HomeMy WebLinkAboutCHFD02132012.pdf
February 10, 2012
Honorable Kate Supron
Board of Trustees
Village of Cayuga Heights
Monthly Report – January, 2012
We had a steady start to 2012 with 52 runs in January. We had 23 calls in the Village of
Cayuga Heights, 24 in the Town of Ithaca and 5 mutual aid requests. We had 33 EMS
calls and 19 fire calls. Our calls through the month of January were pretty routine with
the majority of runs being medical calls. After the hectic pace in December, January
seemed rather calm.
January training focused mainly on getting our members back from break and back into
the swing of things around the station. We did a large area search training at the mall
training facility early in the month. Searching buildings for victims is one of the most
time consuming and stressful tasks on a scene. It must be done quickly and efficiently.
In residential settings the layout of homes and the size of rooms make this process pretty
standard. Many homes have the same basic floor plan and by looking at the layout of the
home we can make a good guess for searches. Large buildings such as the mall,
churches, schools and movie theatres are difficult to search. The large rooms with
unknown obstacles pose problems for search crews. We use ropes and tools to assist us
with the search but it is a very difficult task to perform and takes a lot of practice and
constant communication. The old movie theaters at the mall make a great training venue
for this process. At the end of the month we had our annual OSHA and CPR refresher
training. This annual event gets every member of the department together at the same
time for an all day training covering required OSAH topics in the morning and CPR
recertification’s in the afternoon. Many hours in January were also spent on the
probation checklists. It appears as if the entire fall recruit class will make it through the
checklist process and become exterior firefighters. We have five of these new members
enrolled in the spring Firefighter 1 class. We will be holding a spring recruit class. We
will be looking at a class of 5 to 7 new members for this class.
We recently had our annual SCBA inspection by Tyler Fire Equipment. Within the next
three years all of our current SCBA bottles will be out of compliance because we will not
be able to have them hydro tested due to age. All of our air packs that we are using are
out of warranty at this point. As I have reported before, we have been very fortunate up
to this point with air packs. We have been able to purchase used air packs from the
Lansing Fire Department when they upgraded their system. We are now at the point
when we need to move forward with this project.
We are in the process of having back up cameras installed on all of our heavy apparatus.
There was a backing incident in October with E202. We did an internal assessment of
our backing policies and then decided as an added safety measure we would install
backup cameras on the apparatus.
At the time I am writing this report, we at the fire department are in mourning. A former
member of the department and a close friend of many of us, Joshua Weismann was killed
in the line of duty in Alexandria Virginia on February 9th. Josh had joined the Cayuga
Heights Fire Department in 1994 at the age of 16 and served this community until he
moved to Virginia with his wife in 2005. He was a great man who was dedicated to
being a firefighter. He will be missed. Several of us will be going to Alexandria for the
service next week.
Sincerely,
George Tamborelle
Fire Chief/Fire Superintendent