MD FF charged with arson; Charleston chief out; A FF memorial hit by vandals; Early warning systems; Fire at frat house; NIST – Can you hear me now?
(Updated at 7:45 PM)
Montgomery County, MD firefighter charged with arson
Picture of Thomas Walter from Montgomery County Fire & Rescue Service
STATter 911 has learned a volunteer firefighter with the Gaithersburg-Washington Grove VFD (Montgomery County Station 708) has been charged with arson. 19-year-old Thomas Walter was arrested following a fire under the rear deck of his neighbor’s townhome on Club Lake Road around 10:00 PM on Tuesday night. A spokesperson for the Montgomery County Fire & Rescue Service says when the first engine arrived, Walter told the crew he had put out the fire.
Fire investigators already had Walter on their radar screen after he was on the scene of a March 24 fire that destroyed a utility shed at the Montgomery Village Golf Course. That fire also occurred around 10:00 PM and caused $50,000 in damage.
From their previous contact with Walter, investigators responded to Tuesday’s fire already knowing that Walter lived on the same street. According to a press release issued Wednesday evening, Thomas Walter initially gave fire investigators inconsistent statements, but eventually confessed to both fires.
The press release says Walter was also considered a suspect in a series of nuisance fires in the same area over the past six weeks.
Thomas Walter is charged with one count of 1st degree arson, one count of 2nd degree arson and one count of reckless endangerment. He is currently in the Montgomery County Detention Center.
Walter had been a volunteer firefighter for less than a year. STATter 911 has requested comment from the Gaithersburg-Washington Grove VFD.
Charleston Chief Rusty Thomas retires
Chief Rusty Thomas from Firehouse.com
A day before a report is to be released looking at the tragic June 18 Sofa Super Store fire, Chief Rusty Thomas has announced his retirement effective June 27.
Mayor Joseph Riley has scheduled a 3:00 PM news conference. Brad Franko tells me that WCBD-TV will stream it live. You will be able to click here to watch it.
Here are excerpts from the Charleston Post & Courier:
Embattled Charleston Fire Chief Rusty Thomas announced his retirement Wednesday, saying that last year’s Sofa Super Store fire had changed him forever and that stepping down is the best way to help the department move forward.
The announcement comes on the eve of a highly anticipated report expected to be critical of the fire department’s handling of the June 18 blaze that killed nine of Thomas’ firefighters.
Thomas is a third generation Charleston firefighter, and has served as a member of the department since 1976. He has served as chief since 1992.
Mayor Joe Riley said Wednesday that Thomas came to see him Tuesday afternoon and presented a letter expressing his decision to retire, effective June 27.
Thomas got on the fire department’s dispatch radio Wednesday morning and announced his plans. He said the tragedy and its aftermath have taken a toll on the department and his family.
Roger Yow, president of the local firefighters union that represents about half of the city’s 250 firefighters, said he was in utter shock and had not expected Thomas to step down.
While the state and national firefighters union had called for Thomas to lose his job in the wake of the fire, Yow’s organization had not yet taken a formal position.
“It was a total shock to me. I’ve never had anything against the chief personally. We just wish him and his family the best. We feel like it was something that needed to be done to help this fire department move forward.”
FF memorial vandalized
In Toronto, a memorial honoring fallen firefighters was damaged by vandals on Monday evening. One part was spray-painted with political statements and another section was painted black. More details and reaction in The Guardian:
The memorial’s defacement drew criticism from Toronto Fire Chief William Stewart, who said in a statement that the vandalism was “a despicable act and a disgrace to the memory of firefighters across Ontario that have paid the supreme sacrifice in protecting the citizens of our province.”
Community safety and correctional services minister Rick Bartolucci echoed those statements. “Only the most degenerate could seek to destroy (the memorial) in such a callous manner,” he said.
The siren’s important call
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKg_XZQy8Ic&hl=en]
News reports indicate a volunteer firefighter spotted the deadly EF 4 tornado that hit Picher, OK and helped sound the alarm on Saturday about six-minutes before a warning from the National Weather Service and 19-minutes before it hit the town. Six people died, but the belief is the earlier sounding of the sirens helped save lives. Read more.
About 15 miles southeast of Picher, across the Missouri border, another volunteer firefighter/storm spotter, Tyler Casey, was killed after warning others in Newton County about the approaching tornado. Read details at FirefighterCloseCalls.com.
On Thursday, a fairly new STATter 911 reader, Chief Kirk Trekell of the Alva, OK Fire Department will be sounding the sirens. It is an effort to get his community to stop and think about storm preparedness. Click here for the story.
Alva is just 45 miles west of Wakita. Wakita, OK is the home of the Twis
ter Museum and where the movie Twister was filmed. This year, the real thing has taken its toll in lives and property. Even here on the East Coast, far from Tornado Alley.
Last Friday night, 9NEWS NOW’s Nancy Yamada reported on the lack of sirens in our area to alert residents to Thursday’s Stafford County, VA tornado and other emergencies in the region. Are the text alerts provided by local jurisdictions adequate for the middle of the night?
What Nancy may not have known is that many of the old Civil Defense sirens from this area were sent to the Midwest years ago to be used for storm warnings.
Arlington County began experimenting last year with a more modern “siren” system combining horns with loudspeaker warnings.
Nancy interviewed 9NEWS NOW photographer Greg Guise who has spent many years storm chasing (I joined Greg for a number of those chases).
In some of the comments in reaction to the story, there is a debate over how much responsibility the government should have in providing the alert versus what role citizens should take for their own safety (for example, having a weather radio and the ability to receive text alerts).
The first person I recall bringing up the idea of reviving CD sirens was former DC Emergency Management Agency head Peter LaPorte. It wasn’t long after 9-11 that I did a story on Peter’s proposal to go back in time for a low tech warning system.
Fire during finals
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWqaI3pVKLM&hl=en]
A fire late Monday night heavily damaged the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity house at the University of Wisconsin. No one was injured and a cause has not been listed. The fire was discovered by a Madison police officer who warned the residents. Read more. Watch TV coverage.
Match point – twin, doubles partners team up for a pair of saves
An AP report from Bordeaux, France:
Twin brothers who play professional tennis as a doubles team helped the wife and son of another doubles player escape from a hotel fire.
Sanchai and Sonchat Ratiwatana of Thailand were making their way through thick, black smoke to exit their hotel when they heard someone calling for them.
It was the wife of Lucas Arnold Ker, who like the twins is in town for a Challenger Series tournament.
“After we got out of the room, we made some noise: ‘Is somebody still here?'” Sanchai said in a telephone interview Tuesday. “She called, ‘This way! this way!'”
The twins, who have won two titles on the ATP tour and expect to play at the French Open later this month, entered the room and found Arnold Ker’s wife and son.
“First, she wanted to use the blanket to go out the window,” Sanchai said. “But I said, ‘We can find the exit.'”
Sanchai said they left the room and re-entered the smoke-filled hallway with wet towels wrapped around the heads of the woman and boy. They then saw someone open the fire exit door, and the four got out safely.
“OK, maybe we helped her, but she helped us,” Sanchai said. “If she didn’t call us, maybe we wouldn’t have found the exit. She saved our lives also.”
The brothers later learned that the fire started in another room on the third floor. No one was hurt, Sanchai said.
“I think we were the last to get out of the building,” Sanchai said.
The high price of lower response times
That’s what they are debating in Savage, MN south of Minneapolis. In tight budget times can they really afford the $1.25 million needed per new station. And the may need more than one because of warnings there are “significant areas of service deficiency”. Read the story.
Or, on the EMS side, maybe ALS response times really don’t matter
As usual FossilMedic Mike Ward is stirring the pot with another study. He gives us a little trip down memory lane while looking at whether timely ALS intervention is really needed in cardiac arrest cases.
In a sense, Ward bringing this up, would be like me saying reporters and a free press aren’t really needed.
If you need something to wash all this down with, check out FireGeezer’s look at Pizza Beer. Tastes great, but not less filling?
Let’s see pizza and beer go together like … fire and EMS …oh, never mind.
Update: Mike Ward thinks I am not likely to get beyond the learner’s permit stage with my literary license. He writes this morning –
“In a sense, Ward bringing this up, would be like me saying reporters and a free press aren’t really needed.” Not really (grin)
If you compare the cardiac arrest save rates from from the 1970s and today – like Baxter Larman did in Los Angeles – there has been little change in the OUTCOMES of the patients who have a sudden cardiac arrest in the streets.
It is wasteful to require that all firefighters in urban areas become paramedics (the Baltimore model) because they will never develop ALS clinical skill competency.
In the other five clinical scenarios, provision of ALS care early does make a difference. THAT is the approach we need to take to influence staffing and deployment decisions … and can justify paramedic staffed fire companies as first responders.
Despite what you say Mike, following in the footsteps of many a political pundit on the landscape today, I am just not likely to let the facts get in the way of a good line.
What’s the frequency, Kenneth? Ask NIST.
“Electronics Engineer Dennis Camell (foreground) aligns antennas in an old California silica mine for a NIST study identifying optimal frequencies for radio signal transmissions in tunnels”. G. Koepke/NIST.
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) say they have found the “sweet spot” that could help underground radio communications in subways and mines. From the May 13 NIST Tech Beat:
The optimal frequency depends on the dimensions of the tunnel. For a typical subway-sized tunnel, the sweet spot is found in the frequency range 400 megahertz (MHz) to 1 gigahertz (GHz).
NIST researchers were surprised by how much farther signals at the optimal frequency traveled in above-ground building corridors, as well as underground. Tunnels can channel radio signals in the right frequency range beca
use they act like giant waveguides, the pipelike channels that confine and direct microwaves on integrated circuit wafers, and in antenna feed systems and optical fibers. The channel shape reduces the losses caused when signals are absorbed or scattered by structural features. The waveguide effect depends on a tunnel’s width, height, surface material and roughness, and the flatness of the floor as well as the signal frequency. NIST authors found good agreement between their measured data and theoretical models, leading to the conclusion that the waveguide effect plays a significant role in radio transmissions in tunnels.
The bombs bursting in air
It must have seen like that for the victims of this tragedy that occurred eight-years-ago, yesterday. May 13, 2000: A fire and explosions at the SE Fireworks Depot in Enschede, The Netherlands. The fireworks warehouse was in a former textile factory. Four firefighters and a reporter were among the 21 people killed. About 950 others were injured. Four to five hundred homes were destroyed. Click here to read a report looking at the medical response to the disaster.
