With climate catastrophes reshaping the planet, Washington’s wildland fire season is getting longer. There are two basic tools to control fires: aircraft and crews. The state Department of Natural Resources has increased both, as well as adopting aggressive attack strategies to jump on fires early.
- PUB DATE: 11/25/2022 5:39:26 AM - SOURCE: Seattle Times Online - Metered Site

Henri Hollis

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

(MCT)

There are a couple of reasons why Thanksgiving dinner at Atlanta Fire Station 4 will be different than the stereotypical holiday meal.

First, the firefighters who started their shift at the Edgewood Avenue station this morning don’t know what they’ll be eating. Second, they’re actually looking forward to gathering for dinner at their long kitchen table.

The tight-knit group is confident the food will be good and the company will be enjoyable. Who wouldn’t want the same at Thanksgiving?

To uncover Squad 4′s secret to great family-style dining, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution sent a dining critic to investigate. After sampling the Cajun butter-marinated smoked chicken and balsamic-glazed green beans, they’re lucky I didn’t defect for a career fighting fires.

Because Squad 4 has built a routine that includes a nightly family-style meal, nearly every day here has a Thanksgiving vibe. Thursday might be busier than usual, though, as Thanksgiving seems to inspire ill-advised novice attempts at frying whole turkeys.

“Yeah, it always feels like Thanksgiving. You’ve got the big table, the crazy uncle. Well, you’ve got a few crazy uncles,” quipped Capt. Frederick “Chip” Newell. “It’s just like a family. A family that sits down at the dinner table every night is going to be closer than a family that doesn’t. It’s the same with our firefighters.”

Mealtime at Station 4 usually involves 10 or 12 firefighters. They don’t mind that the seating is donated office chairs, and agree that eating together is more important than what’s actually on the menu.

“We usually just buy whatever’s on sale,” Newell said.

Anyone with different preferences or dietary restrictions will bring their own personal dishes. During the AJC’s recent visit, beautifully smoked chickens were complemented by the Conecuh sausages one firefighter brought. Another, who was training for a triathlon, brought steamed cauliflower and kale.

Lt. Ryan Sims is the station’s unquestioned pitmaster. He injected his marinade into the chickens before they spent several hours in a box smoker at 275 degrees. The resulting birds were juicy, tender and perfectly smoky.

Firefighter Chris Hunter serves as the squad’s main cook on many nights. In a previous career, Hunter worked in the well-regarded kitchen of 8Arm, the Ponce de Leon restaurant that closed earlier this year. Hunter’s skill was on display as he expertly tossed green beans with a large knob of butter in a gigantic cast iron skillet.

Clean-up falls to the rookies, and they take just as much pride in their tasks as the cooks take in theirs. Newell said the newer firefighters tasked with cleaning the kitchen “would probably fight you if you tried to help them.”

Logistically, Hunter said he plans his cooking using the rule of thumb that each firefighter will eat about half a pound of meat and at least two servings of each side. He also recommended cooking main dishes low and slow. Forgiving cooking methods like smoking, braising or slow-roasting helps prevent dishes from being ruined if the crew gets a call and needs to put dinner on hold.

Station 4, on Edgewood Avenue, stays busy thanks to its central location and easy highway access. Car wrecks, fires and medical emergencies have ruined more than a handful of dinners, Hunter said.

When it comes to dinner table conversation, Newell says no topics are off-limits, and politics came up more than once during the AJC’s recent visit, as Georgia’s midterm election votes were still being tallied.

While there was plenty of banter, discussion and cross-talk at the Station 4 dinner table, the closeness of the group was best observed when things fell quiet. The

By Bill Adams

Another ho-hum morning coffee with the Raisin Squad turned into a five-alarm donnybrook over a stupid picture. I was trying to rejuvenate the topic of SafeSpeak and TechnoSpeak that was started months ago when one of the geezers threw a copy of a trade magazine on the table and loudly proclaimed, “Look at this. Why don’t you write about this crap. It’s more important than those fancy words half of us don’t understand.” It was a photograph of a large, well-involved structure fire with a white hat overseeing seven firefighters advancing a charged 2½-inch handline towards it. The size and tenacity of the crew was impressive. 

Then the white-haired critics started passing judgment: “There ain’t no one wearing an air pack.” “So much for training.” “Hell, there’s people from three different departments on that line. You’d think one of them would require packs.” Another said: “We couldn’t get away doing that when you were chief.” I said that was more than 30 years ago. “It don’t matter. You can get burned just as bad today. You oughta write about it.” He made a good point but I wasn’t going to admit it to him – or the rest of the raisins. 

In the fire service literary world that I occasionally visit, the topic of what some people consider an “appropriate” photograph is addressed every year or so by the editorial staffs. Responses are usually triggered by a “letter to the editor” admonishing some fire department for doing or condoning something that “doesn’t look right” in the picture. The dilemma for the magazine is responding to an inference – or outright accusation – of the magazine’s tacit approval of the photograph’s content just because it was published. That’s not right or fair.

Most people in the publishing world are apprehensive about offending anyone or anything that could negatively affect advertising revenue.  Although that’s an understandable concern, I’m not always in agreement with it. Nobody should be financially sanctioned for not being “woke” enough. The old saying “we learn by our mistakes” has merit. If readers can observe the “bad and ugly” as well as the “good” in a photograph, the photographer and magazine have done their job educating the fire service and perhaps influencing a safer work environment. 

If a photograph causes a fire department to get its bunkers in a twist because it does not reflect the department in a positive way – so be it.  That’s life. Stuff happens. Don’t blame the photographer for taking a photo of something you are doing. Is abstention the answer? Should magazines not publish questionable photographs because a fire department does not want to be held accountable in the court of public or peer opinion? Answering those questions is above my paygrade.

The fire service and the publications devoted to it have zero control over social media content where not only still photographs but videos of firefighters in action are readily available. Only half of the raisins can access the internet without help from their grandkids. Those that could were pretty vo

Cranston Fire Department will add a new aerial ladder truck thanks to a $1 million grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Assistance to Firefighters Grant Program, CranstonOnline.com reported.

The new 100-foot aerial ladder fire truck will replace a 20-year-old truck, the report said.

A fire official said the new truck would be safer, easier to drive and includes custom features to help the department’s firefighters, according to the report. The new aerial ladder fire truck is 41-feet long, which is on the shorter end of these vehicles. The department is trying to buy smaller trucks so it’s easier to maneuver around the city. Custom features include two compartments on both sides of the truck for storage and extraction tools that will allow firefighters to pop open a door quicker. He said the fire truck’s outriggers are smaller compared to other outriggers, which will help in crowded streets.

The total cost for the fire truck is $1,261,910 with remaining funding coming through a line item in the department’s budget, the report said.

The new fire truck will be stationed at the department’s Garden City location and the vehicle it replaces will be kept on reserve. The department will also buy an E-One fire engine pumper through bond money. The pumper is being built now and should be in by summertime.

The Wood River City Council paved the way Monday for a new pumper truck for the fire department, AdvantageNews.com reported. 

A fire official said the truck will cost more than $932,000, the report said.

By locking into the price, the fire official said the city avoided expected price increases of 6 percent in mid-December, and a similar increase early in 2023, according to the report.

The new truck will replace a 2000 model that has outlived the company that built it, making it nearly impossible to repair or find replacement parts, the report said.

The build time for the new truck is estimated to be about two years.