FE Volume 147 Issue 9

Last year, I found myself facing an incident and contemplating a decision that I had not experienced in my 20 years in the fire service. At approximately 1700 hours, I was notified of a call to which a neighboring fire department was responding, possibly within my city’s boundaries. As the acting battalion chief that day, I responded to the location.

■ CAIRNS & BROTHER, INC., Clifton, New Jersey, and GLOBE FIREFIGHTERS SUITS, Pittsfield, New Hampshire, have formed a business alliance for producing and marketing Cairns protective clothing for firefighters. Under the agreement. Globe will begin manufacturing Cairns’ complete line of turnouts in Globe’s New Hampshire plant by the end of this year.

Shortly after the International Association of Fire Fighters officially returned to the fold as a participant in the National Fire Protection Association standards process, the Alliance for Fire and Emergency Management (known until recently as the International Society of Fire Service Instructors) announced the creation of its own separate, consensus standards-making body. Directly or indirectly, establishing an Alliance standards division is a power play against the NFPA’s National Fire Codes, a challenge the NFPA could avoid only by publicly apologizing, in effect, for some of its most important fire service standards.

You are assigned to the truck company and are responding to a working fire in a four-story apartment building. The officer directs you to open the roof. The fire is on the third floor. As you climb the aerial ladder to the roof, you hear on your portable radio a report that a civilian may be trapped on the floor above the fire.