Is the bickering really worth it? The incident involved a mail box. Sheesh!

Your volunteer fire brigade needs you. Volunteers are needed as rural brigades across Mid Canterbury find themselves struggling to make up numbers for call-outs during the day as work takes volunteers out of the area.

Mayfield chief fire officer Ian Feilder said the problem of attracting a full reserve of volunteers was discussed at last night’s annual meeting of the brigade held at the Mayfield Rugby Clubrooms.
“New members are always welcome,” he said. “Our biggest problem, as with most brigades, is during the middle of the day.”

Mr Feilder said while the situation was not dire for Mayfield, rural brigades often struggled to have enough members to respond to a call-out in the middle of the day.

“At Mt Somers they have real big problems.”
Chief fire officer Barry Kerr confirmed Mt Somers was under pressure between 7am and 7pm.

“We just haven’t got the men in the village during the day to run the brigade,” he said. “The day’s going to come when there’s not going to be enough to go out.”

Sound familiar? Those paragraphs could have been cut from any number of U.S. newspapers, except for the N.Z. lingo like "brigade" and "call-out".

Codes like 10-4, 10-15, and 10-20 are all part of sort of secret language police and firemen use to talk to each other, but now the federal government says they need to stop or risk losing funding.

...

"We're saying, in order to continue federal funding from any departments and federal agencies, they need to meet those requirements by the end of FY '06 and that includes the plain English standards," says Gil Jamieson of FEMA.

I think that using plain English makes good sense. Less confusion, new firefighters won't have to learn the 10 codes, and in the long run it will probably save time.

I'll try to find the regulations at FEMA and post a link later.

Spain and France have each sent two water-dropping aircraft and another is due to arrive from Italy on Monday.

Two helicopters are being sent from the Netherlands and three from Germany, along with experts to help tackle around 27 blazes in wood and farmland.

The fires have left at least 15 dead and 140,000 hectares destroyed.

Be sure to check out the pictures too. The links are on the right side of the BBC article.

The Big Blowup killed at least 85 people, destroyed entire towns and burned 3 million acres along the Montana-Idaho border. It prompted the U.S. Forest Service to begin aggressively fighting wildfires for the rest of the 20th century.

Pulaski, an early Forest Service ranger, is celebrated for leading his crew to the abandoned mine shaft, saving 39 of the 45 firefighters as raging flames swept over the creek valley. The tool he invented eventually became standard equipment for wildland firefighters across the country.

If you've fought wildland fires, you have probably been on the business end of a pulaski. Great tool. Someday, I'd like to hike this new trail.

Slowly, but surely we have more people voting in the weekly poll.

A Grand Traverse Metro Fire Department firefighter has been charged with negligent homicide, more than five months after the fire truck he was driving was involved in a fatal crash.

Firefighter Cory Carlton, 26, was arraigned and released on a $1,000 personal-recognizance bond after surrendering Thursday. He could face up to two years in prison if convicted of the misdemeanors, the Traverse City Record-Eagle reported.

Prosecutors allege Carlton was on the way to an emergency call when he sped through a stoplight March 8 and struck a sports utility vehicle driven by Matthew Garrisi, 28. The collision in Grand Traverse County's Garfield Township killed Garrisi's wife, Rebecca Garrisi, 28, and the couple's 11-month-old son Jesse.

In contrast, the FDNY is taking some heat because their response times have consistently been slower over the past few months. Is a few seconds of quicker response really worth the chance of killing someone in an accident?

Firefighters across the West are getting a high-tech ally in their battle against wildland flames: A remote-controlled spy plane that doesn't mind smoke, can see in the dark and never sleeps.

Scientists have been testing whether flocks of the planes - similar to the spy drones the U.S. military flies over Iraq and Afghanistan - can help track the direction and behavior of fast-moving flames.

After the experimental flight of three unmanned aerial vehicles this summer, the U.S. Forest Service will launch the first real-life deployment next spring. The plan calls for planes to traverse a dozen Western states, mapping real forest fires 24 hours a day.

This is really going to help firefighting efforts. Fire managers will have a better idea of which fires need more resources. It will also allow fire managers to deploy resources more safely.

This effect has been documented in the pine barrens of Long Island (from Newsday.com).

Even in portions of the pine barrens where conditions are less extreme, fire still plays a role by weeding out less hardy types of plants and clearing out underbrush. But decades of fire suppression leading up to the 1995 fire hampered this natural process, allowing other flora such as tree oaks to move in alongside the previously dominant pitch pines and scrub oak. The trees grew tall and formed canopies that shaded out the ground below. This diminished the area of true pine barrens, which are characterized by a mix of widely spaced pitch pines and scrubland with openings that let light pour in.

UPDATE: The fire mentioned in this post is the Sunrise Fire. It is the 10th anniversary of this fire. Here is another article about the fire itself (from Newsday.com).

MIDDLETOWN, R.I. --A 4,500-pound propane tank exploded at Naval Station Newport on Thursday morning, causing a large fire at the firefighting training facility there.

The tank, one of two near the building, exploded with a loud boom shortly after 7 a.m., said David Sanders, a spokesman for the Naval station. The fire, which could be seen around the area, was extinguished around 8:30 a.m.

There were no injuries, and the cause was being investigated by the Navy, Sanders said.

It is unfortunate that some property was destroyed, but this kind of thing tickles my funny bone. Other headlines that would give me a chuckle would be "Arrests made at Police Academy" or "Injuries Sustained at EMT Class". It reminds me of The Far Side comic strip.

And speaking of the environmental component (the glamour issue centered on the brave new world of hybrids), a number of EMT and fire crews have announced that they will refuse to rescue victims trapped in such vehicles, openly fearing electrocution or fatal acid burns.

It is difficult for me to think that emergency crews would refuse to rescue trapped victims. If there are departments that would refuse to respond, what departments are they? This from the Firehouse.com article:

Neither Car and Driver Magazine nor Brock Yates responded to Firehouse.com's request to identify which fire departments made these alleged announcements, and fire service leaders questioned the veracity of the statement.

In today's internet world, if you make a statement, you better be prepared to back it up. So far Yates hasn't responded, but I just found this story this morning so he may be formulating his response.

I'll be sending an e-mail to Yates and to Car and Driver myself. I'll post about their responses. Stay tuned.

I want to point out that the article was focused almost solely on the viability of hybrid cars. There were no other references to emergency crews in the article.

Good luck to all!

This was a pretty typical fire for us. Mostly we have grass fires; however, this is the first one I've responded to that was totally extinguished by the rain. Fourteen miles is a fair piece, but it isn't the farthest we have to go.

I belong to the volunteer fire department in my hometown of Miller, SD. Going forward I'll post about the incidents that we respond to as well as any other news that affects our department.

Here is a little background info:
Firefighters: 36
Apparatus: 5 pumpers, 3 brush trucks, 1 light rescue, 3 brush trucks
Stations: 2
Primary coverage area: 546 square miles
Population served: 3,000

Our coverage area is rural farm and ranch land with two small towns. Miller has a population of 1,500 and St. Lawrence has a population of 250. We have a station in each town, although the towns are only 2 miles apart, which is something of an anomoly in South Dakota.