Firefighter Math
firefightermath.org
firefightermath.org
[0] https://www.facebook.com/Arizona-State-Fire-School-Arizona-S...
My firefighter superpower is 'vehicle extrication'. When people wreck their cars, firefighters' job is to stabilize the car and extract the people inside as quickly as possible. I don't know why the president of our volunteer fire department decided 3 of us needed to learn about Vehicle Extrication - we don't have a lot of traffic on the county road, nor much in the way of equipment to extricate people from their rolled cars...
At the state fire school's opening ceremony I realized the difference between firefighters and police officers: if the fire department is dispatched in response to your call, they will try to help you. If the police are dispatched in response to your call, part of their job is deciding whether there is an excuse to arrest you.
One of my passengers was mistakenly arrested. Those police officers put her in a bad situation, and it was my honor to help extricate her from the area around the county jail. She wasn't planning to get arrested that night, probably didn't have any of her friends' phone numbers committed to memory [1], and was hoping her friend would have money to pay me when we got to his house.
The diary about my insights about firefighting vs policing is "Ordinary Rendition: The Public Servants' Quagmire" - http://www.taxiwars.org/2017/10/ordinary-rendition-public-se...
This section is about my experience at fire school:
> The Public Servants' Quagmire
> [...] Police officers have a bit of a predicament: their official motto is to "protect and serve", but the politicians have given them no flexibility to fulfill their role.
> After I retired from taxi driving, I spent a couple days at fire school. During the opening ceremony I realized the difference between firefighters and police officers/sheriff's deputies.
> If the fire department is dispatched, they will do whatever they can to try to help you. Fire trucks are outfitted with all sorts of equipment that might be needed to save someone's day. These include not just fire hoses and other firefighting equipment, but also tools to cut up cars to extract people when the doors won't open, etc. Equipment on this Mesa special operations firetruck was once used to lift the light-rail train off of a drunk who'd passed out on the tracks: [Photo: Mesa Fire Department's Rapid Response/Special Operations Firetruck]
> No judgement calls are made by firefighters when responding to the incident at hand. In a future post I intend to tell of the time that I had to call on the city's firefighters to save the day. After the firefighters had disappeared into the night, the also-dispatched police officers decided they didn't need to make the situation worse, and also disappeared into the night.
> Discretion is the police officer's most important skill. But police are frequently pressured (performance evaluations, etc) to take actions that really just needlessly wreck people's lives.
> Another passenger told of the time she was being unruly, and how her family called the police for help dealing with her. After a while those police officers decided they didn't have any way to help, so "we're going to have to take you downtown." Her adult daughter protested, "THIS IS NOT WHY WE CALLED YOU", but the police officers were like, "whatevers". Arresting people is their job, even if that person really only needs a time-out from their situation.
[1] My earlier post about the importance of memorizing some phone numbers, Who Are Your Lifelines?: http://www.TaxiWars.org/who-are-your-lifelines/
(minor edits)
Where I live in California there has been only one house fire in our town in years, but the fire department is on the highway responding to an accident at least once a week.
> It would seem that assisting at auto accident scenes now constitute 95% of actual calls firefighters make
A Mesa firefighter told me how they have "busy" stations, and stations for firefighters who are close to retirement. A common cause of fires around one busy station was electrical shorts from 1950's bathroom ventilation fans.
Chandler and Phoenix have an agreement to share responding to calls on their section of I-10 (part of the border between the cities): https://www.google.com/maps/search/fire+stations+near+i-10+a...
As an anectdote, my district has around 10 miles of interstate and 20 miles of major highways. Our call volume is, in order of prevalence,: 1. Fire Alarm (Only 2 have ever been actual 'fires') 2. Medical Assistance (We are EMR, not EMS) 3. Grass fires / Trash fires 4. Accidents 5. Building fires 6. Something else
Our neighboring district has a ton of farms and little to no major roads. They may receive a total of 20 calls per year compared with over 300 in our station. (Both low volumes but the type of response is reflected.)
Maybe because when you need it, you need it instantly, so he wanted to always have somebody with that knowledge on the current turn?
The most interesting thing for me was learning about the profession from the inside. I might've liked to have learned about driving fire trucks - maybe I'll go again.
/me stands and applauds
The more I think about it, the more I like the model that Michael Wood Jr. has been promoting, "Civilian Led Policing"[1], which attempts to directly fix this impedance mismatch between police goals and community goals.
Instead of police being directed an appointed or elected "chief" (that is necessarily entrenched in the usual political brouhaha), the police should be directed by more like a board of directors, with the members selected[2] from the community where the police have jurisdiction. Each local community should be directing how they want to be policed.
(It's not quite that simple - I'm simplifying to keep this short. See [1] for a more complete description)
[1] http://civilianledpolicing.org/#info
[2] Perhaps by something involving a jury-duty style lottery? It needs to be an equitable sample of the community.
Your link has some good ideas. Maybe civilian-led policing would get la policia to stop arresting anyone for anything. How does this address how the criminal justice system has standardized on harmful practices? "war on drugs", punishment for everything, fines for people who can't afford them, etc. Police have a very difficult job thanks to mistakes made by politicians.
One of the passengers mentioned here, the one whose family called the police for help... After that episode her doctor helped her become an alcoholic (Xanax); she ended up spending 2 years in prison for her 3rd DUI. She got a case of PTSD, and wasn't able to stay sober for long after her release. She's doing better now, no thanks to the system.
America's Make-Work Sheriff: The Anachronism of Joseph Arpaio is about how people are frequently harmed by their interactions with 'justice': http://www.taxiwars.org/2017/09/americas-make-work-sheriff-a...
"A 100-foot length of 1-inch diameter hose is charged with water. How many gallons of water are in that length of hose?"
Ugh.
"How many pints are in a 5-gallon pail? How many cups are in a 5-gallon pail?"
A department can't decide to use metric alone. The entire industry first would need to support at the minimum both standards.
In recent years, the total number of fire deaths is 3000 to 4000 per year:
https://www.usfa.fema.gov/data/statistics/fire_death_rates.h...
Many of those deaths will have happened regardless of the response.
In some sense, across 300 million people, even 3000 is close enough to zero (there's more than 2.5 million total deaths each year in the US). That doesn't mean that improving fire response isn't important, but it might not be a very good place to look for incremental improvements in mortality.
A much bigger issue is the lack of recruitment and volunteerism in the American fire service. People simultaneously don't want to increase property taxes to fund career departments and they also don't want to volunteer. Communities can't have it both ways. Lack of staffing is a far greater risk than whether I'm dividing by 10 or 12.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qkvzb5/the-time-n...
The original problem requires plenty of conversions (to cubic inches) and memorization of infrequently used constants (how many cubic inches in a gallon?).
If imperial isn’t your thing, doing it in metric is easier, at least it was for me.
That problem is still no fun to do in your head. If it's important to do frequently, it's not hard to memorize the constant for "1 ft of 1 in-diameter hose = X gallons" and then multiply as appropriate.
5" supply hose holds about a gallon per foot of water when charged, and water weighs just a little more than 8 lbs per gallon, so a charged 100' section of 5" supply hose weighs over 800 lbs. So make sure you have the hose where you want it before charging it, because it's damn hard to move afterwards and the like.
In terms of doing math on the fireground, at least in a structural fire scenario (wildland firefighting has some other concerns) the single biggest one is usually flow-rate. That is, a crew has stretched a 200' pre-connected 2" attack line, and wants to go in flowing 200 gpm to attack the fire. As the engineer, what pressure do you configure on that discharge to give them their 200 gpm? Here's the kicker though... almost nobody sits there thinking "Well, the friction loss per foot of 2" hose at 200 gpm is x, multiply x by 200, assume a desired pressure of 100 psi at the nozzle, blah, blah, blah.". No, instead somebody precomputed the common configurations, wrote them on an index card, laminated it, and taped it to the pump panel. Plus the engineer probably has the really common ones memorized anyway, and/or has figured out a heuristic that's "good enough".