Tuesday: 10 November 2009
Ida may no longer exist as a hurricane but it’s been making its effects known here since yesterday morning, Monday. Up until that point the weather sites showed bright happy smiley sunny faces. That was wiped away suddenly by gloomy cloud faces featuring 100% chance of rain into tomorrow, and that rain began a few hours ago. Predictions are 3-5-8"!
And here it was that I had just recently noted how we haven’t had any tropical storms this season! In fact, we’ve had very little rain from tropical storms over the last few years, and that’s a significant component to our rainfall over the course of a year. This will be the first real contribution since probably 2005.
What better time than now, then, to get back to the inventory, which after all invokes the idea of water. I’ve just about gotten all the tabulations done now, and have been back to the station several times to gather more data. The rate limiting step has been getting information back from the firefighters on their turnout gear serial numbers. Just two items mainly - turnout jacket and pants, since they total over a thousand dollars just in themselves. A fully dressed out firefighter complete with SCBA pack and air tank, with radio and pager, will be wearing about six thousand dollars of equipment (more than half of it is in the SCBA).
That’s one of the benefits of doing an inventory - finding out just how frigging expensive just about all these items are. Paging through a firefighting supplier catalog is instructive - we get them regularly and folks take them home for bathroom reading material.
So let’s use the turnout coat and pants - that’s all - as a basic unit of cost: your basic PPE unit, and take a look at a few items that do, after all, occur in nature.
Each of the two items below, for instance, can run you a basic PPE unit. Yet we couldn’t do without several of the first, and wouldn’t want to do without the second one. In fact, we’d *love* to have a second one of the second one for the pumper, and for the second year in a row I’m going to be suggesting we get it.
On the left is a wye. A 3" hose goes into it at top and two 1.5" hoses exit at the bottom. You can pretty easily handle a 1.5" hose at full pressure so we use those as attack lines. But 3" lines will launch you into space - it takes a really big person to handle one of those.
Long lengths of 1.5" hose exert a large friction loss in pressure, so it’s nice to be able to use 3" hose, where friction losses are much lessened, to get you where you want to be, and then split it into two 1.5" lines once you’ve gotten there! That little contraption lets you do it.
On the right you’ve got a hydrant valve. How many of you have opened up a water hydrant? They don’t open easily, and it’s pretty exhausting having to open and close them repeatedly with a hydrant wrench, round and round and round until finally the stream starts. That’s what you’d have to do if you were repeatedly filling up a line of trucks, something that occasionally happens.
With the hydrant valve, you just open up the hydrant once after clearing it (they all run muddy at first). Then you use the valve thereafter. Some have split outputs so you can do two or more things at once, but we don’t have one of those.
(As it turns out, none of our responsibile area has piped water accessible via hydrant, at least not close to houses. We do have access to a couple of hydrants that are several miles away, and use those to fill the trucks, but not to directly put water on a fire.)
Below are two pieces of equipment that go paired: hose and nozzle. The former will run you a tenth of PPE per 50 feet, and we usually carry 500 feet just behind the truck cabs. That’s the 1.5" hose - the 3" hose doubles the cost per 50 feet length. We carry close to 1200 feet of that on the top bed of the pumper. This stuff is supposed to be tested at 400 psi every year, although we never run it at more than 150 psi.
The nozzles can set you back a full PPE unit. They’re lovely devices, and you need a 1.5" and 3" nozzle for each hose size. We carry several of these on each truck, mostly 1.5". You can dial the gallons per minute, and change the spread of the stream from full stream to fog. It’s very nice to stand behind the fog stream on a hot summer day!
And, by the way, you can empty a 1000-gallon pumper in a minute or two with a 3" hose running at 150 psi! Or, you can fill it from a hydrant running at about the same pressure.
And finally, below, two examples of a vast variety of couplings and adapters:
We have quite a few of these things - couplings and adapters of all shapes and sizes. When you’re working with other fire departments, you never know when you’re going to have to do the unexpected, such as fit the male end of a hose onto a truck’s male output port (the sin that dare not speak its name, but sometimes you do what you gotta do). For something like that you’d need a female to female adapter. Or you might want to put a 1.5" hose onto a 3" truck output. Then you need something like the one on the left, female to fit onto the truck’s male part, and then a reduction to the 1.5" male fitting.
Couplings are usually threaded, but there are a variety of exit ports that use “Storz connections.” These are mostly large diameter, 5" or 6," and meant to be used with flexible or stiff hose of the same size. They’re very fast couplings - just twist to lock in place - but since small diameter hoses use threaded coupling, you need a Storz to threaded reducing adapter like the one on the right. The Storz part, probably 6," is facing us, and the threaded adapter to which the hose will go is in back.
(Actually, looking at it, that’s a pretty big diameter threaded female in the back. To be used to connect a 1.5" hose, you’d need another reducing adapter down to 1.5," and then at some point a female to male adapter. By convention hoses are always female at the truck, and male at the nozzle end. Nozzles, then, are always female
.)
Couplings and adapters on the left are relatively cheap, running a tenth of a PPE unit. Storz adapters are considerably more expensive - say a quarter to a half a PPE unit.
These are just the tips of the iceberg of what we’re having to inventory, but they’re also items we use all the time. We’ve been fortunate, since our earlier primitive set of equipment was vastly augmented by the purchase four or five years ago from a couple of FEMA grants that our then chief Phyllis wrote and was awarded. That means there’s a good paper record, since she and our treasurer have been meticulous in keeping records. The individual records are still rather scattered though, and most not on a spreadsheet, but in folders on paper. Getting it all together is what I’m doing, basically. That’s what happens when most of the department isn’t familiar with using excel, or perhaps for some, even a computer.
And here it was that I had just recently noted how we haven’t had any tropical storms this season! In fact, we’ve had very little rain from tropical storms over the last few years, and that’s a significant component to our rainfall over the course of a year. This will be the first real contribution since probably 2005.
What better time than now, then, to get back to the inventory, which after all invokes the idea of water. I’ve just about gotten all the tabulations done now, and have been back to the station several times to gather more data. The rate limiting step has been getting information back from the firefighters on their turnout gear serial numbers. Just two items mainly - turnout jacket and pants, since they total over a thousand dollars just in themselves. A fully dressed out firefighter complete with SCBA pack and air tank, with radio and pager, will be wearing about six thousand dollars of equipment (more than half of it is in the SCBA).
That’s one of the benefits of doing an inventory - finding out just how frigging expensive just about all these items are. Paging through a firefighting supplier catalog is instructive - we get them regularly and folks take them home for bathroom reading material.
So let’s use the turnout coat and pants - that’s all - as a basic unit of cost: your basic PPE unit, and take a look at a few items that do, after all, occur in nature.
Each of the two items below, for instance, can run you a basic PPE unit. Yet we couldn’t do without several of the first, and wouldn’t want to do without the second one. In fact, we’d *love* to have a second one of the second one for the pumper, and for the second year in a row I’m going to be suggesting we get it.
On the left is a wye. A 3" hose goes into it at top and two 1.5" hoses exit at the bottom. You can pretty easily handle a 1.5" hose at full pressure so we use those as attack lines. But 3" lines will launch you into space - it takes a really big person to handle one of those.
Long lengths of 1.5" hose exert a large friction loss in pressure, so it’s nice to be able to use 3" hose, where friction losses are much lessened, to get you where you want to be, and then split it into two 1.5" lines once you’ve gotten there! That little contraption lets you do it.
On the right you’ve got a hydrant valve. How many of you have opened up a water hydrant? They don’t open easily, and it’s pretty exhausting having to open and close them repeatedly with a hydrant wrench, round and round and round until finally the stream starts. That’s what you’d have to do if you were repeatedly filling up a line of trucks, something that occasionally happens.
With the hydrant valve, you just open up the hydrant once after clearing it (they all run muddy at first). Then you use the valve thereafter. Some have split outputs so you can do two or more things at once, but we don’t have one of those.
(As it turns out, none of our responsibile area has piped water accessible via hydrant, at least not close to houses. We do have access to a couple of hydrants that are several miles away, and use those to fill the trucks, but not to directly put water on a fire.)
Below are two pieces of equipment that go paired: hose and nozzle. The former will run you a tenth of PPE per 50 feet, and we usually carry 500 feet just behind the truck cabs. That’s the 1.5" hose - the 3" hose doubles the cost per 50 feet length. We carry close to 1200 feet of that on the top bed of the pumper. This stuff is supposed to be tested at 400 psi every year, although we never run it at more than 150 psi.
The nozzles can set you back a full PPE unit. They’re lovely devices, and you need a 1.5" and 3" nozzle for each hose size. We carry several of these on each truck, mostly 1.5". You can dial the gallons per minute, and change the spread of the stream from full stream to fog. It’s very nice to stand behind the fog stream on a hot summer day!
And, by the way, you can empty a 1000-gallon pumper in a minute or two with a 3" hose running at 150 psi! Or, you can fill it from a hydrant running at about the same pressure.
And finally, below, two examples of a vast variety of couplings and adapters:
We have quite a few of these things - couplings and adapters of all shapes and sizes. When you’re working with other fire departments, you never know when you’re going to have to do the unexpected, such as fit the male end of a hose onto a truck’s male output port (the sin that dare not speak its name, but sometimes you do what you gotta do). For something like that you’d need a female to female adapter. Or you might want to put a 1.5" hose onto a 3" truck output. Then you need something like the one on the left, female to fit onto the truck’s male part, and then a reduction to the 1.5" male fitting.
Couplings are usually threaded, but there are a variety of exit ports that use “Storz connections.” These are mostly large diameter, 5" or 6," and meant to be used with flexible or stiff hose of the same size. They’re very fast couplings - just twist to lock in place - but since small diameter hoses use threaded coupling, you need a Storz to threaded reducing adapter like the one on the right. The Storz part, probably 6," is facing us, and the threaded adapter to which the hose will go is in back.
(Actually, looking at it, that’s a pretty big diameter threaded female in the back. To be used to connect a 1.5" hose, you’d need another reducing adapter down to 1.5," and then at some point a female to male adapter. By convention hoses are always female at the truck, and male at the nozzle end. Nozzles, then, are always female
.)Couplings and adapters on the left are relatively cheap, running a tenth of a PPE unit. Storz adapters are considerably more expensive - say a quarter to a half a PPE unit.
These are just the tips of the iceberg of what we’re having to inventory, but they’re also items we use all the time. We’ve been fortunate, since our earlier primitive set of equipment was vastly augmented by the purchase four or five years ago from a couple of FEMA grants that our then chief Phyllis wrote and was awarded. That means there’s a good paper record, since she and our treasurer have been meticulous in keeping records. The individual records are still rather scattered though, and most not on a spreadsheet, but in folders on paper. Getting it all together is what I’m doing, basically. That’s what happens when most of the department isn’t familiar with using excel, or perhaps for some, even a computer.
