Comments | tollers: Spare time? Whazzat??

tollers

Spare time? Whazzat??

May 01, 2011 23:27

So... because I needed another project like I need a hole in my head, I seem to have joined the local volunteer fire department.

Seriously!

Not as a firefighter... I'm so not in shape enough to do that! But as of this afternoon, I'm the photographer/web/PR-person for the Frankton Volunteer Fire Department. Nifty, eh ( Read more... )

fvfd, volunteerism, busy, life

Comments 9

be prepared! infobits May 2 2011, 04:00:10 UTC

Since you'll be on site when things could go crazy, I encourage you to update or take some first aid & CPR courses (human & animal!), 'cause you too can get drafted (or may wind up jumping in and volunteering, especially if its animals) in an emergency.

You may want to learn how to operate the radios, in case you get asked to run communications on site during a big incident.

Have you taken any of the free FEMA courses? Here's the link to your tax dollars at work for you!
http://training.fema.gov/IS/

And good for you, too!

Re: be prepared! tollers May 2 2011, 05:04:17 UTC

Oh, cool! I hadn't seen the FEMA courses... I'll definitely dig through those. Some look both interesting and relevant.

Good point about taking a critter CPR class... I've been wanting to do that anyway, and this gives me a good excuse. I've already made sure that I've got extra slip-leads and a crate in the truck, in case I wind up at an accident scene where loose dogs need to be corralled/contained.

Re: be prepared! msminlr May 2 2011, 10:20:17 UTC

I took several of FEMA's ICS courses in the process of my Civil Air Patrol training. There are two that are all-online, but the ICS-400 course has to be taken in-person. You can check with your State Department of Emergency Management to find out the schedule-of-sessions and find one you can get-to.

The session Morris and I went to was OVERWHELMINGLY small-town fire department people. There were also one other CAP couple, an ambulance crew from a local hospital, and the mayor and his wife from a further-away small town who wanted to see what was involved before they scheduled sessions for THEIR community's first-responders.

The biggest function of the Incident Command System courses is to familiarize people with the way the system works, so volunteer responders can be intelligently plugged-into slots that may not need specific technical training, just intelligence and willingness.

Re: be prepared! tollers May 10 2011, 04:21:46 UTC

I took your advice and started taking some of the FEMA courses, which made it a lovely surprise for the Asst. Chief when he emailed to say that I should take ICS 100, 200, 700 & 800 and I promptly responded by sending him the certificates from 100 and 700. (Oddly, 700 is a pre-req for 200, which just seems wrong.)

I finished 200 tonight. So I've got three of the four out of the way. :-) He didn't say anything about needing 400... I'll ask him about it when we have our training exercise on Wednesday.

Thread 7

catalana May 2 2011, 05:14:16 UTC

That is awesome of you!

tollers May 10 2011, 04:25:42 UTC

It's really pretty cool... I get to see how a volunteer fire department actually works (it's different when there aren't people actually _at_ the station 24/7) and I've already met more people in the last two weeks than I'd met in the previous almost-three years of living in tiny little Frankton!