Last week, the National Institute for Occupational Safety & Health released its draft report on the fire. Earlier this week, Chief Rusty Thomas retired. And yesterday, the Charleston Post-Incident Assessment and Enhancement Review Team released its comprehensive Phase 2 report, with minute details on the deaths of the nine firefighters.

The task force reviewed its analysis of the deadly fire with the fallen firefighters’ immediate-family members, then with a second group of family members. It followed those reviews with a meeting with Charleston firefighters and later with the Charleston city council.

What makes the task force report different from NIOSH’s 55-page draft released last week? The NIOSH draft report is an attempt to reconstruct the fire’s timeline and the fire department’s on-scene activities.

The task force’s in-depth 272-page report includes a timeline, radio transmissions and documentation to support proper procedures. This report also specifies errors and omissions. It is a very difficult and emotional read, especially for anyone with knowledge of the fire service.

The report makes one thing clear — the events leading to these firefighter deaths started long before June 18, 2007. But when did it all start?

Did it begin with cockiness after being awarded an Insurance Service Office Class 1 rating in 1998? Did the “first class” status allow the fire department to rest on its laurels, even though that status applied only to a small portion of Charleston’s response area? Even the mayor referred to Charleston’s “first-class department.”

Did the lack of systematic fire inspections allow the Sofa Super Store to connect new buildings and avoid installing required fire sprinklers?

Which is at greater fault: the water department that removed a hydrant in 2004 or the fire department that failed to update its response plans accordingly?

Was assigning battalion chiefs to act as “safety officers” a sufficient replacement for a trained, designated safety officer?

Perhaps it began when the city’s financial department tightened the budgets, which restricted personnel from traveling to conferences and training programs. Did that cause the lack of officer development programs? Did budgets prohibit the purchase of NFPA-compliant stationwear? That stationwear, along with new PPE and breathing apparatus, are available now, following the recommendations in the Phase 1 report.

The Firefighter Fatality Investigative Report is a must-read for every firefighter, officer and fire chief. There are lessons to be learned from these nine courageous men who died after a long series of errors and omissions. This report also should be mandatory reading for local government officials who need a lesson in the real-life consequences of budget cuts.

Rusty Thomas was shattered when he retired from the position he lived for and loved. He gave up a job, but 11 months ago, nine of his firefighters needlessly gave up their lives, jobs and families.

Nine Charleston firefighters died needlessly on June 18, 2007. Now it’s incumbunt upon every fire department to learn from this report so that those deaths were not in vain.

Dale and I rarely have the opportunity for a leisurely conversation, but recently we started to talk about the future tract of officer development. It’s a given that the long-standing tradition for officer development in the military includes War College, Command and Staff College, and an advanced degree in a related field. These fairly well equate to our Chief Fire Officer Designation, Executive Fire Officer Program, the Harvard Fellowship, and the growing number of master’s degrees offered to fire officers in studies from public administration to executive leadership.

The war on terrorism, however, has produced an unprecedented number of younger military officers, both commissioned and non-commissioned, who have been given greater latitude in problem-solving and local operational jurisdiction in combat. But how will these officers approach the more traditional development path versus the fast-paced decision-making process that they have been exposed to in these combat areas?

Now look at the fire service. While returning veterans from World War II, the Korean and Vietnam wars, and Operation Desert Storm have help shape the fire service as it is today, how will the veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts shape the fire service of the future? All officers, military and fire service, make split-second decisions based on the best situational information available augmented by their level of experience. The military best describes this decision process as the OODA Loop, so named by USAF Colonel John Boyd on how fighter pilots observe, orient, decide and act in aerial combat. Those who can do it better and faster live to fly another day. The fire service incorporates a similar process into our Incident Command System.

As we welcome this generation of young veterans into the fire service, what will be their expectations and their goals for development into the fire officer ranks? They will expect more intense training under near-operational conditions leading to the experience they will need to be a part of the decision process. Their experiences overseas will help frame this decision-making process, just as my past experience as an Air Force officer in Vietnam has framed mine.

Should we be wary of these young men and women? No, by all means this is the same process by which we were assimilated into the organizational culture of the fire service. But understand that as our future leaders, they will shape the next generation of firefighter / medics that will serve our communities for decades. As chiefs, we need to embrace their experience, listen and learn how to channel their energy into innovative ways to manage our departments. This will be a very positive experience in the development of our future fire officers and chiefs.

In the immediate aftermath of the fire, publicized photos and radio transmissions revealed how out of touch with modern firefighting strategy and techniques the Charleston Fire Department was. For example, dispatchers called each fire station for a report of which firefighters reported for duty and which were missing.

Shortly after the fire, Charleston Mayor Joe Riley hired a group of esteemed fire service professionals to investigate and review the fire department and make recommendations. These task force members — who I know and have endorsed for their knowledge and expertise — devoted countless hours to the investigation. They had free access to personnel and the department and made numerous trips to Charleston.

The task force released the Phase 1 report later than first expected, allowing Riley to first review the findings. While the Phase 1 report required serious and immediate changes, the task force also suggested two additional levels of recommendations.

I’ve had many conversations with task force members, and their comments always were restrained but firm — “wait until the fire investigation report comes out” — and implied the report would be straightforward and unpleasant. The report was first due in late fall. Then December. Then February. Now we understand it will be Thursday, May 15.

Nine firefighters died in that fire. The people responsible for their deaths are still working their jobs, still going home to their own families after work and tucking their kids in bed each night. The department has new station uniforms, new 5-inch hose, new training procedures and new SOPs. But too many questions still remain.

Why has the task force tolerated this delay of its hard work? Knowing the caliber of these individuals, I’m surprised no one has resigned over the repeated delays and excuses for not releasing this report.

According to recent news reports, Charleston’s beloved Mayor Joe Riley will finally release the report May 15th, eleven months after the nine firefighters died. Thursday night, the Mayor decided to release a draft of the National Institute of Occupational Health & Safety. Was this to try and soften the blow of the Task Force report to be released on May 15th? The Task Force will deliver the final report to the mayor this week and then to the families of the fallen firefighters before it is released to the media.

Nothing will bring the nine fallen firefighters home to their families, but what really is being done to prevent more firefighter deaths in this “Class 1″ department? Something is still smoldering in Charleston.

Now, I have lots of lines in the water, but no bites yet. I have applications out for a variety of emergency services positions, for which I think my first career has prepared me. But I will say that the Internet sure makes looking and applying for jobs a great deal easier and less costly, especially given the cost of gasoline today. FIRE CHIEF’s Job Zone and the IAFC’s Candidate Center have become popular places for localities to post their public safety vacancies to attract the best candidates. I’m also a registered client with Monster and Yahoo Hot Jobs, especially for potential job opportunities outside the fire and EMS service.

Recently I wrote a piece for Writezilla, an Internet writing service, about where people are looking for jobs and how they’re getting jobs. In a 2007 survey of 15,000 visitors, WEDDLE’s found that almost 27% of the respondents — the highest percentage — both found their last job and successfully applied for it online. The numbers were almost double what the same survey found in 2006.

One thing I’ve learned in my experiences of trying to find good people to hire — and now my own efforts to find gainful employment — is that if fire and EMS organizations want to address their recruitment needs more adequately they need to get better connected with sites like Monster or Yahoo Hot Jobs and put resources into their own Web site design and maintenance. The sites that provide me with everything I need to make an informed decision about the advertised position, complete an application online, and submit my electronic resume and application are the ones for which I take the time to apply for a position.

How many of your Web sites currently allow an applicant to do that?

Phoenix Fire Department Executive Asst. Chief Steve Kreis welcomed the chiefs, officers, commissioners and architects. “Probably some of the most expensive things we do in the fire service, we entrust to you,” he said. “You deal with codes and NFPA standards and those requirements are clearly a challenge.”

The Phoenix Fire Department places a priority on firefighter comfort. “We live where we work and it needs to be a work place and serve that particular purpose,” Kreis said. “Yet it needs to be comfortable to live in also.”

Deputy Chief Ken C. Leake and Project Manager Jim Zwerg followed Kreis with an “Overview of Station Design the Phoenix Way.” Leake stressed the importance of community involvement in the design of a fire station. Station 57, which conference attendees toured on Sunday afternoon, is surrounded by a equestrian trail. “During the design of Station 57, the community wanted a railing in front of the station,” said Leake. Later, when Leake stopped by the new station, he saw a horse tied to the railing while the owner was inside the fire station.

Community rooms in each fire station are available for public use by calling a central scheduling office at Phoenix Fire Department. “We walked in one time and found sewing machines set up in the room,” Leake said. “The local quilting club was using the room.”

Mary McGrath, AIA, Beverly Prior Architects, presented “Operations-Based Design in a Sustainable World,” which focused on the importance of learning to work with your architects. “The most successful station we find is based on the architects’ understanding of what you do,” she said. And McGrath isn’t the only architect who believe that. Later during a break, I overheard an architect ask a chief if he could ride-along for a shift.

The Station Style Conference was focused specifically on designing and building fire and emergency service facilities. But one program that may have seemed tangential turned out to be the most talked about program of the conference. Deputy Chief Ed Nied of the Tucson (Ariz.) Fire Department and Dr. Kelly A. Reynolds of the University of Arizona College of Public Health reported the results of their research study in “Design Strategies for Preventing Infectious Disease Transmission.”

Reynolds explained that they expected to find MRSA in wet, moist areas like showers and gyms, but found nothing. “But dry areas, bacteria survived for day to longer periods of time,” she said. They strongly recommended no carpeting in fire stations, particularly in sleeping areas, and no cloth recliners or couches in the day rooms. Nied also recommended “safe” areas of the fire station where turnout gear and boots would be prohibited. “If a firefighter kneels down in a victim’s house and returns to the station, you don’t know what they could be bringing back to the fire house,” Nied said. They also recommended personnel leave station wear in the station. Changing their clothes before and after work can protect their families from possible exposure.

Furniture manufacturer Bulldogg Tuff Comfort introduced the small, stuffed Bulldogg tuff pupp. Sales raised funds for the National Fallen FireFighters Foundation, and the last of the pups were purchased by Byron Epp, Door Engineering, to meet their goal of $3,000.

Here are a few other tips offered during the 2008 Station Style Conference:

• “Build training into your fire station design,” said Mark Shoemaker, AIA, Cole + Russell Architects. Use mezzanines for rappelling exercises and vertical concrete pipes for confined-space rescues.
  


• “If you talk the talk, then walk the walk and have a fire sprinkler system in your station,”said Alden Spencer, Tyco Fire & Building Products.
  


• “The cost of green or LEED your station can be insignificant,” said Lynn Reda, AIA, LeMay Erickson Willcox Architects.
  


• “It’s almost always less expensive to go out than up,” said Ken Newell, AIA, Stewart Cooper Newell. “American Disability Acts requires elevators to second floors, and that adds between $125 to $225,000.”
  


• “Make sure the flooring you select is UV-resistant,” said Larry Enyart, FAIA, LEA Architects, during “In Flooring Factors for Stations.”
  

And the chiefs were listening. By Tuesday morning, one chief already had called his department and told them not to put the carpeting in the dorm area.

Further details will be featured in an upcoming FIRE CHIEF.

During the demonstration, gear from Motorola, Scitec, Valcom, Cisco Systems, Clarity Communications Systems and Twisted Pair Solutions were connected via the BSI, and communications were conducted in a scenario format involving state, county and local jurisdictions operating on separate bands.

DHS officials were careful to note that the BSI is not a standard, but a specification that leverages commercial voice-over-IP technology. Equipment that allows disparate radio systems to interoperate via an IP platform is nothing new, but that doesn’t mean that the various bridging systems easily interoperate with each other, said Dereck Orr, program manager for public safety communications standards for the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

“Just because it says it’s IP doesn’t mean it’s interoperable,” Orr said. “We needed to get that word out to public safety and to policymakers, as well.”

However, by using IP commonalities, program participants — DHS, vendors and public safety representatives — were able to establish a BSI specification that typically has not been terribly difficult for manufacturers to incorporate in their solutions, said Luke Klein-Berndt, chief technology officer for DHS S&T.

“We were looking for that common technical space and work there,” he said. “We wanted to come up with the best technical solution but also come up with one that didn’t mean dramatic changes for anyone.”

On the surface, the idea of getting multiple vendors that compete with one another on a daily basis to work together might seem to be a difficult proposition, but DHS officials insist that wasn’t the case. The logistics coordinating vendor representatives’ schedules were a challenge, but once they were at the same table, “things really started to flow,” Klein-Berndt said.

DHS deserves a lot of credit in making this happen. It’s nice to know that IP-based connectivity systems should be able to work together, but it’s much more valuable to first responders to know that they do work together and to be able to cite a specification in bid documents.

Such interoperability is important because federal officials estimate that as much as $100 billion has been spent on public-safety LMR systems across the country, so that’s not an investment that can be overhauled overnight. The LMR systems are going to be around for a long time, so technologies like the BSI are valuable in making that happen.

Of course, the BSI is not the only DHS interoperability initiative. The federal department also is spearheading development efforts for multiband radio, radio over wireless broadband, and even an ingenious system that gives helicopter pilots homeland-security surveillance assignments that can be accomplished during their return trips from missions.

By themselves, none of these solutions are the answer to interoperability — there is no single “silver bullet” that will solve the problem. But with each successful DHS project, public-safety communications officials are given another tool that will let them build a solid foundation for interoperability, both now and in the future.

In my February FIRE CHIEF editorial, I suggested that fire chiefs form a book club similar to the Marine Corp Commandant’s Reading List. This month at FireChief.com, we launched that book club with a dozen books recommended by several chiefs. And this week, a book recommended by Garry Briese, now director of FEMA Region VIII, makes the list.

Briese suggested The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss. While the book sounds totally impractical, it has excellent tips for dealing with mushrooming e-mails, endless meetings and time-wasting phone calls. Is it possible to manage these things? Yes, and that’s just the first third of the book. While a four-hour workweek isn’t practical, I’d be happy with just a 40-hour workweek and Ferriss’ ideas could make that happen.

Through a strange coincidence in my hometown, I heard about another book.

Dayna Hilton’s parents moved from Pennsylvania, where her father was a volunteer firefighter, to my hometown 10 years ago. Following in her dad’s footsteps, Hilton later became a volunteer firefighter for the Johnson County Rural Fire District #1, Clarksville, Ark. In 2002 she became the department’s fire and life-safety educator.

Hilton’s teaching took an interesting turn when she and her family adopted a dalmatian named Sparkles. The dog proved to be an enthusiastic attraction for Hilton’s safety classes. Hilton and Sparkles appear on PBS Kids Sprout, a 24-hour TV station for preschoolers, and follow Fireman Sam’s episodes with fire and life-safety tips for children.

“When I take out her red vest, Sparkles gets really excited,” said Hilton. “That’s when I decided to write about what a typical day is like for Sparkles.”

Working with IFSTA to make sure the book was accurate and appropriate for youngsters, the 28-page, soft-cover book took Hilton 18 months to write and publish. With Sparkles as the focus, the book teaches fire and life-safety tips. Hilton and Sparkles recently appeared in Washington, D.C., and at FDIC in Indianapolis.

While Hilton’s book isn’t a leadership book for our chiefs’ book club, I certainly would recommend it for your fire and life-safety education program for primary school children.

Meanwhile, check out the Fire Chief Book Club and suggest additional titles. The list is connected to Amazon.com for quick, easy ordering.

When you whittle down your hours, you’ll have more time to read.

“This project is unprecedented in scope and depth,” said Jim Crawford, fire marshal for the city of Vancouver, Wash., and the Vision 20/20 project manager. “We have assembled an incredible array of experts from a diversity of fields to help craft a national plan to reduce the loss of life and property from fire. Through our collective efforts we will develop strategies that will save lives, now and for the future.”

Vision 20/20 was conceived last year when the Institute of Fire Engineers–U.S. Branch received a DHS Fire Prevention and Safety Grant to develop a comprehensive national strategy for fire prevention. This project’s goal is to help bring together fire-prevention efforts to collectively and effectively address the fire problem in the United States.

It is a noble cause, but the fire service has been down this road many times before. The President’s Conference on Fire Prevention in 1947, the release of the America Burning report in 1973, the update with the America Burning Revisited report in 1987, and the release of the America Burning, Recommissionedreport in 2000 all focused on the very same issue.

So what’s different about the Vision 20/20 plan? According to the forum’s Web site:

1. This project involves a large number of participants representing all areas of fire prevention, as well as other advocates and stakeholders to the plan and its recommended outcomes.
   


2. This project is committed to action, with a few strategic recommendations being converted to a national plan that stakeholders will be asked to support with documentation of specific actions and benchmarks instead of a long list of recommended practices that everyone agrees are important (but then never get completed).
   


3. This project will not create recommendations in a vacuum. Other existing efforts that have identified significant progress toward achieving prevention goals will be taken into account to avoid competing efforts.
   


4. A long-term monitoring mechanism will provide regular reports on the progress of the strategic initiatives that arise out of Vision 20/20.
   

If commitment to action is the litmus test, then the fact that despite many challenges Vision 20/20 was able to pull such a high-caliber team together in such a productive forum is a major accomplishment. This forum is a significant step in the right direction, but this is only the first step in beginning the journey. More is still to come.

Reviewing the reports from the previous national conferences, a common theme for increasing efforts in fire prevention is always emphasized as a key component to the fire-safety problem in the United States.

Recognizing the importance of fire prevention, IFE invited panelists from Australia and England to share their experiences. The “International Perspective” panel discussion was quite interesting and of tremendous value in disseminating information about the incredibly innovative approaches and programs that are currently being done overseas, which we could learn a lot from.

Neil Bibby, chief executive officer of County Fire Authority, Victoria, Australia; Philip Hales, head of community fire safety of Cheshire Fire & Rescue Services, Winsford, England; Phil Schaenman, president of Tri-Data Systems Planning Corp.; and Mick Ballesteros, epidemiologist/team lead of the Home and Recreation Injury Prevention with the Centers for Disease Control; shared their experiences and successes in reducing fire fatalities and losses, which only underlined the fact many of us in the United States are only beginning to realize about how far behind the rest of the world we are in our fire prevention efforts.

At the end of the two days, the participants of the Vision 20/20 Forum identified five specific strategies and developed action plans for reducing fire fatalities and losses in America. The specifics and the details of these strategies will be posted on the Vision 20/20 Web site in the very near future, but here are the outlines:

• Advocacy. Get on the agenda to make America safe from fire.
  


• Public education. Establish a consistent, sustained, multi-faceted educational/social marketing campaign to reduce risks and losses from fire by getting people to change their behavior toward fire safety.
  


• Fire service culture. Shift the organizational culture within the fire service so that prevention is accepted and supported as a primary service for public safety.
  


• Technology. Promote and leverage existing and new technology to enhance fire and life safety.
  


• Codes and standards. Development and application of codes and standards to enhance public and firefighter safety and preserve community assets.
  

“Everyone wants to see something happen,” said Crawford. “They just don’t want another report sitting on the shelf. They want to see action. They want to show that taxpayers’ money was not wasted.”

According to Ed Comeau with writer-tech.com, “Everyone was in agreement that it will be critically important for there to be an ongoing commitment to this project and its ideas. Many people signed up to continue working on the various strategies as this project continues to move forward, demonstrating such a commitment.”

I hope that this level of excitement and commitment continues in the future, and just like the participants, we all recognize that this forum was not the conclusion, but merely the beginning of our journey in addressing the fire problem in our country. Back in the 1947, at the conclusion of the Conference on Fire Prevention, it was stated “we have enlisted not for a brief skirmish, but for the whole campaign. In winning that campaign we shall have the satisfaction of knowing that we are saving lives and putting an end to the wanton destruction of our nation’s resources.” It just can’t be said any better than that.

I am amazed and very grateful for the hard work and long hours that Peg Carson with Carson Associates and Bill Kehoe with the IFE–USA spent to bring this first act to the national stage. Without their admirable commitment to the cause, this indeed would not have been possible.

For the fire service, April is a full month of meetings and conferences starting with Vision 20/20, the Congressional Fire Services Institute events, and FDIC — and that’s just the first two weeks of the month.

I’m just catching my breath before the last two weeks bring the International Association of Women in the Fire and Emergency Services’ Eighth Biennial Fire Service Women’s Leadership Training Seminar, April 24–27 in Glendale, Ariz. That event will quickly be followed by FIRE CHIEF’s 2008 Station Style Conference April 27–29 in Phoenix, and IAFC’s Metro Chiefs Conference, starting April 29 in Virginia Beach, Va.

Before we rush into the final weeks of April, I have collected a number of items from my correspondence that might make you smile — or just make you shake your head in wonder.

Disregard the noise. An article in suburban Chicago’s Daily Herald recently reported on the trial of 28 Chicago firefighters who are suing Federal Signal for hearing loss purportedly from siren use. The trial was interrupted when the fire alarms sounded on the 16th floor of the Daley Center. The judge had tried to postpone the alarm-testing drill, but failed. Instead, he had to instruct the jury that the alarms were not part of the trial.

Detour. Erlanger, Ky., is located on one of the nation’s busiest stretches of Interstate 71/75, which also is the main corridor from Michigan to Florida. According to American City and County magazine, Erlanger Fire Chief Tim Koenig is frustrated that the department responds to hundreds of accidents on the highway each year, most of which involve drivers who are just passing through the area.

“Our citizens are paying,” Koenig said. “It’s their tax dollars that are putting the fire truck on the expressway.”

In January, Erlanger became one of many cities across the nation that charge out-of-town divers’ insurance companies emergency services fees. On average emergency response calls costs the Erlanger Fire Department between $500 and $700, so the city has contracted with an Ohio-based company to bill and collect money from the insurance companies. According to the article, municipalities in 18 states have implemented similar fees, including Ocala, Fla., where 70% of the accidents (3,300 annually) involve non-city residents.

You who? A couple years ago, Chicago Fire Department Commissioner Ray Orozco told me the department was making fire prevention videos for YouTube. “You have to get the message to the people [who] need to see it,” Orozco told me, and was he ever correct. Currently there are 2,840 fire-safety videos on YouTube.

Fresno Fire Department’s public-service announcement on fire sprinklers has had more than 57,000 views, and rightly so. Introduced by the very professional Chief Randy Bruegman, it quickly captures viewers attention and delivers the message. Watch it and consider this medium to send your fire-safety message. Philadelphia; Renton, Wash.; and South Terre Haute, Ind.; already have.

Passion and coffee. A recent issue of Michigan’s South Lyon Herald featured a story about Tom Malcolm, a firefighter with Lyon Township, paramedic with Huron Valley Ambulance, husband and father of two small children. Malcolm “works 24-hour shifts for HVA on Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday, and then goes straight to work for the fire department on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., and on call for the department in case anything happens overnight.”

Malcolm said that “passion and a pot of coffee” help him get through his 100-plus-hour work week. While he naps frequently, the firefighter has even “stayed up for 72 consecutive hours without sleeping” and considers eight hours of sleep a “waste.” Passion is admirable, but sleep deprivation causes accidents.

And you thought April 15 was taxing.

What makes these men so noteworthy is their charitable efforts. Last year, Ron Gruening partnered with Greg Johnson and Mark Allen to form International Fire Relief Mission. Their mission was to deliver serviceable but unwanted fire apparatus and equipment, such as turnout gear and SCBA, to Moldova. Moldova is a former Eastern Bloc country of about 13,000 square miles wedged between Romania and the Ukraine. The U.S. government estimates Moldova’s population at just over 4 million. Our government also says that Moldova remains one of the poorest countries in Europe — about 30% of the population lives in poverty.

At the Rosenbauer event, IFRM hung a rubber bunker jacket, a thin metal helmet with no liner and bunker pants cut at the knees. Any protective properties these items may have had at one point were long since gone.

Gruening, IFRM’s president and a retired EMT, says this is the gear used by the Moldova fire department trying to protect Chisinau, a city of roughly 1 million residents. In 2007, IFRM collected some used equipment, made a trip to Moldova, presented the gear and provided some training. He says they visited one fire station where tankers were filled by a line of firefighters originating at an old well and passing water-laden buckets toward the trucks. Gruening and his crew connected a pump to the well.

The problem, as Gruening explains, is that the fire service was neglected during the communist era and economic conditions have kept it from recovering since the iron curtain fell in 1991.

Gruening and Kirvida met over lunch to discuss how to do more for firefighters in that fledgling country. Kirvida hooked IFRM up with the Minnesota Fire Chiefs Association, which began soliciting and collecting donations. Kirvida also opened up his facility’s warehouse to store these used apparatus.

Since then, IFRM has made return trips to Eastern Europe, enough in fact, to have set in place checks to make sure the equipment gets to and stays with the fire service. This is important because equipment sent from Seattle and Miami went missing, Gruening says.

Gruening says interest in this program is growing on both sides of the Atlantic. Here, more and more departments are looking to dispose of apparatus with little to no resale value and gear that no longer meets safety requirements. But SCBA that is no longer NFPA-compliant is decades ahead of anything currently used in Moldova. Having seen the equipment coming into Moldova, Ukraine and Romania are seeking assistance — as are some South American and Asia countries.

In addition to fire department donations, IFRM is getting a shot in the arm from corporate sponsors. Besides Rosenbauer (Frontier Emergency Products and General Safety Equipment), Lion Apparel, Gear Grid, Fire Research Corp., Stryker and MSA have signed on as sponsors. Even the State Department has come on board by shipping containers of these goods for IFRM.

The group currently has about three full containers ready to ship, and are planning their next delivery to Moldova late this summer.

There are certainly a number of groups doing similar work, but IFRM is a small operation that is making a big difference in the global fire community. Those interested in more information on IFRM can visit their Web site at ifrm2007.googlepages.com or e-mail Gruening at rgruening@gmail.com.