Editor:
Regarding our city firefighters' retirement: Leave it alone! Let them keep the plan intact as it is and take a few more bucks for my annual fire protection tax.
I am a retired driver-engineer / EMT Intermediate from a small town department in Kansas and believe me, I appreciate what I have. Firefighting is a rough job, physically and psychologically demanding. Despite modern "lightweight" equipment, you still end up with lungs filled with toxic chemicals while trying to rehab outside a burning building. Your back gets worn out. You are wearing 50 pounds of equipment, pulling 250 feet of water filled 1 3/4-inch lines while carrying an ax and a 10-pound infra-red camera swinging from your neck. After you exhaust yourself by running around with all this gear hooking up a 5-inch diameter line to the hydrant and turning it on. You bust down a door and you crawl into a room so smoke filled you can't see your hand in front of your face. You try to search for victims in the intense heat of a burning house where the temperature at floor level is higher than your oven baking a cake (at the ceiling it can be up to 1500 degrees) and also find the seat of the fire to put it out.
I am a retired driver-engineer / EMT Intermediate from a small town department in Kansas and believe me, I appreciate what I have. Firefighting is a rough job, physically and psychologically demanding. Despite modern "lightweight" equipment, you still end up with lungs filled with toxic chemicals while trying to rehab outside a burning building. Your back gets worn out. You are wearing 50 pounds of equipment, pulling 250 feet of water filled 1 3/4-inch lines while carrying an ax and a 10-pound infra-red camera swinging from your neck. After you exhaust yourself by running around with all this gear hooking up a 5-inch diameter line to the hydrant and turning it on. You bust down a door and you crawl into a room so smoke filled you can't see your hand in front of your face. You try to search for victims in the intense heat of a burning house where the temperature at floor level is higher than your oven baking a cake (at the ceiling it can be up to 1500 degrees) and also find the seat of the fire to put it out.
Then after the fire is out you spend hours doing overhaul. You shovel tons of wet material out a window then pull down walls and ceiling and roofing materials to make sure the fire hasn't extended further and shovel that stuff out too.
Oh ... and you are not done yet. After hours of this grueling hot work you get to squeeze the water out of your supply line and reload it on the truck. Then you put clean attack lines on ... oh ... no ... you are not done yet. When you get back to the station you get to refill your SCBA (air) bottles, wash hose and clean up your bunker gear (fire clothes) and wash the truck.
Some days you are "lucky" and repeat all this a couple times a day.
On medical calls you tell a woman in the car "We will get you out first, then take care of your husband" because you don't want to tell her at that moment he's already gone. You tote a 5-year-old baby girl out to your unit because she drank too much mouthwash and read her obituary in the paper two days later. You stop a fellow firefighter's engine from responding because it's his sister that was killed in that roll over accident. You go to a church van accident and after all the people that are still alive are on their way to the hospital, you stay at the scene with the hurst tool (Jaws of Life) to pry loose a 10-year-old boy that's gone but still needs removed from the van. You go in to comfort an elderly woman whose husband while sitting on the back porch took a self inflicted 22 round to his head while waiting for the coroner to confirm what you already know.
The least we can do as taxpayers is pay annually an extra $10/20/50 per house per year, whatever it takes to reward these people for the job they do and for the wear and tear on their bodies and minds.
Joe Schirck III
Wednesday, January 30, 2013 - www.newssun.com/ltr-013013-schirck