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SPECIAL REPORT
News, Major Incidents, Hot Topics |
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Web Sites Monitor Fire News
to help Train Emergency Personnel
By Joseph Popiolkowski – Buffalo
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Every morning at 5 a.m., Mike
Vanderlaan wakes up to check the overnight recordings from the police and fire
scanner that feed into two computers in a corner of his living room. If a
fire, motor vehicle accident or other serious incident occurred overnight, he
posts the dispatch audio and photos and video from contributors at the scene
to his Web site. His site, called Erie County Fire Wire, started as a hobby,
but since its launch in February 2008, it has quickly become a valuable and
popular resource among with the area's firefighters, police and other
emergency personnel, both volunteer and professional. It's one of several sites, including
the newer Erie County Fire
Blotter, that employ relatively easy-to-use software and technology to
serve the county's 94 volunteer fire departments, which count between 5,000
and 6,000 members among their ranks. Vanderlaan, a stocky, 37-year-old "It's not to embarrass anybody.
It's not to downgrade anybody," Vanderlaan said. "It's there for
them to learn — to help them." His site's most useful feature is the
recorded radio transmissions, which are heavy in firefighter lingo and often
paint an organized but tense picture. "A lot of times, you get so much
confusion on the radio," he said. "Hopefully they can go on there
and say, "All right, we don't want to do this in our company.'"
Vanderlaan explains how he captures dispatch audio from his police and fire
scanner: The Fire Blotter, meanwhile, puts
more of a news spin on its posts with in-depth stories and interviews from
the scene. "We wanted to put more of a face to those incidents instead
of just the 20 or 30 seconds you might see on TV — if it makes it to TV at
all," said Jim Herr II, a video journalist who started the site in
October 2009 with his father, Jim, a retired Vanderlaan enlisted two friends — Don
Murtha and Shawn McMahon — to shoot photos. In their trucks, branded with
vinyl letters and the Fire Wire's logo (designed by McMahon), they've become
a common — even welcome — sight on the periphery of fire scenes. "Most
of our structure fires, they've been at," said John P. Buttino, chief of
Eggertsville Hose Company in the Town of And like all organizations that
gather news and information, Vanderlaan said he has had to wrestle with
ethics and develop his own policy when it comes to sensitive privacy issues.
He said he protects patients and bystanders by blocking out faces and license
plates in photos and editing out personal information from the audio.
"You're not going to see me chasing Rural/Metro down the street if
they're doing CPR on a baby," he said. Jon Kemp, Main Transit Fire
Department chief, said he considers the Fire Wire a convenient way to access
public information, but he is leery of how much of it gets published.
"Where's the line?" Kemp asks. "If he's policing it himself,
then I give him credit." The tragedies he so often documents
became personal for Vanderlaan in August 2009, when a deli fire killed two Demand for the sites' coverage has
gone national and international given the Internet's global reach. A fire
chief in Vanderlaan, an The sites aren't geared only toward
the departments' emergency purposes but also toward their community outreach
efforts by spotlighting summer parades, open houses and fundraising. "We
travel all the way around the county ... we start meeting these people and
you form friendships with them," Vanderlaan said. |