For the first time in the FDNY’s 150-year history, more women and black, Latino and Asian applicants have filed for the upcoming firefighter exam than white men. The latest numbers mark a significant change for the department — which has been the city’s least diverse agency for decades, despite also being one of its largest with 10,000 members.
- PUB DATE: 5/8/2017 12:00:00 AM - SOURCE: New York Daily News

Diana Matty joined West Palm Beach Fire Rescue fresh out of high school, in October 1994. She was 18. Work hard and someday you’ll be chief, they told her. “I took that to heart. I’ve been a hard worker all of my career,” Matty said. They made good on their promise Tuesday at 5 p.m. — on an interim basis, anyway — when City Administrator Jeff Green called to tell Asst.
- PUB DATE: 5/8/2017 12:00:00 AM - SOURCE: Palm Beach Post

Two years before 36 partygoers died in the Ghost Ship warehouse inferno, Oakland firefighters toured the cluttered firetrap, even dancing in the same second-story performance space where the victims would huddle in their final moments, according to witnesses and documents. The visits started Sept. 26, 2014, a Friday, when firefighters extinguished a couch fire outside the warehouse artists’ collective on 31st Avenue before touring the eclectic interior, people who saw them inside the building said.
- PUB DATE: 5/8/2017 12:00:00 AM - SOURCE: East Bay Times

PHOTO/VIDEO - Five people were injured when a Hudson-Bergen Light Rail train crashed into a fire truck and derailed in Jersey City on Friday evening, fire officials said. Four firefighters and the train's operator suffered minor injuries in the collision near Washington Boulevard and Sixth Street, officials said.
- PUB DATE: 5/8/2017 12:00:00 AM - SOURCE: NBC New York

The Mount Horeb (WI) Joint Fire Department recently placed this 2016 Pierce Quantum platform aerial in service.