28 ms·

Firefighter Math

94 points by miobrien 9y ago

taxicabjesus 9y ago
After I 'retired' from taxi-driving, the volunteer fire department for my grandfather's (deceased) rural cabin sent a bunch of us to the Arizona State Fire School [0]. This organization provides training for small fire departments that don't have the resources to run their own training. Topics covered include basic firefighting, how to drive a firetruck, fire investigation (arson?), etc. [0] https://www.facebook.com/Arizona-State-Fire-School-Arizona-State-Fire-Training-Committee-150904741607047/ https://www.facebook.com/Arizona-State-Fire-School-Arizona-S... My firefighter superpower is 'vehicle extrication'. When people wreck their cars, firefighters' job is to stabilize the car and extract the people inside as quickly as possible. I don't know why the president of our volunteer fire department decided 3 of us needed to learn about Vehicle Extrication - we don't have a lot of traffic on the county road, nor much in the way of equipment to extricate people from their rolled cars... At the state fire school's opening ceremony I realized the difference between firefighters and police officers: if the fire department is dispatched in response to your call, they will try to help you. If the police are dispatched in response to your call, part of their job is deciding whether there is an excuse to arrest you. One of my passengers was mistakenly arrested. Those police officers put her in a bad situation, and it was my honor to help extricate her from the area around the county jail. She wasn't planning to get arrested that night, probably didn't have any of her friends' phone numbers committed to memory [1], and was hoping her friend would have money to pay me when we got to his house. The diary about my insights about firefighting vs policing is "Ordinary Rendition: The Public Servants' Quagmire" - http://www.taxiwars.org/2017/10/ordinary-rendition-public-servants.html http://www.taxiwars.org/2017/10/ordinary-rendition-public-se... This section is about my experience at fire school: > The Public Servants' Quagmire > [...] Police officers have a bit of a predicament: their official motto is to "protect and serve", but the politicians have given them no flexibility to fulfill their role. > After I retired from taxi driving, I spent a couple days at fire school. During the opening ceremony I realized the difference between firefighters and police officers/sheriff's deputies. > If the fire department is dispatched, they will do whatever they can to try to help you. Fire trucks are outfitted with all sorts of equipment that might be needed to save someone's day. These include not just fire hoses and other firefighting equipment, but also tools to cut up cars to extract people when the doors won't open, etc. Equipment on this Mesa special operations firetruck was once used to lift the light-rail train off of a drunk who'd passed out on the tracks: [Photo: Mesa Fire Department's Rapid Response/Special Operations Firetruck] > No judgement calls are made by firefighters when responding to the incident at hand. In a future post I intend to tell of the time that I had to call on the city's firefighters to save the day. After the firefighters had disappeared into the night, the also-dispatched police officers decided they didn't need to make the situation worse, and also disappeared into the night. > Discretion is the police officer's most important skill. But police are frequently pressured (performance evaluations, etc) to take actions that really just needlessly wreck people's lives. > Another passenger told of the time she was being unruly, and how her family called the police for help dealing with her. After a while those police officers decided they didn't have any way to help, so "we're going to have to take you downtown." Her adult daughter protested, "THIS IS NOT WHY WE CALLED YOU", but the police officers were like, "whatevers". Arresting people is their job, even if that person really only needs a time-out from their situation. [1] My earlier post about the importance of memorizing some phone numbers, Who Are Your Lifelines?: http://www.TaxiWars.org/who-are-your-lifelines/ http://www.TaxiWars.org/who-are-your-lifelines/ (minor edits)
- junkscience2017 9y ago
  It would seem that assisting at auto accident scenes now constitute 95% of actual calls firefighters make (i.e. discounting false-alarm calls)...which makes me wonder why there isn't an effort to situate fire stations right on major highways. Where I live in California there has been only one house fire in our town in years, but the fire department is on the highway responding to an accident at least once a week.
  - stevenwoo 9y ago
    My guess is EMS is probably not primarily auto accident response so population density/tax revenue has more to do with location of fire stations. Along rural 5/99 in California often see county fire responders, versus seeing municipal stations respond to situations closer to towns. Somewhere along the way EMS has switched from independent service seen in that 70's TV show about EMS in my childhood to almost always being attached to a fire station. Anecdotally from a suburb in Silicon Valley I hear the local firestation truck sirens go off multiple times daily when working at home, and there are an average of zero fires a day anywhere near my home.
  - johansch 9y ago
    Ah.. I guess that explains why they moved my city's fire station from the city center to something closer to the nearby major highway. (Europe/Sweden though.)
    - dx034 9y ago
      It could also be that they wanted to expand the area they can reach within a certain timeframe.
  - taxicabjesus 9y ago
    I had a passenger who was a wildland firefighter. He'd tried city firefighting, but said most the calls were medical, and he wanted to fight fires. He also didn't like having to shave twice a day to keep his beard from breaking his mask's seal. > It would seem that assisting at auto accident scenes now constitute 95% of actual calls firefighters make A Mesa firefighter told me how they have "busy" stations, and stations for firefighters who are close to retirement. A common cause of fires around one busy station was electrical shorts from 1950's bathroom ventilation fans. Chandler and Phoenix have an agreement to share responding to calls on their section of I-10 (part of the border between the cities): https://www.google.com/maps/search/fire+stations+near+i-10+and+baseline/@33.3215407,-111.9760362,12z https://www.google.com/maps/search/fire+stations+near+i-10+a...
hulkisdumb 9y ago
almost mistook this for another iteration of street-fighting maths. Bravo though!
johansch 9y ago
http://www.firefightermath.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=29&Itemid=43 http://www.firefightermath.org/index.php?option=com_content&... "A 100-foot length of 1-inch diameter hose is charged with water. How many gallons of water are in that length of hose?" Ugh.
- knz 9y ago
  The section on unit conversions (http://www.firefightermath.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=23&Itemid=125 http://www.firefightermath.org/index.php?option=com_content&...) just makes me wonder why fire fighters don't use metric... "How many pints are in a 5-gallon pail? How many cups are in a 5-gallon pail?"
  - ateesdalejr 9y ago
    Probably because most firefighters were taught and grown up on the imperial system of measurement...
    - yardie 9y ago
      If they were taught in a US school for the last 40 years they were taught metric. If they were enlisted at any point in the last 30 years they were taught, and used, metric. If they can't handle the metric system then they probably aren't that good at math and are just using rote memorizations.
  - brooksgarrett 9y ago
    Speaking from experience, it's primarily due to 'tradition.' All of your combi-nozzles and rate control valves are rated and marked in GPM (Gallons per minute) and hose is purchased and stored as 50' sections. NFPA specifications for the hose required on a first due engine are in feet. A department can't decide to use metric alone. The entire industry first would need to support at the minimum both standards.
    - johansch 9y ago
zarkov99 9y ago
this is one of the coolest things I have ever read.
stmw 9y ago
This is very cool! There should be an SRE version: "the mx4-large instance is filling memory at 5 megabytes-per-gallon, when will Datadog retrigger PagerDuty?"

94 points by miobrien 9y ago

After I 'retired' from taxi-driving, the volunteer fire department for my grandfather's (deceased) rural cabin sent a bunch of us to the Arizona State Fire School [0]. This organization provides training for small fire departments that don't have the resources to run their own training. Topics covered include basic firefighting, how to drive a firetruck, fire investigation (arson?), etc. [0] https://www.facebook.com/Arizona-State-Fire-School-Arizona-State-Fire-Training-Committee-150904741607047/ https://www.facebook.com/Arizona-State-Fire-School-Arizona-S... My firefighter superpower is 'vehicle extrication'. When people wreck their cars, firefighters' job is to stabilize the car and extract the people inside as quickly as possible. I don't know why the president of our volunteer fire department decided 3 of us needed to learn about Vehicle Extrication - we don't have a lot of traffic on the county road, nor much in the way of equipment to extricate people from their rolled cars... At the state fire school's opening ceremony I realized the difference between firefighters and police officers: if the fire department is dispatched in response to your call, they will try to help you. If the police are dispatched in response to your call, part of their job is deciding whether there is an excuse to arrest you. One of my passengers was mistakenly arrested. Those police officers put her in a bad situation, and it was my honor to help extricate her from the area around the county jail. She wasn't planning to get arrested that night, probably didn't have any of her friends' phone numbers committed to memory [1], and was hoping her friend would have money to pay me when we got to his house. The diary about my insights about firefighting vs policing is "Ordinary Rendition: The Public Servants' Quagmire" - http://www.taxiwars.org/2017/10/ordinary-rendition-public-servants.html http://www.taxiwars.org/2017/10/ordinary-rendition-public-se... This section is about my experience at fire school: > The Public Servants' Quagmire > [...] Police officers have a bit of a predicament: their official motto is to "protect and serve", but the politicians have given them no flexibility to fulfill their role. > After I retired from taxi driving, I spent a couple days at fire school. During the opening ceremony I realized the difference between firefighters and police officers/sheriff's deputies. > If the fire department is dispatched, they will do whatever they can to try to help you. Fire trucks are outfitted with all sorts of equipment that might be needed to save someone's day. These include not just fire hoses and other firefighting equipment, but also tools to cut up cars to extract people when the doors won't open, etc. Equipment on this Mesa special operations firetruck was once used to lift the light-rail train off of a drunk who'd passed out on the tracks: [Photo: Mesa Fire Department's Rapid Response/Special Operations Firetruck] > No judgement calls are made by firefighters when responding to the incident at hand. In a future post I intend to tell of the time that I had to call on the city's firefighters to save the day. After the firefighters had disappeared into the night, the also-dispatched police officers decided they didn't need to make the situation worse, and also disappeared into the night. > Discretion is the police officer's most important skill. But police are frequently pressured (performance evaluations, etc) to take actions that really just needlessly wreck people's lives. > Another passenger told of the time she was being unruly, and how her family called the police for help dealing with her. After a while those police officers decided they didn't have any way to help, so "we're going to have to take you downtown." Her adult daughter protested, "THIS IS NOT WHY WE CALLED YOU", but the police officers were like, "whatevers". Arresting people is their job, even if that person really only needs a time-out from their situation. [1] My earlier post about the importance of memorizing some phone numbers, Who Are Your Lifelines?: http://www.TaxiWars.org/who-are-your-lifelines/ http://www.TaxiWars.org/who-are-your-lifelines/ (minor edits)

junkscience2017 9y ago
It would seem that assisting at auto accident scenes now constitute 95% of actual calls firefighters make (i.e. discounting false-alarm calls)...which makes me wonder why there isn't an effort to situate fire stations right on major highways. Where I live in California there has been only one house fire in our town in years, but the fire department is on the highway responding to an accident at least once a week.
- stevenwoo 9y ago
  My guess is EMS is probably not primarily auto accident response so population density/tax revenue has more to do with location of fire stations. Along rural 5/99 in California often see county fire responders, versus seeing municipal stations respond to situations closer to towns. Somewhere along the way EMS has switched from independent service seen in that 70's TV show about EMS in my childhood to almost always being attached to a fire station. Anecdotally from a suburb in Silicon Valley I hear the local firestation truck sirens go off multiple times daily when working at home, and there are an average of zero fires a day anywhere near my home.
- johansch 9y ago
  Ah.. I guess that explains why they moved my city's fire station from the city center to something closer to the nearby major highway. (Europe/Sweden though.)
  - dx034 9y ago
    It could also be that they wanted to expand the area they can reach within a certain timeframe.
- taxicabjesus 9y ago
  I had a passenger who was a wildland firefighter. He'd tried city firefighting, but said most the calls were medical, and he wanted to fight fires. He also didn't like having to shave twice a day to keep his beard from breaking his mask's seal. > It would seem that assisting at auto accident scenes now constitute 95% of actual calls firefighters make A Mesa firefighter told me how they have "busy" stations, and stations for firefighters who are close to retirement. A common cause of fires around one busy station was electrical shorts from 1950's bathroom ventilation fans. Chandler and Phoenix have an agreement to share responding to calls on their section of I-10 (part of the border between the cities): https://www.google.com/maps/search/fire+stations+near+i-10+and+baseline/@33.3215407,-111.9760362,12z https://www.google.com/maps/search/fire+stations+near+i-10+a...

hulkisdumb 9y ago

almost mistook this for another iteration of street-fighting maths. Bravo though!

johansch 9y ago

http://www.firefightermath.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=29&Itemid=43 http://www.firefightermath.org/index.php?option=com_content&... "A 100-foot length of 1-inch diameter hose is charged with water. How many gallons of water are in that length of hose?" Ugh.

knz 9y ago
The section on unit conversions (http://www.firefightermath.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=23&Itemid=125 http://www.firefightermath.org/index.php?option=com_content&...) just makes me wonder why fire fighters don't use metric... "How many pints are in a 5-gallon pail? How many cups are in a 5-gallon pail?"
- ateesdalejr 9y ago
  Probably because most firefighters were taught and grown up on the imperial system of measurement...
  - yardie 9y ago
    If they were taught in a US school for the last 40 years they were taught metric. If they were enlisted at any point in the last 30 years they were taught, and used, metric. If they can't handle the metric system then they probably aren't that good at math and are just using rote memorizations.
- brooksgarrett 9y ago
  Speaking from experience, it's primarily due to 'tradition.' All of your combi-nozzles and rate control valves are rated and marked in GPM (Gallons per minute) and hose is purchased and stored as 50' sections. NFPA specifications for the hose required on a first due engine are in feet. A department can't decide to use metric alone. The entire industry first would need to support at the minimum both standards.
  - johansch 9y ago

zarkov99 9y ago

this is one of the coolest things I have ever read.

stmw 9y ago

This is very cool! There should be an SRE version: "the mx4-large instance is filling memory at 5 megabytes-per-gallon, when will Datadog retrigger PagerDuty?"