Random notes: February 2, 2015.

I feel an obligation to say something about the Super Bowl. Here it is:

I was burned out on the game and the commercials by Sunday of last week. I had no intent to watch any of it; I was just so tired and frustrated and fed up with the whole thing.

I ended up catching a few minutes of it when I went out for dinner. What I caught was the less exciting part, but I did see a couple of commercials that puzzled me:

I’ve been sort of following the Brooklyn warehouse fire story, and I got to wondering. Seven alarms is a lot. But what’s the largest alarm response ever in the history of the NYFD? And how many alarms was September 11th?

I haven’t found a good answer to either of those questions. According to this Slate article, there has been at least one ten alarm fire. (I defend my decision to link to Slate by noting that this is a very old article.)

As for the second question, that’s also not easy to answer, but for different reasons. According to New York magazine:

In a standard single-alarm fire, a total of six units—three engines, two ladders, and a battalion chief—respond. A five-alarm fire brings 44 units. September 11 was on the order of five five-alarm responses, involving more than 214 FDNY units—112 engines, 58 ladder trucks, five rescue companies, seven squad companies, four marine units, dozens of chiefs, and numerous command, communication, and support units.

But:

Off-duty firefighters and entire companies “self-dispatched” to the site without orders. So did numerous ambulances and police officers. The area around the Trade Center quickly became a “parking lot,” in the words of one police radio report, making it impossible for many units to report to the alarm boxes and staging areas they were assigned to. Of the 214 or so units dispatched, only 117 of them activated a “10-84” status signal that let dispatchers know they’d arrived. The details of what many companies did at the scene remain hazy; the operations of twenty companies that were wiped out are simply unknown.

2 Responses to “Random notes: February 2, 2015.”

  1. Borepatch says:

    The Nissan commercial didn’t include the last verse of the song. I got choked up when I watched it, and choked up again when I saw it as an Internet ad (yes, I watched it all the way through).

    Without that last verse, it focuses on the Dad’s sacrifice, not the kid’s. That’s pretty powerful stuff, and very unusual to see these days.

  2. Borepatch says:

    And the Nationwide ad is already being mocked on the ‘net:

    https://imgur.com/gallery/HoNSrhO