It’s easy to be provincial when you live on the West Coast. All of our sun, the mountains, the ocean… Indianapolis may not be a likely destination for the typical world traveler. In fact, Indy is one of the hippest cities we visit: great food, INSANE jazz, fun clubs and great drinks. Indy pride spills over as hipster kids and upwardly mobile millenials command the city, or at least the Mass Ave portion of the city. The best part? Wait for it…

Guest post by Eric Tomlinson. Eric is a Deputy Chief with the Kent Regional Fire Authority in Washington State

Much has been said about the brotherhood of the American Fire Service. Put firefighters from neighboring departments together at a conference, watering hole, or other neutral ground and we will buy each other beverages and compare our Maltese tattoos until the wee hours, celebrating our brotherhood of public service. For some reason though, when we broach the subject of change to our practices or operations with our mutual aid neighbors, we suddenly become very tribal and defensive. After all, most of us were hired by a Fire Chief who told us that

I grew up as a child of the 70s.  No, I was not wearing bell bottoms or syncing my dance moves to John Travolta (I did that when disco got cool again in the 90s).  By the time I had been born in 1971, humans had stepped onto another celestial body a few times over.  We had NASA fever in our household and Walter Cronkite narrated the saga; his voice hanging in the ether on hot summer nights.  As a kid, I gazed at the stars and the moon with a keen sense of wonder.  Madly leafing through NASA picture books, I dreamed of the future.

We’re a long way from the black and white images of cops with their feet up on the desk and firemen playing cribbage in Fire Station USA. Since 9/11 and the dawn of the iPad, emergency services is becoming increasingly armed with the latest and most intuitive technological enhancements from the consumer space to track, measure, and analyze.