The Fire Chief’s Blog

Listen in as Mayor Phil Young, center, calls Eden Prairie’s newest fire station into service.

Pictured with Mayor Young are some of the firefighters assigned to the new station. They are, from left to right, Firefighter Aaron Casper, Firefighter Roger Anderson, Firefighter Rod Uting, Captain Tony Liddell and Lieutenant Patrick Maynard. Click photo to enlarge.

Click play to listen. 31 seconds.

Last week was the last of the Open Houses for the new Fire Station, number 4. The Open House ran from 10:00 - Noon last Saturday and was a success with over 500 people in attendance. We are lucky in this city to have such great support from the citizens we serve.

A lot of kids were there with their parents, we always like to interact with the kids and talk to them about fire safe behaviors they can adopt in their young lives. The hope is that a new generation of safe adults will emerge as a result of of our efforts and help to curb the senseless loss of life and property that continues to plague our society in general. Almost all fires are caused by the same old issues: Un-attended cooking, improperly discarded smoking materials and fireplace ashes. The compounding factor is always non-working smoke and CO detectors. Seemingly easy things to address and yet……

Pictured below are a couple of Eden Prairie kids who wanted their picture taken with some firefighters. In the picture, from left to right are: Lieutenant Jeremy Hoehn, Four year old Linnea Askegaard, Six year old Lars Askegaard and Firefighter Casey Hoeschen. Perhaps when they get older, Linnea and Lars will become volunteer firefighters in Eden Prairie and pass along safety tips to the next generation of Eden Prairie kids.

On Saturday March 10th, Dave Thompson, Don Jensen, Rick Thompson, and Jeffrey Dezenski from Eden Prairie Fire, and a firefighter from St. Michael climbed the 33 South Sixth Street Tower in downtown Minneapolis to benefit the American Lung Association. They climbed 48 floors (1,152) steps in full turn out gear including air-packs and accomplished this as a team in just under 17 minutes.

Firefighter Dave Thompson sent me this account of the days accomplishments: “I thought you’d be interested that four of us from Station 3 did the American Lung Association’s 33 South Sixth Street Tower climb this past Saturday (March 10^th) in downtown Minneapolis. We climbed 48 floors (1,152 steps) in full gear while wearing air packs. Only one other department wore full gear and air packs (but they had small air cylinders!). We did this with less than a week’s notice and zero specific training for this event. While in the lobby we met up with a fire fighter from St. Michael who thought others from his department would be joining him. I asked him to join us and he was glad to be a part of our team (you’ll notice he is in our photos). The other department in full gear had news cameras following them, they climbed the IDS Tower a month earlier, and they were all under the age of 25. We started our climb after them, and it was interesting that around the 15^th floor we ran into one of their guys alone in the stairwell obviously extremely tired. We asked him several times if he was OK and he assured us he was, so we went ahead. They intentionally start everyone 30 seconds apart, but by the 35^th floor we (Eden Prairie) were all climbing together as a team. Working as a team was critical for us, I for one felt like I was struggling early on so it was invaluable that we stayed together. At the 47^th floor we ran into the other fire fighter team waiting for their last team member (who, as you’ll see from the finish times, didn’t get up there until 5 minutes later on his own). I’m proud of the way we stuck together as a team, encouraged each other, and pulled it out. In the back of all of our minds was also the fact that fire fighters in the World Trade Center climbed twice as far while carrying tools, and then had to go do their job. When we arrived at the top the other participants cheered and clapped for these crazy fire fighters who did this in gear and packs. For a bunch of older guys (our average age was almost 40), we did all right, finishing in less than 17 minutes total (faster than many people who did this in shorts and t-shirts). Eddy (from St. Michael) has already been sending me email about participating in a water-ball contest later this year. We’ll see about that and will definitely be back next year for the stair climb. I’ll forward this to Chief 4 tomorrow as I don’t have his email address at the moment.”

Event info/results here: http://www.mrsnv.com/evt/home.jsp?id=1334. Note: any fire fighters faster than us weren’t in gear and packs

-Dave Thompson

FF186

Last night was the dedication ceremony and “Ribbon Cutting” for Eden Prairie’s newest Fire Station. Instead of the traditional ribbon cutting, Pat Brink from the Communications Department decided that having a truck assigned to the new station driving through the “ribbon” would be a fun new twist. I have to admit that I had serious doubts and could envision a lot of scenarios where things got broken…..

Much to my delight, everything went off without a hitch! Pat I never should have doubted your engineering skills and your creativity. Thanks for a great idea, flawlessly executed!

Tonight, as mentioned in my earlier blog today, we are having a major snow event. Our primarily volunteer firefighting staff will be spending the overnight hours staffing each of our three fire stations. Along with our firefighters will be three snow plow drivers, and their trucks. The last time we did this was during the snow storm that landed on Halloween night in 1991.

Below is a picture of one of the plow trucks stationed at Fire Station #1, and also a picture of the three drivers spending the night at each station. From left to right are: Gary Peters (Public Works), Mike Schmidt(Public Works)and Tom Hermann(Parks Maintenance). This effort is another shining example of the spirit of teamwork that exits within our city and makes it the great place it is…

Thank you to everyone who is able to help out!

Okay, so I’m not a weather expert but with two significant snow storms in the past 7 days, the moisture content has to be on the mend in the local area. This is great news for everyone who boats, farms or otherwise likes lots of water where it belongs, when it belongs there. Today is a little extreme on the snow meter as a dumping of over 14 inches is predicted.

Pictured along with the falling snow shot is Assistant Fire Chief Steve Koering, hard at work. Steve is busy getting the stand-by crew plans finalized for tonight. Normally our stations are not staffed, but with the bad weather we will have crews on-hand in each of our three fire stations until after the morning rush hour tomorrow comes to a successful conclusion.

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Snow falling at 1″ per hour Assistant Fire Chief, Steve Koering