by Fred R. LaPoint, Fire Chief Paramedic | Sep 26, 2026 | Behind The Alarm
In May, the council the President appointed to reexamine the Federal Emergency Management Agency delivered its final report. Near the top is a sentence every household in America ought to read twice. Disaster response, the council wrote, should be “locally executed,...
by Fred R. LaPoint, Fire Chief Paramedic | Sep 19, 2026 | Behind The Alarm
A Nebraska city turned away a licensed EMT because he was homeschooled, then rewrote its job posting to fit the decision. In a fire service that can’t fill its seats, every chief should study what happened in Fremont.Andrew Coates is 22 years old. He volunteers with...
by Fred R. LaPoint, Fire Chief Paramedic | Sep 18, 2026 | Behind The Alarm
CASE STUDY · A TEACHABLE MOMENTPull up a chair. Today’s case study doesn’t come from a fireground, and nobody died. That’s exactly why it belongs in front of a class.If you’ve sat through a post-incident analysis, you know how they tend to go. Somebody draws the...
by Fred R. LaPoint, Fire Chief Paramedic | Sep 12, 2026 | Behind The Alarm
The last patient care report one of my firefighters filed did not stay in our station.It went out over the wire to a server I have never seen, in a building I could not find on a map, administered by employees of a company I have never spoken to, protected by security...
by Fred R. LaPoint, Fire Chief Paramedic | Sep 11, 2026 | Behind The Alarm
Fred R. LaPoint, Fire Chief ParamedicI was on duty on September 11, 2001.I was twenty-two years into my career with the City of Manistee Fire Department, and it was the longest shift of my life. There were a lot of reasons for that, but the one that sat heaviest was...
by Fred R. LaPoint, Fire Chief Paramedic | Sep 8, 2026 | Behind The Alarm
Retired FDNY Lieutenant Gerard M. Reilly of Ladder 22 died on September 3, 2026. He had given the department twenty-one years. What killed him was a World Trade Center-related illness, contracted at a fire scene he was ordered to and never really left.He died eight...
by Fred R. LaPoint, Fire Chief Paramedic | Aug 22, 2026 | Behind The Alarm
There is a rule on the fireground that every officer learns early and never unlearns: the people who fight the fire and the people who set the conditions for it have to belong to the same conversation.On a structure fire, that means the inspector who walked the...
by Fred R. LaPoint, Fire Chief Paramedic | Aug 20, 2026 | Behind The Alarm
A friend of mine flies a Chinook on fires. He posted a clip the other day from the Aspen Acres Fire in southern Colorado — working out of Lake Isabel, two thousand gallons on the line, ninety-five hundred feet. His caption was five words long: needed a bigger bucket,...
by Fred R. LaPoint, Fire Chief Paramedic | Aug 12, 2026 | Behind The Alarm
On Monday night, a post started moving through the weather corners of social media warning of a major NOAA outage. Radar data delayed. Alerts arriving forty minutes late, some of them showing up after the warning they described had already expired. Do not rely on your...
by Fred R. LaPoint, Fire Chief Paramedic | Aug 11, 2026 | Behind The Alarm
BEHIND THE ALARMFred R. LaPoint | Fire Chief & Paramedic, Stronach Township Fire DepartmentA viral theory says wildland firefighters let fires burn because big fires pay better. Its own statistics come from a state law written to argue the opposite — and they...
