Lately there seems to be a push against experience in favor of education in the fire service. This push isn’t new, but this wave is riding the coattails of the preliminary results of the first large scale fire attack study, which is at best half way done. Many young inexperienced firefighters and officers are looking […]

How often do we give our fire service saws a soup to nuts inspection and cleaning? I’m sure that there are people reading this with a wide range of answers; once a week or after every use that saw gets completely disassembled, inspected and cleaned, some might say we send it out to a shop […]

What is it that prevents fire departments from throwing ground ladders or aerials? Why do ground ladders remain on the apparatus and aerials remain in their beds at fire calls? Why are RIT teams allowed to stand around like yard gnomes, not being proactive? And on that same vein if 2 in 2 out is […]

What is it that prevents fire departments from throwing ground ladders or aerials? Why do ground ladders remain on the apparatus and aerials remain in their beds at fire calls? Why are RIT teams allowed to stand around like yard gnomes, not being proactive? And on that same vein if 2 in 2 out is […]

Earlier this month, Virginia State Trooper Chad Dermyer was shot and killed in the line of duty. Trooper Dermyer had served as a police officer in the city where I work before moving on in his career and I started wondering if there were lessons to be learned beyond firefighter line of duty death reports. […]

Some of you may know this but the NFPA is currently in the works of creating a standard on fire attack. It’s proper name is NFPA 1700: Guide for Structural Fire Fighting and it is currently in development with a scheduled completion date of the end of 2016. As we speak a committee called the […]

Search- The first thing I want you to notice is I did not include rescue, that will come later . It was not until an article written by Michael Briclaut in the Fire Engineering, that I realize I was one of those guys who did not understand that search and rescue where not lumped together as […]

We live in a glorious age of information – the internet has provided unlimited access to a vast wealth of knowledge. Never in the history of man has one been able to gather information as efficiently as we are able today. But most people take this for granted. We ignore information we don’t agree with […]

Ryan and I had the honor of sitting in on a UL/NIST class today on Fire Dynamics Research to Tactical Solutions. We appreciate the time and effort that was put into the class and the fireground application examples that were given. These help to bridge the gap between the “Scientific Lab Stuff” and the real […]

Everytime I turn around it feels like I’m being told to change. I’ve been told my thought process is outdated, my tactics are obsolete and, even worse, that I am dangerous. A lot of change in the fire service is driven by NIST/UL research. A lot of beneficial information has come out of that research, […]