Excerpt with permission from pipenozzle dot com: 

Video recordings of public meetings are legal under Connecticut open meetings statutes. The Groton Town Council records its meetings and places the video online for the public. The PBFD board does not record its  meetings, but prefers to hide behind euphemistic agendas and cryptic meeting minutes. Firefighter Bryan Quilter has, since Ackley took office a year ago, performed a valuable and courageous public service (in…

Excerpt post with permission of pipenozzle.com

Yes, Collinwood (1908) and Our Lady of Angels (1958) happened a long time ago, but in May 2012, three teenage boys mimicked a youtube.com video and set fire to hand sanitizer on a desktop in a Woodburn High Schoolcomputer room and tried to put it out with paper…

This is an excerpt from the current post at pipenozzle.com, reprinted here with permission:

Alan Ackley is angry. He’s not getting his way, and he’s going to kick and scream and hold his breath until he turns blue. He and the Ackleyites asked the voters for $3.5 million to run the Poquonnock Bridge Dire District into the ground by the end of 2013, but it turns out the mill rate the district board set was actually for $4.1 million. There’s more. The district has another…

Excerpt from current post at pipenozzle.com printed here with permission:

Deborah Straszheim’s update on Alan Ackley’s inane, insidious antics in today’s New London paper is old news. Ackley continues to act the mad fool navigating—if you can call it that—the Poquonnock Bridge Fire District right toward the shoals of financial and public safety disaster.

Straszheim reported that Ackley…

Excerpt from post at pipenozzle.com on Ackley Argle Bargle and the Ecology of Fire.  Reprinted here with permission.  

"But the hazard load won’t go away no matter who runs the department or runs it into the ground. Firefighters see the world as a collection of hazards so the rest of us don’t have to look at them, and the total of hazards in a protection jurisdiction is the hazard load. It’s all part of the ecology of fire, of all things that burn. Firefighters know…

Sample from current post at pipenozzle.com reprinted with permission: 

"I’d say it’s fair to conclude, based on my two decades of teaching experience and thirty years as a writer, that most Americans can not tell if they have been victims of propaganda or not until some obnoxious retired educator/writer like me starts asking for fact. I did so with Kaitlyn and easily established that she had no basis in fact for supporting Ackley and for voting to slash the PBFD budget.…

Excerpt posted here with permission of pipenozzle dot com.  For the full post, visit the site. 

For alcoholics to seek a cure, they have to hit bottom first.

Before serious leadership emerges to cure the fire protection mess in the Town of Groton, Connecticut, Alan Ackley will take the Poquonnock Bridge Fire District, which provides fire protection for half of the town, to the bottom first.…

Except reprinted with permission of pipenozzle dot com. Visit site for complete entry.

At the end of a hot, muggy southern Michigan May day, I pulled my truck into the Coca Cola warehouse lot and glanced up at sky blue everywhere but over downtown Kalamazoo where a black thunderhead passed over as they tended to do on hot, muggy spring afternoons.  The only thought I had concerned turning in my paperwork at the front office, and then getting in…

Excerpt with permission of blog posted at pipenozzle.com

Firehouse.com reprinted a New London Day article reporting that Poquonnock Bridge Fire District czar Alan Ackley wants to take PBFD into the future by returning to the past, a vague romanticized past where PBFD property owners were protected by volunteer firefighters. You might ask him to first read …

Excerpt of Chicago Fire review reprinted with permission of pipenozzle.com: 

According to the Chicago Sun-Times, “Chicago Fire” executive producer, Dick Wolf, said the new “Chicago Fire” television series would be character driven. In other words, another hose opera because the special effects would cost too much, not to mention the equipment…

See the full blog entry at pipenozzle.com:

"There’s more, much more needed to win the political debate than touchy-feely, feel-good public relations, of course. Firefighters need to lock and load with cold, hard fact. Lots of them, and I don’t mean run stats. Even the busiest departments touch the daily lives of only a small percentage of the population, and that’s good. Fewer runs, safer city, and therein lies the political paradox for firefighters. The safer taxpayers feel,…

Excerpt from latest blog post at pipenozzle.com:

But once in a while a city leader actually gets it. The current example is America’s most hands-on mayor, Newark’s Cory Booker, who gained a ton of press attention for a couple of days for rushing into a burning house on April 13 with his security aid to save a woman. After the rescue, standing before the press with a burned and bandaged hand, the privileged (Stanford, Oxford, Yale) Booker expressed a new-found respect for…

A comment at pipenozzle.com on the funny math used to report response times by FDNY and LAFD.

"For fire departments, measuring anything is tricky. Does the local government brag that it has a good fire department because of the increasing number of emergency responses each year? Nope. Though the fire department would look productive, that would not make the city seem like a safe place to live. Could the local government measure the number of days that pass without an…

Excerpt from new post at pipenozzle:

"Back in January overpaid management consultants released a report on the Philly Fire Department that got a few paragraphs attention by the Philadelphia Inquirer based on the executive summary–for one day.  And then, like all other expensive time-wasters, the study disappeared onto a dusty shelf from which it will be pulled for political cover by the local government to reduce fire service further in Philly with allegedly…

Pipe Nozzle: Firefighting Prose You Can Read is free this week only, Monday through Friday, for Kindle download at amazon.com.  The Kindle reader is free to install on computers and smartphones.  FDNY Battalion 9 Chief called Pipe Nozzle "all good," which may explain why the title is among the top 25% at amazon.com. 

Excerpt from new post at pipenozzle.com: 

Former Penn State president Graham Spanier is among a group of academics I’d never want with me in a burning building. That’s a literal trust test firefighters use when going to fires, because they do not want to go into a burning building knowing the person who has their back is always looking for a way out without giving a damn about anyone else.  We trained to never go into a building alone, to always grip the turnout coat of the…

Excerpt from full review of Lauren Manning's story of surviving 9/11 with burns over 80 percent of her body. 

"The story worth reading, and make no mistake about it, is that Lauren Manning is a survivor. She is one tough mother. Instinctively she threw an arm up to protect her face when she was enveloped in flame at the elevator. Intelligently, she ran from the World Trade Center to a nearby lawn and stopped, dropped, and rolled, and with the help of a stranger, put the fire out.…

Excerpt from a vision of a more efficient fire service for Camden, New Jersey and other cash-strapped cities across the nation.  The full blog is found at http://www.pipenozzle.com.

Camden 9-1-1. We meet or exceed your fire suppression needs. Sir, I am sorry to hear the fire is now through the roof of your apartment building. Based on that assessment, would you prefer the…