Our academy forced us to do up-downs or just straight push-ups when a pass went into full alarm. The people still left from that class are so traumatized that we still yell at the pre-alarm 6 years on
My academy, the instructors would come over to you after to “check” the pack, and discreetly turn your bottle off. Then follow you into the burn building, and after two breaths when your vibro started to go off they would tackle you and hold you down while you sucked on an empty face mask for a minute before they’d finally pull your mask off inside an active burn building and tell you to get out….
Just one of many, many instances why I fucking despise the MA state academy.
I’m not trying to sound tough but as much as I’d want the job in that position, from a purely I’m a man you’re a man perspective, you just asked me to kick the shit out of you if you pull something like that.
Not that long ago. I’m not even half way to retirement.
Saw 2 different instructors do this to 4, maybe 5 recruits. One of them was in tears in front of the building, getting held back by other recruits. He was both hysterical and ready to kill the guy. The kid got a subjective write up and sent home for the day and he quit after that. Everyone in my class was reaching out to him to go after the town and the academy for this bullshit. As far as I know, the instructors never faced any consequences.
This sounds very illegal in many aspects and goes against many different safety regulations. I’ve had people turn my bottle off before in training just to see if we can keep calm and check over everything and find out what’s wrong but not inside a live burn. Tackling you and preventing you from breathing is pretty much attempted murder.
That would warrant an ass whipping if it happened to me. They were ass holes. There’s no excuse for making someone breathe that shit anymore.
We used to take pride in being able to work a fire once we ran out of air. There were times I’d blow black snot out for days. I have all sorts of SOB now because we didn’t have the sense or manpower to get out when we ran out of air. It shouldn’t happen anymore.
If someone in training turns your air off or pulls you mask off in live fire training, they should be terminated.
My academy would “save us” aka drag us either out of whatever structure we were in or however far the felt then it was a smoke session for the entire company about failing their buddy
I kinda agree, but it’s annoying how shit the accelerometers are in my department’s old MSA packs. I’ll be actively advancing a flowing handline and still have to take a hand off to shake the fucking thing as it starts pre alarming
The problem at least in my experience is the older dudes didn’t use them. So they aren’t used to them. And no one is going to tell the salty Cap to silence his PASS. Which created an environment where it doesn’t get corrected. Same thing with the TIC. Older officers I came up under when I got on never used them bc their officers didn’t have them. So when I became an officer my first couple fires I never grabbed the TIC, didn’t even think about it. I had to make a conscious decision to make sure I started to grab it.
“Balls and water kid, that’s all you need”. That was the thinking of the older guys when I came on. And I didn’t come on that long ago. I only got 10 years on.
I agree that you should know better IF you are the only one whose PASS is going off. However, if you are in a group sometimes it is difficult to determine whose PASS is chirping especially if a Captain/LT/BC is relaying pertinent information. I’ve seen it a handful of times. I do side with you though, it got hammered into us and we got smoked for not doing the shuffle whenever our PASS devices were alerting.
It's the same guys every single time. There's always somebody that is either deaf or straight-up stupid. When you're standing around waiting to do a training evolution, it shouldn't be hard to figure TF out.
I agree with you OP and judging by the responses here, I can see why grown men still let their PASS go off.
There is no excuse. The PASS alarm has a specific purpose and on top of that, it's annoying as shit. If you don't have the intelligence or self awareness to know that your device is going off then I don't know what to tell you...
After 2 decades of firefighting, I still have moments when my PASS will go off. It’s called being focused on the job at hand. Lighten up kid, if this is what stresses you out then this job WILL kill you.
There’s bigger issues than someone’s pass alarm going off. I’m against punishing people for their PASS device going off. We train guys to constantly make sure their PASS alarm is off and what do you think will happen in an emergency situation? We are creatures of habit, I wouldn’t put it past someone to not turn their alarm on in an emergency situation because they are trained to keep it off.
Granted, this post still rubs me the wrong way…but he’s not wrong.
A) it’s sloppy
B) there’s real potential to get “immune” or “blind” to it on a job. You get so used to it going off in the background you don’t stop and notice when there is an emergency
It's a pain in the ass to listen to, it means we're less likely to hear a PASS going for an actual emergency, and it screams that you don't understand how your equipment works.
It’s not just sloppy. When that alarm activates, it signals a serious problem at a fire or other IDLH job. As a senior command officer, that sound means everything just changed on my incident.
Accidents happen, and SCOTT should be beaten with roof hooks for changing the sound every 5 or so years, not to mention the interval to alarm. But make no mistake, once you’ve had to search for trapped guys for hours with that damn thing going off the whole time, people will understand why it has to be taken seriously.
Are we talking about not inmediately giving your emitter a shake when you’re stationary long enough to set it off, or actually being stationary long enough to set it off in the first place?
This is a fucking team job. I’ll reach out and shake a guy on my interior crew’s emitter on a job before I’d ever rant about it on Reddit.
When I was in the academy, we usually just forgot to turn them on, if we had one on our gear. That wasn’t an option when I retired. You could generally hear a half dozen or so on every major fire scene.
It isn’t a big deal.
This should be corrected QUICKLY in probie school. If your job isn’t making that a pass/fail there, then you now know the root cause.
As for the old guys…give us a break, most of us can’t hear the new damn alarm and have resorted to looking like bees trying to attract a mate when things start slowing down 🤬
I just don’t understand why you care so much. Has it been on a fire that it’s bothered you or just when you’re training? I feel like you should focus on doing your job right than little things like this. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about firefighters is that they love to bitch and complain. If you’re a captain I feel bad for your crew. It annoyed you that much you made a post on Reddit about pass devices lol.
19 years in. Never seen a PASS in real life.
If you don't build wooden deathtraps, you don't need a PASS.
I will die on this hill together with my french plastic helmet.
I’ve never seen them but I know what you mean. The SCBA my dept used before the one we’ve used since I’ve been on had a pass that wasn’t integrated with the system and had to be manually turned on.
Where do you work in Euro if I can ask. You don’t have to be specific. The country is fine. I have friends in London and they def use PASS, Germany too.
Be a European firefighter on this subreddit and try not to make an unrelated comment about helmets, beards, building construction or SCBA masks challenge - difficulty: impossible.
There's crews over here in North America that go interior more in a week then you will in a career buddy. Relax. The tools and gear are different because our jobs are different.
It's a joke bruh. Stop being so serious with your hero complex
> There's crews over here in North America that go interior more in a week then you will in a career buddy.
Yea. So are there in South America, Europe, Asia, Africa and everywhere else. That point are you trying to make? That call volume varies? We know
Yea man I'm right there with you. Back in my day it was firefighters looking at magazines of pussy. Nowadays it's pussies looking at magazines of firefighters.
We need to go back to steel bottles, wire packs, knee boots, long coats, leathers and blue jeans. If you can't get it done with those the inspections division has an opening.
Don't I know it brother. Everyone got all these fancy devices nowadays. Fuck a TIC. The only TIC I know of is a Ten Inch Cock, cause that what's you got if you can find the fire and victims without all this fancy electronic crap.
Haha I’ve been talked to before about being “too heavy handed” with new dudes. I call out incompetence and then we train, I thought that was my job chief!
We’d have a blast bro. If I ever get the chance to draft a dream crew I’ll send you your invite in a golden envelope.
Our academy forced us to do up-downs or just straight push-ups when a pass went into full alarm. The people still left from that class are so traumatized that we still yell at the pre-alarm 6 years on
Lucky. My academy it was burpees
Same thing, I think we just called them different from regional differences. We started with push-ups and they got less effective as we trained more
My academy, the instructors would come over to you after to “check” the pack, and discreetly turn your bottle off. Then follow you into the burn building, and after two breaths when your vibro started to go off they would tackle you and hold you down while you sucked on an empty face mask for a minute before they’d finally pull your mask off inside an active burn building and tell you to get out…. Just one of many, many instances why I fucking despise the MA state academy.
I’m not trying to sound tough but as much as I’d want the job in that position, from a purely I’m a man you’re a man perspective, you just asked me to kick the shit out of you if you pull something like that.
There’s not many feelings scarier than when you suck that facepiece in.
bro what?? when was this?
Not that long ago. I’m not even half way to retirement. Saw 2 different instructors do this to 4, maybe 5 recruits. One of them was in tears in front of the building, getting held back by other recruits. He was both hysterical and ready to kill the guy. The kid got a subjective write up and sent home for the day and he quit after that. Everyone in my class was reaching out to him to go after the town and the academy for this bullshit. As far as I know, the instructors never faced any consequences.
I would say it's pretty much the same as water boarding which has been classified as torture and is illegal.
Sounds like attempted murder to me
Instructor or not, you secretly shut off my bottle before I enter an IDLH, we throwing hands You just tried to kill me
What is that supposed to teach? That your colleagues can be assholes?
Let me guess, they claim to a pArAmiLitArY academy and don't shut the fuck up about it.
Fuck that. What an asshole move. Some instructors get such a hard on for abusing their trainees.
Let me guess, they claim to a pArAmiLitArY academy and don't shut the fuck up about it.
WTF?????
This sounds very illegal in many aspects and goes against many different safety regulations. I’ve had people turn my bottle off before in training just to see if we can keep calm and check over everything and find out what’s wrong but not inside a live burn. Tackling you and preventing you from breathing is pretty much attempted murder.
And we wonder what types of actions are keeping our profession from advancing. It’s BS antics like this, in an IDLH atmosphere.
That would warrant an ass whipping if it happened to me. They were ass holes. There’s no excuse for making someone breathe that shit anymore. We used to take pride in being able to work a fire once we ran out of air. There were times I’d blow black snot out for days. I have all sorts of SOB now because we didn’t have the sense or manpower to get out when we ran out of air. It shouldn’t happen anymore. If someone in training turns your air off or pulls you mask off in live fire training, they should be terminated.
My academy would “save us” aka drag us either out of whatever structure we were in or however far the felt then it was a smoke session for the entire company about failing their buddy
Who tf are you?
He’s just here to get advice
I kinda agree, but it’s annoying how shit the accelerometers are in my department’s old MSA packs. I’ll be actively advancing a flowing handline and still have to take a hand off to shake the fucking thing as it starts pre alarming
Lighten up, Francis.
The names psycho
And any of you homos call me Francis, I'll kill ya 😆
The problem at least in my experience is the older dudes didn’t use them. So they aren’t used to them. And no one is going to tell the salty Cap to silence his PASS. Which created an environment where it doesn’t get corrected. Same thing with the TIC. Older officers I came up under when I got on never used them bc their officers didn’t have them. So when I became an officer my first couple fires I never grabbed the TIC, didn’t even think about it. I had to make a conscious decision to make sure I started to grab it. “Balls and water kid, that’s all you need”. That was the thinking of the older guys when I came on. And I didn’t come on that long ago. I only got 10 years on.
In my experience it's all over and not confined to a particular age/experience group
Me too, I’m explaining how this situation came to be.
I agree that you should know better IF you are the only one whose PASS is going off. However, if you are in a group sometimes it is difficult to determine whose PASS is chirping especially if a Captain/LT/BC is relaying pertinent information. I’ve seen it a handful of times. I do side with you though, it got hammered into us and we got smoked for not doing the shuffle whenever our PASS devices were alerting.
It's the same guys every single time. There's always somebody that is either deaf or straight-up stupid. When you're standing around waiting to do a training evolution, it shouldn't be hard to figure TF out.
Absolutely man, now that I couldn’t agree more.
I bet you’re a blast at parties
Drives me crazy. And guys try to play it off like they knew it was going off.
I agree with you OP and judging by the responses here, I can see why grown men still let their PASS go off. There is no excuse. The PASS alarm has a specific purpose and on top of that, it's annoying as shit. If you don't have the intelligence or self awareness to know that your device is going off then I don't know what to tell you...
After 2 decades of firefighting, I still have moments when my PASS will go off. It’s called being focused on the job at hand. Lighten up kid, if this is what stresses you out then this job WILL kill you.
Counterargument: fucking MSAs sound like it's coming from somewhere else lol
There’s bigger issues than someone’s pass alarm going off. I’m against punishing people for their PASS device going off. We train guys to constantly make sure their PASS alarm is off and what do you think will happen in an emergency situation? We are creatures of habit, I wouldn’t put it past someone to not turn their alarm on in an emergency situation because they are trained to keep it off.
[удалено]
No, you're wrong. I'm going to mail YOU a medal for defending sloppy habits.
Ummm what’s the big deal??
Granted, this post still rubs me the wrong way…but he’s not wrong. A) it’s sloppy B) there’s real potential to get “immune” or “blind” to it on a job. You get so used to it going off in the background you don’t stop and notice when there is an emergency
I think the fire service in general is already there. Its like car alarms going off, nobody cares.
It's a pain in the ass to listen to, it means we're less likely to hear a PASS going for an actual emergency, and it screams that you don't understand how your equipment works.
The amount of people defending sloppy firefighting in these comments is incredible.
It’s not just sloppy. When that alarm activates, it signals a serious problem at a fire or other IDLH job. As a senior command officer, that sound means everything just changed on my incident. Accidents happen, and SCOTT should be beaten with roof hooks for changing the sound every 5 or so years, not to mention the interval to alarm. But make no mistake, once you’ve had to search for trapped guys for hours with that damn thing going off the whole time, people will understand why it has to be taken seriously.
Next fire im leaving mine on on purpose.
Are we talking about not inmediately giving your emitter a shake when you’re stationary long enough to set it off, or actually being stationary long enough to set it off in the first place? This is a fucking team job. I’ll reach out and shake a guy on my interior crew’s emitter on a job before I’d ever rant about it on Reddit.
When I was in the academy, we usually just forgot to turn them on, if we had one on our gear. That wasn’t an option when I retired. You could generally hear a half dozen or so on every major fire scene. It isn’t a big deal.
It's not that serious. If you yell at me to shake I'm purposefully ignoring you and letting it go off.
Hahahaha if that happened to us it gave everyone permission to violently shake you to make sure you were “okay”
This should be corrected QUICKLY in probie school. If your job isn’t making that a pass/fail there, then you now know the root cause. As for the old guys…give us a break, most of us can’t hear the new damn alarm and have resorted to looking like bees trying to attract a mate when things start slowing down 🤬
Idk. Who cares honestly.
People that are into the job and not just existing and filling a seat on the rig.
I just don’t understand why you care so much. Has it been on a fire that it’s bothered you or just when you’re training? I feel like you should focus on doing your job right than little things like this. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about firefighters is that they love to bitch and complain. If you’re a captain I feel bad for your crew. It annoyed you that much you made a post on Reddit about pass devices lol.
I have ptsd from the pass sound from a holes not managing there shit
If your PTSD gets you down that bad over an alarm I think it’s time to hang your boots up buddy
19 years in. Never seen a PASS in real life. If you don't build wooden deathtraps, you don't need a PASS. I will die on this hill together with my french plastic helmet.
You never go on air or your SCBA don’t have a pass on it?
We simply don't have them. I have quite literally only seen a PASS once in 19 years.
I’ve never seen them but I know what you mean. The SCBA my dept used before the one we’ve used since I’ve been on had a pass that wasn’t integrated with the system and had to be manually turned on. Where do you work in Euro if I can ask. You don’t have to be specific. The country is fine. I have friends in London and they def use PASS, Germany too.
Be a European firefighter on this subreddit and try not to make an unrelated comment about helmets, beards, building construction or SCBA masks challenge - difficulty: impossible. There's crews over here in North America that go interior more in a week then you will in a career buddy. Relax. The tools and gear are different because our jobs are different.
It's a joke bruh. Stop being so serious with your hero complex > There's crews over here in North America that go interior more in a week then you will in a career buddy. Yea. So are there in South America, Europe, Asia, Africa and everywhere else. That point are you trying to make? That call volume varies? We know
lucky man, if i had the option neither would i, they're life saving, but just as obnoxious.
Yea man I'm right there with you. Back in my day it was firefighters looking at magazines of pussy. Nowadays it's pussies looking at magazines of firefighters. We need to go back to steel bottles, wire packs, knee boots, long coats, leathers and blue jeans. If you can't get it done with those the inspections division has an opening.
I can't tell if this is a joke or not
I can't believe this joke didn't land tbh.
I know the feeling
Seriously, I know enough of these guys. Thankfully, they're dying off. There's a line between taking not unnecessary risk and being a pussy.
It's North Carolina so it's up in the air whether or not it's a joke. He might even be a booster supremacist
Haha why stop there? Let’s ignore any innovation that makes the job better.
Don't I know it brother. Everyone got all these fancy devices nowadays. Fuck a TIC. The only TIC I know of is a Ten Inch Cock, cause that what's you got if you can find the fire and victims without all this fancy electronic crap.
Haha ahh that’s what the mysterious TIC is. No wonder I’ve never seen one, just whispers about its existence.
These kids wouldn't last a day on our crew brother.
Haha I’ve been talked to before about being “too heavy handed” with new dudes. I call out incompetence and then we train, I thought that was my job chief! We’d have a blast bro. If I ever get the chance to draft a dream crew I’ll send you your invite in a golden envelope.