Excerpts from the DailyHerald.com:
Elgin Fire Chief Dave Schmidt will leave Jan. 3 after 30 years with the department and start Jan. 6 as chief of the Carrboro Fire Department in North Carolina .
Schmidt became a lieutenant in 2000, captain in 2005, and assistant chief of operations in 2011.
He is particularly proud of the changes in technology he helped implement. When he started, he was teaching firefighters what a personal computer was and how to use it. Now all Elgin fire vehicles are equipped with mobile computers and Wi-Fi hot spots. Cardiac monitors, for example, can send reports wirelessly to paramedics’ tablets for importation into reports rather than having to print out long strips of paper that would be taped to a piece of copy paper.
He is also proud of his 15 years of work with the department’s academy, which trained firefighters for Elgin and other cities.
Asked for an example of how he learned from a bad call, Schmidt recalled the April 2001 mass shooting at JB’s Pub, in which a man shot 18 people, killing two of them. His ambulance was the second on the scene and ended up taking the shooter to a hospital for treatment.
thanks Ron
