Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Chief25sr on September 19, 2008 at 10:11am

First of all i wanna say hello. Well in our department we use two tags. We have green for everyone and depending on your status we have red for interior, yellow for exterior, orange for juniors and fire police have two greens. We hand our tags to the Safety Officer who clips them in groups on a board with various rings atatched. We check PAR every 5 minutes during a structure fire. We are still learning as this is something we instituted just a couple of years ago. We try to keep track of tanks etc. We do send all of our firefighters to rehab after the second tank. If the EMS personnel advises that someone needs to take a break we strictly do enforce this. When they go to be checked they have to give their helmet to the EMT and do not receive it back until cleared. It seems to work well.

Permalink Reply by Lou Anne on November 22, 2008 at 7:55pm

Every fire and ems person has two tags, if someone is there that can take charge of the board the tags are handed to them otherwise they are put on the first truck in. they are suppose to be tracking the number of tanks used. Each fire fighter is only allowed two tanks before they have to go to rehab. They get vitals taken and are given something to drink. Our tags are made out of metal, a local company made them for us. They have our last name and department number on them.

Permalink Reply by Rob on January 23, 2009 at 4:50am

We use a passport system with two cards per rig (one for accountability officer and one stays on the rig so if the whole place is wiped out they can tell who came in the rig. Drivers tag is placed upside down at the top with teh officer uner him and crew below that. Officer and crew are placed right side up. This allows the accountability office rto know instantly who the operator is (especially helpful for PAR when the operator is tanking water and is 5 miles away at the fill site). The department has been using white plastic engraved tage with the firefighter's name and nuint number on them. My station switched (about 2 1/2 years ago) to a tag that was used by one of my previous departments and other stations are considering switching. The tag is still the same size (about 1/2" x 2") and still has the name and unit number of the FF, but it now also is color coded based on cert level and has the certs listed below. Red only is FF or FF trainee with no EMS cert, Blue only is EMS only or EMS trainee with no fire cert, Red & Blue is EMS/Fire certified, and Green is a cadet or explorer. This allows the accountability officer to very rapidly scan the board and see what skill sets they have or need if the situation should change. We keep 2 tage for each FF assigned to the station on a velcro strip (or 3) on the officer side of the engine on the dash so the officer can place the tags for the FF's on board on the cards enroute without the FF's having to get out of their seat while the vehicle is moving to hand tags up. Also each FF has 6 tags on their helmet. This is so they will have tags available if they are detailed out to another station or if we have accountability at the entry point of a particular sector (ie. you have your overall accountability person but you have 2 structures involved and you have a person at the entry point of each structure keeping track of who is inside or it is a crime scene and you just had a tag to the entry officer so he can log it in the crime scene log). These tags are printed with a color printer on regular paper then trimmed with a paper cutter or scisors then laminated and a strip of velcro put on the back. I made tags for the whole station (10 people) a month or so ago (old ones were jsut falling apart and had a bunch of new guys) for under $10 (taking in to account I already had the equipment to do it and the ink and laminate would also be used for other things).