MVFD’s Station #2 is in bad shape

February 15th, 2007 · · General, Mount Vernon No comments - Tags: ,

First off, the city is aware of the issues at the station from my information and IS at some stage of getting these matters corrected. Secondly, the statements made below are based on information gathered from confidential sources. I just think that it’s garbage that the firemen in charge of protecting our lives and possibly dying while doing so are treated to conditions so deplorable and arguably unsafe.

To begin with, the roof had holes. A local company was hired to do the repair. The repairs were made as best they could be for the moment. Now, there are several more issues that still need to be addressed at this location by the city. I have photos, and will publish them as I can add them.

The list isn’t extremely long that I have, but it is full of rather important issues:

1. The support beam that runs between the garage doors at the front of the building comes at least an inch from making contact with the concrete.

I-Beam_Distance

I-Beam_Macro

2. There are many points just below the roof that leak/have leaked, including just above the sleeping quarters.

Cropped_Tiles

3. The drain in the concrete to the front of the building appears to be unstable. While one can’t be sure without digging, it seems to be caving-in. I believe that I understood correctly one of the ladder trucks had to be moved to another station due to fear of the pad not handling they weight if it was pulled out onto the pad.

Sinking_Cropped

4. Water pools to the front of the building in the bay instead of flowing down the drains as it should. This is likely related to the shifting of the building, but still needs to be addressed.

5. The front of the building appears to be pulling away from the rear based on cracks in the building that continue to grow over time.

I will say that the conditions are pretty bad. My observations and information are not from engineers or construction experts, but just from my experience. Like I said at the beginning of this post, the city did hire a local company to make the repairs, and they did the emergency repairs that they could. I was told they are examining the issues above in detail and will make suggestions for repairs once the evaluation is done. That is great, and good job making sure everything is done correctly.

I am making this post so that taxpayers can see something in the community that I believe should be fixed well and quickly. Is this how protectors of our homes and lives should be treated? I don’t think so and I hope you don’t either.

RSS – You should use it

February 14th, 2007 · · General No comments - Tags:

Really Simple Syndication in case you didn’t know. Heck, I consider myself a geek and I don’t use it as much as I could. RSS is a great tool to track websites and blogs that you like without having to directly go there. The site produces a feed (like the latest scores on ESPN for example) that a RSS reader displays for you. This can range from article headlines, to brief summaries, to a full article. Subscribing to your favorite site feed is generally as easy as finding a little orange radio icon like you will see to the right of this page.

“How do I subscribe to these feeds”, you may ask. Well, thank you for asking. The easiest way of subscribing is by using your browser. For those of you using Firefox 2.x, if there is a feed available for a particular page you are browsing, the radio icon is probably on the right side of your address bar at the top of the browser.

By clicking on that orange icon Firefox will ask you how you would like to subscribe to the feed, offering multiple choices. I use the “Bookmarks Toolbar” option myself to have the feeds right at the top of my browser any time I want to check them.

I will give honorable mention to Internet Explorer 7 because it now has RSS capability as well. Unfortunately I don’t use IE, so I can’t say how easy it is to use their RSS features. If anyone wants to leave information in the comments, please do.

There are many, many services and even special programs that will track RSS feeds for you. As a matter of fact, there are so many that I will not even mention them here. Just go to Google and type in “RSS aggregator” for a vast amount of choices.

To summarize, RSS is a simple, neat way to track sites that you enjoy. When you use RSS you can pick through the posts and go to what sounds interesting, and keep track of when your sites update.

For more information, please visit Wikipedia and read the much better description they have on site.

Create traffic – several helpful hints

February 13th, 2007 · · General No comments - Tags:

How To Drive Traffic to Your Blog – The Advice of a 12 Year Old

This kid does a great job of suggesting many ways to improve traffic to your blog. I was pretty impressed with the information. Surprisingly, it’s up to date as well.

Father kills daughter

February 8th, 2007 · · General No comments - Tags:

While this guy will get his day in court, we can only hope that if the facts are true as presented in this article he will be receiving the death penalty.

CNN.com Article link

Ready to give DNA to the Feds?

February 5th, 2007 · · General No comments - Tags: ,

U.S. Set to Begin a Vast Expansion of DNA Sampling – New York Times

While I agree that there is a need to track criminals, especially in violent or sexual crimes, this seems to be very over-reaching. The government can now take DNA from essentially any person it wishes and lock it away in their databases.

I know this sounds Orwellian, but is mandatory sampling at traffic stops very far off? Also, who is to say that there won’t be trumped-up charges brought so that the FBI or whomever can obtain a sample of your DNA? Then you are faced with a long battle through the courts to get your information removed when the matter is resolved properly.

Again, I agree that the idea is great. What I question is whether the law could have been written to be more concise and narrow the scope under which it operates.

UPDATE: Here is another article on the same program. This one seems to be a little more involved and technical.