There is still a lot of buzz around the fire/rescue universe about this photo that showed up the other day in the Winnipeg Free Press:
This is not a training fire where the guys take their picture while the donated building burns down behind them. It’s an actual house fire with the FF’s immortalizing themselves while waiting for water. Naturally, it generated a lot of response from all different viewpoints. Take a moment and read the full explanation HERE in STATter911 of what all was taking place before you make your own conclusion.
Everybody has a perfectly innocent and understandable explanation of what was going on, but this is the sort of thing that makes fire chiefs earn their higher salaries. Keep in mind that a high (very high) percentage of the normal people (aka “the public”) go through their entire lives without ever personally seeing a house fire. “Waiting for water” means nothing to them. Their perception of what goes on at a fire is based entirely on their imagination and what they’ve seen in movies, including cartoons. And in this day and age, many of those snapshots and videos are being captured by 7th-grade dropouts with cellphones who show up at every fire, crash and emergency incident including those inside a private dwelling. That’s something that you always have to keep in mind now.
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Speaking of movies and videos, there is a new source of EMT training that is being recognized by many 1st-responders. One of the trickiest and most critical skills that an EMT needs to master is proper and accurate diagnosis. A mis-diagnosis can be disastrous to the patient.
Now somebody has come up with a webpage that explains the Medical Afflictions of Cartoon Characters. Here you can observe the obvious symptoms of various maladies and associate them with your favorite Warner Bros. animated actors. For example, under the heading of Amphetamine Addiction you learn that:
Speedy Gonzales is known as the fastest mouse in Mexico. Those who know about amphetamines and the addiction which plagues its users also know that Speedy exhibits some of the more well know symptoms of this drug. Rapid heartbeat, dilated pupils and overly exaggerated fast speech are this drug’s calling card. Physical agitation, such as Speedy’s need for speed, is also a well known symptom.
This is a valuable resource because now you can make sure to spend 24 minutes daily watching the Cartoon Network on tv and then enter it as a drill on your training log. Be sure to tell your battalion chief that you learned about it on Firegeezer.
But before we begin our drills, we need to get this equipment checked out. And I’ve got to get the coffee started. See you back in the day room. (Jackson….get the tv screen cleaned off.)
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