My friend and former colleague Scott Broom at 9NEWS NOW in Washington, DC bravely let the Prince George’s County Fire/EMS Department run him through the paces yesterday on the department’s new Mobile Mayday Simulator. Scott did a nice job and gives the public a feel for what this is all about.
I imagine if I was still at the TV station the bosses would have made this my assignment. I would have been hiding and cowering in a corner somewhere refusing to go. Do you realize just how many people in PGFD would have loved to pull the lever with me above a trap door? Oops, sorry Dave. We forgot to put the mattress in this time. There would have been two people leaving the firehouse on stretchers (see the story). Photographer Greg Guise, after he got his laughing under control, would have been forced to take over the reporting role.
Reminds me very much of being invited by the late IAFF Local 1619 president, Ron Milor to the annual MDA softball tournament more than 20-years-ago and being told to bring a bathing suit. I ended up doing a stint in the dunk (notice there is no “r” in that word) tank alongside then fire chief Jim Estepp. Who knew that many firefighters had such good aim after a few beers?
The Prince George’s County Fire/EMS Department made the video above to show off its Mobile Mayday Simulator. The simulator was developed in part as a reaction to lessons learned from a report into the April, 2009 fire at 87 Herrington Drive in Largo that left a firefighter critically injured. PGFD PIO Mark Brady issued a press release with details on the simulator and its development. Here are excerpts:
The Technical Services Battalion, under the command of Major Adon Snyder, has developed a mobile “mayday” simulator, accompanied by a classroom lecture, which can be easily brought to any Fire/EMS station or training facility. A 40-minute classroom session with power point presentation and practical evolution comprise this training program. The practical portion starts with participants raising their heart rate to about 140, a rate consistent with response and initial activity at an incident scene. It is also the heart rate where decision making could be adversely affected. Raising the heart rate is accomplished by participants donning full personal protective equipment (PPE) and self contained breathing apparatus (SCBA) then carries a stand-pipe pack for approximately 5 to 10 minutes. The firefighter then places their cloth covered face piece on and begins to breathe air. The firefighter, with no visibility, is then instructed to follow a 100 foot section of hoseline. The firefighter follows the hoseline and is led up a ramp and then up steps to a simulated second floor and then experience a sudden floor collapse.
The firefighter, following General Orders and valuable lessons learned in the classroom portion of the drill, must then demonstrate the correct survival skills and mayday procedure.
The mobile mayday simulator was constructed inside of a fire department utility box truck. The conversion of the interior box of the utility truck includes elements required for participants to ascend steps onto an upper floor landing and a collapsible floor which will allow participants to feel the unexpected jolting experience of a floor collapse. The firefighter has been previously instructed to ensure their SCBA and PPE are still in place and then transmit, by way of their portable radio, a correct MAYDAY message.
The drill is designed not only for firefighters but also incident commanders that will receive the radio mayday message and act accordingly. Scenarios can be modified to include non-working radios, dislodged facepiece, etc. The mobile mayday simulator has been used at select stations in order to collect data and evaluate the program. The program has received very positive feedback from both evaluators and participants. A train-the-trainer program is now being developed and will soon be made available to all personnel.
Jim Davis has written us an email insisting we tell you the above video, from a WUSA9.com video player, that he sold to 9NEWSNOW/WUSA9.com, was shot by him.
The Prince George’s County Fire/EMS Department has publicly released its Safety and Investigative Team (SIT) report from the fire that critically injured Firefighter/Paramedic Daniel McGown. Two other firefighters were hurt in the April 8, 2009 fire at 87 Herrington Drive. PGFD Spokesman Mark Brady says that SIT completed its investigation in December 2009, but until now it had not been made public.
According to Brady, the following issues were identified:
Failure to establish an initial water supply
Incomplete size-up reports
Improper tactics
Lack of company-level supervision
Lack of effective crew integrity
Inadequate communication on the fire ground
Failure to provide adequate ventilation
Lack of training and experience in fire fighter survival skills
Here’s more from the PGFD press release:
From the findings of the investigation, the SIT developed a total of nine (9) recommendations. Five (5) of these recommendations were identified as “primary recommendations” as they relate directly to actions, inactions, or factors that contributed in a direct way to the resulting injuries. The remaining four (4) recommendations were identified as “ancillary recommendations” because they were discovered in the course of the investigation and identified as issues, but did not contribute directly to the resulting injuries.
Prince George’s County Acting Fire Chief Marc S. Bashoor commented on the public release of this document by saying, “In the interest of communicating the lessons learned to prevent occurrences of a similar nature, I am officially releasing this report. Lessons learned by our department can be of value to others in preventing injury and death to firefighters across the country.” He concluded by saying, “I would like to thank the team that compiled this report. One of our most challenging tasks as an organization is to pause and conduct a through and honest critique of ourselves in an incident such as this.”
Andrew Pantelis, President of the Prince George’s County Professional Fire Fighters and Paramedics Association, IAFF Local 1619, stated, “The intent of such reports are not to cast blame or second guess split second decisions that are made on the fire ground but rather to provide a tool for members to use to apply in training and future incidents.”
We have a winner! The very first entry into our top stories contest for 2009 correctly guessed the top story of the year. Even though the rest of that person’s top five weren’t on target, it gave me hope for you people and this contest. Once again, Statter was wrong.
Many of you were blinded by our extensive coverage of PGFD and one man in particular, who at last look was still in the Prince George’s County Detention Center. You will have to scroll way done to number 14 to find his picture on this page. Other entries, including one from a person who should know better, focused way too much on our coverage of the District of Columbia Fire & EMS Department. Only one DC story made the list (but it was a big one at number two). In fact, only eight of the top 20 were local stories from the Washington, DC area. Remember that for next year’s contest. We are global in scope here at STATter911.com (yeah, right!).
To get a winner we had to go deep down to someone who guessed two of the top five. While he had the two top stories in reverse order, author and fire service veteran from Baltimore County Chris Hawley was the only entrant to get more than one out of five. The good news is the two Baltimore boys should have lots to talk about when this one buys lunch.
Our rankings are based on the number of pageviews between January 1 and December 31, 2009 according to Google Analytics. If a story had multiple postings we only counted the top one for our list.
The interesting thing is that the bottom two stories and the 21st story were just nine clicks apart. Their rankings kept changing up until the closing hours of 2009. In the end, a somewhat odd, but newer story from Montgomery County, Maryland moved up, knocking off one of my personal favorites from earlier in the year. Number 21 is the story of Alexandria Fire Department (VA) veteran Doug Townshend who, while off duty, rescued his brother Mike from a burning home. Click here for that story.
Click the Popeye cartoon to see what used to pass for a year-end review at STATter911.com.
By the way, I did this type of year end review, rather than the more humorous (at least I thought so) version of the two previous years, because I thought it would be easier to manage. I am writing this at 4:00 AM on New Years Day, so now I am not so sure. If you miss the old one, here it is (I am sure most of it is still true today anyway).
Obviously isn’t just us taking a look back at 2009 and ahead to 2010. Other fire service sites beat us to the punch. Paul Peluso at Firehouse.com says 2009 was the year of the video (look below for proof). FireRescue1.com has a host of characters writing lots of words under its year in review banner. Billy Goldfeder has a message for the new year at FirefighterCloseCalls.com. Paul Combs has a great thought in his December cartoon at FireEngineering.com. I am sure Bill Schumm will have something to help bring in the new year Firegeezer style and so will many others who share the FireEMSBlogs.com site with this rag. .
And Rhett Fleitz at The Fire Critic, who is a great inspiration and supporter to all of us who blog, has a contest that is better than mine. Rhett is looking for the Fire/EMS Blog of the Year 2009 (now you know why I said those nice things about him). Rhett’s is better because he is promoting it as the contest with the prize where you don’t have to sit across the lunch table from Dave Statter.
Thank you to all who entered our contest. Thank you to all who read and comment each day. Thank you to all who link to STATter911.com and carry our stories. Most important, a happy and safe 2010 to all of you and especially those out there protecting us each and every day.
So, drum roll please! We present our 20 most popular stories from 2009:
This was the story that dominated 2009 on STATter911.com. Not only did the posting on May 30 (our fourth posting on the topic) bring in 43 percent more pageviews than our number two story for the year, three other stories on the confrontation would have taken places two, three, and four. When you add up the clicks for the almost 20 stories we posted on this topic they account for about five-percent of the overall traffic on the blog for 2009.
There have been more than 700 comments (actually a lot more than that, but many we couldn’t publish). A couple of comments still arrive each week.
I think the reason for the high numbers, besides being a hot topic, is that we apparently reached way beyond our normal fire and EMS service audience on this story. It helps that the YouTube video above, which has more than two million views, has our link in its description.
As much grief as I get for carrying too many negative stories on the blog, the only reason the world knew about this one is because I was trying to do a good deed and post some positive news. On Wednesday, October 7 there were two sprinkler demonstrations scheduled in the National Capital region. One at Gallaudet University and the other at the University of Maryland (at MFRI). My goal was to get to both of them, but the Maryland one was the priority because of the release of a study about Prince George’s County’s mandatory residential sprinkler law. I never made it to DC and no one said anything to me about a problem during that demonstration.
As I was about to leave work the following evening I was feeling guilty the DC sprinkler video didn’t get any play in my story the day before (there had been a photographer on the scene from LNS, the local news service run by my station and two others in Washington). I pulled the video up with the intention of editing something for the blog and possibly WUSA9.com. Of course, as I watched the video, I immediately realized there was a little bit more to this demonstration.
This entry had 128 comments. More comments came in after Chief Dennis Rubin, when talking about what he saw, used the term “comedy act”.
Firefighter Will Gregory exits the home with his PPE on fire. Photo by Brian Haney, The Daily Record.
This was a late entry for the year. It came about because FirefighterCloseCalls.com first put out the story of the close call based on the newspaper article by Brian Haney at The Daily Record in Dunn, NC. Figuring that there might be more than one photo, I called Mr. Haney and he told me he had shot 210 images from that fire. Brian sent a bunch to STATter911.com and gave us permission to use the photos.
Until a day or two ago, this was in the number three spot for the year. In my heart I wish it was number one. I was blogging away on the Friday afternoon that Ladder 26 wrecked trying to keep up with the developments from Boston. Later in the evening when we learned that Lt. Kevin Kelley was the firefighter killed, it didn’t take long to find his appearances from Firehouse USA on the web. How can you not smile when you watch these?
While I get a lot of stories and videos from your tips, this is one I found all by myself. Going through fire related YouTube videos on a Sunday evening I happened upon this clip. I usually don’t run controlled burning type training exercises, but this one looked different. After picking my jaw off the floor upon seeing the unusual PPV via the leaf blower, I decided this was one worthy of a wider audience.
You have to admit this one was different. The 160-foot Spirit of Washington squeezed the 72-foot John H. Glenn Jr., putting a big gash in the Glenn’s hull and sidelining the boat for many months. The collision also crushed a small FBI boat at an adjacent dock.
This is a rather simple story of a rescue in that it was popular despite there being no video of the event. Firefighters saving the day when it looks like that might be impossible.
Here’s how WZZM-TV’s Lambrini Lukidis described the story:
Kelysse LaBelle is full of energy today. But when fireman Scott Campau rescued her from the bottom of Fisherman’s Landing in Muskegon last week, Kelysse was purple, her eyes were gray and lifeless.
“The stroller was actually sitting up-right on its wheels on the bottom of the lake and she was unconscious,” said Campau.
“She wasn’t breathing, no heart rate,” said Battalion Chief Ken Chudy who lead the team on the call. “She was lifeless when we pulled her out of the water,” said Fireman Kevin McMillan also assisted by firemen Chad Horn and Scott Hemmeslbach.
Eight Prince George’s County firefighters were hurt when an explosion occurred while they were investigating a natural has leak at a shopping center in Forestville.
Truly one of the great stories of the year. John and Joel Rechlitz received national attention for their off-duty rescue of a young boy from a burning car. Their efforts didn’t stop after the rescue. The firefighters remained close to D.J. Harper and his family. Click here.
In December, 2008 Continental Flight 1404 ran off a runway and burst into flames at Denver International Airport. This was the audio as the airport tower controllers directed firefighters to the scene.
The fireground audio provided by Erie County Fire wire was very difficult to listen to as these two men responded to a call for help inside the burning building on Genesee Street.
Layoffs and budget cuts were THE story of 2009. We saw a lot of stories like this one, but for some reason the Flint fire got more attention than the others.
What more can I say about this frequent subject of STATter911.com stories. In the interview Jerry Engle told us all about an arson ring involving firefighters. Later in the year Engle and another former volunteer from Riverdale were both charged with the fire Jerry told us about. If you haven’t read enough about him, click here for our Jerry archive.
A touching tribute to firefighters who were lost 50-years earlier. The incident is believed to be the first time the term BLEVE was used to describe the rupture and rocketing of a flammable liquid container during a fire.
It took teamwork and a lot of guts as a dispatcher and engine company worked to save a woman trapped in an apartment fire started thanks to a neighbor’s meth lab. Video shows Chad Meyer from Engine 26 basically walking through fire to bring out Nikki Cain.
This entry from Montgomery County had to be one of the more unusual stories of the year. A firefighter’s date spent the night at the firehouse and got lost on the way to the bathroom.
What this means is that, even though Kyle Wilson died in a house fire in April, 2007 and the report was released nine-months later, firefighters are still interested in learning from this tragic situation. Enough people searched, found and apparently read that entry in 2009 to make it part of our top 20.
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