Remembering the Sandy Hook Tragedy and Thoughts on where we are at Four Years Later

December 14, 2016 by Nick Witczak in FHTribune Staff

Four years ago, on December 14, 2012 tragedy struck our country, we lost 20 children and 8 adults.Twenty innocent children and seven adults who were going about their day at their elementary school in the small town of Newtown Connecticut. They werekilled by of a psychotic and ruthless murderer.

I remember where I was, what I was doing that day and will always remember hearing the news and live radio audio as to what happened a short 40-minute drive from my college campus. I was a junior in college and assigned to work for the ambulance service of a neighboring town. I had been offered to work that day but had turned it down due to finals being that week and I desperately needed to study. Unfortunately, that day, my colleagues who worked the same BLS service that I did, had to respond to the shooting and help. I couldn’t feel anything but guilt that a new guy had to take that shift on one of his first days working for our company.

The valiant response that day by the school staff and first responders, some of whom I have worked with was honorable and courageous. They saved as many lives as they could. However, the lives of 27 people were lost. Those 27 people will always be remembered for good people that they were, we continue to pray for their families and friends. We also continue to keep our colleagues that were there that tragicday in our thoughts and prayers.

About the Author

NICHOLAS WITCZAK is the 2nd Assistant Chief of Brookside Engine Co. 1 and volunteer EMT for the Mendham Township First Aid Squad. Additionally he serves as the Mendham Borough OEM Coordinator. Nick has served in a multitude of departments and positions over the last 8 years including Past Captain of Morristown Ambulance Squad, volunteer firefighter/EMT in combination fire departments including the Wallingford and Allingtown Connecticut fire departments. He has wealth of experience working and volunteering in emergency medical services including municipal, commercial, fire based EMS and 911 fire dispatching. He currently holds a B.S. in Fire Administration from the University of New Haven. Nick works full time in the fire protection industry specializing in safety, sales and project management. He works part time as the NJ Client Development Coordinator for Emergency Resource Management.

Engine Company Operations: Perfection in the Attention to Detail

June 20, 2016 by Nick Witczak in Engine Company Ops

Friends of mine who are members of area truck companies aka ladder companies love to bust my chops being that I am an engine company guy. We get used to hearing the sayings like “You can train a monkey to advance a hose by throwing bananas down the hall” or “If the engine company is blocking the stairs just say (move important truck company coming through)”.

The job of the engine company seems simple enough, “put the wet stuff on the red stuff”. It takes a well-trained crew and apparatus to fulfill that saying. Simplicity of the engine company comes with experience. Hose kinks, pressure losses, lines not reaching the fire room and lack of supply line are what make engine company member’s head boil. Why is this?

It may be as simple as another fire service saying “as the first line goes, so does the fire”.

On the engine company it takes an ounce of prevention and detail to make a ton of difference on the fireground. How often do you stretch your handlines? When was the last time you pulled the 2 ½” handline? When was the last time you flowed your handlines? Pulled a draft? Conducted relay pumping and tender shuttles? There is never such a thing as stretching and flowing lines too many times. The public doesn’t want to hear excuses when the line doesn’t reach the fire floor or the line wasn’t pulled correctly and the block was lost.

When you’re re-racking lines, does your crew second guess how to rerack the lines, or has it become second nature? The saying “looks pretty, pulls pretty” comes to mind. It may take an extra few minutes to rerack it correctly at zero dark thirty but when the alarm rings for the next job, you are going to want that line to pull nice and smooth each and every time. Do you have riding positions on your engines, for when each member gets off the apparatus do they know their assignment? This helps keep accountability and cut down on confusion when arriving on scene.

There is much that can be discussed later about engine company tactics. For the time being we will give in to the truck company guys and keep the engine tactics simple. Steady is smooth, and smooth is fast. Summer is here, keep stretching and flowing those handlines. Get creative and start timing your company from drop of the supply line to water on the training prop.

The more you work at it, the smoother your engine company tactics will become.

About the Author

NICHOLAS WITCZAK is the lieutenant of Brookside Engine Co. 1 and volunteer EMT for the Mendham Township First Aid Squad. Additionally he serves as the Mendham Borough OEM Coordinator. Nick has served in a multitude of departments and positions over the last 8 years including Past Captain of Morristown Ambulance Squad, volunteer firefighter/EMT in combination fire departments including the Wallingford and Allingtown Connecticut fire departments. He has wealth of experience working and volunteering in emergency medical services including municipal, commercial, fire based EMS and 911 fire dispatching. He currently holds a B.S. in Fire Administration from the University of New Haven. Nick works full time in the fire protection industry specializing in safety, sales and project management. He works part time as the NJ Client Development Coordinator for Emergency Resource Management.

Choices, On Duty and Off Duty, Their Consequences, and the Era of the Social Media Jury

April 25, 2016 by Nick Witczak in Career Development

In light of recent incidents in which I have read in local and regional news, I felt this article to be very necessary. The news stories hit home, extremely close to home. We live in a society that relies on social media and the headlines from major news outlets. We even seem to rely on the tabloids for our “news”. When a member of the emergency services including police, fire and ems make it into the news, it seems to be more common that its bad news rather than good news. The days of reporting about lives being saved appear to be taking a back seat to articles about who has been arrested and who is being sued. This is not a good sign for all of us as emergency services providers.

We must take a look into the mirror each morning and ask ourselves “are we truly able to handle the trust that the public has for us?” When we are engaging in activities both on and off duty, are we thinking about the consequences of what we are doing? If not, I urge you to ask yourself, can you responsibly handle the public’s trust and respect? When emergency services providers end up in trouble, the headline is not just “Joe Somebody arrested for theft” its “Joe Somebody, chief of XYZ department arrested for theft”. When you sign up to join the emergency services field, you take an oath of office or a commitment to serving others. In doing so, you also take on the weight that what you do will reflect not only on yourself, but also on your family, your department, your community and your respective service as a whole. If you think going through the United States legal system is stressful, the fallout on the social media which seems to follow situations as such, is just as stressful and never truly goes away, even when proven innocent in a court of law. The court of law is not the same as the “court of social media.”

As a judge would say, “The Court of Social Media is in session”. It appears from many comments online for some of these situations that people are quick to rush judgment on situations before the legal process has made its official determination. We seem to lose sight of “Innocent until proven guilty” or “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.” Did we not learn as children, the saying of “those who live in glass houses don’t throw stones?” It’s easy to denounce someone else on social media for their mistake or situation. How would you respond to being in a similar situation if it was yourself, your best friend, your family member or your own department? Many of these situations can be prevented with just a little bit of thinking before doing. When a member gets caught up in a situation where they didn’t think and caused trouble for themselves and everyone around them, the court of social media will be in full swing and the prosecution never seems to relent. The legal system may actually be more forgiving than that of the social media court and its jury.

The era of instant gratification and instant blame has pushed its way into emergency services. This push of instant public comment has exacerbated situations as quickly as turning on a light bulb. We as the emergency services community have not seemed to learn from these situations and mistakes that members have made. If we don’t learn from the mistakes and situations, we will never get ahead of that public relations nightmare light bulb turning on and we will continue to see the court of social media in full session.

When you’re on duty or off duty and making a decision, ask yourself, “will this decision end up on an internet search? Will this follow you for the rest of your life? Will it cause distrust of you, your family, your department and your community?” When you are reading the news online and see that a fellow emergency services member has been caught up in some trouble, are you going take part in the “court of social media” acting as a prosecutor, judge and juror? Or are you going to pass over doing that and spare someone the added grief and stress in the situation that they are dealing with?

The choices are yours, the consequences that follow an action are more than just yours to face. The way to begin to regain the public’s trust and restore integrity to our emergency services is to wake up in the morning, look in the mirror, wash your face and ask yourself “are we truly able to handle the public’s trust today?” “Are we going to do the right thing, not just today, but every day?” That oath, that commitment you made, are you going to uphold it? That comment box below an online article about a fellow provider, ask yourself, “Are we going to comment, or are we going to move along and keep our thoughts to ourselves?” These life choices are yours, choose wisely, for your future, your family’s future and the future of the emergency services community depends on it.

About the Author

Friendship, From the Radio to the Street

April 15, 2016 by Nick Witczak in FHTribune Staff

For many of us in the emergency services fields, we get an opportunity to know our dispatchers. Our dispatchers or 911 operators are the lifeline on the other side of the radio. This lifeline, watches our “6” when we are alone, keeps the callers calm and directs us with precision to where help is needed.

I was fortunate to have worked on the other side of the mic from fellow contributor and dispatcher Sean Walsh. It was Sean who helped me get my start at The Firehouse Tribune. Over the past few years I developed a strong bond with Sean and the members of the night shift at Morris County Communications Center. It was truly helpful to know that Sean would always be on the same wavelength as me.

Many a time Sean could figure out what I was about to say before I said it over the air to him. He was able to do this just by picking up our tendencies in field communications over the years. Sean was there to help me run the largest attended county parade in the course of 10+ years. It was his help during the night shift when things got busy that ensured the quick responses of ambulances. That day, in the course of 14 hours, we had 44+ emergency medical services calls.

Sean, operator 180, was there when I became a new company officer in the fire department. Even at 2am, he was able to go above and beyond for us. He was able to get call back numbers, do phone patches, cover the radio, and manage to calm residents down who were thousands of miles away and inform them that the fire department was at their house and needed access.

As Captain of a very busy local ambulance squad, I regularly volunteered on our Saturday night shift. It was considered to be one of the busiest days of the week for the squad due to the many bars and restaurants in town. Sean was on the dispatch desk for many of those Saturday nights. Sean was always ready to help us at 2am when the bars would close and the call volume would spike within a 20 to 30 minute period. He was truly always on his “A” game helping us manage the influx of calls.

It’s a great feeling when you know you’re on the same wave length as your dispatcher and you can relate to one another. I have been fortunate over the past few years to have worked the radio with fellow contributor Sean Walsh. We will certainly miss him as he chases new endeavors, guiding the world’s air travel. We thank him for his service. To operator 180, thank you for your service, best of luck my friend, we will miss you.

About the Author

The Ever-Changing Fire Service and its debate over Fire Suppression Strategy and Technology

February 08, 2016 by Nick Witczak in Firematics

For many departments and fire service leaders, the fire service has a saying “100+ years of tradition unimpeded by progress”. For others, this same saying is “100+ years of progress unimpeded by tradition”. This issue may certainly take root in the debate over a drinking glass, and which way you look at it. Is the glass half empty, or is it half full? The perspective issue at hand is our own fire service’s strategy and integration of technology in fire suppression. We have come to learn terms such as RECEOVS or SLICERS. RECEOVS stands for Rescue, Exposures, Contain, Extinguish, Overhaul, Ventilation, Salvage. SLICERS stands for Size-up, Locate the fire, Identify flow path, Cool the space, Extinguish, Rescue, Salvage. Isn’t the first priority of all incidents life safety? Why would we start changing our tactics? Some of this change can be focused on the fact that the materials which are burning in today’s structure fires greatly differs from those of the 1960’s, 70’s, 80’s and into the 90’s. Those days of firefighting saw most of the combustibles being made up of wood, cotton, paper and a few plastics or oil based products. Today’s fires are burning much hotter due to the majority of combustibles being of plastic and oil based products. Today’s lightweight construction has not helped; this construction makes surface areas easier to burn and causes a failure of the structure much more rapidly.

These changes have led to some possibly make drastic changes in the strategy and tactics. One major decision factor which needs to be utilized is what we use to put fires out. Since the start of the early fire service, we have relied on water to put out fires. For many departments, we continue to put out fires with water and only water. Water takes out only one area of the fire tetrahedron, it cools the surface. The new combustibles which are in everyday residences, commercial buildings and industrial facilities are multi-faceted and require eliminating multiple sides of the fire tetrahedron for successful rapid extinguishment.

We are faced with the exponentially growing use of oil and plastic based products in those burning materials. Some of members have changed their strategy and tactics rather than consider changing what is used to put out the fire. Albert Einstein once said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” This certainly applies to our current fire service. We continue to put out fires with water and only water when our environment, the composition of the burning material, is rapidly changing around us each and every day. This is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.

One such area for our fire service should look at is using alternative agents for extinguishing fires. These alternative extinguishing agents include foam concentrate, dry chemical powder, clean agents and water misting. These systems and their fire suppression products are becoming more widely used across the private sector for industrial and commercial fire suppression applications. The possibility may be there for a transition of use in some aspects of suppression in municipal firefighting. For most of us in the fire service, we think of using foam on liquid fuels or stubborn industrial fires. Most don’t see us using it in private dwelling fires or main street America type occupancies. When we think about it, how many of us still have a majority of items in our homes or businesses from the 1940’s through the 1990’s? Not many. Yet we still use the same tactic of only using water.

In 2014, Underwriters Laboratories (UL) provided an analysis of changing residential fire dynamics. Areas of the report cited that larger homes, open home geometries, increased fuel loads and new construction materials have led to faster fire propagation, shorter times to flashover, rapid changes in fire dynamics and shorter times to collapse. Experiments that were done by UL showed that flashovers are occurring at 5 minute time frame when it used to be 30 minutes or more to reach flashover conditions. Another area of the report showed that temperatures of fires in modern or legacy construction are much hotter than that of the tradition construction. The National Institute of Standards and Technologies (NIST) has also conducted studies as well in analyzing the changes we are facing in the fire service. Their study revealed that little has been done in the way of researching the effectiveness of manual hose lines. As more research is done we can begin to see how the big picture relating to fire suppression strategy and tactics is going to unfold and how best we can improvise, adapt and overcome challenges in this ever changing landscape.

The truth in the matter is that, the fire we see today is made up of these highly combustible products. Rather than just adopting new tactics in how we fight fire and suppress fire, maybe we need to consider options of learning from the private sector fire protection companies and teaming up with manufacturers to come up with new technological solutions to growing problems. Our fire service is ever changing, fires burning hotter, lightweight construction collapsing quicker, response times increasing, staffing decreasing but we continue to stay the course while our environment continues to change. Are we, as a fire service still willing to be “100+ years of tradition unimpeded by progress” or “100 years of progress unimpeded by tradition” the glass is yours, is it half full or half empty?

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Volunteer EMS in the 21st Century & The Tough Conversation About Staffing

December 21, 2015 by Nick Witczak in EMS

In recent weeks I have seen an uptick in the number of articles throughout local newspapers and websites about the staffing shortages facing volunteer first aid & ambulance squads in New Jersey and across the country. Having been the captain of a squad that faced the same shortage of volunteers that others are facing, I know first-hand what those squad officers and members are feeling. The shortage of volunteers for many agencies gets worse, morale issues begin to set in, those members who were the most dedicated begin to burn out, mutual aid squads begin to cover more calls, residents or local leaders begin to complain. It seems as if it becomes a down-ward spiral. In an article from EMS1.com from September of this year it was stated that some New York counties were facing shortages of volunteer EMT’s and launched a study to figure out why it was happening and how it could be fixed. This issue isn’t just confined to those New York counties, but is visible across the country. Its great to see those New York counties stepping up and finding out how to fix this on-going problem for their communities. Reasons for the decline in EMS volunteers as stated in the study were changes in demographics resulting from instability in the economy where as many more people now have to work 2 jobs to provide for themselves or their family. Other changes were noted including the increased call volume from the aging population where many agencies were running fewer calls just 5 and 10 years ago as compared to today.

In addition to the increased call volume came the increase in the amount of training hours for initial and continuing education. New Jersey went from having a 120 hour basic course to a 200+ hour basic course just a few years ago. These changes can affect volunteer ambulance squads overnight. The current changes in the field of volunteer emergency services are similar to a domino effect, each domino is effected somewhere along the line, each squad, each member is effected somewhere along that line. It is up to leaders of squads and government agencies including elected officials to try and fix this situation before it gets worse. That will take a team effort on everyone’s part including local EMT’s asking their local officials for support and to think outside the box when it comes to providing the best possible care for the citizens of the community. If we look a little further to the north in Connecticut, a different type of service has come about in the last 10-15 years which can reverse that down-ward spiral. EMS staffing companies have begun to surface. These companies supply per diem EMTs for volunteer agencies to supplement their staffing when they are faced with man-power shortages. They don't just cover the calls, they do patient care reports, stock and check ambulances, clean living quarters etc. One such company from CT, called Emergency Resource Management is working to come to aid New Jersey's volunteer first aid and ambulance squads. Solutions to the shortages are there, it’s not just any one given solution to fix everyone’s problems, it will take each agency and municipality to have a conversation about it’s staffing and abilities. Those squads will need to develop their own course of actions for their community and lay the ground work to start to reverse this volunteer EMT shortage. Support will be needed from the elected officials and state governments. Sometimes the toughest conversation for squad officers, members and community leaders is the best conversation for the benefit of the citizens and ultimately enable providers to provide the best care they can.

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