The last week of the year is a good time to look back and acknowledge lessons learned from the past 12 months. Recently I looked through the 51 Command Post editorials I had written this year and I found a few questions for you to ponder when you have a quiet moment.
Archive for December, 2007
A Year in Review
The Gift that Keeps on Giving
Between your shifts and call-outs, I hope you’ll have time with family and many friends over the next 10 days. Can I suggest an idea for a gift from you to them? Give the gift of your knowledge.
Dangerous Waters
When Universal Pictures released the second Jaws movie in 1978, it came with the tag line, “Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water.” It was the original movie’s scariness that made this tag line resonate.
Fuels Management
When I recently purchased new living-room furniture, I glanced at the label and asked the salesperson if the material was flame-resistant? She said yes, but I knew better.
The Other Holiday Killer
With the holiday season here, the NFPA updated its statistics on holiday-related fires. The data includes the average annual number and severity of incidents, loss estimates, and injuries and deaths related to fires from holiday decorations, lights, trees and candles. But another statistic generated by the NFPA caught my eye even more than the holiday update.
OSHA Obstacles
Scene of the Accident’s Executive Director Todd Hoffman spends a good deal of his time with fire departments, particularly volunteer departments, with his accident-scene training company. Recently Hoffman contacted me because he was concerned about a recent Occupational Safety and Health Administration ruling that will affect volunteer fire departments — that all PPE, with a few exceptions, will be provided at no cost to the employee.
Gearing up for Mission Impossible
Much has been written and said about how the effort to reconfigure the 800-MHz band so that operations by Sprint Nextel no longer cause harmful interference to first responder communications is well behind schedule and likely won’t be completed by the June 26, 2008, deadline set by the Federal Communications Commission. But not much has been written or said about what’s being done to get the derailment back on track.
