Hi everyone!

I'm a Paramedic in Maryland and the majority of the state is switching to the 24/72 hour schedule. Currently, my county does 24/72 starting at 0600. I've been contemplating trying to see if management would allow shifts to start at 1800 instead of 0600. **NOTE: My county is paid EMS ONLY. Fire side is still volunteer based.**

What are y'alls thoughts on starting in at 1800 for a 24 instead of the 0600? What departments do you know of that do reverse 24 hour shifts?

Feel free to comment anything!! If you know of any articles involving fatigue from working 24 hour shifts, please also add a link!!

ANYTHING helps!!!

Thanks!!

My first husband was abused both physically and psychologically by my now former father in law and teacher. Growing up we both had terrific neighbors and people in our community supported us, encouragement,love, peaceful existence in our respective neighborhoods was abundant in those times. We were and will always be childhood sweethearts and best friends but in recent years I discovered that no contact is best for both of them due to their respective lines of work. One is a police officer and former baseball player and the other is a elderly pastoral clergy member. Tough line of work. I want to know how to bridge the gap in the estrangement relationship for them both without my feeling triangulated,manipulated,narcissistically abused physically mentally emotionally financially and discarded...for one cannot go to the father unless through the son. So where does this wife stand in the picture? Your advice help is appreciated. Thank you.

Hey all! Wondering: What are the odds that, in a big city, the police will respond to a call about chest pain? EMTs showed up when I called the other day, but was police a possibility? My partner got very upset that I called 911 instead of a non-emergency number, and I'm wondering if that could possibly be the reason (she is black, we live in America).

Good morning,

Yesterday around 2pm I got a call about someone who collapsed on our property line. Being the EHS tech, I rushed over with my partner and then proceeded to help with compressions. He soon got picked up in an ambulance and transported to a hospital. While the police and EMTs did everything I could see the correct way, the man did not look like he was in good shape. My question is, how do I find out if this man lived or died? This would give us all at our company who witnessed it some closer.

is it common for emergency responders to suffer from PTSD? If so why don't we talk about it?

I am having a serious situation with a dangerous person who has a history of assault with a deadly weapon and has an open carry permit. I am afraid I and possibly my partner will be shot and/or stabbed by him. Can anyone recommend a medical kid and resources so I can learn how to properly use the supplies so neither of us die if we get shot or stabbed?

Emergency Communications as a Service (ECaaS) by Carbyne enables partners to dramatically enhance your existing platform capabilities by adding video, voice, messaging and real time location with just a few lines of code. Applications like Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) and other mission critical system can benefit from enhanced situational awareness and multi-channel communication for better incident outcomes.

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So I've always wondered why the sirens that are on firehouses are so incredibly loud? The trucks I can understand. But here in Pittsburgh PA there's tons of firehouses and almost every single one has a really loud tornado siren type thing they set off every time they head out to respond but those things can be heard for litterally miles round.

No, this isnt for COVID. Well, sort of. Just, thank you for what you do everyday. Keeping your community safe and healthy.

What are some use cases for augmented reality glasses in wildland firefighting scenarios that could potentially reduce response time and increase remote collaboration?

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/real-plan-just-fantasy-five-characteristics-documents-illis/

In a previous post, I spoke briefly about fantasy documents a term coined by Lee Clarke of Rutgers. In this post, I wanted to dive a little deeper into this concept. There are, I think, five characteristics[1] of a fantasy document as described by Clarke.

Characteristics of Fantasy Documents:

1. A fantasy document tells the reader a story rather than describing reality[2]
2. A fantasy document plans by simile[3]
3. A fantasy document calls for actions which have never been done successfully and/or are not seriously prepared for operationally[4]
4. A fantasy document (tries to) protect a system or organization from criticism and scrutiny[5]
5. A fantasy document never admits a risk is unassessable or uncontrollable, rather asserts that every risk is not only understood but controlled[6]

Fantasy documents follow a story-like structure. They read like a script for everyone to follow, cleanly denoting timelines, designating actions to be taken, communication lines to be established, supplies to be requisitioned, and actions to be taken. In all reality, a true plan at scale would have to work something like a choose your own adventure novel; except it would fill bookcases upon bookcases trying to account for every any eventuality or combination of events. These plans would swell to the size of the reality they inhabit, like Borges’ unconscionable maps, making them exact, but functionally useless.

Fantasy documents don’t take that multi-path procedural tact. Instead, they lay out a narrative. ‘In the case of [x], we will do [y], within [h] hours we will do [z], within [d] days we will do [a]. Himself a perpetuator of his own fantasy documents, nuclear strategist Herman Khan mocked early nuclear war plans of the US. He said in On Thermonuclear War that the Army’s plans to, immediately after a nuclear exchange, begin embarking state-side units to sail overseas and fight a land war with the enemy, were patently absurd.

Khan, likely lightly, observed that in the event of general nuclear war what was left of domestic military formations would be immediately engaged in reconstruction & keeping domestic order, they would not be embarking to fight a land war in Europe. But the story of sneak attack followed by an extended land & sea battle is a story policymakers and civilians alike were familiar with.

In service of the story, fantasy documents plan by simile. [x] event which we’ve previously dealt with is like [y] event which we’re trying to plan for. Nuclear war is like conventional war but with bigger bombs. A big oil spill is like a little oil spill[7], we just need more response vessels. The evacuation of Long Island during a nuclear reactor meltdown is like the daily Long Island – NYC commute. Responding to a radiological emergency is like responding to a fire[8]. They often presume that a small emergency response will linearly scale to a large one.

These similes often lead to fantasy documents specifying actions to be taken which, would be impossible or nearly impossible to undertake, and are never seriously prepared for operationally. One clear example is civil defense plans in America. One of the plot points in the stories told by civil defense planners was the evacuation of urban areas if the government believed nuclear war was imminent. This would, planners thought, serve two purposes, first to get civilians out of harm's way and second to put the United States on more secure footing to fight a win a nuclear war.

Never mind that the total evacuation of New York is something that had never been done before. Never mind that the millions of evacuees could be easily seen and then targeted by bombers. Simply envision for a moment the logistical challenges of moving the entire population of New York City out of New York City. Then the challenges of housing them somewhere far enough from Manhattan to be safe from a nuclear attack. This alone would stretch the resources of the government to the breaking point. Now imagine doing that simultaneously with the 10 largest American metro areas under a condition of imminent nuclear war. It simply strains credulity that urban evacuation could have ever been considered a serious policy, but it nonetheless was.

Khan, a physicist by training, was frustrated nearly to the point of rage over what he saw as unrealistic and ineffectual civil & military planning in the early cold war. In one famous incident during a meeting in the Pentagon, Khan slammed the table saying in extreme frustration “Gentlemen, you do not have a war plan. You have a Wargasm!”[9] referring to the military’s doctrine at the time of massive retaliation. But by looking at the plans in Clarke’s framing as fantasy documents instead of Khan’s framing as ‘plans which should guide operations,’ they begin to make more sense.

The actual function of a fantasy document is often not to plan for anything, but rather, in part, to shield an organizations or institution from criticism. Oil spill containment plans assure the public & environmental groups that the oil company is in fact prepared to respond to, contain, and resolve even a massive spill. Civil defense plans assure the public that their government is ready and able to protect them in the case of a nuclear war. The story that nuclear war plans tell is that the government or the military stands ready an able to not only fight, but win a nuclear war.

As Clarke details at length, the United States government claimed to be able to protect 80% of the American population in the event of nuclear war, a number which, as near as could be determined, had no basis in reality[10]. It was stated in a single report and then repeated as fact for years.

Fantasy documents never admit an inability to control risk. The reality was, most likely, that the potential damage from a nuclear exchange was completely unbounded, and there was little to nothing the United States government could do to control that risk other than trying to prevent nuclear war to begin with through deterrence. The risks involved in a nuclear exchange were unassessable and uncontrollable.

The reality was, that in the event of a 200,000 barrel oil spill neither the oil company nor the government would have the ability to contain the oil or prevent ecological damage. The very act of shipping oil by supertanker had created an uncontrollable risk. How could planners admit that to themselves let alone the public at large? A fantasy document wouldn’t be fantasy if it didn’t purport the ability to control the uncontrollable.

Now that we have a good background on what a fantasy document is, next up we’ll talk about some uses of fantasy documents and why writing them may not be as bad as it seems.

Notes:

• [1] I should emphasize these are drawn from my reading Clarke’s work but this is not a set of criteria he explicitly lays out anywhere in his book. I have tried to include robust page references so that a reader can follow where I’m drawing from.
• [2] Clarke, Lee. Mission Improbable: Using Fantasy Document to Tame Disaster. 16
• [3] Clarke. 74
• [4] Clarke. 39; Clarke p.78
• [5] Clarke. 41
• [6] Clarke. 142
• [7] Clarke. 78
• [8] Clarke. 89
• [9] Kaplan, Fred. The Wizards of Armageddon. 222-223
• [10] Clarke. 35-38