this should produce a slide show of fire apparatus
[slideshow=7]
Wikipedia firefighting and emergency management resources
A few weeks back, my friend and neighbor Gary Osgood
explained Wikipedia’s vetting process; I had only the notion – from mainstream media – that whoever posted last posted loudest.
[singlepic=46,320,240,,] From Wikipedia’s Firefighting Page.
Turns out that the peer-reviewed and featured pieces have been subject to pretty vigorous editing and fact-checking. It’s a small percentage, that are fully vetted, but the number that have useful starting points. As Gary points out in his Wikipedia user profile,
As overwhelming [as] the dreck
may be in Wikipedia, one can still type that word into Wikipedia’s search box and get an answer that stumbles toward the truth, leaving the reader with at least a little clue. That small miracle still happens more often that not.
And often there’s a bit of redundancy – for instance, two entries on Prospect Park, both good – Gary has contributed to one, and is the principal contributor to the entry on Aymar Embury II.
I hadn’t realized until today the extent and number of the firefighting resources. Here’s a sample from the excellent entry on Palm Beach, Florida’s emergency responders:
In 2004 the County Commission approved a resolution allowing for funding for the Fire-Rescue Communications Center to come out of the General Fund instead of the Fire-Rescue budget. This change meant that now any city that wanted to be dispatched by Fire-Rescue could do so without having to negotiate a price and a contract, since all taxpayers were paying for it anyway. The concept behind this was to create a “Regionalized Dispatch Center” where the closest unit could be dispatched to a call, regardless of municipal boundaries. This was initially met with opposition from a few cities, citing that this construed “Double Taxation”, as they were already providing dispatch services to their own departments yet their citizens were being taxed for the Countywide system. Recently, more and more cities are coming into the new system.
This is typical of the entry: concise, and addresses to complex logistical issues, how the political process addresses and resolves the problem. The principal drafter of the entry is, it appears, an active serving member of the PBCFR, has also provided the entry “Quint (fire apparatus),” which is a type of “apparatus that serves the dual purpose of an engine and a ladder truck.”
There’s much more on this and related subject in Wikipedia – and I’ll try to point them out in future posts. 
wpfslogo.jpg
If you’d like a good starting point – it might be at The Wiki Project:FireService.
DHS Responder Knowledge Base
Another outstanding resource from Brian Steckler from the Naval Postgraduate School and the Center for the Study of Hastily Formed Networks for Humantarian Assistance/Disaster Relief –
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been compiling a Responder Knowledge Base, much of which is non-classified, has what appears to be an encyclopedic collection of information about:
- equipment
- equipment grants
- standards
- best practices
If you’re a registered user (first responder, paid or volunteer, planner – someone with a verifiable legitimate use), there’s an “ask an expert” submission form – and the staff promises to try to answer questions, via email, within a week. I’m going to submit a couple of questions that have been, of late, frustrating my attempts to do some communications planning and budgeting.
Pat McCaffrey, Construction worker, killed working on natural gas pipeline in Harriman State Park
Last Sunday’s Times, Metro section, Sunday September 16, 2007, page 21, column 1, headlined: “Pipeline Accident Kills Worker.” No dateline, no byline. Not showing up in the Times’ archive search on its website. From that piece, which reports that Mr. McCaffrey was killed on Saturday:
The worker, identified as Pat McCaffrey, 67, of Lebanon, N.J. , was operating a crane-like machine called a side boom.
“This is a terrible tragedy,” said Michael Armiak, a spokesman for Millenium Pipeline Company, which is overseeing the building of the pipeline. He said Mr. McCaffrey worked for a contractor, Precision Pipeline, based in Wisconsin.
The pipeline, scheduled to be completed by November 2008, is to stretch across the Southern Tier and Lower Hudson Valley.
Connecticut Firefighter, twice injured seriously, fights his way out of disability pension and back onto the job
From Peter Applebome’s column in last Sunday’s Times:
NORTH HAVEN, Conn.
The first fall should have been the catastrophe.
Dino Ferraro was at a fire in a largely abandoned clock factory in 1989 when he fell from a fully extended aerial ladder 25 feet to the concrete below, landing on his left shoulder. A different angle, he could have been paralyzed or killed. As it was, small miracle, he hit the ground and bounced up like a rubber ball. He separated the shoulder and was out for two and a half months, but lived to fight fires another day.
But you get to dodge only so many bullets. He didn’t dodge any on Sept. 23, 2000, when he came to work a little early and took a call he would have missed had he showed up five minutes later. This time he was on a ladder breaking open second-floor windows at a bedroom fire in a housing project.
The firefighters inside, not seeing him through the smoke, blasted him with a hose shooting out water at 150 pounds per square inch of pressure. He fell only 12 feet, but when a firefighter at the bottom of the ladder tried to break the fall, Mr. Ferraro landed squarely on the heel of his right foot. “When they pulled off the boot, it looked like scrambled eggs,” Mr. Ferraro said. He suffered what is called a pilon fracture. It is also known as a hammer fracture, which tells you all you need to know.
“They looked at the ankle and told me it was all over,” Mr. Ferraro, 48, recalled. “They told me before the surgery, they told me after the surgery, they probably told me during the surgery, that I was all done with fighting fires. They said there was just no way.”
Emergency Management Symbols
European Civil Defense Symbol
One of these things is not like the others. Can you tell which one?
EM/Public Safety Public Trust
Gunnar J Kuepper, Chief of Operations for the consultancy Emergency Disaster Response, Inc., is the author of the paper, “Emergency Management Symbols, History – Meaning – Relevance. A Commentary to the Symbol introduced by NEMA as the New National Logo for Emergency Management.”
Kuepper thinks one of these three logos is quite problematic.
United States Civil Defense Logo
USB GPS device – weighs 18 grams
For those having trouble with the metric thing – you know who you are – 18 grams is a wee bit more than half an ounce. From Engadget, via Identity Unknown :
Concrete-Canvas shelter – 12-hour
San Francisco, Oakland announce radio interoperability
None
technical difficulties
Apparently having some trouble with some code somewhere. Please bear with us as we fiddle with format.
Tancredo characterizes Katrina relief as “gravy train” – eloquent rebuttal by Paul Greenberg
Paul Greenberg writes at Beyond Katrina:
This past weekend, the post-Katrina malaise that has swept the nation took an ugly turn towards full-on insensitivity. Representative Tom Tancredo (R-CO) had this to say about New Orleans: “It is time the taxpayer gravy train left the New Orleans station.”
Specifically, he urged an end to the federal aid to a city largely still in ruins. “The amount of money that has been wasted on these so-called ‘recovery’ efforts has been mind-boggling,” said the Congressman who is running a long-shot presidential campaign. “Enough is enough.”
And just to be absolutely certain that you and I understood what he was trying to say, he added this: “At some point, state and local officials and individuals have got to step up to the plate and take some initiative. The mentality that people can wait around indefinitely for the federal taxpayer to solve all their worldly problems has got to come to an end.”
Tancredo (just as gentle reminder) is the legislator who voted against the renewal of the historic Voting Rights Act in 2006.
Christine Levinson applies for visa to travel to Iran to search for husband, reports Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
RFERL reports that Christine Levinson is awaiting a response to her application for a visa to travel to Iran to search for her husband, Bobby Levinson, who has been missing since March 8, last seen on the Iranian island Kish.
The wife of a former FBI agent who disappeared in March while on a business trip to Iran told Radio Farda today that she has traveled to New York to try to meet with Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, who is expected to speak at the UN General Assembly. Christine Levinson told Radio Farda that she has not been able yet to get an appointment with the Iranian president.
[photo of Robert Levinson via RadioFarda.com
, credited “public domain’]
“I keep trying to get an appointment, I know he’s a very busy man but I hope he will be able to find even 10 minutes to see me,” she said. “I want to ask him for his help in finding my husband, I know that he has the ability to find him.”Robert Levinson was last seen on March 8 on Kish Island off the southern coast of Iran, where according to his family he had gone to seek information on cigarette smuggling.
His wife told Radio Farda that she has applied for an Iranian visa to travel to Iran and seek information on her missing husband. She said Iranian authorities are reviewing her visa request.
Cholera outbreak(s) in Iraq – from Effect Measure
Effect Measure reports and comments on cholera in Iraq. One of the main weapons against cholera is chlorine; chlorine is also usable as, and has in Iraq been used as, a weapon.
Cholera is expected to make its way to the capital by late September or early October. There is a shortage of chlorine because insurgents have used it as a weapon. Chlorine is extremely toxic and was used in World War I. as a poison gas. Since even rudimentary protection of water supplies doesn’t seem possible, the solution was to curtail chlorine imports. Instead we have cholera.
Cholera is primarily a waterborne disease that kills by sudden dehydration of its victims from a profuse, watery diarrhea. It can be prevented by simple disinfection of the water supply with chlorine and treated with oral rehydration. That neither of these can be readily accomplished in US occupied Iraq, where the occupiers expend $300 million a day to kill people, speaks volumes.
"[T]here will surely be a counter to our countermeasure"
Noah Schactman on the cycles of innovation and counter-innovation between insurgent-placed IEDs and coalition forces, in Danger Room:
Radio-controlled bombs used to be the biggest killer of American troops in Iraq. Now, they’ve been rendered all-but-useless. Good news, right? Like so much else in Iraq, it’s not quite that simple.
Since the Iraq insurgency began, mobile phones, garage-door openers, and remotely-driven kids’ toys have all been used to trigger improvised explosive devices from afar. In response, the U.S. military has cobbled together an arsenal of radio-frequency jammers, to interrupt the deadly signals before they can set off the bombs. At first, the jammers had all kinds of troubles. Each type of jammer would only cover a relatively small slice of the spectrum. And they’d drive friendly radio and robots haywire.
But those problems have largely been fixed, troops across Iraq report. The newer jammers have effectively killed off radio-controlled IEDs in major chunks of the country.
The explosive cat-and-mouse game continues, though. The American have built up high-tech bomb-stoppers. So the insurgents have gone ever lower-tech than before. They’ve largely turned towards so-called “command wire” IEDs to attack U.S. targets.
Pairs of insulated copper threads, some not much thicker than a hair, are buried under the Iraqi dust, and strung out for as long as a kilometer. At the end, an insurgent triggerman waits – sometimes in a buried bunker. It’s a more crude approach to killing, of course. But, barring a lucky find of wires, “there’s no way for us to defeat it,” says one bomb technician. And those wires are getting attached to bigger and bigger bombs.
[picture above, of a cement-mixer-turned-shaped-charge. From Danger Room]
– snip –
Do away with one problem, and you now have to cope with the blowback from your success.
– snip –Anyway, command-wire bombs aren’t the only IED threat over here. “Pressure plate” weapons, triggered by the smallest stress, are also in vogue here. Some are even shoved into brown ration packets, and left by the side of the road. Insurgents continue to use passive infrared sensors — like those used in burglar alarms – to sense changes in heat, and trigger a bomb accordingly. Many Humvees here are equipped with a flash-type device that can prematurely set the trigger off. But there will surely be a counter to our countermeasure.
Schachtman is on the money. The relative positions of the two forces don’t appear to make it likely that either side will have a distinct advantage with any longevity.
There is one way to deal with a problem of this sort: it’s to make a majority of the local population identify with soldiers, make them believe that the soldiers are acting out of a desire to protect them. That delicate opportunity slipped out of our hand in 2003, and it’s been moving away from us since.
Waxman accuses Department of State IG of obstructing investigations
According to an article on the website of The New York Times, Congressman Henry Waxman has Howard J. Krongard in his sights. David Stout and Brian Knowlton (for whom the Times doesn’t have an index page) report that Waxman
sent the inspector general, Howard J. Krongard, a 14-page letter spelling out accusations that he said came from several current and former employees of that office, who documented their charges with e-mails.
– snip –
Some of the accusers have sought “whistleblower” status, which protects government employees who report malfeasance from being punished for doing so, Mr. Waxman said. The accusations are serious and far-reaching, and included assertions that Mr. Krongard has effectively become a political defender of the administration rather than, as his job is meant to be, a studiedly neutral overseer of its spending and practices.
– snip –
Mr. Waxman invited Mr. Krongard to respond to the accusations at a committee hearing on Oct. 16.– snip –
Since Democrats gained control of the House in the 2006 elections, Mr. Waxman has made no secret of his relish in probing activities of the Bush administration. One of the more serious accusations against Mr. Krongard is that he interfered with an investigation into the conduct of Kenneth Tomlinson, the head of Voice of America and a close associate of Karl Rove, President Bush’s former political adviser, by passing information about the inquiry to Mr. Tomlinson.
Mr. Waxman wrote that Mr. Krongard’s detractors have described “a dysfunctional office environment” in which he routinely bullies and berates employees and shows contempt for the work of career professionals. As a result, turnover has been so high that the inspector general’s office has been severely compromised, Mr. Waxman wrote.