Some incidents are just worse than others.

When a high-speed train leaves the rails or a tornado rips the roof off the school gym, first responders face the confusion of a complicated incident scene. How many dead? Who is alive? Which of the living needs our help first?

Incidents like these require a different sort of response.

Sometimes a picture is worth much more than a thousand words. Especially when those words are taking up valuable radio bandwidth.

It continues to be VERY busy at work these days. I responded to 7 legitimate working fires for the month of May. And three of those have been two alarm fires. It’s been a really crazy run!

Two things happened last week in my life as a Fire Captain that simply could not have happened a generation ago.

Here’s a funny fact about entrepreneurs: The most common reason people start businesses is to avoid working for others. 

It’s easy to be provincial when you live on the West Coast. All of our sun, the mountains, the ocean… Indianapolis may not be a likely destination for the typical world traveler. In fact, Indy is one of the hippest cities we visit: great food, INSANE jazz, fun clubs and great drinks. Indy pride spills over as hipster kids and upwardly mobile millenials command the city, or at least the Mass Ave portion of the city. The best part? Wait for it…

For sports fans, myself included, Spring is a wonderful time of year. Of course there’s March Madness and tons of college sports championships, and the NHL, and NBA playoff picture is shaping up.

Guest post by Eric Tomlinson. Eric is a Deputy Chief with the Kent Regional Fire Authority in Washington State

Much has been said about the brotherhood of the American Fire Service. Put firefighters from neighboring departments together at a conference, watering hole, or other neutral ground and we will buy each other beverages and compare our Maltese tattoos until the wee hours, celebrating our brotherhood of public service. For some reason though, when we broach the subject of change to our practices or operations with our mutual aid neighbors, we suddenly become very tribal and defensive. After all, most of us were hired by a Fire Chief who told us that

I grew up as a child of the 70s.  No, I was not wearing bell bottoms or syncing my dance moves to John Travolta (I did that when disco got cool again in the 90s).  By the time I had been born in 1971, humans had stepped onto another celestial body a few times over.  We had NASA fever in our household and Walter Cronkite narrated the saga; his voice hanging in the ether on hot summer nights.  As a kid, I gazed at the stars and the moon with a keen sense of wonder.  Madly leafing through NASA picture books, I dreamed of the future.