Free Leadership Training

The Texas A&M Engineering Extension Service (TEEX) annually offers the Leadership Symposium designed for fire and EMS service staff and command. Firefighters, chiefs, and other emergency services personnel receive up-to-date information on leadership, management, safety, budgeting and other relevant topics for these challenging times. This program is part of the Leadership Development Program which is funded by Texas general revenue.

I recently found that every presentation from the most recent Symposium (2013) is available for free from the TEEX website.  Each presentation includes a video recording of the presentation being delivered, the powerpoint presentation, and any relevant handouts.  This is a wealth of information on fire service leadership available free of charge.

TEEX 2013 Leadership Development Symposium Presentations

Click here for information and to register for the 2014 Leadership Development Symposium.

Lt. Ray McCormack - True Values of a Fire Service Leader

If you are in the fire service you need to watch this video:

Part 1:

Part 2:

"If you value honor, tradition, pride, and ownership of the fire service, take this video and pass it on to as many people as possible. We can not allow the upcoming generations to lose sight of what the fire service stands for, nor can we allow them to be misled in the way the job is supposed to be done."

Army Firefighting: A Historical Perspective

Army Fire Fighting: A Historical Perspective  by, Leroy Allen Ward, captures the previously undocumented aspect of the army fire service history. What started as research to assist a former World War II army firefighter in gathering data for his website http://www.firefighters.mil-fire.net grew into a desire to capture the fragmented history of the Army soldier/firefighter into a book devoted to the army’s military occupational specialty, “21M Firefighter”.

Until now, writers have given army firefighting little more than a brief quote in a much larger book or article. This book covers the origins of the MOS beginning with the Civil War and continues through the War on Terrorism. It includes not only the training, vehicles and equipment used throughout the years, but also dates and locations of deployments for firefighting platoons and detachments, unit rosters of World War I and II and in collaboration with Ted Heinbuch, webmaster of www.firetrucks-atwar.com and James Davis, webmaster of www.firefighters.mil-fire.net and author of, Fire Fighters in Fatigues, Army Fire Fighting includes a comprehensive list of Line of Duty Death (LODD) of soldier/firefighters. 

The purpose of this book is to present a concise history of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers military occupational specialty 21M, Firefighter. With this object in mind, it addresses several audiences.

• First are the young soldiers who may be unfamiliar with the historical underpinnings of their MOS. For them, the evolution of the MOS' past reveals insights into its future and provides them with knowledge and pride of the past.
• The second audience is the scholarly community of historians. For these professionals, the work serves as a tool for further analysis of this small unknown MOS within the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
• The third audience consists of those who served in the MOS or its precursors, as well as other members of the firefighting industry and the public at large. For this group, the book endeavors to detail the history of this low-density MOS which represents a small section of the Corps of Engineers.

This book belongs to those firefighters, past, present and future. Above all it belongs to those American soldier/firefighters who have given their all.

The book, Army Fire Fighting: A Historical Perspective , is available in Hard or Soft Cover from AuthorHouse. Or you can order online from your favorite bookseller by using the following ISBN numbers:

978-1-4685-2369-0 (HC ISBN)

978-1-4685-2370-6 (SC ISBN)

978-1-4685-2368-3 (ebook ISBN)

I invite anyone with pictures or information on army firefighting they would like to share, please contact the author at allen.ward@armyfirefighter.com

Free Codes and Standards

State codes, standards, and regulations should be free and accessible to all.  Carl Malamud, creator law.resource.org ,has taken action on this belief, and provides .pdf files of all state building and fire codes free of charge.

Here are a few general codes and standards that they have available:

• International Building Code (IBC) 2012
• International Fire Code (IFC) 2009
• NFPA 1, 2006 ed.
• NFPA 101, 2006 ed.

Visit the site for more codes and standards and state adopted editions.