The fire service lost two legends last month. Ed McCormack and Tom Brennan both passed away in April. These greats lived up to a cardinal rule of the fire service which is to leave it a better place then you found it. Both certainly did all that and more and will be sadly missed. I'm just back from FDIC where the brothers and sisters of the Indianapolis Fire Department and IAFF Local 416 were the usual outstanding hosts. Like every year there were lots of excellent presentations and certainly much to learn and see. A very wide range of subjects were presented from legal issues, public education, fire prevention, fire codes and standards, hazardous materials, nearly any topic you want to think about. All good and worthy subjects no doubt but what are the real courses that should be attended which will really make a difference in saving firefighters lives? I attended a couple of excellent presentations that may do just that. As we all know stress is still the leading cause of firefighter fatalities year after year. Two fire departments; Indianapolis and Eugene, Oregon, are taking a novel approach by developing a workplace fitness evaluation that measures the real world physical ability of firefighters to do fire-ground tasks. These evaluations are being done in a non-competitive environment without the stigma of penalties for failing and providing remedial assistance and counseling to improve performance and ability. Indianapolis is once again leading the way in this arena in a model of exemplary labor-management cooperation A standard axiom of firefighting is that as the first hose line goes so goes the fire. Another way to put is that more lives are saved by the proper advancement, placement and operation of the first hose-line than by any other single tactic. If we put the fire out the biggest part of our problem goes away. Ray McCormack of FDNY and Jeff Shulpe of the Cleveland Fire Department made this point abundantly clear in their separate but complimentary presentations. Both have recent articles in Fire Engineering that deserve close attention and consideration. In Thursday morning's Big Room Session, David Dodson provided crystal clear information about reading smoke and the behavior of modern building fires. When we see the heavy black boiling smoke that we all recognize that precedes flashover we need to rename it to what it really is: "black-fire" If we consider it as black fire then we may become more responsive to the danger it signals. On Friday morning, Gary Van Pelt, also of FDNY, made a presentation on the important subject of May-Day communications. There is a lot of talk today about May-Day's but this class emphasized the need for training in actually calling a May-Day and regular drilling in calling a May-Day on the radios used on the fire-ground. For your own drills: quickly reach for the PASS alarm on your SCBA. With SCBA and a blacked out face-piece reach for your radio microphone and call a May-Day. Evaluate your muscle memory to reach your microphone and evaluate the voice clarity. A spectacular cockpit video of an Air Force pilot that has to eject when his plane hurtles toward the ground clearly demonstrates how quickly you need to know where your safety equipment is located and how it is used. As I mentioned in the beginning, there is a lot of quality training on many subjects available. But if you want to focus on the issues that are causing the greatest harm to our members consider the topics I've highlighted. Get yourself in shape and keep yourself in shape, improve your ability to get a line and adequate water on the fire, learn how modern fires behave and be ready to call for help in a clear and calm manner. If you can do this you'll probably stay alive to learn those other things. Stay safe!