Here it is, another Sunday already.  It’s always so peaceful outside on Sunday mornings.  Let’s hope it stays that way.

The underlying theme of the fire and rescue events this past week seems to have been “safety.”  We didn’t plan it that way, it’s just how events tumbled out.  They seem to batch themselves that way and I always find that fascinating.  Another undercurrent of events has been under the category of “arson,” although we didn’t have nearly the time to get into all of those items that came along.

Maybe we’ll have the chance to wrap those two topics up for a while.  It will be interesting to see what spontaneous topics bubble to the top this week.  And then we’ll be having all the folks coming back home from the F.R.I. in Denver and they’ll be sparking some new discussions on what solutions are being tackled in the administrative levels.  Do you think that “lightweight construction” is still a priority?  We’ll see how that goes.  Personally, I’d like to see much more public effort by both the IAFC and the IAFF, along with the state and local chapters of both, to get that problem turned around.  I just don’t like this idea of firefighters being forced to stay outside and watch houses burn down because the home builder saved a couple of thousand in costs by putting up a wood-chip-and-glue sham of a building.

Anyway, we still have to get this equipment checked out.  I’ll go start the coffee and in a little while we can get the Sunday breakfeast going.  Meanwhile, this week’s photo art will help get our mind off of that August heat that’s building up out there.  See you later in the Day Room.

Everybody has heard of the Oxford English Dictionary (the OED).  Some people have even seen a set of the 20-volume work in their local library.  But nobody that I know has ever actually used it.  I certainly haven’t. 

That’s probably because it isn’t the same type of reference work that we usually associate with a dictionary.  The OED was created with the thought of becoming the authoritative source for not only the definitions of words, but their complete histories and usages from the time of their first-known utterances.  Most of the individual entries run to hundreds of words and are mostly utilized by scholars.

Briefly put, the dictionary project was begun in 1858 by a group of linguists headed by Frederick Furnivall and they put out a call to English language scholars for help.  They requested that volunteers send in their submissions of specific word histories complete with their references of past usage.  Then the papers began to pour in by the thousands.  The project continued to grow over the years and in 1879 Dr. James Murray took over the post of editor.

As the massive work approached its mid-point of completion in 1896, Dr. Murray noticed that of the thousands of steady contributors, the most prolific of them all was a Dr. William C. Minor who had sent in an astounding 10,000 entries and was still going strong after 20 years.  Despite many invitations and pleadings, Murray never was able to convince W. C. Minor to travel from his home in SW England up to London so that they could meet.  Dr. Murray then decided to take the train to Berkshire and call on Dr. Minor personally.  When he arrived, it was then that he learned that Minor was a permanent resident of the Broadmoor Lunatic Asylum.

Not long ago I finished reading a fascinating book that tells the story of this remarkable man who was an American army surgeon but had gone mad and murdered an innocent Londoner.  The book, The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester, weaves the story of Minor’s sad life along with a concise history of the OED.  The dictionary project was finally finished in 1929 after 70 years of dedicated effort by thousands of scholars.  A second edition was issued in 1989 and a digitized edition on CD-ROM was released in 2002.  A complete overhaul of the OED culminating in the release of the 3rd edition is hoped to be completed in 2037.

That’s probably more than you wanted to know about the Oxford English Dictionary, but I really would recommend the story about W. C. Minor.  The 230-page book is inexpensive and easy reading, but is very interesting if you like historical stories.

Now let’s get the equipment checked out.  I’ll go start the coffee and then find the order-form for the book.

I’ve been around the fire business for a long time (over 50 years) and I’ve certainly seen a lot of changes in firefighting operations.  Especially in the design and construction of running gear, or what they call PPE today.  Along with that has come advances in equipment design, procedures and apparatus construction.

Yet, despite all these technical and procedural changes, we are STILL seeing the same ratio of injuries and FF deaths, more or less, that we have been getting for decades.  If everything that we do and wear and use are better now, then the only thing that hasn’t been upgraded is the brain that we use.  You can spend scads of money on clothes, tools and trucks, but if you don’t upgrade your thinking and actions along with them, then you are endangering yourself and everybody else.

Safety, both on the fireground and in the station, is not being practiced to the level that it could be in a lot of departments.  Many departments now have appointed Safety Officers that respond to all fire calls and do nothing but observe and point out unsafe actions that should be immediately corrected.  All in the name of reducing injuries.  Between fire calls, the safety officers visit stations and review problems and conduct drills to highlight safety practices.  Does your department do this?

Ephrata, Washington FD photo

Oftentimes, smaller volunteer departments tend to leave niceties like this out of their fireground operations.  “Not enough people” is one of their excuses.  Or in many cases it’s just not a wide-enough planning ahead of time.  The recent report just issued on the house fire in Texas last year that killed two volunteer FF’s points out a LOT of necessities that were ignored that directly led to the fatal results.

Ok, so your little country department can only muster 8 or 10 fit bodies on a “worker.”  What about the “old-timers” who still listen to the scanner and show up to watch?  Who better to become the fireground safety officer than somebody with the experience to recognize unsafe actions in progress?  Or maybe you should consider a regional procedure where the 2nd or 3rd arriving department that is coming to assist you assumes that repsonsibility along with their R.I.T. assignments.  Please, don’t tell me that you don’t have R.I.T. assignments automatically programmed in.  After that disaster in Texas?

And do we really need to say any more about seat belt usage?  Everybody knows about that stuff.  But there are still a lot of fire and ambulance squads that don’t practice it, even though they know better.  As a result, we get a dozen or so needless FF deaths every year just because somebody didn’t bother to buckle up.  And the beat goes on.

Make “Safety” your business.  Demand safe procedures and dedicated safety officers in your department.  And every day check out FireFighter Close Calls (http://www.firefighterclosecalls.com) to see and be reminded of little things with big consequences that are killing and maiming our fire and rescue people.

After we check out the equipment this morning, I’ll have the coffee ready in the Day Room and we’ll take a look at this training video produced by the Denver Fire Department covering their new mandatory seat belt procedure:

Today starts the annual “convention” of the International Association of Fire Chiefs (IAFC) that is being held in Denver this year.  Many organizations have dropped the term “convention” from their vocabulary because the word immediately brings up a mental picture of a bunch of drunks wearing funny hats weaving down the sidewalks and singing old songs.

So now the annual conclaves are called things like “conference,” “exposition,” and “seminar.”  The IAFC just leaves off the descriptor altogether calling the 3-day event the Fire-Rescue International.  But do you know where they are?  They’re at the Colorado Convention Center.

Seriously, though, I hope they have a successful meeting.  There is always a lot of good, new ideas exchanged and solutions to common problems worked on.

Speaking of Denver, as I understand it, the emergency ambulance service is part of a separate agency called Denver Health and it works in partnership with the FD in responding to medical calls.  Denver Health is a unit of a large medical center and operates 34 ambulances.

Well, somebody at Denver Health thought it would be a good idea to look at ways to make the ambulances operate more efficiently and asked the University of Denver to help design an ambulance that could utilize solar power to help run the rig.  Political reality of the moment says that if you wave a flag that says “Green!” on it at anything, then the municipal budgeteers will scramble to fund it.

In order to help infuse a sense of need, the Denver Health hospital director Patti Gabow tossed out this, according to Ward Lucas of tv channel 9:

She wondered if there was a way to build an ambulance that didn’t need to be kept idling during its shift.

Ambulances are notorious energy hogs. Because they are filled with medical and communication equipment that has to be constantly kept at full charge, ambulances are parked throughout the city spewing fumes and consuming diesel 24 hours a day.

Now I’ve never been to Denver.  And I’ve never played Denver citizen on TV.  But I am willing to bet that they don’t leave their ambulances idling in the stations non-stop while waiting for the next call.  But it worked, they got their funding.  They have come up with a design and are currently building a unit with solar panels on the roof and hope to have it in service sometime this month.

The solar panels will provide enough current to keep the onboard medical equipment charged while the unit is not being used.  Personally, I’m always glad to see innovation and new ideas being tried.  That is a form of progress and these early attempts usually open the path to new technology that ends up helping in other ways that we can’t yet imagine.  So let’s hope the experiment works and see what happens next.  Read the full story from Channel 9 HERE.  And then don’t forget our article from last March HERE about the San Rafael, Californina, FD successfully using solar panels on their fire engines to keep the radios and computers topped off.

We’d better get this equipment checked out now.  And since the coffee maker isn’t yet solar-powered, I’ll go get it started.

There was a bit of a flap from the China Olympics the past couple of days.  First, the dictatorial regime was caught enhancing the opening ceremonies on the video feed.  It seems that the air quality was so bad that the people couldn’t see the fireworks very well, so they super-imposed some previously recorded fireworks displays over the live picture.  It made it appear that they were putting on a terrific show, but it was really just a terrific piece of deception.

During the same ceremony, it was revealed yesterday, they had a little girl singing a song before the crowd in the stadium.  But some oaf with the “Official Appearances and Impressions” committee was offended by the little tyke’s looks.  So at the last minute they hustled another little gal onto the stage who had a more politically correct smile, and she lip-synched the song Milli-Vanilli style.

And that was just on the first day.  But what more can you expect from a rotten government that blandly exports a billion counterfeit DVD’s every year?

*  *  *

Does your shift have a gravy-man?  Every station shift has a cook who is able to put a good dinner on the table.  Usually the cook is chosen by acclamation as a result of being more skilled, and willing, than any of the others in the culinary arts.  And if the crew is lucky, they have a backup who can fill in when Cookie is on leave.

Firehouse cookery has a reputation of long standing.  Known for their ability to set out a spread for anywhere from six to fifteen hungry firefighters and paramedics, the station cooks have been written up in countless cookbooks and news stories.

The primary requirement is to lay out a meal that is (a) plentiful, (b) nutritious, and (c) tasty.  And a good variety from day to day is a given.

But how about the gravy?  For some reason, making really good gravy is a skill that one is born with.  No matter how hard you try to learn, if you weren’t born with this special touch, then you won’t be doing anything great with the gravy.

How can that be, you say?  The basic recipe for gravy is as simple as they come.  You just add some juices (or milk) to some flour, mix well while heating, add some spices, and there it is.  Wrong!  It’s not going to be there unless you were born with that magic touch.  I don’t care how good you are with the meat loaf or the fettucini.  If you don’t have the gravy touch, you just ain’t gonna make it.  It’s one of those mysteries of life.

Some shifts have both a regular cook AND a gravy guy who is brought in at the last minute to stir up the tantalizing sauce that makes the entree great.  Lucky is the shift that has a gravy guy.

Lucky or not, we still have to get this equipment checked out.  And I’ll let loose with my coffee touch.

These guys fix gravy 100 gallons at a time:

I still can’t get over that bizarre event in Toronto on Sunday.  I guess “massive” is a pretty good word to describe it, but I’ll bet the people who were there have some better ones.  We’ll have to keep an eye on what goes on in North York for a while and hopefully the citizens there can find out who allowed this outfit to put up those huge propane tanks in the middle of the city.  Just amazing.

*  *  *

We started a discussion a while back about citizen 1st responders (CFR’s) and where they seem to be successful.  There are also different areas of responsibility for them, depending on the region of the country and how reliant on them an area is.

One of our readers sent along some information on one well-organized group of CFR’s that inarguably has one of the toughest 1st-due territories in the world.  And when it comes to dedication, you can’t beat the Hatzalah Emergency Rescue Service in Israel.

On their WEBSITE they explain:  “Our mission is to ensure the finest medical care and emergency response services are available in all parts of Israel. To do so we work closely with local municipalities, MDA, and the IDF to provide a number of services throughout Israel:”

• Renovating medical facilities
• Adding buildings to existing medical facilities
• Constructing ambulance bays
• Staffing medical facilities
• Coordinating volunteers at centers and in the field
• Purchasing and upgrading medical equipment 

Here is a group of volunteers whose response district is literally a war zone.  Part of their mission is setting up and operating what they call Emergency Rescue Centers where emergency care can begin and life-saving treatments can be carried out before transportation.  In some areas, a hospital is an hour’s drive away. 

Again, from their website:  Hatzalah Emergency Rescue Centers ensure that there are standards of excellence in critical care and trauma treatment throughout Israel.  We train, equip, supply and coordinate emergency response teams spread
through the country with an average response time of 3 minutes to any call. Our first responder services include:

• Coordinating medical response teams
• Equipping ambulances and EMTs
• Constructing ambulance bays
• Providing medical supplies and restocking EMT field kits
• Providing radios for field communication and bullet-proof vests
• Training new EMT’s and ambulance drivers

 Did you catch that?  Three minutes response time nationwide!

I don’t think there are very many Yuppies in Israel.  Be sure to check out their WEBSITE HERE and see what all they do.

But before we get started on that, let’s get this equipment checked out.  I need to order some more coffee.

(When you get the time, check out this 10-minute video that they have produced as a public relations effort:

After watching total destruction of an industrial gas supply depot in Toronto yesterday, if you’re wondering why such a facility was permitted in the middle of a long-established residential community, then welcome to the club.

National Post

The area was largely developed during and immediately after World War II around a collection of wartime factories with most of the housing dating back 50 to 60 years.  And while it’s accepted that the original zoning allows for some industry, apparently there are no regulations there for high-hazard occupancies like Sunrise.  I wonder why not?

The large storage and transfer facility was built on the site just four years ago and the citizens have been complaining about it since the day they started constructing it.  Apparently, the politicians who have the final say over such things weren’t all that bothered about it.  Publicly, they’ll be saying things like “The zoning laws permitted it.”  But what they won’t be admitting is that they could have very easily amended those ordinances to restrict such dangerous occupancies from setting up in that particular industrial park.  And again the question will come up, “Why didn’t they?”

Richard Hawrelak, a plant design engineer who lectures at the University of Western Ontario said that Canada, in contrast to other countries like the United States and some European nations, lacks firm rules governing the storage of dangerous substances like propane near concentrations of people.

“In the States, they’ve got a damned good system,” said Hawrelak. “(In Canada) it’s a toothless, gutless wonder.”

Meanwhile the so-called deputy mayor went on national television and said that the (4-yr.-old) plant was there first and all those people should have known better than to move there.  My own cynical distrust of local politicians and zoning boards gives me a lot of doubts about this situation.  Unfortunately for the rest of us, if there was any favoritism involved in this deal, then the layers of responsibility will be thick and almost impossible to cut through.

The Toronto Globe and Mail has already begun looking into the checkered past of Sunrise Propane’s owner and his legal problems.  In one instance a ruling against him complained that, ”He adjusted his evidence so often that it was apparent that he was manoeuvring himself out of liability.”  It also noted his “sloppy” management of the company. 

The fire is out now, but there is still a lot of dirt left to be dug up.

While they start that, we’d better get the equipment checked.  I see that the coffee pot needs refilling.

I have to move carefully for a while.  This is one of those mornings where every move that I make goes awry.  If I pick something up, I spill it or drop it.  If I make a move, I bump into something.

Thank goodness it’s Sunday and we can take it easy for the first few hours, anyway.  It would have been much better if I could have slept a couple more hours this morning.  Just make sure that I’ve got my seat belt latched properly if we have to go somewhere.

Meanwhile, as you’re getting the equipment checked out, I will be - carefully - making a fresh pot of coffee and putting up the Sunday photo art.

It’s time  to hunker down for the quadrennial Olympic onslaught.  Two weeks worth of hype and hollering by the TV people who try to convince us that there’s nothing in the world more exciting that watching a bunch of people in their skivvies run as fast as they can for 10.4 seconds.  Excuse me if I don’t miss a meal because of it.

The Olympic “ideal” is nice in itself, that of providing a venue for the best athletes of each country to gather and compete for the ultimate prize and to chase the elusive record times for their event.  It’s great that they can do that.  But the Ideal was bespoiled long ago when the Olympics dumped the purism of amateur participation to allow professional athletes to compete.

Sometime about 30 years ago the self-appointed leaders of the Olympic committee realized that they were sitting on a money machine and decided to make the most of it.  First, they trademarked the name and symbols, effectively locking up the generic terms and making them proprietary.  Then they established a hierarchy of nation-level committees filled with their cohorts in exploiting the program.

Along with eliminating the amateur benchmark, they expended great sums of money and effort to convince a guillable public that their traveling roadshow is the greatest experience you could ever witness.  By requiring participants along with the host nations to pay for everything themselves, the Olympic Committee have enriched themselves beyond description.  And in many cases the national committees have followed their lead and created a lot of personal wealth with their monopoly on the running and jumping business.

Personally, I enjoy watching some of the Winter Games.  They provide some genuine excitement, like the ski jumps, slaloms, and hockey games.  But I fail to see the thrill in watching somebody hurl a spear or a cannonball across the yard.  If you’ll watch the television you will see an endless promotion for upcoming programs, interviews with people you don’t particularly want to know about anyway, and large gaps filled with commercials.  If you stick around long enough, you’ll see a pause for 40 seconds while a few people run a lap and maybe jump over something along the way.

I’m sorry, but I just don’t share the excitement of watching somebody else play volleyball or shoot their pistols at a distant target.  For me, the only thing that’s more boring than track is field.

But let’s take a break from boredom and get this equipment checked out.  I’ll make some exciting coffee (Watch it drip!!).

p.s.  The only summer athletic event, the only one, that has never been tainted with professional participation is rowing.

I was reading through some of the links that STATter911 posted HERE about the fines being levied on North Carolina fire departments.  The agenda item, of course, was the double-fatal FF casualty in Salisbury earlier this year. 

The state Department of Labor thoroughly investigated the all the actions taken during the fire and issued a report focusing on the mistakes that were made by the several fire companies working the incident.  That’s all well and good.  It needs to be done and everybody in the country should be able to learn from these mistakes and made certain that they don’t duplicate them. 

But I have a problem, I think, with this levying of fines on the affected FD’s for their actions.  By doing so, the DOL has transformed the report from a factual document into a means of punishment.  Is punishment really the proper response here?  Aren’t all of the FD’s that were there already feeling the results of the fire?

Once you begin using the findings of the investigation as grounds for punitive action (absent criminal negligence, of course) then you start assigning blame and seeking retribution.  Once that bureaucratic boondoggle bounds out of the bottle, then you have a mess.  Finger-pointing and letter writing begin to take precedence over the importance of education and improvement.

One of the charges made in the report was:  ”Safety inspectors found that on more than one occasion firefighters entered and exited the burning structure without radio or visual monitoring from the command post.”  C’mon, now.  While we’ll agree that is not a good thing to happen, is it always avoidable on a large property like that?  Does that warrant fines and punishment on the overworked firefighters and officers that were there?

I don’t know about all this.  I’ll have to think about it some more.  What were your first thoughts when you read that report?

Well, we’d better direct our thoughts toward getting the equipment checked out.  Mine are focused on measuring out some coffee for the machine.

Like most people, I don’t just go to one supermarket for my groceries.  I’ll visit two or three of them during the course of the week to take advantage of any sales as well as the usual lower prices that one store may have in certain product categories.

The market that’s closest to where I live is also right next door to one of those “dollar stores” that have been sprouting up over the past few years.  Have you ever taken the time to look through one of those places?  They really do have much lower prices on most items and if they have something that you’ll be buying anyway, then you can save quite a bit of money there.

In a lot of instances you can’t be quite sure of what is on the shelves until you get there.  They tend to offer grocery items that are whatever happens to be available when their buyer was contracting purchases.  The dry-goods staples like brooms and mousetraps are always on hand, but the quick-turnaround grocery items change constantly and you have to see what’s being offered today.

I’ll visit my local dollar store once in a while to pick up some name-brand canned sardines.  Not only are they the only place where I can get a certain kind of smoked sardines that I like, but the price of their sardines is 40% less than the supermarket.  When I went in there yesterday I noticed a lot of gaps on the shelves in the grocery section.  Stock was really low.

Then it occurred to me, I had heard somewhere that a lot of people are drifting into the dollar stores from the supermarkets because of the recent spike in food prices and they can save quite a bit of money picking up their sundry items and canned goods there.  And it was evident in the Dollar General where I was that business had picked up.

Consumer Reports and SmartMoney Magazine have both done some comparison shopping at places like Dollar Tree and Dollar General and have come up with some “good deals” and “bad deals” lists of what to watch for.  Under the “good deals” column they say that you can’t beat them for cleaning supplies, shampoo and hair care products, gift wrapping paper, and kitchen supplies like brooms and dust pans.

On the “avoid” list they recommend that you pass up the vitamins, anything with an electrical cord, and off-brand toys.  Also, Consumer Reports says be wary of look-alike brands at some dollar stores, that look like major brands with a slightly different name. You may be unhappy with the quality.

But if you stick to basic products and especially to name brands….a dollar store is well worth exploring in today’s tough economy.  And conveniently, when you go there you don’t have to get all dressed up, like you were going to Wal*Mart or something.

Ok blue-light shoppers, let’s get this equipment checked out while I go start the coffee.
 

I thought we were through talking about First Responder programs for a few days, at least.  But Dave Statter (STATter911) reminded me of a pure volunteer first responder program that operates in Brooklyn, New York.

The Bedford-Stuyvesant Volunteer Ambulance Corps just celebrated its 20th anniversary on July 19.  Founded in 1988 by two NY City EMS workers, the organization has functioned on donations alone.  When Joseph “Rocky” Robinson and Joe Perez started the grass-roots squad, the average response times for ambulances in the Bed-Stuy section of the city was 10 minutes.  They soon brought that down to under 4 minutes with their dedicated volunteers who now respond to over 100 emergency calls per month.

Starting with nothing more than a shelf full of first aid supplies, they would get a direct phone call for help and grab their aid bag along with an oxygen therapy kit mounted in a backpack and literally run to the incident.  Eventually they got two ambulances in service, staffed with certified EMT’s.  Not content with just the emergency response team, Robinson set up a trailer on a city-owned lot and began neighborhood training in first aid, CPR and first-responder certification.  They are also recognized by the Dept. of Health as a 3-yr. EMT Recertification agency.

On their website they tell us that:

In addition to medical services, BSVAC has worked tirelessly to train the Bed-Stuy community.  To date, over two thousand local residents have been trained through BSVAC as First Responders who can save lives in emergencies.  BSVAC has also developed a remarkable Youth Corps program that provides CPR, first aid and basic emergency medical training to teens and young adults, preparing them for full-time employment in emergency medicine. 

A program for younger children, called the Trauma Troopers, has also been developed by BSVAC; it provides CPR and first aid training.  In addition to medical training, these programs provide positive role models and social activities. To date, hundreds of young people have completed the program; almost 100 of the graduates have become EMTs or have otherwise pursued careers in medicine as nurse, physician’s assistant, or doctor.

Rocky Robinson retired from the City EMS division in 2000 at the rank of Captain with just over 30 years service.  But he has not retired from his second vocation as leader and bedrock of the remarkable volunteer rescue squad plonked down in the center of one of the world’s largest cities.

Earlier this year the headquarters trailer was condemned by the city for being unsafe.  Rocky has been working all year on plodding through the Byzantine maze of regulations to get all the approvals needed to replace it.  Grant money was provided for the new home and now all the permits are in place.  The new headquarters will become a reality soon.  Recently they had to park one of their two ambulances for want of $24,000 needed for the insurance.  But Robinson always finds a way to get over those kinds of hurdles.

Last month the television show Hannity’s America did a nice 6-minute interview with Robinson and visited the BSVAC.  Someone grabbed it off the tv and posted the segment HERE.  You can also visit the rescue squad’s website to learn more about their operation HERE.

But before you check out those two sites, let’s get this equipment checked out for the day.  I’ll get the coffee started.

Morning Lineup at Bed-Stuy VAC