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Comment by Fabulous Heather Days of Summer on December 28, 2011 at 12:45pm

I was somewhat lucky - that is an extremely ironic statement - for my story below.

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During my fire essentials training during our smoke house search and rescue work, as we were crawling through the 2nd floor one of the guys in the team in front of me fell head first down a flight of stairs with his pack on - it could have killed him - and it did destroy his ff career and his truck driving career as he tore the bicep muscle off his humerus, etc. in the fall.
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and a moment later I almost fell down the same flight of stairs... except my brother-in-law caught me...

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I went off on my officers - (a) they had a safety officer at the top and bottom of the stairway, since they KNEW it was blind and dangerous; (b) several were my relatives; (c) they failed to provide proper emergency medical care to the FF after falling [he drove himself to the emergency room]; and (d) the officers were saying schit like "it was his own fault, he should have been crawling instead of squatting"
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my argument "you are willing to let a FF trainee DIE to teach him a lesson ???"
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back at our station - with a major debriefing - the chief, etc. backed my position up... and the chief made it clear to all of us - NEVER DO ANYTHING that WE FFs feel is unsafe - SINCE the FFs see stuff that the chief & officers can not see - and we all have to use our own common sense and training and report our observations back to our leaders... not blindly follow...
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long story short - it taught me that no one could be fully trusted with my life and the decisions about "what situations are safe" ... that situation taught me that I have to critically analyze EVERY situation beyond the orders given to me
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and yes, that meant that there were orders in the future that I refused and stated "I don't think that is safe because of x,y,z"
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and on a side note that training bldg (which was just an OLD abandoned house in town) was torn down a few years later by the city - condemned as DANGEROUS and unfit for any activity - duh !!!

Comment by Patti Walz on December 28, 2011 at 12:19pm

I am in tears here guys.....  Keep saying the forbidden words, send them my way, oh and get loads fo spankings!!!!!

Comment by Fabulous Heather Days of Summer on December 28, 2011 at 12:09pm

yea yea yea - we are gonna be spanking the elderly elders - LOLOLOL whoo hoo !!!

Comment by Fabulous Heather Days of Summer on December 28, 2011 at 12:08pm

Chief Weber - STOP SAYING ALL FORBIDDEN NAUGHTY WORDS.... I suspect you are just WANTING to be sent to the spanking line... I am seeing a pattern !!!

No precipitation words - thus you can not use Ra*n or Sle*t words either... HELLO McFly??? You knew this - you are just being naughty on purpose :-)~

Comment by Chris Weber on December 28, 2011 at 10:50am

And I will now report to the spanking line.

Comment by Chris Weber on December 28, 2011 at 10:17am

Morning.

Jim,we had the wind and rain and now we have sn*w on the ground and temps in the 20s.Amazing we had to wait till almost Jan.1 to get cold.vacation sounds like a good idea actually.I would like to make to go to Harrisburg for the PA Farm Show in a week and a half.Not looking too good this year,maybe next year.

Heather,I was on a truss roof right after I started doing this and it got SOFT.There was three of us on it and there wasn't very much fire under it,just heat.We laid on the peak of the roof until someone slid another ladder up to us and we got off that sucker.

Never trust the truss is something you don't tend to forget.Lightweight construction has really chnged things for the worst in the last few years.

Comment by Fabulous Heather Days of Summer on December 27, 2011 at 10:43pm

and jumping off what Chief Weber said: I personally don't think in my 10 years of service on my FD, did I once say to my officers "we should NOT have been inside that buildling"

my entire service I remained a FF, never wanted to be an officer, and never became one - I preferred to be a worker bee and try to avoid as much of the politics as possible

but I think our culture was the officers made the decisions and the under-lings were just supposed to shut up and work...

and anytime an underling implied that something was too much or too dangerous - the seasoned guys would shame them and harrass them for being "unable to handle the job" which quickly shut them up

I wonder how the fire service would change if the underlings were permitted to say "too much" or "too dangerous"

I also wonder WHY MORE officers/chiefs don't man-up and say "NO - We Will Not Do An Interior Attack"

a lot of LODD deaths that I had read about don't happen in the first few minutes of the fire, instead they happen over time as to many FFs stay inside structures or work on precarious roofs, etc.

it seems officer/chiefs (all FFs) need to improve the flexibility of their decision making and make more rapid changes in their approach

from my discussions with FFs in other countries - their first priority is human life - ALL HUMAN LIFE - and they are much more aggressive about getting (keeping) their FFs HUMAN LIVES out of great harm

Comment by Fabulous Heather Days of Summer on December 27, 2011 at 10:25pm

naughty naughty naughty BOTH OF YOU .... GO ... to the spanking line for using FORBIDDEN WORDS !!!!

Comment by Chris Weber on December 27, 2011 at 2:26pm

Afternoon folks.

Little bit of everything here today.rain,sleet,sn*w,etc..Looks as if today might be interesting.

I can think of a few occasions in the past where we had no business being in a building doing anything.I do think we are getting better with risk vs reward than we did a few years ago.Still have those certain occasions where we should really go the extra mile.Those will never go away.

We are having a very rough end of the year as a whole.Lets all hope that we have a better year in 2012.

Comment by Patti Walz on December 27, 2011 at 9:10am

Good Morning Everyone.  I hope that your hiliday was a safe one.  Ours was pretty Qu**t only two homes were lost this season and no injuries.

 

Our new academy starts in one week and I will be shuttling students back and forth to classes....  Oh the joys...

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