The Erie County Fire Wire website has quickly become a valuable and popular resource among with local firefighters
June 08, 2010 09:43 AM
By Joseph Popiolkowski
The Buffalo News
ERIE, N.Y. — 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 Cheektowaga man, said he wants first responders to use his site as a training tool to help them prepare for the inevitable fire and medical calls.
“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.’ ”
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 Cheektowaga firefighter.
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 Amherst. “The next day or hours after, we’re able to use that for training and for the critiques we do after all our major incidents.”
Buttino said he treats them as media by giving their staff the same access afforded to traditional news organizations.
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 Buffalo firefighters. Vanderlaan said he counted one of them — Lt. Charles “Chip” McCarthy — among his friends.
He said he debated for hours whether to post the audio and ultimately did but cut it off before McCarthy’s “mayday” call for help. He says he still can’t listen to it.
Demand for the sites’ coverage has gone national and international given the Internet’s global reach. A fire chief in Alaska asked Vanderlaan for permission to use dispatch audio made the night Flight 3407 crashed in Clarence, killing 50. Firefighters serving overseas in the U.S. military find out what’s going on in their home companies by checking the Fire Wire, which Vanderlaan modeled off Monroe County’s.
Vanderlaan, an East Rochester native, works for an emergency enclosures company and said he uses ad revenue from his site to buy unlimited bandwidth and other upgrades. Donations from users helped replace a broken computer. He said his wife, Barbara, and 8-year-old son are “100 percent supportive” of the project even though he spends four to eight hours a day on it.
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.
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