What facts may seem to be in evidence right now may not always be accurate, thus the need for continual re-evaluation of your situation. Even though something appears to be true right now, it might not be in a few minutes, a few hours, or a few days.

Trust is the mortar, the bond between power and responsibility. Without empowerment, people are unable to act on their vision. Give someone power and they are free to create all kinds of possibilities.

US&R teams from around the world are engaging missions in Haiti: New York TF 1, Florida TFs 1 and 2, Virginia 1, California 2, and Colorado 1 are working in country, as well as teams from Jamaica, Costa Rica, Salvador, Peru, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Luxemburg, Canada, Russia, Spain, China, France, Iceland, St. Domingo, Mexico, Netherlands, the UK and Colombia.

As a quick aside, if any of you are interested, I’ll be in Wayne County, PA on January 30-31, teaching at the Browndale Fire Department. I don’t know if there are any open spots left, but contact info is on the flier.

Every community must understand its vulnerabilities and the potential for disaster, and plan accordingly. The caveat to this is, that despite the presence of a written plan, you can have every contingency covered and discussed, if you don’t understand and practice the plan, it isn’t worth the paper it is written on.

Since there seems to be a huge lean forward right now from people who want to know more about US&R, and since US&R is (and has been) one of my main projects for over twenty years, I figure I’ll take the opportunity to point you all in some directions for information.

It is imperative that we take this opportunity to recognize that these disasters also affect our own communities, and this is the time when increased education of your customers is important: what to do if something like this happens here, who will respond, what your capabilities are and how you plan to address your needs in a disaster.

I’m flattered that we (okay, at FHZ, there’s  just me, actually) here at FHZ put up just enough smoke and mirrors that we were nominated over on The Fire Critic for Fire/EMS Blog of the Year.  While I am honored, I count myself as humbly fortunate to simply be on the same network as some […]

Happy New Year! Recently I was on my way to work and marveling at the sunrise (I get a good shot of it going over the Cross Island bridge on the way to my station) and got to remembering one call where a person dove off that very same bridge.  I was thinking, if you’re […]