If your apparatus pump freezes, so too does your ability to fight fire; take these steps to keep your rig ready when the thermometer falls.

Was wondering if you could do me a favor and list what you believe to be the most significant changes/trends in the past 10 years of the fire service.

Continued improvements in storage battery technology, and the advent of light-emitting diodes as a powerful general lighting source, have hastened the development of lightweight and portable lighting equipment.

Not so fast! Are you still telling your stakeholders what YOU need or are you telling them what THEY need? In his best seller, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, the late Stephen Covey calls this “seeing the issue from the other person’s frame of reference and crafting your message so that it comes back to them through their frame of reference.”

So I did, and the CEO of the company picks up my call! Great customer service and I’m not even a “buying customer”! I can only imagine what you folks do for the people who buy your products!

The leaders of most U.S. fire department are struggling to make ends meet these days. Smaller departments, and particularly volunteer fire departments, are facing real challenges when it comes to having apparatus that's ready for duty.

Time for another of the great "less filling, tastes great" debates within the fire service: Should a department run a dry or a wet pump during cold-weather operations?

Growing up most of us have probably been told, “You only get one chance to make a good first impression”! This is also true in the market place for any business, organization or individual.

Let’s “cut to the chase”, shall we? We've got many paradigms in the fire service that we need to “break" and one of them is how we seek resources to get the job done.

Is your department consistently faced with an inadequate number of qualified and properly equipped firefighters arriving at the scene of a structure fire? Are your people launching an interior fire attack solo, or with only another member with them? (We know this is happening every day in the USA, don't we).