Latest news with #firechief
CBC
4 days ago
- Climate
- CBC
Aircraft and fire retardant needed for wildfires, says Sask. fire chief
Candle Lake fire chief Jim Arnold explains what his firefighters are seeing on the front lines and calls for much-needed equipment from the province to help fight the fires.
The Independent
25-05-2025
- General
- The Independent
Mea Culpa: ‘He gave it 1,188 per cent'
We sometimes use percentages greater than 100, but they do not generally help the reader, unless we are quoting a footballer who says he 'gave it 110 per cent'. We had this headline on Thursday: 'Popular London outdoor swimming spot sees 1,188 per cent increase in bacteria.' We might as well have said 'a huge increase' because no one knows how much 1,188 per cent is. Having thought about it and checked my arithmetic, it is more than a twelvefold increase. We could have said that. In the text of the report, we said that the actual increase in E coli in the Serpentine Lido in Hyde Park, London, was '1,188.8 per cent'. Giving a test-sample figure to five significant figures is an example of another common bamboozlement, that of spurious accuracy. The actual increase was from a count of 45 to 580: rendering that to the nearest tenth of one per cent serves no useful purpose. Go forth and multiply: Another headline on Thursday said: 'Multiple people dead after private jet crashes in San Diego neighbourhood.' I know this is how some Americans speak, and one of them was quoted in the article – the assistant fire chief said there had been 'a direct hit to multiple homes' – but British people would usually say 'several people' if, as in this case, they didn't know how many exactly but knew that it was more than one. Singularly inadequate: We confused our singulars and plurals in Wednesday's editorial: 'It is some months since anything resembling an adequate supply of food and medicines were provided to keep blameless Palestinian civilians alive, and famine, as well as war and pestilence, now stalks the Holy Land in grim biblical fashion.' Thanks to Sue Alexander for reminding us that 'an adequate supply' is a singular noun, so it should be 'was provided'. She suggested a more elegant solution, though, which would be to replace 'an adequate supply of' with 'enough'. Safety break: In a sports report, we said: 'Lewis Hamilton was fortuitous in various safety car interludes but still carried off a typically composed performance on track.' As Roger Thetford pointed out, we meant 'fortunate', meaning lucky. Or we could have said his escapes from the 'safety car interludes' were fortuitous, meaning happening by lucky chance. Gold suspension: We reported an unusual crime story thus: 'A man involved in the plot to steal an 18-carat gold toilet, valued at £4.75m, from Blenheim Palace has avoided prison after being given a suspended sentence.' This implies that there were two events: first, the would-be thief was given a suspended sentence, and later he avoided prison. We could have said 'when he was given'. Murder mystery: Our report of the sale of Abraham Lincoln's gloves began: 'The blood-stained leather gloves that were in Lincoln's pocket the night he was assassinated have been sold for $1.52m at a controversial auction.' That makes it seem as if they were blood-stained before he was killed; we could have said they were the gloves he had when he was assassinated, and come to the pocket later. Semi-mythical star: We quoted Elton John on the subject of protecting copyright material from large language models: 'The government are just being absolute losers and I'm very angry.' We described him as 'the legendary singer'. As John Harrison pointed out, this is like calling him famous: either you have heard of him or not; if not, being told that everyone else has heard of him implies that you are ignorant. As for legendary, though, that strictly means a historical but unverified figure; here it just means 'great'. I mean, I think he was great in the 1970s, but that is my opinion, not a news story. Did you know he had only two solo No 1 hits in the UK: 'Sacrifice' in 1990, and the Diana version of 'Candle in the Wind' in 1997?
CBC
23-05-2025
- General
- CBC
Using some fire pits, open air burning without a permit in Windsor will now land you a $570 fine
If a neighbour reports your backyard fire in Windsor this summer, be prepared to pay a hefty fine that covers the cost of the fire department's response. City council approved a new $570.50 fine for people starting fires on their property that don't fit within the city's bylaw. That's up from the $150 fine in 2024 — and Windsor's fire chief says they're not giving out any more warnings when they arrive on scene. "We've spent a number of months with stern warnings and that has now ceased," said fire chief James Waffle. "Everybody is getting billed." The bylaw does not allow wood burning fires in pits or steel drums unless it is approved by the fire department through the permit process. Approved outdoor cooking appliances include barbecues, pizza ovens and small fire pits that are propane or natural gas fired. Telling firefighters your fire is for cooking, or keeping a grill nearby, won't get you out of a fine. "We've seen a number of things over years, you know, rocks and tinfoil pretending to be baked potatoes, right? That's not an approved cooking appliance," Waffle said. The increased fine comes as the fire department handles higher annual call volumes for all types of events across the city. Waffle said the department doesn't drive around the city looking for backyard fires. "But if it comes in by complaint or through our dispatch system, we go." Responses are costly, pull away from other work May is typically the busiest time of the year for this type of call. Firefighters responded to 369 open burn calls in 2024, bucking a downward trend that started in 2020. Waffle said he did not yet have numbers about fines issued over the Victoria Day long weekend. The fine is set to match the Ontario Ministry of Transportation's fire department response rate, which is adjusted annually. These open air burn calls cost Windsor just over $200,000 in 2024, using last years figures. Waffle said another area of concern is what people are burning when they show up. "They're burning rubbish, plastics, metals, wood, grass clippings," said Waffle. He said one of the issues with these types of calls is how often it pulls firefighters away from the station. "It's a significant strain on our resources, particularly if and when a fire comes in that's at another location, you have a crew that's tied up," he said. These types of preventative bylaws are found at major urban centres throughout Ontario because a campfire in a backyard can be risky, said the chief. He said a backyard fire spreading and becoming a house fire happens on occasion, and that requires an even bigger response. "We're responding with more crews, unfortunately your bill gets even bigger," he said. The fire department doesn't receive many applications for open burn fire permits. There's been 11 since the permit system was adopted in 2023 and the fire department has only approved two.
The Guardian
23-05-2025
- The Guardian
Maga's ‘DEI hire' taunt is an age-old grievance reignited. And it's spreading
Wayne Brown was a trailblazer, a man who made his own small piece of history by becoming Britain's first black fire chief. He worked his way up as a young firefighter, rising through the ranks, serving the public through dark times including the 2005 London terror attacks and the Grenfell fire. But in January of last year, at the age of 54, he took his own life, leaving a note that read: 'I can't do this any more.' An inquest heard Brown had become increasingly distressed after being bombarded for years with hostile social media posts, complaints to his employer, freedom of information inquiries and emails from an anonymous account that seemed to be mounting a campaign against him. Days before he died, Brown had learned he would be formally investigated for claiming on his CV to have an MBA, which in truth he had started but never finished. Whether these were vexatious complaints – what Brown's female deputy called 'constant harassment from multiple individuals' – or perfectly legitimate whistleblowing was not for the coroner to decide, and nor was it her job to investigate why a senior black officer seemingly attracted so many of them. Yet there was something in the picture friends and family painted of a man in an already stressful job, carrying an extra burden that will at the very least be familiar to other 'firsts' in their field: the uncomfortable feeling that the world is just waiting for you to fall flat on your face, the relentless sniping that you're not up to it, and the whispers that you're what the very online British right is starting to call a 'DEI hire'. The acronym is a giveaway: DEI is the American version of what Brits more often call EDI, or equality diversity and inclusion, ground zero of Donald Trump's war on woke. The president's bizarre and seemingly evidence-free attempt to blame a fatal mid-air collision between a helicopter and a plane in Washington this January on DEI hiring policies was disturbing enough, but it was the speed with which some Americans embraced the idea that was genuinely chilling. An incoherent ball of online rage took shape, alighting horribly swiftly on Captain Rebecca Lobach, the female army helicopter pilot killed in the crash. Her grieving family and friends were forced on to the defensive, pointing out that she'd been in the top 20% of graduating cadets, information seemingly not required of the male crew on board. But to the DEI warriors, her qualifications didn't seem to matter. She was a woman, wasn't she? So obviously she must have been the weak link. Weeks later, Trump fired the black air force general Charles Q Brown Jr, identified by his defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, as a champion of 'woke shit' in the military, along with Admiral Lisa Franchetti (who was the first woman to lead the US navy) and three other senior Pentagon figures. Gen Brown was a former fighter pilot with 40 years of distinguished service to his country, while Hegseth is a former Fox News pundit who never rose above the rank of major in the Army National Guard, and whose nomination as defence secretary prompted reports that he had left two jobs in veterans' organisations after allegations of financial mismanagement, aggressive drunkenness and sexist behaviour, which Hegseth has repeatedly denied. 'Was it because of his skin colour? Or his skill? We'll never know, but always doubt,' Hegseth once wrote of Gen Brown. Such doubts might seem unfair, Hegseth conceded, but 'since he has made the race card one of his biggest calling cards, it doesn't really much matter'. To be scorned as a DEI hire, a liability on the job who should never have been allowed to rise this high, you don't have to be proven incompetent or even to have been hired through any formal diversity scheme. Just having an enviable job, while not being a straight white man, is grounds for suspicion – especially if you have the audacity to champion lifting others up the ladder. Britain is not America, or at least not yet. We are still the country where it was 'just not that big a deal' (as Rishi Sunak put it) in the end to have a British Asian prime minister, and where Nigel Farage's ominous suggestion that diversity officers in newly Reform-led councils should start looking for new jobs elicited sharp warnings from unions that in this country people can't be fired at will for political reasons. (They could also have added that diversity officers aren't some suspicious lefty affectation but mostly people employed to ensure councils meet their legal obligations under the Equality Act, as some Reform councillors may be about to discover.) But the playground taunt of 'DEI hire' nonetheless feeds an age-old grievance, a lurking sense that someone has a job that could have been yours. It creates a climate where what was fast becoming unsayable in polite company can, once again, be said with confidence. And perhaps most corrosively of all, it feeds the nagging voice of doubt already lurking inside the most outwardly confident of people. Successful women, and increasingly often successful men from non-traditional backgrounds, sometimes complain of 'impostor syndrome', or the irrational fear that any minute now someone is going to rumble you as a fraud. You don't belong; you shouldn't be here; you'll get found out, less for doing wrong than for intrinsically being it. Though everyone makes mistakes, impostor syndrome makes them loom larger and more shamefully inside your head than they should. For politicians and others in the public eye, social media long ago turned what were once snarky whispers behind your back into an incessant and very public barrage of sexist or racist abuse that chips away at the confidence of even the most rhino-skinned. You can complain to platform moderators if you like, but a fat lot of good it will generally do you – which leaves a choice between leaving or learning to ignore it, a choice nobody would consider acceptable if the same insults were driving minorities out of a pub. The race equality thinktank British Future argues, in a submission to the Commons equality select committee's new inquiry into community cohesion, that platforms whose reporting mechanisms do not ensure that female and minority users enjoy the same service as everyone else could be in breach of the Equality Act 2010. At the very least, there's arguably a case for the Equality and Human Rights Commission to make its presence felt. But the real risk, perhaps, is of the same playground taunts and knee-jerk prejudices spilling back out into real life conversations. Britain is not America, not yet. But only if we make the effort to keep it that way. Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@ or jo@ In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Public provides input on search for new Bernalillo County Fire and Rescue chief
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (KRQE) – After nearly seven years, Bernalillo County Fire Rescue is looking for its next chief, and Monday night, the public discussed what they're looking for in leadership. The nationwide search comes after acting Chief Greg Perez announced his departure earlier this year. City of Albuquerque updates rules for fiber internet construction projects Monday night, the county received feedback from residents and former firefighters about the qualities, priorities, and leadership skills they would like to see in the next chief. 'If you hire somebody from the outside, that's not within the department. You're potentially blocking those younger firefighters that have aspirations to be chief someday,' said a speaker. Perez will continue to serve as acting fire chief until a replacement is selected. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
