40th Anniversary: Moving the Needle, the Last 40 and the Next 40

Forty years of sharing ideas, sharing information and discussing the issues that matter most.

Keeping firefighters safe, Firehouse Magazine has been a leader in this zero-fail mission. We will never truly know how many lives have been saved, how many injuries have been prevented or how many near misses we have avoided because of the information that has been shared with the fire service by all the contributors of Firehouse Magazine over the last 40 years. Being part of such a legacy is a tremendous honor but it is also a big responsibility. The information that is shared has the potential to impact a person’s life and profession. Since day one, Firehouse has understand this and took great care to ensure that the information presented will benefit the fire service as a whole, push us out of our comfort zones, challenge us, better us and, most importantly, keep us safe.

I truly believe that training is the foundation for every successful operation and that our training must be diverse, both in methodology and subject. Given my passionate and unwavering stance on training, I am humbled and grateful that I have a platform to share my successes, my teachable moments and even some of my failures with my brother and sister firefighters in an attempt to challenge the status quo, engage people in deep thought and reflection, to purposefully take people out of their comfort zone and inspire conversation and debate, all to promote firefighter safety and moving the service forward.

The platform I have been given is not lost upon me; I use this opportunity to achieve two things—keep firefighters safe and enable people to achieve success without experiencing the same trials and tribulations that I have encountered over the last two decades. I am a firm believer that we honor those that have gone before us, especially those who have paid the ultimate price, by never settling. We have an obligation to ourselves, to our brothers and sisters, to our department, to our community, to our history and to our families to never settle on yesterday’s success. We must strive to get better and learn from the lessons that have been given to us over the last 40 years.

To Firehouse Magazine, to all the contributors over the last 40 years, to all the people behind the scenes who have helped push the fire service forward, I say THANK YOU for all you have done in the service of others. Here is to the next 40 years of keeping the fire service safe and pushing forward no matter the obstacle.

Stay low, stay safe and train everyday!