Incident Management in the Fast Lane: Reducing Responder Road Rage! “From our perspective, we considered it a minor accident: two passenger cars, a few bumps and bruises but no serious injuries – to either driver or their vehicles. However, the way the vehicles were positioned in the roadway and the amount of clean-up that would […]

For me and I’m sure many others, February 12, 2009 was one of those moments in your life where you’ll always say “I remember exactly where I was, what I was doing … at the moment I heard of the crash.” My wife Laurie and I have always had an unwritten rule that we don’t […]

I am often reluctant to write about commercial business ventures in my blogs and other platforms as I am sensitive to the trusted relationship between a writer and their readers, and leary about self-promotion. Thus I have delayed writing this post for quite some time. It wasn’t until I came to the realization that this […]

Given recent events and all the heartache they’ve brought, I’m not sure that December is a month to remember but instead, it’s one we’d like to forget.

Despite the fact that I wrote this piece for Fire-Rescue Magazine last year, I’m pretty sure its content is still relevant as we ponder recent and not so recent events during Fire/EMS Safety, Health and Survival Week http://www.firefighternation.com/forum/topics/usfa-reminds-you-that…. As I stated in comments to another blog by John Mitchell (www.firedaily.com) titled: “The Charleston 43” (http://www.firefighternation.com/profiles/blogs/the-charleston-43) […]

I hung around after drill and talked with two good friends, Dave and Jack. Jack has been a volunteer firefighter on and off over the last 20 years, and with a few different departments. All three of us are within a few years of each other in age but Dave is a probie, and we remind him of that constantly. In fact, we have a pet name for him that I won’t put in writing.

He just joined the department in the last year as a result of the peer pressure we amply applied. The Probie’s gear rack is positioned smack-dab between Jack’s and mine, so we can keep a close eye on him and hopefully keep his rookie blunders to a minimum.

Dave started asking questions about the scenes depicted in some of the photos that hang on the wall outside of our training room.

My kids will verify that we rarely swear in front of them. Foul language is unacceptable in our house. My involuntary response to the pager message was: “Holy S***!” Alex immediately sensed something and asked me “What’s wrong Dad?”

I said, “I can’t believe I’m saying this but… I’m going to a plane crash.” I grabbed my laptop backpack and my go-bag for extended deployments and headed out the door.

I stumbled across this post from FireCritic (Fire-EMS Blog Network) and was dumbstruck. I haven’t thought of John Jordan in a long, long time. In May of 1994, as Managing Editor of The Fire Fighter Newspaper and as a guest of VFIS, I and three other local firefighters (Dave Sherman, Jim Guy and Ric Dimpfl) traveled […]