Outside, thunder shook the atmosphere, accompanied by a downpour of rain, but inside the training building of the Sarasota County Technical Institute Fire Academy, it was a completely different environment. And it was heating up.

“Alpha Team standing by,” called a voice over the radio.  

When the training leader gave the team the green light, Alpha Team breached the bare living room scene in the training facility. Firefighters-in-training flooded the room in teams much larger than the pairs they would be in during a real-life scenario. 

The couch was on fire. 

One of the trainees took control of the hose and extinguished the fire before Alpha Team advanced to the kitchen fire. 

With the touch of a button a control room, flames engulfed the ceiling of the training simulation kitchen. The trainees crouched down and looked up at the orange sea of fire. It was a simulated rollover — when a fire reaches a ceiling and then spreads horizontally. 

In a rollover, the team needs to deploy a technique called “penciling,” where short bursts of water are applied to the ceiling to cool gases and prevent a larger ignition that would take over the entire room.

Though a majority of the team had little real-life experience, they made it through the drill in only a couple of minutes, despite a few technical difficulties in the control room. 

In the simulation, temperatures reached as high as 300 to 400 degrees Fahrenheit, but that’s nowhere near what temperatures can reach in the real world, according to Josh Hirschy. Hirschy was the operator in the control room and is a firefighter with Charlotte County. 

About 3 feet off the ground in a real fire, the temperature can reach 500 degrees, but the temperature goes well past 1,000 degrees near the ceiling, according to Longboat Key Training Captain John Elwood.

Because of a concept called thermal layering, the hottest area is closest to the ceiling. Prior to entering the drill, every person on both Alpha and Bravo teams had to enter the room while the stove in the kitchen was on fire. Every trainee took off one of their gloves and reached toward the ceiling to feel the heat stratification. 

During the simulated building fire, Longboat Key Fire Rescue recruit Daniel Rosetta was one of the Alpha team members. His new coworker and fellow new recruit, Derek Flaim, was outside on Bravo Team, waiting for his turn in the drill. 

Crawl, walk, jog

The first training exercise Longboat Key’s new fire rescue recruits went through on Aug. 18 was practicing how to maneuver through tight spaces with obstacles. 

This exercise was contained in a wooden structure, which had three lanes on the inside. The trainees would enter the one end with their back to the wall, using either a “swim” or a “dive” technique to breach the wall.

Once past the opening braced by two-by-fours, they needed to crawl through one of the lanes, each with its own obstacles. One of the lanes had makeshift wires to simulate gear getting caught on objects. Another lane had a surprise drop where the bottom fell through. 

Elwood guided the new recruits along in the process. The first exercise of the day’s training was a microcosm of the entire training process. 

“When they go through school, you learn how to crawl, then you learn how to walk and then you kind of work up to a jog,” Elwood said. 

First, the trainees need to get accustomed to breathing with the self-contained breathing apparatus out in the open. Both Rosetta and Flaim already learned this part at the start of their training process. 

The first trial of the confined space exercise was performed with just their gear on, without the breathing apparatus. Fire gear alone takes away some of their senses, Elwood said. For example, the thick gloves take away some dexterity, making it difficult to move their fingers. 

Then, after a couple repetitions of the first step, Rosetta and Flaim put on the breathing apparatus and practiced with that.

The two were then ready to move on to the final trial. For this, Elwood attached a blackout face shield to Rosetta and Flaim’s masks. 

“We start layering it with complexity,” Elwood said. 

The face shield simulates what firefighters would be able to see while in an active fire. With the face shields on, they can barely see their hands in front of them. 

Elwood said it’s hoped that the trainees will never find themselves in these tricky situations, but he said repetition is key in training. If they ever find themselves in this situation, hopefully some sort of instinct will kick in. 

“The other thing you’re trying to control is your natural instinct of fight or flight,” Elwood said. “Your body is telling you when everything in this building is getting out and you’re going in, it’s an unnatural act.”

Continuous training 

Training for a Longboat Key firefighter paramedic is not contained to one day. 

New recruits start with an 80-hour orientation, according to Fire Chief Paul Dezzi. During orientation, they learn about the town, the department and get familiar with the equipment. New recruits also go through driver training and safety functional training, like at Sarasota County Technical Institute Fire Academy.

After the orientation hours, the trainees get placed on a shift and are assigned a preceptor. The preceptor is an experienced paramedic that acts as a field trainer for anywhere from 12 to 16 weeks. During this timeframe, the newbies learn about protocols for talking to a patient and best treatment practices.

Once both the preceptor and trainee feel confident, the department’s medical director is notified and gives a test composed of multiple scenarios. If the trainee passes the test, then they become a paramedic-in-charge.

Next comes the more rigid, on-the-job fire training. This process lasts for about two and a half years, during which the trainee is tested about every month on certain modules. After this is completed,  the trainee graduates to become a fully trained firefighter paramedic for the town of Longboat Key — almost. 

Though the formal training process is complete after that, every member of the department goes through routine training. This allows the department to stay up to date and always be learning new skills. 

“When we get a call, the citizens are getting a high level of service,” Dezzi said. 

Firefighters extinguished a kitchen fire at a house in Nashua on Saturday morning.Nashua Fire-Rescue said around 10:45 a.m., the dispatch center got several calls reporting a fire at 38 Brook St. Firefighters found an active stove fire in the kitchen of the house. The fire was quickly extinguished with little damage to the house, fire officials said.First responders remained at the scene for about an hour and a half to remove smoke from the building and to investigate the cause of the fire.No one was injured, officials said.

Firefighters rescue kitten from storm drain

Updated: 7:14 PM EDT Aug 15, 2023

AND MARIA. ALL RIGHT, MIKE, THANK YOU FOR THAT. SO OUR PRODUCER, HER NAME IS JANELLE AND NOBODY LOVES CATS AND KITTENS MORE THAN HER UNIVERSE. SO WHAT SHE WROTE, YEAH, I AGREE WITH YES, IT IS EASILY GOING TO BE THE BEST THING THAT YOU’VE SEEN ALL DAY. I’LL LET YOU BE THE JUDGE. GO AHEAD. TAKE A LOOK AT WHAT WHAT DO YOU THINK? WHAT? YES. THAT’S THE CUTEST KITTEN EVER, RIGHT? YEAH. WELL, THIS KITTEN WAS REUNITED WITH THE FIREFIGHTERS THAT RESCUED HIM IN RAYNHAM. ANIMAL CONTROL SAYS AROUND MIDNIGHT ON SUNDAY, SOMEONE WALKING A DOG SAW THE KITTEN RUNNING DOWN. PRINCESS LANE TRIED TO CATCH HIM, BUT HE WENT DOWN INTO A STORM DRAIN. SO POLICE, FIREFIGHTERS, ANIMAL CONTROL, THEY ALL TRIED TO GET HIM OUT, WOULDN’T BUDGE. THE NEXT MORNING, FIREFIGHTERS CAME BACK WITH A LADDER. THEY HEADED DOWN THE DRAIN. OH, WOW. WELL, HE WAS GOING TO GO DOWN. THAT SCARED HIM OUT OF GOING DOWN THERE. I WAS HEADED DOWN THERE AND SOMEBODY MENTIONED SOMETHING THAT THERE’S A POSSIBLY A SNAKE BEING DOWN THERE, TOO. AND HE HASN’T LIKE SNAKES. AND I’M NOT A FAN. SO I SAID, YEAH, YOU’RE UP, CRAWL DOWN SCARED HIM OUT OF THE FROM THAT GRANITE WITH ONE HAND AND GRABBED HIM BY THE OTHER AND JUST HANDED HIM UP BACK UP TO THE TOP. YEAH INDY I DON’T WANT SNAKES. YEAH. NO WAY. NO, NO. BUT THAT IS. THAT’S THAT KITTEN. LOOK AT THAT. LOOK AT THESE TWO. RIGHT THERE. THEY’RE HAVING FUN. THE KITTEN BY THE WAY, HAS A GREAT NAME. THE KITTEN’S NAME IS STORM. HE’S ESTIMATED TO BE ABOUT SIX WEEKS OLD. EXTREMELY FRIENDLY, AS YOU CAN SEE. MAKES RESCUERS BELIEVE THAT HE ISN’T FERAL, BUT HE HE MAY HAVE BEEN ABANDONED. ANIMAL CONTROL SAYS THERE IS ALREADY A LIST OF POTENTIAL ADOPTERS ALL LINED UP. YEAH, OBVIOUSLY, BEING AROUND PEOPLE. OUR PRODUCER JANELLE. YEAH

Firefighters rescue kitten from storm drain

Updated: 7:14 PM EDT Aug 15, 2023

Firefighters were reunited Tuesday with a tiny kitten they rescued from a storm drain this weekend. Raynham Animal Control said at around midnight on Sunday, someone walking a dog saw the kitten running down the street and tried to catch him, but he went down into a storm drain.Police, firefighters and animal control all tried to get him out, but he wouldn't budge.The next morning they came back, grabbed a ladder and headed down into the drain."Crawled down. Scared him out of the from that granite with one hand and grabbed him with the other, and just handed him up back up to the top," said Dominic Kuran, a firefighter and paramedic with Raynham Fire.The black and white tuxedo kitten, now named Storm, is estimated to be about six weeks old and is extremely friendly.Animal control said there's already a list of potential adopters lined up.

Firefighters were reunited Tuesday with a tiny kitten they rescued from a storm drain this weekend.

Raynham Animal Control said at around midnight on Sunday, someone walking a dog saw the kitten running down the street and tried to catch him, but he went down into a storm drain.

Police, firefighters and animal control all tried to get him out, but he wouldn't budge.

The next morning they came back, grabbed a ladder and headed down into the drain.

"Crawled down. Scared him out of the from that granite with one hand and grabbed him with the other, and just handed him up back up to the top," said Dominic Kuran, a firefighter and paramedic with Raynham Fire.

The black and white tuxedo kitten, now named Storm, is estimated to be about six weeks old and is extremely friendly.

Animal control said there's already a list of potential adopters lined up.

As the product manager for one of the first NFPA 1802-compliant portable radio systems, I spent several years with firefighters listening to their concerns and understanding their issues.

A short time ago, I was asked, “So what are you going to do now that you’re done making the radios and mics?”

I explained that having a device was just the start – the communication device is just the foundation on which to build an ecosystem.

Today’s communication equipment is capable of more than just transmitting and receiving voice. With digital waveforms like P25 over broadband and Mission-Critical Push-To-Talk, radios are now able to send large amounts of data in addition to voice communications.

Most of today’s radios have embedded GPS, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi – and a few also have LTE capability. That is quite a lot of power in the palm of your hands or, rather, in your communications pocket.

Revolutionizing On-Scene Communications

One of the issues that firefighters have is firefighter-to-firefighter, on-scene communications.

A couple of years ago, I had one of our audio engineers with me at a burn house training exercise, and as we watched the activity, we noticed two fighters grabbing each other by their turnout coats. The audio engineer wondered aloud, “What are they doing in there?”

I knew that they were talking.

Firefighter 1 would pull at the upper sleeve of firefighter 2; he then would position his ear up against Firefighter 2’s self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA) near the audio amplifier, so he could hear what Firefighter 2 was saying. Then they reversed that operation so that Firefighter 2 could hear what Firefighter 1’s response was.

When the exercise was over, the audio engineer asked them in disbelief if that was truly how they “talk” to each other during this critical event.

They said, “Yeah, man – we were talking.”

That event led to expanding the role of a radio to a personal public address system.

A simple and elegant solution to improving on-scene communications.

You see, like I mentioned earlier, most radios have Bluetooth capability, and today many SCBA masks also have a Bluetooth microphone embedded into the mask.

The Bluetooth mic within the mask transmits clear audio when the user presses the Push-to-Talk (PTT) on the Remote Speaker Microphone (RSM) attached to their turnout coat.

Rather than use the microphone within the RSM, the radio uses the in-mask microphone to pass audio over the Bluetooth link to the radio and, ultimately, over the air to dispatch and the team.

The audio engineer returned home wondering how he could use the technology that firefighters already had to Excellerate their on-scene team, non-radio communications. His answer was to replace the low-power audio emitted from the voice amp with something more powerful. This led to a personal Public Address (PA) system on each firefighter.

Using the same “personal PS system,” radios send all in-mask audio out over the RSM whenever the firefighter is talking. In other words, if the Interior Fire Attack Team press their PTT, the in-mask audio is heard loud and clear by the other nearby team members over the exposed RSM. Ingeniously, this PA function mutes to receive live traffic.

It is incredible what innovations come from listening and watching end users do their job day to day!

Consider the potential for creating additional “hands-free and operator-free” capabilities using the technology already contained in today’s communication devices?

The Power of Wi-Fi

Some radios already have the ability to stream Thermal Imaging Camera (TIC) data out to Incident Command (IC) or Safety Officers (SO) – or, really, anyone who needs this data.

Recently, TIC manufacturers started adding Wi-Fi capability to the TIC. When you connect your Wi-Fi to a radio equipped with LTE, the TIC data passes through the radio over a Public Safety LTE network out to any authorized device connected to the network.

Now, in addition to the verbal descriptions from the TIC operator in the building, IC or SO can see the image displayed on the TIC. This added Situational Awareness (SA) may increase the response to the incident by providing additional actionable data for the exterior team.

As a product manager, my goal is to create devices that not only address pain points users know they have but also address pain points they have but didn’t know.

It’s been my honor to have met with many Fire Chiefs at IAFC events over the past several years. The one thing that has stood out to me and really hit me hard was learning that sudden cardiac death is consistently the leading cause of on-duty deaths.

Solving Old Problems in New Ways

These cardiac deaths are mainly attributed to overexertion or physiological stress.

Firefighters rush into burning structures, rescuing families and property, while putting themselves in danger from extreme heat and enormous physical stress.

Two main stresses include raising core body temperature (heat stress) and elevated heart rate (tachycardia). For teams who follow the PEAK (Preparing, Equipping, Assigning and Knowing) fireground approach. The “Knowing,” includes how the team is doing physically within the hazard zone. And it’s that knowledge of capabilities and limitations of a responding department that lead to be best decision-making outcomes.

One common challenge that many agencies have tried to address is monitoring the core-body temperature of firefighters while they are in a hazardous zone, as well as their heart rate recovery during their rest period after leaving the zone (resus).

The fact of the matter is that many firefighters don’t realize when their core body temperature is too hot. Even though modern turnout coats do a great job of insulating firefighters from the external heat, heat does build up over time of exposure – they are basically slowly being cooked.

Hence the title of this blog is based on the boiling frog analogy. The familiar story describes how a frog will jump out when placed in boiling water. If the frog is placed in cold water that is slowly heated, it will not perceive the danger and will cook to death.

Some firefighters have shared that they know it is too hot when their ear lobes start burning. However, even when aware of this, if asked about taking a break to cool down, they all fervently answered, “No, I have a job to do.”

The same goes for heart rate; while in the hazard zone, most firefighters have no idea what their heart rate is. It is only during resus that they are asked to take their pulse to ensure that, whatever the egress heart rate was, it returns to resting rate within a certain time frame; otherwise, they are sent to get medical attention.

I now ask you to imagine a firefighter, equipped with a biometric monitor device that connects to their communication device over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi.

Without user intervention, this body-worn equipment attached to their communication device will send data over LTE to alert the incident commander or safety officer whenever that firefighter’s core body temperature or heart rate exceeds a predetermined value.

The incident commander, now armed with this critical information, can determine what actions are needed -- whether it’s to ready another team to move in and remove the current team from harm’s way or an alternative plan.

This imagined capability is not outside of the realm of the communication equipment available today and may truly prevent some brave soul from paying the ultimate sacrifice.

Firefighters and police officers were at Bonfire Bar and Grill Sunday for the third annual cornhole tournament for the Battle of the Badges baseball game.The game goes down Sept. 9. Sunday was all about fundraising money for the Special Olympics. In order to play in the baseball game, they have to raise money and they're doing it by playing cornhole.“Bonfire was nice enough to put this on for us every year and we get a bunch of people come out every year, come down and contribute. It's nice,” said Nick Makris, a Manchester firefighter.Makris said there was a great turnout this year so he expects a lot of money will be raised for the Special Olympics.

A group of Massachusetts firefighters got to enjoy the results of a job well done.

On Tuesday, first responders from the Raynham Fire Department (RFD) reunited with a tiny kitten they rescued from a storm drain over the weekend — and there were plenty of cuddles to be had! Photos from the heartwarming moment show the rescuers holding, playing with, and offering treats to the 5-week-old black-and-white kitten, now fittingly named Storm.

On Sunday, just after midnight, Raynham Police and Fire responded to a report of a kitten trapped inside a storm drain, according to the RFD. The animal could be heard making mewling noises.

Due to the dark conditions, officers decided to wait until daybreak to carry out their rescue efforts. In the meantime, a pet crate, food, and water were lowered into the drain to help keep the cat comfortable overnight.

The crew returned in the morning, and firefighter Dom Kuran climbed into the eight-foot-deep drain and brought Storm the kitten to safety.

In an interview with WCVB Channel 5 Boston, Kuran ribbed fellow firefighter Tab Shumway for being reluctant to descend into the drain. "Somebody mentioned that there's a possibility of a snake being down there too, and I'm not a fan. So I said, 'Yeah, you're up' [to Kuran]," Shumway explained with a laugh.

Little Storm is currently staying with Raynham Animal Control Officer Linda Brackett until the kitten is old enough to get adopted. Several people have already expressed interest in giving a home to the resilient kitten.

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