New areas of response

[Sirene]

What is everyone doing with all of the new and different areas of possible response the Haz Mat team encounters. Like here on my dept. we are going WMD, confined space, trench rescue, vertical rescue, to name a few.
I think that some of these area should be different teams. Even if they are not differnt teams what or where is everyone putting all of this new equipment they are getting. Our Haz Mat rig was pretty much full before they started talking about all of these other responses.
We figure Haz Mat will be there if for no other reason than monitoring. But why should the burden of all of this training go to the Haz Mat Team?
What are your thoughts? I just don't want to put all of our eggs in one basket.
Stay Safe
Darren (Sirene)Reeves

[dfwscotty]

Wow Darren, I could have sworn that you worked with me! We too began with just the Hamat Team. Now we are getting up to speed as technical rescue techs including hi angle, csr, trench, collapse etc... Now we have gotten alot of other fire fighters that do rescue without the hazmat portion and it still is alot to keep up to speed on. This sound familiar? "Be sure and keep up on your 40 hours for haztech, keep up on rope work(lot of overlap in areas here) and haul systems cause you know how fast you forget those knots, oh and don't forget your structural work and address and building work and then conducting drills and still training on the apparatus, oh yeah, the CHief has this one small task for us to do and shouldn't take more than a month, then the day after that is due is the big rescue training scenario that will take 10 hours at least, by the way, this is new ff's Jones, SMith and Barney....see that they are brought up to speed in the next couple of weeks." I try not to look at that big pic and just go day by day and sort of do a balncing act between it all......But dang I still love it...

[Capt2-9-2]

Our team also is getting into alot of areas. Our big part of the WMD/Terrorism incident would be mostly decon and metering. Yeah, lots of training. Another thing we've been doing is trainings and drills involving police, ems, fire and industry. It's amazing the SARA facilities in neighborhoods. It's also a great way to work together.

[This message has been edited by Capt2-9-2 (edited 04-06-2001).]