New Safety Committee Member

Today we had our quarterly safety committee meeting. I am the new member representing the reserves. We go over the safety concerns, any incidents and exposures that happened that quarter. One of those incidents was mine. It was a horrible day for me while on the ambulance. I wrote about that a while back. They didn’t seem to think it was a huge deal, but for me it was and still is a big deal. I was so embarrassed over it.

When the meeting was done I did some stuff at the house including E-mailing back and forth with a guy who needs a web developer. I found that he wanted a php guy, so I am not sure I am going to be the guy he needs.

Fire training tonight was aerial operations and stand pipes. Due to my ankling being incredibly painful I was put on engineer status for the training. It was good because it gave me some pump time. We started at station thirty-one. After the Powerpoint we went to the tower. One guy had some issues he wanted to talk about with some of the things that was happening on the shift. So he told me that he was mad about the fact we haven’t had a lot of participation with the Sunday rig checks. I told him I would put in a policy to correct that. Pretty much everyone will need to find coverage for the rig checks even if they are taking an Ollie day.

He also was concerned over the way I had the schedule set up with who was on the engine with him as the officer. He wanted someone with more Pullman fire experience. I had someone who had been a firefighter for a while somewhere else. So I made some changes to the schedule. He also thought I was having a hard time adjusting to being a reserve and our role on the scene. He said on a call when we got to the scene it was clear they wanted us to wait in the rig. But I had gotten out.

I told him that I had gotten out because Thompson was not answering the radio when someone was calling him and I was letting him know he was being asked for on the radio. I let him know due to the loud engines in the area it took several attempts to let him know. Then he started to talk to me about other stuff. He and the other guy were in Rescue and they were miffed over it, but they didn’t know the whole story. So that was just someone getting mad when they didn’t know the whole story. It was one reason why I don’t like to get mad about things without knowing the facts. Making assumptions can cause unneeded bad feelings.

Him and I left and went to the training at the tower. All went good from there. The training went well. When it was done we went to Zeppoz and hung out for a while. We were there until about midnight. We got some dinner and had some beverages. It was a good night over all.