Combustible

Often, the longer you are with an organization, the more your responsibilities increase. Get enough responsibility and this means you are now carrying a personal and work phone. And you’re required to be available by phone, text, and email 24/7, which basically means your spouse and family are also available. This episode with our wives covers a lot of ground. We get their opinions on whether we s...

When we recently opened up the podcast to questions from our listeners, we never suspected that we would receive such a good question from a listener Samuel’s age. We can’t be positive, but we think he’s officially our youngest listener.

Do you consider yourself a glass half-full or half-empty person? What would others say about you? In this episode we discuss the nature of optimism versus pessimism. We debate whether the fire service is an inherently optimistic occupation. Or is a pessimistic view of the world an unavoidable by-product of the line of work we do and the suffering we see? Can you be optimistic and still face the re...

For this episode, Mike Chester calls in with a question for the group. Chester asked, “What do you tell a good, and I mean good, Fireman/EMT who is so jaded with the departmental politics that it affects their passion for the job?” We all probably know someone on the job who fits that description, and each of the group has a suggestion for Chester on how to approach this particular problem. (In ke...

For this episode, Captain Rick Meyers (Ret.) calls in with a question for the group. Rick was actually one of our first guests back when we started the podcast, and that episode (Episode 004) is very worth a listen. Rick’s question was: “What departments have tool assignments and riding positions in their policies and procedures?” We tackle that question and give it some heavy consideration, as we...

This episode wasn’t intended to be an episode, but sometimes we have private discussions and the “record” button gets pushed. This was the conversation that followed our previous episode, “What Makes A Good Firefighter.” When we ended that episode, we couldn’t stop talking about the subject. If you haven’t listened to that episode yet, we suggest you start there. Where in the previous episode we d...

It seems like a pretty simple question. If you were to ask the public what makes a good firefighter, they probably wouldn’t hesitate to tell you. But asking a group of firefighters is quite a bit more problematic. On this episode, we explore what each of us thinks a good firefighter is. We get Lt. Danny Dwyer’s perspective and debate whether you can teach someone to be courageous. Then things get...

We’ve recently started asking weekly fill-in-the-blank questions on our Facebook page, and the first question generated a lot of great responses. In this episode we talk about our listener responses to the question, “It all comes down to _____.” Sitting in for Hatch is one of those listeners, Payton Owens, who helps us discuss and theorize about what our listeners meant.

Fast Tracking…Lateral Transfer…Whatever you want to call it…The idea of bringing persons into your organization who are already trained (and possibly experienced) can be pretty enticing. It eliminates the insecurity of putting someone through a lengthy academy (which you have no guarantee they will graduate.) It’s vastly cheaper than spending $50,000 per recruit to hire and certify a firefighter (...

Most of us probably have someone that we call a “mentor,” but that’s a really vague label for something that most of us probably haven’t thought enough about. If someone else considers you a mentor, are you living up to that person’s expectations of that relationship? Are you even aware that they consider you a mentor? And are you really mentoring, or are you coaching? For this episode, we use a T...

Some of us had never really considered that some of our listeners might not be firefighters, up until one of those listeners asked us to talk about the reality of fighting fire vs. what shows up on television and film. In this episode, the crew goes over what they think about some of the better-known firefighting films and discusses how those films might negatively affect the non-firefighting publ...

How well do you know the person above you in the chain of command? How about the person below you? When your buddy got promoted, did you think he changed? In this episode, we discuss how close you want to be with the people you work with in the department. It’s a sweet spot that is ridiculously hard to find, especially if you promote and end up supervising some of those people you are really close...

We’ve joked that this was possibly the most dangerous podcast we’ve ever recorded. Turning the microphones on and encouraging our wives to turn the filters off was a little bit of a risk, since we didn’t know what they would say, but it’s a risk we’re really glad we took. Our wives, Shannon (Shane), Robin (Hatch), Nicole (Pabel), and Paula (Bill) tackle how they’ve dealt with us, our careers, and...

Our Mulligan Series continues with Shane’s tale of regret about an apartment fire that probably should have gone a little better. But like all of our mulligans, we let bad early decisions, shortcuts when we know better, and our own egos get in the way of doing a great job. It happens to the best of us. What also happens to the best of us is that we learn from our mistakes and become better firefig...

16 minutes doesn't sound like a long time, unless you're pinned under a collapse, unable to move, and running out of air. In that situation, every second becomes an eternity. And there were 960 of those agonizing seconds. In this episode, we sit down with Clark Glass and talk to him about his MAYDAY. A MAYDAY he was unable to declare for himself. A MAYDAY that he had absolutely no ability to self-...

In this follow-up episode, Hatch gives us a second mulligan involving his role as Safety Officer at a particularly aggressive fire. His first mulligan episode was about a weak leadership moment, centered around something he said that he shouldn't have. This mulligan is where Hatch wishes he had said more.

In this episode, Hatch surprises us a little when he reveals his mulligan. It wasn't exactly within the parameters we had established for the mulligan episodes, but that's kind of Hatch in a nutshell. And it ended up being a really interesting story that we think will seem pretty familiar to anyone that's been in a supervisory role before.

We've never heard of a station that doesn't have some form of house dues, and most of us have been at a station where someone questioned whether or not they should have to pay them. Some don't drink coffee. Some don't use salad dressing. Some watch television more than others. On this episode we use the issue of house dues as a starting point on a discussion about what it means to be part of a sta...

A listener wrote to us about some senior firefighters being disengaged with less experienced firefighters in the station and basically asked why won't they share their knowledge? Is it deliberate or just lazy? Are they holding their knowledge hostage as a means to retain power? Or are they simply at a point where they just don't care about the newer firefighters? D) All of the above.

Mistakes. We all make them. And if you've been a firefighter long enough you probably have a few fires in your mental rolodex that you wish you could go back in time and do again. There's a clinical term for it: regret. And while none of us have that ability to relive the past, we do have the ability to try and ensure that other firefighters don't make the same mistake we did. This episode feature...

In this episode, we explore the lessons that can be gleaned from Captain Tammie Jo Shults' radio traffic after her Boeing 737 lost an engine on April 17, 2018, killing one passenger and endangering the remaining 148 souls on board. Her radio traffic has been held up as an example of how to remain calm in truly desperate circumstances. So what lessons in that radio traffic are there for the firegro...

Moneyball is the story of the Oakland Athletics' 2002 season; a season in which General Manager Billy Beane used the unconventional theory of "Sabrmetrics" to field a competitive team. It's a compelling sports film filled with drama, humor, and suspenseful moments that was nominated for Best Picture. But we also think it's a really good movie for the fire service. On the surface, the team's situat...

It's a once in a career moment, and it actually happened twice on this one fire in DeKalb County GA. Two children, in desperation, were thrown from the third floor balcony into the arms of firefighters below. Only one of those catches was captured on a helmet cam, but the images were so striking they literally made it around the world. For this episode we sit down with Capt. Scott Stroup who made...

This outtake comes from our session with Cale Hamilton. Here we talk about the role of the fire service in active shooter or active threat situations.

This audio was compiled from the interviews we did with Frank Martinez. We assembled this to use in a class because of how profound Frank's words are. We are putting it out here for that very reason as well.