It’s been said in many fire education classes that the first few minutes of the fire determines the outcome or the severity of the incident. We have also told our new recruits that the first few minutes at work determines how their day will proceed. The importance of getting dressed, getting your gear on the …
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At the end of last week, the City of Tulsa had initiated a hiring freeze. Tulsa has lost $1.8 million in revenues over the last two months. Seattle where the pandemic hit hard is projecting more than $110 million in lost revenue, and that isn’t counting the losses from stay at home orders. Prior to …
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Social distancing has put a real challenge in front of battalion fire commanders as well as the rest of society. Unlike many private sector businesses, the fire service has more of a tradition of interacting with commanders on a regular basis. The distancing has challenged this tradition. With this change comes a need to change …
In November of 2019, two central Indiana fire departments initiated mandatory training for their personnel regarding Dementia. EMS has been discussing the large numbers of baby boomers who are aging and in need of more medical care for the last few years. Those increased calls for assistance have materialized to impact public safety and are …
Go shopping or browsing for IT devices and you will find a great deal of them tout the ability of their product to allow the user to multi-task. Their suggestion is that multi-tasking is a normal function of the human being and their product will help you do it better. This buzz-word has been around …
Fireground commanders never know when a mayday will occur at an emergency scene. The statistics tell us that it will be at the beginning of an incident, it will involve ride-out or overtime officers, combined with younger inexperienced firefighters or entire crews that don’t work together all that much. The focus quickly becomes the rescue …
A couple of years ago, I started getting the daily paper delivered to my house. I stopped getting it before because the delivery person always threw it under the shrubs and I was tired of digging it out every day. It was a service issue, not a publication or content problem. So here I am …
A few years ago, the term situational awareness wasn’t used or even recognized by the fire service. Today, you can ask just about every firefighter what it means, and they will be familiar with the term and the concept. The ability to determine one’s own safety and look ahead at protecting yourself is invaluable and …
The Third Bugle is a blog and webpage dedicated to firefighters in battalion chief and company officer positions. There are a significant number of classes and books dedicated to these positions, but experience and sharing experiences can be very useful even to the most experienced firefighter. A shift with out a lesson learned is a …
The Third Bugle