Yup, I wana see the urban assult vehicles that everyone is running to fire and ems calls. especially with what everone is running to move traffic.
Here's mine.
Heeyyyyyyyyyy, I'll add your name to the petition supporting leather boots! *LOL*, just kidding! We don't really have a petition! Less weight would definately be a plus. Hard enough for this fat old lady to haul her arse up onto a brush truck in street clothes, let alone all the heavy bunker gear and boots! We're looking at the new lightweight gear and that includes leather boots. We are facing replacing almost all of our bunker gear due to most of it being over 10 years old! Gonna cost an arm and a leg to do, guess we'll have to knock off a bank or something.
Oh trust me I'm all for less POV's at the scenes, just saying that in someplaces thats not always the option, and I also agree with keeping them back out of the way., especially when apparatus must keep leaving and returning to the scene,IE: tanker shuttles.
This is my new baby. I have an in dash strobe (blue only) and that's it for now. I will be adding blue lights to my front where the fog lights go since I don't have fog lights. but that's a little later. just got the decals on yesterday.
we are on a mutual aid agreement with 5 other departments should we ever have the "big one". 3 of those departments are within 5 miles of ours, and the other 2 within 10 miles. therefore, we are usually not short handed on manpower. however, during daytime hours, we are hurting badly for rescue personnel. i think we only have 4 qualified individuals during daytime hours on our department. that is kind of a sore subject, because we have people qualified who are willing to do the job, but the department won't put them on because it is up to the city board to elect and hire personnel. we receive our calls by pager.
in which, we have 3 different tones. one for fire, one for rescue, and one for hazmat. set up like this to keep unqualified personnel from responding to something that they are not qualified for. i say one tone is all we need. if you are not qualified to respond to the specific type of call, then disregard. everyone knows, or should i say, they should know as to whether they are qualified or not.
I Agree with Jim, somtimes going to the station is not an option. Our dept is a dual role Vol. Dept. (Whew!), so we all have to drive to the station. Getting the men on the trucks is a big problem these days for us Vollies. When we do have a run we don't look the gift horse in the mouth when we get more than usuals (normally about5 guys) show up for scenes. Somtimes We drive our POVs to EMS scenes because its on our way there or the units already first responded and couldn't wait. Most of us have the common sense to stay out of the way of the unit (Or units) when we do this. But we need to focus, as an old cheif told us, to "get the butts in the seats".
I also come from a rural volunteer department. We have 4 trucks, our main Engine a 1982 GMC (holds 3) a 1977 Chevy Tanker/Pumper which isn't in the best of shape, so we have recommended that it not be driven out of town, it is ok for in town calls, we also have a 1995 Ford Tanker/Pumper, and a 1977 Dodge 2500 Brush Truck which is out of service at the time. Not to mention our 1995 E-350 Ford Ambulance 7.3L Turbo Diesel which is chipped. But anyways, sometimes as a lot of people have pointed out, it is hard to not take POVs to the scene. We have 17 people on the department, 5 or 6 of us which are trained in Firefighting and know how to run our equipment and how to use our gear, SCBA's etc..... Being in a rural county in Iowa, we have a mutual aid system in place for all structure fires where the main department for the call (the closest to the scene) is dispatched, and then a second department is dispatched and a third is put on Stand By, which at our mutual aid meeting we had most departments agree that when put on stand by we will go ahead and roll, no lights and no sirens. However, our county dispatch is horrible. 90% of the time they forget to page another department or only page one department and put them on standby. We had a one vehicle roll over accident about a year and a half ago, the town dispatched had to come through our town because the bridge to get their was out, the sherrifs office knew the bridge was out and that for anything near us, that was their district we were supposed to be called simultaneously. Well, myself and two other guys heard the page, went to the station.....waited, and waited in full bunker gear with the squad running, about 7 minutes later we hear sirens, its the other department's rescue squad, as they are coming into town they radio dispatch and ask if we are on scene yet, she replies, i have not paged them. To make a long story short, a jeep rolled, guy was thrown out and trapped under a roll bar, passerby stops to help and calls 911, the guy was still alive, however he ended up not making it due to asphyxiation (couldnt breathe and died), and had we been paged (since we were 3 miles away from scene and it was 11 miles for the other department by the time they did the run around to get there) there is a good chance this guy would still be alive. Back to my original intent of this post, if i have 5 guys show up to the station and take two trucks to scene, i have to take a POV to scene, sometimes i have even met at the station grabbed my gear and waited for anyone else to show up and we take one POV. But it is nearly impossible for small town rural volunteer departments to not allow POV's on scene. Some of us work 15 miles from town, or farther. I have even used my POV for traffic control several times, my current vehicle is an '07 Ford F150 Super Crew, i have a multi pattern wig wag controlling my head lights and fog lights, i have a slimlighter in my dash, and i have two strobe effect LED's in the back window behind the head rests, it is a bright truck. My previous vehicle was an '06 Dodge Ram, i had wig wags, slimlighter, white strobes in the fog lights, and blue strobes in my reverse lights, as well as the blue lights in the back window. I will post some pictures and video once i get them uploaded.