Firefighting Tactics Quotes

You need to plan the way a fire department plans: it cannot anticipate where the next fire will be, so it has to shape an energetic and efficient team that is capable of responding to the unanticipated as well as to any ordinary event.

I decline utterly to be impartial as between the fire brigade and the fire.

I'm fascinated by fire. When I was four, I wore an American fireman's hat all the time, and I still have one in my office today. Glasgow used to be called 'Tinderbox City;' there were always fires, people getting killed.

I'm a medevac pilot. I have spent time suppressing wildfires and things like that. And as a combat pilot, I tend to find the biggest bucket of water I can find and put it on the biggest fire I can find, right?

The closest fires were near enough for us to hear the crackling flames and the yells of firemen. Little fires grew into big ones even as we watched. Big ones died down under the firemen's valor only to break out again later.

Firefighters are indispensable foot soldiers here at home.

When you fight fires for a few seasons, you know what to expect. Your heart doesn't race as much as it did.

If the house is on fire, and the fireman shows up, you don't question his color or credentials. You don't send him back to the firehouse and say, 'Send somebody else.'

With better gear, firefighters no longer surround and drown a fire - they go in.

Five and forty steps the sky will burn. Fire approaching the large new city. Instantly a great thin flame will leap, when someone will want to test the Normans.

My father once told me of a trick question he used in a college class on forest fire control. If there was a fire coming from a certain direction and wind was coming from another, what was the best thing to do? The right answer was, "Run like hell and pray for rain," but few students ever got it. So allow yourself the freedom of knowing there are times to bail out, quit, run, leave the struggle, and have more time for joy.

I'm developing some new kinds of robotic firefighting vehicles to help with the massive forest fires we're dealing with in the West.