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wood

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by wood

  1. Someone here said HEB would beat them there, right? Which one of y'all was that.
  2. I haven't paid attention to AFD inside stuff since I left 4 years ago, and I have purposefully stayed out of the loop. I retired at least in part to get away from that. But yeah, I think they already had some problem with the way he was doing things. They even alluded to previous problems in their vote announcement, whatever they may be. What are those problems? No idea. Are there valid issues? Maybe, but I dunno what they are. I'm not here defending Chief Baker or saying he's a saint. I'm also not looking to throw him under the bus or have him be used as a scapegoat by the lunatics out there like Charlie fucking Kirk. We just don't know much, and the complaint seems very strange to me given what has to be balanced in decisions to send specialized equipment and personnel (that you don't have much of to begin with) 100 miles away when you're probably going to need it in short order - to tell people to leave. The only ones I know of who we know tried to get messages to the locals were the NWS, and for whatever reason the locals apparently weren't seeing them. If it's on anyone to try to get Kerrville/Kerr County's shit together 2 days before the storm, it's the State, who Abbott says was already out there. Not Austin. But even if we were to send people out there to get the word out (rather than just trying to communicate with them from here to take the storm seriously and go alert the public on their own), that still could be done with any number of people that aren't specialized personnel who would likely be needed here along with their apparatus, and it likely wouldn't be just AFD people making the trip. I can't make it make sense to send people out there for the purpose of warning the locals, be they officials or the public. IMHO this is probably over something else that was denied. Maybe they have a point. I dunno. I don't like not jumping into the fray to help, 'cause that's what we do. But I also understand that throughout my career the chiefs often had to make tough, sometimes unpopular decisions, that we didn't always understand or have enough info to make an informed judgement over. I need a lot more info before I can pin this on the chief as some sort of terrible disservice.
  3. They just asked questions. I didn't see any conclusion-jumping. I'm also unsure why you'd need to send anyone to tell people to get out, much less specialized personnel, when you could just communicate and coordinate with officials there to do the same thing without our people going there.
  4. Not sure there is much under the hat.
  5. So, re: Chief Baker ... I'm not gonna pretend to know what all went down in regard to his decision to not send swiftwater rescue resources to to Kerrville. And I don't particularly care to find out. But I can assure you it's not the slam dunk negligence that some including Charlie Kirk or some of my brothers and/or sisters at the AFL-CIO Local are making it out to be. I have my doubts it was even the wrong decision. For the folks saying Chief Baker was wrong to keep AFD resources here rather than ~100 miles away with severe weather incoming, you have to remember that Austin has its own severe flooding issues, and our closer neighbors also rely on us to help them out. It's not simple. Not ever. We don't have unlimited swiftwater rescue resources. Far from it. We have a handful of boats, and they get worked overtime in every heavy rain event in Austin and the surrounding area. And every time one of those boats leaves the station, the crew and the truck go with it. Thus, they are out of service for typical responses and leave a hole in the city's coverage. Had Kerrville, Kerr County, and the State lived up to their responsibilites, the disaster could have been averted, or at the very minimum, the human toll could have been drastically reduced. Period. Trying to put this on a Fire Chief close to 2 hours away is some astronomically stupid bullshit, esp in light of the incredible idiocy that went down out in Kerr County. But, of course, I understand that as a good little Nazi, that's his job, so that's what that POS is gonna do.
  6. That hat's prolly what got him elected.
  7. Yeah they're def loaded af. What I was getting at there was that Albon is also Thai, so they might see considerable marketing value in reacquiring him and marketing accordingly. But maybe not, as that market is probably not a huge concern for them.
  8. He could even take a 1 year sabbatical a la Fernando and go do other shit, race other series, etc.
  9. Doggett responds to Hot Wheels' idiotic comments comparing the flood response to a football game ... https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/09/politics/video/lloyd-doggett-repsonds-greg-abbott-texas-flood-football-digvid
  10. Yeah if I had to bet, he'll re-up with the Bulls for 1 year.
  11. My view of George is that he's quick, and that's about it. His racecraft is a running joke, even in the F1 movie. You gotta be quick, but ya gotta be a lot more than that. He's not even top 6 in the current field imho.
  12. Aren't they Thai? I'm sure y'all can see where I'm going with this.
  13. LOL at least one of these doesn't belong in a sentence about elite drivers.
  14. That was my first thought as well, and Martin thinks that's it, too.
  15. Having talked to numerous small-town or county dispatchers calling us to request assistance in the middle of the night, my bet is that understaffing is the answer to that reporter's question. Numerous times I've been on the phone with these dispatchers when shit was blowing up on their end, and they were the only ones there, or maybe there were two of them. And sometimes the only person there is brand new to the job.
  16. https://bsky.app/profile/callmenash.bsky.social/post/3ltiaz4nhd222
  17. Sadly, in effect, it is. Morons get one vote, just like anyone else.
  18. Who/what is Ryan Hall? That's the thing. It doesn't appear to have been executed at all, except by the counselors who weren't given, well, any lead time at all. Exactly.
  19. I think the important lesson from the Station fire and Mystic having a plan approved just 2 days before this disaster (among others) is this: Having a 'plan' on paper to show an inspector is very different from actually practicing a plan so that it can be effectively implemented when the shit hits the fan, and having supervisors monitor situations closely enough to know when the plan should be executed. Yep.
  20. h/t @speed817 in the Leavitt thread.
  21. Also, re: this bit from theUSA Today article: I don't know why that figure surprises anyone. I said from the beginning that they would soon find out that there were a large number of people missing that they didn't even know were missing yet. With so many people being there for July 4 and the water coming in the middle of the night, it was always going to be in the hundreds. Worst case scenario.
  22. That little motherfucker seems to have missed the fact that we got the everloving shit kicked out of us. We fucking LOST. BADLY. And he's acting like we were a good team and won the fucking game. "We got this"? No, we don't fucking 'got' anything, you stupid idiotic little shitstain.
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