Bounty said:
Quite right, sir - it's been fixed.
I was actually a very enthusiastic member of my cutter's damage control team (nozzleman on hose #1, baby!). We beat out all of the Navy vessels in 1997 during refresher training at NAB Little Creek, VA, and earned a Coast Guard "E" Ribbon (Excellence) for it.
Maritime firefighting rocks. And yes -- it is VERY different than land-based firefighting!
Now the DC Olympics are held every year during the Ft. Lauderdale Air/Land/Sea show down in Ft. Lauderdale at Resolve Fire and Hazard training.. the school my dad was formerly director of.. and i say formerly because of this little story:
my dad did 20 years in the navy, retired in 01 and went to work for them, the company had a shitty policy of renting out the facility to land based fire fighters who would in turn use the facility like a rental car.. one day they got somebody killed, the company turned around and basically tried to blame my dad.. even though the following facts were present:
A. The company had this policy long before my dad ever worked for them
B. The facility didn't have any permits for its construction, no blue prints.. basically it was a whole bunch of cargo containers stacked ontop of each other in the shape of a ship, and had been gutted so many times, even if there were permits and blueprints from its original construction, they wouldn't match up.
C. because the facility wasn't properly built or designed... ie it was basically a backyard construction project that involved no contractors or architects, it didn't ventilate heat or smoke properly, and being of all metal construction it conducted heat around the whole facility rather easily, rising the temperatures in rooms on the opposite end of the facility where the burn rooms were.
D. my dad had told the company several times that they needed a new facility built properly, all they said was they were working on it (which technically they were, but a new facility would be opened 10-15 years down the road)
E. My dad was in haiti at the time of the incident
The company didn't blame him for the death or anything of the like, the blamed the financial failure of the school on him, because the city of hollywood had shut the school down.. for obvious code violations with the facility, it was shut down for a good year, so all the business the school did, which was teaching cruise line employees and land based firefighters how to fight maritime fires was effectively ended while the school was shut down in order to rebuild the facility.
So basically... The company fired my dad as director of the school and put him in charge of the incident response team, cut his pay by 33%, all because of violations the company knew of for years caused the school to be shut down for 1 year, with the vast majority of income being closed off, while money was being spent to bring it upto code. My dad said fuck this, quit the company, started up his own which hes still trying to get off the ground, but he needs to get more money for advertising, which is the only overhead costs he has.
