From the Publishers Desk
departments
Fire Engineering: Written by Fire Fighters for Fire Fighters
Regularly we get letters and calls from subscribers who want to know how, or even if, they can submit articles to Fire Engineering. It’s really easy. Just send a type-written manuscript plus some pictures and illustrations to our editor, Jim Casey, at the address listed in the editor’s page of every issue. As for the second part of the question, the pages of Fire Engineering are open to anyone in the fire service who has a story to tell—a story that will be of interest to others in the fire service.
This is not, of course, a new policy. A look at any issue in one of our bound volumes (and we have them going back 102 years) will show that some 70 percent of our articles have been written by members of the fire service. Most of these articles were sent in unannounced—“over the transom,” as we say in the trade. Some, of course, were assigned by the editors. But the point we want to make is that the articles were written by the brothers in blue and from all ranks. This is the main reason why—many years ago—fire fighters started calling Fire Engineering the “bible of the fire service.”
Just take this issue as an example:
We have an article on prison fire protection submitted by a chief who has one of the largest prisons in the country in his city. Another article treats with a head-on train crash in a small city which was written by a fire prevention officer. His department incidentally is a member of a mutual aid association comprised of 20 departments that cover 110 square miles.
Still another, by an assistant chief, also from a small town, tells of the problem of exposure protection at a multiple-alarm fire. And finally, there is a short article, again written by a fire chief, that tells how fire fighter tags provide vital data in the event of injury.
As you can see, there is no doubt that we publish, encourage, in fact, articles from the Fire service. Don’t worry about polished writing—our editors can do the polishing. Just send them in!
