The 2011 Fireman's Association of the State of New York

(FASNY) Convention will be held August 16th-19th in beautiful Alexandria Bay, New York. The four day event is filled with social and educational activities for all levels of firefighters.…

It’s very easy to become complacent as a firefighter. Yet it

is also one of the most dangerous attitudes to adopt.

We’ve all been on calls where weekly, it seems, the alarm at

the same location seems to activate and ends up being a false alarm. It could

be a commercial structure in a business district or a residential alarm in what

seems to be the middle of nowhere. It could be that geriatric call you’ve

gotten…

Sometimes we need to look outside the fire service to

improve how we learn, how we train, and how we move forward. Successful people

in virtually every field can point to a person who they feel positively

affected them in a way that steered them in an affirmative direction to achieve

their success. While they may not realize it, those people are mentors.

The concept of mentoring is not new, but has recently become more…

I spent twenty-three years in the same fire department, volunteering with the same base

group of people for most of that time. Like most departments, the core group of

people rarely changed. Every so often we would lose a person or two to job

transfers, burnout or death, then gain a person or two through just plain luck,

since we really never had an organized recruitment effort.

In my early years trying to find my way within…