Firefighters and fire trucks bring out the child in adults. There‘s just something about those big red (or yellow or white) fire trucks that draws people like flies to honey.

The Congressional Fire Services Institute couldn‘t have come up with a better way to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the annual National Fire Services Dinner than to take over the National Mall on Wednesday, April 2, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., to display fire and emergency service personnel and apparatus. Hosted by the CFSI and sponsored by the International Fire Service Training Association, the showcase will offer congressional leaders and their staffs an up-close look at the equipment and apparatus funded by the FIRE Grants. The Firefighter Combat Challenge also will kick off its 2008 season on the Mall, with more than 100 firefighters competing.

The timing of the showcase also coincides with the National Cherry Blossom Festival, which will draw thousands of visitors to Washington, D.C. The Home Safety Council‘s pavilion is taking advantage of the two events to offer special fire-prevention education for senior citizens in the morning and families in the afternoon.

According to Cara Beale, special projects program director for the CFSI, seven local fire departments will offer educational demonstrations to highlight the specialized training and equipment needed by fire and emergency services.

“Each participating department will demonstrate a specific area including hazardous materials, wildland and wildland-urban interface, technical rescue, and arson investigation,” she said. “The D.C. Fire Department has fire suppression and EMS and will have fire apparatus and an ambulance on display.”

But that’s just the surface. Take a closer look at what‘s really going on with this event.

The CFSI has and still is committed to bringing the issues and needs of the fire and emergency services to the attention of congressional leaders. Twenty years ago, this effort was nowhere, but by working together with key fire service organizations and political leaders, the fire and emergency service is becoming a force in Washington. Is it perfect? No. Will it ever be? It‘s the government, folks. Do to you really think it will be perfect?

Even if you won’t be in Washington next week, there are things you can do in your home state. The event is likely to garner national media attention, and often the local media look for a local slant to national stories. At the very least, be prepared to field calls from the local media. Better yet, go a step further by calling the media outlets. Inviting reporters to look at your apparatus or firehouse.

Also consider taking this idea to your home state legislators. Many states already have a Home Day activity or a time when the fire and emergency services meet their state and national representatives. Whether you call it face time, education or enlightenment, it’s your chance to help your political leaders understand the fire service’s issues and problems in providing services to their constituents. Maybe it‘s just an opportunity to say thanks for their support — wouldn‘t that get their attention?

Who doesn‘t stop and look when a fire truck shows up? Why not turn that big, shiny investment into an educational tool? Drive the fire truck to your legislators’ offices, turn the lights on and watch what happens. Once you have their attention, talk to them about residential sprinklers, codes or funding for much-needed equipment.

Take a big idea and make it your own.

Every department has a story about building or renovating a fire station. One of my favorites is the department that put in a new kitchen during renovation. For some reason, the new kitchen cabinets weren’t wide enough for dinner plates to lie flat in the cabinets, so the plates have to be stored underneath the counters.

There are many aspects to consider when you‘re building a new fire station or renovating an old one. One aspect is building a clean zone into the station design.

Ed Nied is the deputy chief of safety and health for the Tucson (Ariz.) Fire Department. He also is chair of the Pima Fire Chiefs’ safety section and of the Southern Arizona Safety Officers Association.

I heard Nied speak at the Fire Department Safety Officers Association‘s Annual Forum last October, and he can be one scary guy — you‘d shudder to hear what‘s lurking in your fire station. And that‘s exactly why I asked him to present the 2008 Station Style Conference in Phoenix, April 26–29.

“What‘s one of the major bacteria-infested items in a fire station?” Nied asked. I’d guess the water fountain. Turns out, it’s the couch. “[They hold] huge quantities of bacteria,” he said. “Dry, flaking areas of the skin all over the couch, on bedding and carpeting, [plus] soot, possible carcinogens. Some departments cover bedding with plastic covers that can be wiped down between use.”

Nied and Kelly Reynolds, Ph.D., MPH, an associate professor for environmental health sciences at the Arizona College of Public Health, Department of Soil, Water, and Environmental Sciences at the University of Arizona, have been doing research on contaminants in fire and EMS facilities.

Within the past several months, a firefighter and an EMS worker in Texas each died from methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus infections. According to Nied, there is current legislation proposed to protect emergency workers from MRSA.

Nied said Tucson has posted signs to remind personnel to wash their hands for 20 seconds in hot water. “We need to have signs that remind people ‘You are entering a clean zone‘ and restrict turnouts from common areas,” he said.

Nied and Reynolds’ presentation, “Building Infection Control into Your Fire Station” will offer other ways to keep firefighters and emergency medical workers safe.

“Stainless steel versus porous materials need to be considered for surfaces in fire stations,” Nied said. “Reducing exposure to communicable and/or transmissible diseases/illnesses is the most challenging part of designing a fire station.”

Are individual recliners any better? Actually, never mind.

By Mary Rose Roberts

Sometimes life forces us to change, even when we’re not ready. Often, it’s gradual. At other times, it comes at us so fast we have to hold on for dear life. And it may happen to us directly or indirectly through heartbreaking events that change the way we see the world.

In fact, tragedy is way too commonplace. We move about in our daily routine only to be blindsided by a disaster, be it from the wrath of Mother Nature or the result of a manmade event. In my lifetime alone, I have seen the devastation of a terrorist attack — a day I will never forget — as well as destructive hurricanes, tsunamis and wars. We also live in a time where our youth, instead of being focused on furthering their education on university campuses, fear reprisal from mentally ill and unstable people who unleash their rage on unsuspecting students and their faculty. We saw this at Virginia Tech and just last month at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Ill., where the safety of a lecture hall turned into a parent’s worst nightmare.

Everyone wants to be safe, to live their lives knowing that their daily routine will move forward uninterrupted by tragedy. But those tasked with keeping our family, neighbors and colleagues alive and secure during emergency situations are only human. Yes, they’ve done the training. They run drills before they apply them in real-life scenarios. They believe in their mission. But in the end, each first responder depends, to some degree, on technological innovation and vendors that bring their wares to market to ensure they can respond appropriately to an incident.

The International Wireless Communications Expo is a reminder of this, with multiple vendors introducing new radio technologies with the promise of performance and reliability. But one area specifically where public safety innovation is behind commercial capabilities is E-911.

Commercial carriers let cell phone users send multimedia and still images from one end of the country to the other. Friends and family can sign up for unlimited text messaging to keep in touch. Yet, if someone witnesses a crime in progress and captures an image on one of these commercial devices, what’s next? How does that data transmit to a 911 center?

We all know that it doesn’t.

Think of those students in the lecture hall at Virginia Tech orNIU. Each one probably was armed with a cell phone that had the capability to capture still images and send text messages. Imagine the information that could have been sent to campus police and local law enforcement during the shooting rampage if students transmitted information or images of the event. First responders would have been able to recognize the subject, know his or her location and save precious minutes by responding with a full cache of information. It could have been the difference between life and death for many students who perished that day.

Public safety access points will adapt to the new technologies, but they still await legislative action and technological innovation to help move them in the right direction.

In addition, there is the human aspect. Call-takers and operators jobs continue to be more sophisticated than 15, 10 or even five years ago. Each must learn new call-taking software. Handling calls and data from wireless devices will require new processes and procedures. As well, access to more information about emergency situations will involve new decision-support tools that will interpret the data for call takers and dispatchers.

Change is scary. For PSAPs and those personnel essential to the success of E-911, it means reinventing how they do their jobs. With wireless voice and data devices becoming more ubiquitous, however, so will the challenges faced by an already overworked and overstressed segment of the first-responder community: 911 operators and call takers. But each must embrace these disruptions to their daily routine, because, whether each is ready, change is needed — and coming full speed ahead.

Mary Rose Roberts is the associate editor of Mobile Radio Technology, FIRE CHIEF’s sister publication.

With five significant opportunities to spring into action, April is shaping up to be a pretty busy month for the fire and emergency service industry.

The month kicks off with Vision 20/20, a two-day forum designed to develop a national strategy for fire-loss prevention. Organized by the Institute of Fire Engineers–U.S. Branch and supported with a Prevention and Safety Grant from the Department of Homeland Security, Vision 20/20 will bring together 150 selected representatives to collaborate on a strategy and plan for action based on history, successes and commitment.

“We will come out with priorities that people can work on to reduce fire loss,” said Project Manager Jim Crawford, who also is with the Vancouver (B.C.) Fire Department.

Then April 2–3, the Congressional Fire Services Institute will hold its 20th Annual National Fire and Emergency Services Seminars and Dinner. As part of anniversary events, CFSI will host “Showcase of the Fire and Emergency Services on the National Mall” on April 2. Designed to draw Congressional leaders and staffers‘ attention to the U.S. fire and emergency services, several area fire departments will display apparatus and equipment. There also will be a firefighter combat challenge, a bagpipe competition, antique apparatus and public safety educational pavilion.

After Washington, D.C., it‘s off to Indianapolis for the Fire Department Instructors Conference and a week of training and exhibits. Come visit FIRE CHIEF at Booth 4500, outside the entrance to the dome.

From Indy, we head west for the International Association of Women in Fire and Emergency Services Eighth Biennial Leadership and Training Seminar, April 24–27, in Glendale, Ariz. The conference is open to anyone and offers a unique selection of speakers and programs. If you‘re looking for an intensive and non-routine training opportunity for the next generation of fire service officers and leaders, check out this seminar.

The last week of the month, FIRE CHIEF will host its 2008 Station Style Conference in Phoenix. This year includes a new pre-conference program, Experience Speaks, with several chiefs and officers discussing lessons learned from their station-design projects. Among the general session presenters are a township administrator and project managers for three metropolitan departments. We also added a networking Golf Scramble, Saturday, April 26, for those who arrive early.

April is certainly shaping up to be a pretty busy month with plenty of options to learn, network and get involved.

A couple years ago, my department was awarded a $300,000 Assistance to Firefighters Grant to upgrade our communications equipment. At that time our dispatch center, transmitter and antenna system all were 40 to 50 years old. It was designed to use a dedicated telephone line to carry audio from the dispatch console to the transmitter that was over a mile away on the city‘s water tower. During rain or snowy weather, the telephone line often would ground out and the first notification of a problem was when our fire and EMS units would not acknowledge the run.

This past week, I attended one of the many Department of Homeland Security grant meetings held to assist departments with their 2008 AFG applications. The Region V facilitator, Lori Smith-Lonbom, and I discussed how difficult it was for some departments to express what they needed to secure an AFG for communications equipment.

The first and perhaps one of the most important items is to find someone within or closely associated with your department who understands communications, computers, software and interactive technology to design the concept of what you want and how it will operate. This individual should lay out the numbers and types of radios (base station, portables, mobiles); computers, including MDCs, software; and hardware, such as transmitters, antennas, coax, power supplies and an emergency generator; that you need to make this work.

If successful, your department generally will need to bid every item over $5,000 or whatever limit your locality requires. If there are GSA, state, county or joint bids in place, the equipment usually can be bought on contract from those vendors without a bid; but again follow what your city or fire district requires. For example, my city had a separate limit so even a purchase with grant money required the approval of city council.

This individual also should be relatively familiar with Federal Communications Commission regulations on licensing and alterations. For example, if you are already licensed to a radio frequency that you wish to maintain, you need to know the limitations of your transmitter‘s output, the height of your antenna and the location where your transmitter is housed. If any of these are being changed, you first need to obtain the proper waivers from the FCC before starting the project.

Some tips for selling the project to the AFG reviewers include explaining how the current system does not fill your needs; how the new system will increase firefighter safety; how a new system will aid your neighbors; and how a new system will fit into the grand scheme of interoperability with your county, state and region. In our case, the new communications system allows us to run automatic aid with several surrounding communities. In the past it took one dispatcher to call another on the phone then re-dispatch the run for us, adding a minimum of two minutes to any automatic or mutual aid run. As we dispatched on another frequency altogether, none of our neighbors knew when or if we had gone in service. For a number of years it was easier for them just to bypass us for a farther-away department because they could communicate with them more directly.

Also remember to document everything. Any major grant award will be audited by the DHS. You need to keep all your records of your correspondence, invoices, purchase orders and matching funds clearly in a central location so they are open to inspection during the audit. Any item over $5,000 must be available to the auditor for a physical inspection including verifying serial numbers of each item. I can‘t emphasize how important it is to keep accurate records, especially when you use multiple vendors and purchase orders.

Finally, expect and compensate for project delays. Ours came as a result of Hurricane Katrina, when emergency generators were diverted to those affected areas in the South, and we waited nearly two months longer than anticipated for its delivery and installation.

Good luck with your 2008 grant request, and if you have any questions about the process of requesting communications equipment, contact me through FIRE CHIEF and I‘ll try to help.

It was a cold and snowy night on the road to Wisconsin when flashing red lights appeared in my rear-view mirror. After I pulled over, the red lights and siren whine of an elliptical tanker sped by.

I was surprised to see how quickly the rig became a dot in the distance. I sped up to see just how fast the tanker was going and guessed 60 mph in the straight-aways and 50 mph on the curves. I thought, “This must be some fire.”

But I also thought of the high rate of tanker rollovers and the pleas from attorney Jim Juneau at the Fire Department Safety Officers‘ Apparatus Symposium to “take the lights and sirens off tankers and don‘t let [engineers] drive over 40 mph.”

The tanker finally slowed at a roadblock. When my car approached, the sheriff gruffly asked if we were first responders and why we were speeding behind the fire truck. I was well over 500 feet behind the rig, but I was trying to stay close enough to read the department‘s name on the back. Then it was my turn to ask a question. “There‘s a big fire, that‘s why they were speeding,” said the cop before he diverted our car.

It turned out to be a barn fire at a dairy farm. As we circled around the roadblock, I saw firefighters positioning a large-diameter hose truck to draft from a creek. Several other firefighters were positioned to fill tanks and carry water to the barn fire. Fire departments from around the county responded.

I later heard that all the cows made it out of the barn and the fire was controlled quickly. I also heard of a conversation between some firefighters and a sheriff about the first tanker to arrive on scene. From their comments, it seems that the same tanker driver always is the first to arrive because “he drives like his wheels are on fire.”

If the fire were contained, wouldn‘t responding vehicles hear that on their radios? Wouldn‘t that mean that later-responding vehicles could slow down?

Nineteen firefighters were killed in vehicle accidents in 2006. In most cases, the deaths were preventable. Five crashes involved water tenders, which are involved in a disproportionate number of fatal crashes. As a result, the U.S. Fire Administration developed Safe Operation of Fire Tankers.

While waiting for the first water tender to be refilled from the creek, I heard a firefighter say, “Not too many dairy farms left up here anymore.”

I stared at him that cold, late night. I could feel the urgency to save the barn, the dairy cows and the farmer‘s business. When you train for the big fires, the adrenalin rush causes firefighters to want to enter into battle with a raging fire. Yet speeding with a water tender can be deadly — there are too many statistics to prove it.

Note: In Service Senior Editor Chris Cavette recently wrote about water-carrying emergency apparatus in his newsletter. “It‘s Tenders, not tankers,” Cavette wrote. “The Incident Command System nomenclature for fire apparatus is now in effect for all departments in the United States. Under the ICS system, wheeled vehicles with large tanks of water are called water tenders, not water tankers. The term tanker applies to water-dropping aircraft. Manufacturers and departments alike should start using the new terminology.”

As the city of Vallejo, Calif., races toward bankruptcy, firefighter unions are asking “Why us?” But they should be asking “What next?”

An article in the San Jose Mercury News reports that Vallejo, a medium-sized city at the northern end of the San Francisco Bay, faces a $6 million budget shortfall this year with a deficit of $14 million projected next year. And Vallejo may be nothing more than the tip of a very large iceberg.

The paper cites public employee pay and benefit spirals spawned by two problems — comparisons among communities rather than comparable private sector jobs and binding arbitration decisions — for unsustainable public safety payrolls. Rising overtime claims, fueled by cozy relationships with unions and among employees to help colleagues boost their pensions, also erode efforts to improve the certainty and security of public safety budgets.

Like most cities, public safety consumes the lion‘s share of municipal revenues in Vallejo. Fire and police salaries and benefits consume the vast majority of that large slice of the municipal budget pie. Unlike many of their peers in other cities, Vallejo firefighters have enjoyed significant wage increases at a time when revenues have remained more or less stagnant. A new wage agreement in 2007 granted firefighters a 9% pay hike while maintaining employer contributions to the generous CALPERS retirement system.

An independent citizens’ group, citing information obtained from city payroll records, demonstrated that the median income of a uniformed Vallejo Fire Department official in 2006 topped $157,000, while the median income of Vallejo residents sat around $54,000. The top-paid fire department employee’s W-2 form reported a whopping $359,000 in gross income during his last year of employment, a figure that would appear to guarantee a pension wage equal to or greater than the average enjoyed by his still-working former colleagues.

Community activists have accused the local firefighter union leaders and high-ranking fire department officials with nothing short of corruption in the handling of firefighter pay issues. Claims and counterclaims have consumed local media coverage and public discourse for much of the past year without resolving the looming fiscal crisis.

An outside observer might reasonably wonder whether either side in the Vallejo budget dispute recognizes its complicity in this disaster. Firefighters, like other public servants, deserve a decent wage for their work. Most public servants receive generous benefits that make up, in part, for pay that usually lags behind comparably qualified private-sector occupations. They also receive employment conditions that protect their tenure to a far greater degree than most other workers and generally have enjoyed greater consideration of tenure than performance in pay and promotional decisions.

Local elected officials agreed to the generous employment and remuneration conditions for Vallejo firefighters despite ample evidence that their conditions not only were fair, but also were competitive. By committing to these conditions despite ample demands for fiscal restraint — remember Proposition 13? — they bound their fellow citizens to a commitment they clearly cannot keep.

When firefighters employed under collective agreements are earning more than the exempt executives overseeing their departments and many private-sector senior executives and professionals, it seems reasonable to ask what‘s wrong with this picture. When firefighters‘ average salaries and benefits are nearly three times the local median wage, citizens could reasonably question the morality of the situation.

“We deserve whatever we can get,” is not a reasonable answer to reasonable remuneration for firefighters. The dangers of the job do not justify additional pay; they demand a well-trained and engaged work force that practices what it preaches.

The days when fire department vacancies attracted hundreds of applicants for a handful of jobs may be gone, but so too is any illusion that candidates for fire department jobs require special qualities beyond a simple and deeply felt desire to serve. As such, competition for candidates should be seen as a need to invest more money in firefighter training and fire prevention instead of higher pay and better benefits.

Leading Democrat presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama has outlined a plan for a program to promote public service and civic engagement in exchange for college tuition benefits. Notwithstanding concerns about the prospective costs of the Democrat‘s proposal, Republican frontrunner Sen. John McCain unsurprisingly seems to support calls for national service. The success of these efforts will depend on local opportunities to engage young people in activities that serve the needs of their fellow citizens. And few needs rank higher among citizens than safety and security.

Before the unions tell us why engaging young people as volunteer firefighters or EMTs will undermine the safety of the community or firefighters mdash; and they will say that — we better ask ourselves what we are prepared to do to see something like this work. Firefighters have an overriding obligation to serve their communities not just themselves. If they can’t or won’t reconcile their interests with those of their communities, we must not only support efforts to encourage a national service program that will supply communities with the willing and able volunteers needed to ensure their protection, but also do everything we can to make sure it succeeds.