bev - email - url
I can definitely identify with your feeling of relief to return to paradise. I get that almost any time I have to attend an event in the city.
Very interesting about the terrorist incidents. Of course, the word “terrorist” has become loaded with recent baggage, but there are many other circumstances in which terrorism can take place. That meth lab stuff sounds very scary. I don’t think there’s been a lot of that up in our region so far, but I guess it’s getting here. Up this way, I think grow ops are more common, but I would think many of them might be booby-trapped as well. Lots to consider – especially the whole topic of safety. Will you now have a meeting to go over what you’ve learned with the rest of the VFD?
Monday: 26 March 2007 @ 09:35:54
David - email
SOMEbody is just a smidgen unbalanced (I’m smiling, Wayne) over mobile telephone devices, but LOVES his Internet connectivity. Is there a trace of a contradiction here? (Though I certainly don’t want to imply that you’d cart that laptop into a restroom stall... )
Monday: 26 March 2007 @ 09:58:41
Wayne - email - url
Bev - as you might imagine, I was at low-level but measurable angst for two week before this weekend. Not because of the challenge of taking the course but because of having to mesh with a socially encompassing event. So yes, the return to paradise was exhiliarating.
Our instructor was extremely professional and very careful not to offend anyone but I think his disgust with the baggage that the word “terrorism” has been loaded with was evident. He was very clear that while foreign terrorist acts may be high visibility and dramatic, it’s the homegrown crazies that we really have to deal with. That can happen anywhere where someone has a bone to pick. It’s probably on too small a scale to register but it’s something we might encounter, whether it’s a church bombing or an abortion clinic bombing. He did address what I think you might mean by “grow ops” (I have so much alphabet soup swimming through my head that I’m not sure). But for wildland firefighting, we might *just* have to worry about fishhooks set in invisible lines at eye level should a wildland fire occur in a marijuana patch.
Glenn and I spent a good deal of our free time and the time driving up thinking about presentations to our VFD, and there are quite a few possibilities. I’d like to see, for instance, us have a training session on a moderately hot day where our resident nurse takes blood pressure and pulse rate from everyone involved. And we clearly need to incorporate a safety officer (who still takes part in training) who on every training day carries a clipboard annotating potential safety problems. We need to have Standard Operational Procedures (SOP) for all the activitites we are expected to carry out, for our equipment is unique and one and possibly two trucks really need to be addressed. And any VFD needs to have a SOP for what people should or shouldn’t do if they’ve had a couple of beers at home and suddenly there’s a call (don’t go).
Pre-planning: chicken houses (a big thing here) for instance. Is there any point at all in sending firefighters *into* a chicken house? None whatsoever, and yet there are firefighters who will do exactly that. Incredibly stupid. But then what about human houses, or even large warehouses, that are unoccupied? There are firefighters who want to save the house and we saw videos of firefighters entering empty houses to try to save them - as our instructors said *WHY* are they doing this??? As I said, once a house is even moderately involved, honey, you might as well tear it down and start over - it’s not going to be habitable *ever*. Yet a lot of firefighters will consider it their duty to enter the building to try to save it.
Much is common sense, some is common sense that you never thought of before, and all too much is common sense that escapes like smoke from some firefighters' heads.
Monday: 26 March 2007 @ 10:03:59
Wayne - email - url
David - well the fact that I wouldn’t cart that laptop into a bathroom stall is, I think, a fair indication of the difference 
Indeed, I didn’t have access the entire weekend. I could have. We do have a laptop, and I suspect the place is wireless. But I was perfectly ok with that. Can you now, really, imagine a cell phone user discarding his cell phone for the weekend? Now who, really, is unbalanced?
Beyond all that, what makes you think I’m as surgically attached to my internet access as 99% of cell phone users are to theirs? (Honest, I overheard, deliberately, ok, all in the interest of social observation, quite a number of cell phone calls, and they were the most vacuous unnecessary things in the world. How offensive: - I’m much more interesting than whoever they were talking to 
)
Monday: 26 March 2007 @ 10:10:36
robin andrea - email - url
It’s always a relief to get back to paradise. We should all wear our ruby-red slippers and click our heels together repeating our real life mantras–"There’s no place like home."
I don’t know why, but I always forget that firefighters do more than fight a blazing fire. I don’t think about meth labs, car accidents, or bombed abortion clinics. It’s quite a job being a first responder to the places where social cohesion and social chaos smash head-on. These trainings always sound very interesting and incredibly worthwhile. The scenery is quite lovely as well.
I wouldn’t mind having a cell-phone when we are traveling, but taking one into a bathroom or even into the market seems a bit too dysfunctional to me.
Monday: 26 March 2007 @ 10:38:02
bev - email - url
Wayne - I’m not too worried about your internet connectivity (or mine) just yet. When we start carting our laptops along on hikes in the bush... well, then perhaps it will be time to worry. Whick reminds me of a discussion on the Nearctic Arachnologists' Forum about whether the Spider WebWatch site would benefit by having a way to upload data from a cellphone or PDA. I’m actually (*cringe*) toying with the idea of getting a PDA sometime over the next while for recording data while out in the field, so perhaps I would make use of such a thing. Anyhow, I’m not sure if I’m ready to start toting a PDA along (guess I should have considered one with built in GPS!), but can definitely see the advantages of it for some types of survey work.
As for the grow ops... yes, I was thinking of plantations in public or private forests, but also those inside buildings. Surely, a lot of them are booby-trapped, and one could stumble upon one. Apparently, people doing forestry work occasionally do on occasion. Animal traps and the like (fish-hooks on line is a new one to me, but certainly a nasty idea) are set up to keep people from nosing around.
Monday: 26 March 2007 @ 10:45:53
bev - email - url
Now there’s redundancy for you... “Apparently, people doing forestry work occasionally do on occasion.”
Perhaps I should proofread what I write! (-:
Monday: 26 March 2007 @ 10:48:18
David - email
I think the bulk of public mobile phone usage is caught somewhere between addiction and ‘performance art’. The addiction part sort of explains itself, but the ‘performance art’ piece is less recognized. I mean, there you are, your own little soap opera, performing for the on-lookers, or rather the on-listeners. Especially common among the mobile telephone performance artists are ‘The Borg’, those individuals with the Bluetooth wireless headsets semi-permanently installed in their ears. I’m just embarrassed when I see them, but then I’m embarrassed when I see people with their baseball caps on backwards, so I stay in an embarrassed state pretty much on an ongoing basis.
(See Wayne? I’m about eighty percent on YOUR side... )
Monday: 26 March 2007 @ 11:21:36
FC - email - url
Are the pot growers still doing the fish hook at eyelevel thing? We dealt with that at FLETC back in 1984.
I still think about our course on terrorism in '84 when it was all something the furreners did to each other and we thought it was such a waste of course time for we the wildlife law enforcers.
The instructor caught that attitude and warned us that it was coming home and we’d better be ready for it.
It did.
We weren’t.
Monday: 26 March 2007 @ 11:22:03
Wayne - email - url
Robin - this particular training made the associated, unexpected things much clearer to me. I mean, they were actually talking about firefighters at an abortion clinic bombing being shot at from surrounding buildings. I don’t think our PPE handles that!
As David mentions below, much of what I see in cell phone use (or backwards baseball cap wearing) is simply embarrassing. Emergencies, fine. But come to a dinner I’m giving, or some other gathering and spend 10% of your time in idle conversation on a cell phone with someone else, forget it. You’ll never be invited again.
Monday: 26 March 2007 @ 11:59:20
Wayne - email - url
Bev - I’m not sure what I’d use a PDA for that wouldn’t fit in a notebook or clipboard - I suppose realtime uploaded observations are a possiblity. I’m all for interesting gadgets of course, and now you’ve got me thinking about whether this is a good idea! Having GPS coords automatically attach to an observation would be valuable.
Monday: 26 March 2007 @ 12:07:26
Wayne - email - url
David - don’t mistake my annoyance with tilting at windmills! I don’t have any problem with cell phones as emergency tools, nor with backward baseball caps as possible deterrants from wayward meteorites. Indeed Glenn has a cell phone, which is never turned on, and I’ve dealt with the sneering from my sister and others that somehow that means I have one, or that Glenn’s once-every-two-month usage somehow accords with their dozen times a day usage. Recall that Glenn has MS, and that we really don’t want him stuck on the road if his 15-year-old truck has trouble. And I actually *touched* his cell phone this weekend. I wanted to know what time it was (wall clocks in public places were never frequent, and seem to have gone the way of public telephone booths. I lost my watch 18 years ago and never replaced it).
By the way, I have a few students who have those bluetooth ear-wrapping phones. I told one a couple of weeks ago how stupid she looked with it. I immediately caught myself, thinking, can I soften this? And then I thought, no, I can’t. You really do look stupid with it. Extremely stupid.
Monday: 26 March 2007 @ 12:15:01
Wayne - email - url
FC - apparently so. How did FLETC deal with that? I wasn’t unfamiliar with the fishhook booby trap, but hadn’t connected it as a hazard in an otherwise unrelated event.
I don’t know if us VFD people have to worry so much about secondary devices, or parking at least 300 feet away from a potential terrorist scene. I kind of think not, since our arrival is fairly unpredictable, and there usually aren’t santuaries for snipers, but city FDs certainly need to suspect that.
Monday: 26 March 2007 @ 12:24:37
David - email
Then, I take it, you would approve of my fantasy handbill which would read: “A baseball catcher wears his cap on backwards for a reason, you on the other hand just look like a moron.” The ‘Borg’ earpiece, pathetically ‘look-at-me’ as it is does not hold a candle to the backward baseball cap. Years and years ago, before the cap blight became irreversible (pardon the usage) someone wrote a piece called “Crimes of Fashion” in which the 180˚ cap fell under the “without possibility of parole” heading. And people are starving in Africa, I know, I know…
Monday: 26 March 2007 @ 12:41:14
LauraH - email - url
Cell phone use as performance art - Love it!
Monday: 26 March 2007 @ 22:09:07