Firefighter Sims

This is my first attempt at making a Wordpress theme, with some help from my wife. I have been looking all over for something that resembled a firefighter theme, but could not find anything close or free. ecently my wife has been having a lot of problems with her website because she kept downloading free Wordpress templates only to find out that they did not work correctly. We finally decided to pay the $49 for Artisteer which is a software that lets you make your own templates. It is really easy to use. She made a couple the other day and asked me if I wanted to make some fire themes for my site. We started working on it together and when she put the kids to bed I worked on it myself. It was real easy to understand any did not take me long to make the template. The part that took the longest was finding picture that I wanted.

The header picture is an original picture of mine taken at Louis F. Garland Fire Academy at Goodfellow AFB in San Angelo, Texas. The photo was taken during Haz-Mat Instructor School and the exercise was pressurized container fires. I’m the really good looking one in the picture. I thought it looked really awesome so I am letting anyone who wants to use it, download it. I would appreciate it if you could leave my link in the footer.

You can download the .zip theme file here: intothefire.zip.

If you have trouble installing themes, here is the Wordpress Using Themes page.

I never really talk much about where I work on the blog, but I will give you a little clue. My wife and I went to the Annual Marine Corps Ball last night and had a great time. It was good because it made me get my patches up to date on my dress uniform. I did not make any arrangements to sit with anyone particular at dinner so we ended up at a table with a nice family who by chance was involved in the production of textile products that are fire resistant. In particular their company was working on a line of fire resistant firefighter T’s.

I thought this was pretty interesting and we talked about their product during dinner. My wife, always thinking, asked if they had a website and recommended I write about the product on the blog. This morning I checked out their website: Derma-Gard.com. The T-Shirts are priced well and come in a standard navy color. One of the key points of the shirt is the special Derma-Gard Safety Printing Technique which does not involve any plastic material so the lettering will not melt.

I found a copy of their video on Youtube that shows a burn test of the Derma-Gard T vs a regular cotton T.

I really love a lot of things. Two of them are old fire engines and trading patches. I met a firefighter the other day from the Wilson Fire Department in CT.  I did not have a chance to get a lot of information on the department and when I looked it up on the internet I did not find much either.  The interesting part about the department is that they have a functioning  1901 Amoskeag  steam engine.  I found a little bit of information from the Connecticut Historical Society and the Connecticut Fire Museum.



In the picture below: The new propeller, No. 4, extra size Amoskeag, known as the Pride of Hartford. It was the largest engine of its kind at the time. The photo was taken in front of the station at 60 Ann Street. At the throttle, Engineer John C. Moran; in rear, Assistant Engineer Charles F. Grundt; and at the wheel, Tillerman Warren A. Bingham. Photo by William G. Dudley, probably 1901.


The original image is here. at the Connecticut Historical Society website. According to the book Greater Hartford Firefighting (CT) (Images of America) the engine was retired in 1925 and later moved to the Wilson Department.

I am always browsing around the web looking at different fire simulations, because you know you can never train too much. I ending up on the StageIT web page the other day. They had a link to a news story about a Searcy, AR department that is using their Emergency Response Simulator and I attached the video below. The system looks like it lets you build lots of different exercises because you can select different scenarios as you go along. The one thing I thought was interesting was that according to the news clip you can take a digital photo of any building in your area and input it into the simulator for use in a simulation. The simulator comes pre-loaded with clip art images, commercial and residential photographs, fire, smoke animations and over 130 sound files. There is also an expansion pack if you need more smoke and fire effects. The base package with the instructor's license and manual is running $1499 right now with student licenses running $159. You can check their website for more information on this and other simulators the company has.