated to them and to who.  Firefighter Close Calls has encapsulated the latest in a posting HERE about what the IAFC representative said or didn’t say to a Congressional committee on the subject.  This one started with a Firehouse.com article that the IAFC  says is seriously misrepresentative of what they testified.

I don’t think there’s any question about the new funding being provided, despite the Heritage Foundation study, but the players are positioning to see who gets the biggest pieces of the pie.  Click on that link that I put in the previous paragraph and see what’s going on this week.

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We were talking not long ago about how the rising unemployment in the country coupled with shrinking budgets is making it more challenging for job seekers in the FRD field.  There’s an interesting article in this morning’s Dallas Morning News about how some departments are lowering their hiring standards to increase their applicant pool.  That seems contrary to the theory that you should raise your standards when you’ve got more people looking for work.  You can argue it both ways, I guess.

But I still say that your path to acceptance lies in getting your paramedic certification before you get hired.  Read the article that I’m referring to HERE.  It’s good food for thought and opinionating.

I’m not awake enough to take all that in just yet.  I’ll go start some coffee while you get the equipment checked out.  We’ll meet back in the day room.

It seems like this has been “Fire Chief Week” for the past two weeks.  Stories about fire chiefs, both good and bad, keep dribbling out on a daily basis, the latest being the vol. chief in rural Virginia who checked himself out after a grand jury passed down 13 indictments for a variety of felony charges (HERE).  Now we’re hearing about a fire chief who is being fired – maybe – for saying “No more” to the mayor’s demand for further budget cuts.

Chief Donald Barnes

Shaker Heights, Ohio, is an affluent suburb of Cleveland that is in a budget crisis along with many other cities.  The mayor, Earl Leiken had earlier chopped the city’s budget to compensate for some serious tax revenue shortfalls, but he recently called on all the department heads to make further cuts immediately as the deficit continued to grow.  He asked Fire Chief Donald Barnes to lop $250,000 more from the FD’s $8.5 million dollar budget.

But Chief Barnes became an instant-hero in the FRD community by refusing to whittle more away from the already-shrunken budget, including the mayor’s order to lay off an assistant chief and eliminate the position.  “I just can’t professionally or morally do what you have instructed without jeopardizing the health, safety and welfare of our residents and our firefighters,” he wrote to the mayor.

This infuriated the mayor who then summarily “fired” Barnes and appointed one of the assistant chiefs as acting chief.  But Barnes isn’t ready to become a doormat yet.  He has hired a law firm to contest the dismissal, saying that it was unjust.  Firefighter Close Calls, reporting on the situation, says further:

One source claims that the mayor doesn’t give all the details. He doesn’t mention that the only employees that are not taking a pay cut are him, the finance director, and the CAO. The CAO retired and came back as a “civilian” so she gets 2 salaries, her pension and her salary. She makes more than the governor of Ohio. The city she is supposed to be running is in financial trouble and she doesn’t at least take the same pay cut that she decides to force on everyone else in the city is taking. It appears that the 3 people who decide that the employees need to help get the city financially sound by taking a pay cut are the 3 people who can afford to take a pay cut yet they are the only ones who don’t.

Nor did the mayor provide information that the city paid for flower baskets and they pay someone to go around and water the flower baskets.

It looks like this one is going to be fun to watch.  And Hooray for Chief Barnes for putting principle and integrity ahead of political protectionism.  He has been Shaker Heights’ fire chief for seven years.

Now let’s stick to our principles and get this equipment checked out.  I’ll get the coffee started.  See you back in the day room.

Somebody on TV yesterday went to all the trouble to point out that shortly after noon today the clock/calendar display will read 12:34:56 - 7/8/09.  It probably took you all of 1/10th of a second to spot the transposition of the last two digits (09) that messes up the whole game.  Maybe that particular talking head can only handle up to eight digits effectively.  But it was a nice try. 

The pure time/date sequence took place in 1990, but nobody forewarned us then, that I can remember.  But we didn’t have the wonderful world-wide-web back then to spread useless information around the universe at the speed of light.  The next time that the perfect digital scenario is scheduled to appear will be 81 years from now.  If any of you are still around then, be sure to remind us, ok?

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There has been a bit of buzz during the last couple of weeks about the deliberately-slanted study done by The Heritage Foundation that “indicates” the fire service SAFER grants, etc., do not accomplish any good and should be abolished.

Chief Billy Goldfeder at Firefighter Close Calls has just published an excellent rebuttal written by a Massachusetts firefighter.  The essay is properly researched and footnoted and is an ideal reference for anybody who wants to respond to the Heritage Foundation’s claims.  An example:

One adaptation that the NAPA specifically supports in its report is the strengthening of the nation’s EMS system. More and more fire departments are taking on ambulance service delivery, and there are some gaps in the quality of care from community to community. According to the report, EMS response is one of three main areas that the AFG program can potentially impact [3]. The NAPA report also notes that the program can work, “with others to support strengthened EMS capabilities and effectiveness” [4].

As first responders, firefighters and EMTs are the frontline for disasters and emergencies. We are an important part of national preparedness at all levels. The NAPA report does not lose sight of this, and recognizes that the AFG program satisfies several of the necessary capabilities of the National Response Plan. These capabilities include, but are not limited to: firefighting operations/support; triage and prehospital treatment; and WMD/hazardous materials response [5]. In other words, building local capacity, which the AFG does, will increase national safety on the whole. The Foundation should stand behind this, as they, “want an America that is safe and secure” [6].

While The Heritage Foundation is dedicated to making government more efficient and smaller, their reasons for eliminating an entire funding process are shallow underneath the conclusions that they propose for the SAFER program.

Make sure that you read, and save, the entire essay that FFCloseCalls has posted HERE.

Update:  Be sure to read the rebuttal to the rebuttal in our Comment #1 below.

After you’ve done that, let’s get this equipment checked out.  I need to get the coffee started.

Visit us at booth #2200 in the Exhibit Hall

“Planning” is an element of almost everything we do.  When you go to bed at night, you are planning in your mind what you’ll be doing the next day, or even next month.  When you go to the grocery store you do some planning.  That usually involves preparing a list of needed goods to purchase, and planning which store(s) you’ll be visiting to get them.  Planning is just such an ingrained behavior that we seldom give it any thought.

But there are two kinds of planning:  Good planning and poor planning.  And the outcome of anything you do is dependent on how effectively you’ve planned your moves, whether it be grocery shopping or putting out a fire.  In my FRD one of the three shifts is commanded by an upper-level captain who is in charge of the entire station’s functions, including ordering all the station supplies.  Whenever somebody was newly-promoted to that position, my advice to them was simple:  Never run out of toilet paper.  It doesn’t matter what you do with anything else, or how it works out.  Everybody turns left when they should have turned right once in a while and you can be forgiven for the occasional mistake.  But …… if the station runs out of TP, then your a$$ is grass and there is no forgiveness for that.

Our fiscal year begins on July 1, so that means the month of June is slim pickings for getting anything out of the warehouse.  If you don’t plan ahead and have a sufficient amount of things like cleaning supplies (and toilet paper) already on hand to get you through June, then you’ll be in the hurt locker for a couple of weeks.  And part of that planning included squirreling enough of your stock away in hiding to keep from being raided.

You see, there were always a few stations that had senior captains who didn’t learn the stocking-up game and would be running short of essentials along about June 20th.  And you could bet that if you got an emergency call, then as soon as the apparatus was out of sight, a foreign ambulance would be slipping into the back lot of the station and their shopping trip would begin.  And  Presto! all your careful planning was compromised.  Unless you had planned further and hidden your vital supplies away.

So you see, it takes more than just planning to be a success.  It takes good planning and extended planning.  What brought this subject to mind was an article that I read yesterday about a 3-day beer festival in Scotland England that had to shut down after two days because they ran out of beer.  The Scotsman reported it:

The Beer on the Wye festival in Herefordshire bucked tales of economic doom and gloom after it saw a 30 per cent increase in attendance of thirsty punters who literally drank it dry.

The three-day event, organised by the Herefordshire branch of the Campaign for Real Ale (Camra), was due to run until yesterday evening but organisers had to bring it to a close after they completely ran out of beer.

A message on the website said: “Beer on the Wye has been drunk completely dry.”

Man, that’s even worse than running out of toilet paper.

Hey, we’d better get the equipment checked out.  I’m planning on making a fresh pot of coffee.