Phil Fire/Rescue: Fire Expo/Open House

Greetings everyone. This past Sunday down here, was our Fire Department open house/expo for the general public. Since we are such a small community down here, it is important for everyone to understand what we, as a Fire Department, do down here. What is weird is that the Fire Department down here is somewhat of a hybrid or combination of many other departments. Besides the Fire Prevention, Protection, Suppression, Rescue and Medical operations that most Fire Departments do down here, we also are the police force in some aspects. We have to enforce the noise violations and any suspicious activity we have to investigate. For example, a couple of drunk people decided to walk around the Ice Pier down here. We had to send one of our engines down to escort the people off the restricted ice pier for their own safety.

This sometimes negatively affects our image with the general public, because that is the burden of being an authority figure. Only a small handful of people down on the base see what we do on a daily basis. Mostly people who work at the airfield, and the medical staff have a very good understanding of what we do down here. But a majority of people don't really understand the need for a Fire Department down here.

So, in order to promote and remind many people of our positive aspects, we organized an open house in where people could see what we do on a daily basis. I helped with marketing of this event and did several other duties for the event. We ran serval Television spots, or ads on our scrolling information channel. I finally got to sort of use my Mass Comm degree, shout out to the best Mass Comm major at FPC and my home-boy Sammy Stolzar!!!

We also set up posters and of course advertised that we were making real chili. The chili I think was the biggest selling point. The firehouse down here is infamous for their chili recipie that one of our Leutenants has. It was fairly good, and you'd be surprised of the hoops we had to jump through to make it. Due to the horrible economy, they cut alot of programs down here...and our food has also suffered. One used to be able to order some ingredents from the kitchen, but now we have a very restricted menu in which to order. But thanks to us escorting a medivac to New Zealand, we were able to smuggle in some supplies and make said chili.

The activitys that we had open to the public were really cool. We used a smoke machine to smoke up the upstairs bunk rooms of our firehouse. Then turned out the lights and had people gear up and find the rescue dummy we hid up there. The whole bay got very smoky, as you can see from the image earlier. We also had a hose spraying relay, and a car cutting/hydraulic tools demonstration. I helped out in a couple of those events as well as did a hand tool demonstration.

All and All it was a pretty productive and rewarding open house. The head of the Nation Science Foundation down here came by and she really enjoyed it.