Fire Engineering Senior Editor Mary Jane Dittmar posed this question to some of our FDIC International instructors: During the past year, was there an event, an occurrence, or a bit of knowledge you came across that moved you to think, “Wow! I must remember to include that in my FDIC class or workshop this year?”
Response from Raul Angulo:
Absolutely!
I was walking the show floor at last year’s Fire Department Instructors Conference International when I heard this guy speaking, and I heard this occasional loud “snap.” The booth drew a crown and my curiosity. I met Dave Breiner, an apparatus operator and firefighter/paramedic with the East Hartford (CT) Fire Department, and he was enthusiastically talking about his new product that looked like a gigantic red clothespin. It was clamped to a section of 1¾-inch hose. When Dave pulled the giant red clothespin away from the hose, it would snap shut and an alarm would sound. Well, I had never seen one of those things before, so I decided to join the crowd to see what all the commotion was about.
He asked me, “Have you ever been driving down the road with the rig and have all the hose accidentally deploy, dumping the entire hose bed on the road before anyone noticed?” I immediately started to laugh, as did he. I thought to myself, “How did he know?” It’s happened to me, too. He continued, “It actually happens a lot but no one is willing to admit it. It’s one of those embarrassing questions like, ‘Have you ever been caught sitting on the toilet when the bell hit?’ Sooner or later, it’s going to happen.”
The giant red clothespin is called Hose Alert, and it was invented by Dave after he dumped the entire large diameter hose (LDH) bed of Engine 1 on to Silver Lane. They were backing the engine into the station when this kid came riding up on his bicycle, “Hey fireman!....” Dave yelled at the crew, “Hey guys! Get back on the rig! We gotta go!” After turning the corner, he could see 1,000 feet of five-inch LDH laying all the way down Silver Lane! Since it was also 10°F, they reluctantly called the truck to help load hose…and he paid for that. He said to his buddy, “You know, if there was a buzzer to let me know the hose came off the rig, I would have stopped!” He started thinking that there had to be a way to alert the driver when hose is accidentally deployed, much like a buzzer sounds in the cab when a compartment door becomes ajar or flies open. In fact, many apparatuses also have a warning light in the cab in addition to an audible alarm so when a compartment door is opened, the driver can immediately stop the rig.
Hose Alert debuted at the FDIC International 2016. It is a simple concept to alert the driver when any hose is detached or deployed from the engine, either intentionally or unintentionally. The red clothespin is actually a spring-loaded, hose-gripping unit that clamps on to the top flake in the hosebed or hose slot. The Hose Alert clamp is tethered and anchored to the apparatus with a thin, nonobtrusive steel cable, which doesn’t interfere or gets caught when pulling off hose. When the hose is deployed or removed for any reason, the gripping unit is pulled away from the hose and the contact sensors connect, which sends an electronic signal to the dash unit control screen inside the cab. The alarm immediately sounds notifying the driver that a hose load has accidentally been deployed. The driver can stop in a timely and safe manner before hundreds of feet of hose is laid out in the street.
A Change of Mi