“What are you going to do at 3:00 in the morning when you get that call with people hanging out of windows with an active fire?”   We’ve all heard or said that in regards to our training and preparation at some point in our career. It’s safe to say that it can be […]

First, let me say that this post has nothing to do with the debate about interior versus exterior, so if you’re trolling for something like that, just move along. No, this is one post in a string of future posts that will address some situations I’ve recently seen regarding aggressiveness and the lack of on […]

As a young firefighter at my first career job, I had a captain that made us take a can on just about every type of alarm.  Fire alarm–take the can.  Odor of smoke–take the can.  The list goes on and it became a habit for us to grab the can.  During my time there (it’s […]

Bailout is a last option for us when things go bad. We can do all of the right things and still find ourselves in trouble. It doesn’t and won’t happen often when we train and operate in standard manners, but we have to be prepared. This podcast discusses some basic concepts that we at Engine […]

With all of the debate about exterior versus interior, I wanted to share a video that I use in many of the tactical classes that I teach and offer a few observations.  First, this is a video that is used for learning, not to critique the methods or tactics that were or were not deployed […]

By: Captain Steve Heidbreder As many of you may have done over the Father’s Day weekend, I spent some time thinking about the day and what it means to me as a father. I reflected on my own Father, my Step-Dad, my Grandfathers, and those that were a father figure in my life. I then looked at myself […]

I recently have had a lot of suggestions and requests to post on some volunteer, rural, combination issues that the fire service faces. I started and am still a member of a mostly rural volunteer, now combination, department. My earliest exposure to the fire service was at this mostly rural department.  We had a large […]