Impressive Brothers

This was one more busy day at CCFR. We had a short appearance at the school district job fair this afternoon. I realized I must be getting old because they all looked so young.
One of the tasks of a Division Chief is to review all of the time sheets for payroll. It is not one of the more glamorous tasks but a needed one. During payroll errors are found that go both ways. Some times there are hours that are not recorded and other times it goes in the CBJ's favor.
I am exploring how to stream line the process using our computer system to help eliminate errors and make things easier in general.

It is nice to be pleasantly surprised from time to time. Today I was able to witness two people work through a very difficult situation. This showed me why I look up to these guys. I work with some of the finest people in the country. It is nice to see people care about each other and show how much they love their jobs.

I am going to work with my Captains and develop a good "play book" on how we should be running our bread and butter calls. This will improve speed and quality by getting some consistency.

We have the Paratech rep in Juneau in the morning. He will be putting on a 3 hour class 3 separate times on high lift low pressure rescue bags. This is a new tool for our department. This will work along with the rescue struts we added the last year.

Thursday is also a live fire day for the FF II class. We will also be hosting a debriefing on our last fire on Sunday. There were some things that went well and some things that did not go so well. As long as people are honest and straight forward about what they saw this should be a great learning opportunity.

We as a fire service need to look at how we are doing business. With these hard economic times creeping up on us we need to start planning for the very near future. We will have to start looking at our basic services and make sure we are doing them the best we can. We also need to evaluate the extra services we provide and see how they balance out.

I leave you with this thought of the day. If you rescue a cat from a tree, don't put him inside your bunker coat. The reason could become suddenly apparent when you least expect it.

Take care of each other and stay safe!