OCFD--the best in the USA!

The firemen - Bless their hearts. What a terrible situation for the family to come home to. Thank God that no one was in the home.

A huge Thank You to our fire fighters. With the wind blowing out of the North East, the smoke and flames were driven towards the neighboring homes. It was clear there was a situation when the police evacuated the neighborhood. Our fire men manged to keep the damage contained to the engulfed home. They did a great job. Many thanks.

My grandmother and I were driving north on the parkway and we saw a line of black smoke. We were wondering what was happening. Thank you to our OUTSTANDING fire fighters!!

Firefighters and police did a great job. But why the heck were spectators allowed to stand all over the dunes at the end of the street. I live around the corner and our beach is already almost totally gone. I'm sure the police didn't have the manpower to keep them off. But I wish people weren't so ignorant.

Great job OCFD

Well Done OCFD and Others!

Thankful the fire didn't spread with the strong winds and especially thankful no one was injured or worse.

Get a quote from Councilman Hartzell or Ping who have said nobody cares how fast they respond to a fire, it's all about emergeny medical calls.

Hartzell and Ping are quickly becoming irrelevant and forgotten. Their constant negativity is getting old. I am sure they will turn a fabulous effort by the fire department into a negative.

Hard to have any respect for a wanna be politician who drives around in an electric car with his name plastered on the side. Ya gotta just laugh at a guy who needs attention that badly.

So sorry for their loss! One of the Grandest old homes in our town! Thanks firefighters for your work on preventing the fire to spread.

Hartzell and Ping proposed saving taxpayer dollars by restructuring the fire department. Their focus was on EMTs that serve in a dual role as firefighters and are paid as fire fighters (even when responding as EMTs). I don’t think anyone was proposing anything that would adversely impact the ability of the fire department to respond to a fire. The assumption seems to be made that the result would have been worse had they succeeded in saving taxpayer dollars. I don’t know that assumption is true. Would the result have been any different had the operational budget of the fire department been reduced below $6 mill a year? Would those firefighters have responded any less quickly had they been making less than $100,000 a year?

It’s good that we have a competent fire department, especially in a town where there’s often little space between adjacent structures. But that doesn’t speak to the question as to whether we’re over paying for those services. We (the taxpayers) seem to pay thru the nose for everything here. Can we sustain that level of spending? How much more, as a taxpayer, can you pay? There are ongoing pension and benefit costs associated with every fireman we employ. We’re not just paying for this generation, but the preceding generations of fire fighters. With a two percent levy cap we have to be careful we don’t back ourselves into a corner. If we can save money without significantly reducing the level of service, we need to do it.

Kudos on your post, Eric
It's disheartening how people will use a tragedy to launch personal attacks on people, misrepresenting the facts as they go. Your post is spot on !

Actually eric they were NOT proposing to have emts operate in dual roles to save money. They were proposing replacing retiring firefighters(who are in dual roles) with people who are soley emts. Therefore lowering the staffing level of full time firefighters. Which in a situation like the one above could have adversely affected the outcome of this incident. So would the lower number of firefighters have tried any less if the operational budget was 6 million lower? No! But what is needed in a FIRE is........FIREFIGHTERS! Putting our firemen in a dangerous situation with less resources to handle it is negligence! When will people see that we not only need fire fighters to protect us but fire fighters also need fire fighters to protect eachother!!! Dont you believe they deserve the safety net as well? GREAT! Im glad you agree! Good job OCFD!!! Hows that for spot on!!

People we need to stop thinking with a fat wallet and start thinking with our heads. A question was raised at the candidate debate about taxes in Ocean City … are they high, low, or about where they should be? All of the candidates talked about the great services we have, and how great a place Ocean City is, but only two candidates analyzed the question and gave a considered response. Ed Price commented that Ocean City has an older population living on a fixed income, and that the tax burden is forcing some of our senior citizens off the island. Pete Guinosso commented that we pay our civil servants 40% more than they are paid in Philly. Yes we have great services but at what cost? I commented elsewhere that if I had the money maybe I’d step up and buy a new Land Rover, but I’m not going to pay 40% more for it. The car I have gets me where I need to go. It would be nice if all of us could make 6 figures with a full pension and lifetime benefits, but can the taxpayers afford it?

You suprise me yet again! I didnt misunderstand what i read, you misunderstood what you wrote. But again they wanted to replace retiring fire fighters with emts therefore reducing fire fighter levels. No matter how you word it it still equals less fire fighters!! As for your comment about their pay, yeah certain individuals would have you believe they are over paid and maybe you are one of them, however how were the numbers formulated?? Oh thats right they used figures on a w-2 and not the contracted salaries!! Whats the big deal right? They made that amount for the year right! WRONG AGAIN! What a information a w2 lacks is how many hours they worked to get that amount! Our guys work 56 hours in a week. They work longer than most departments in the state including philadelphia!!! By about ten hours per week!!! ADDITIONALY, philly fire fighters are not required to be emts!! So how can we compare our guys to others when their qualifications and hours worked are not the same!!

How can you make the comparison that the jobs are identical when what they do is not?  how can you say they are overpaid but forget the fact that our fd are working 0ver 20% more hours per week!!  Should we simply ignore that because all we care to see is the side you believe in Eric!! APPLES AND ORANGES! So maybe you eric, should  do your own research rather than counting on the likes of individuals trying to win their own political battles and check on the info yourself!  Not one other council member has stood up and looked into the marginal errors that were delivered at that time.  None of them!   When making group based decisions one of the best ways to get the fair outcome is to have the person who believes the most in the cause (lowering fire fighter staffing with emts) to work on the flip side of the equation( why we need to keep our current level of staffing).

 I learned this in about 8th grade at my great public school in OCEAN CITY.  This forces people to see the reality and not just what they want!  But with all the council members you heard silence and little to no rebuttle on every comment made that was in favor of this!  GREAT MONEY SAVING IDEA!  We may have and older city population.. But what keeps people in OC is the the services they get for their taxes!  Great city, clean area ,SAFETY, LOW TAXES!   Great schooling and many many others!  People compare our city as a pinnacle of what a city should be!  We are the best and our people and public servants deserve the best!  If they work more they deserve more!  If you saw that fire in person i gurantee the last thought in your head would have been "these guys make to much"!  Their pay is in line with their job. A job that may one day leave their family without them FOREVER!   Remember one thing. Everyday a fire fighter goes to work he writes a blank check to the people they serve and protect payable in the amount up to and including his own life!!!!  THINK ABOUT IT PEOPLE!

The better question here, which no one has addressed, is why are there so many pictures of this? This is devastating for the home owners and the patch is exploiting it by posting 29 photos. If I were the home owner's I'd be pretty pissed and would hope there's legal action that can take place- hopefully enabling them to purchase a new 2.6 mil home.

Great job by our public safety personnel. Could have been much worse.

Congratulations OCFD!

@Dr. Rabb, this is a 2.6 million dollar VACATION home. I'm sure the owners will be just fine. Also, why does everything so quickly turn to litigation? Aren't medical doctors being run out of this state due to high malpractice insurance and litigation? The patch is posting pictures, just like newspapers have done for many years. How many people have already driven by to get a look at what has happened?

I seriously doubt that is the real Dr Rabb.

Ha Eric Sauder my man! I am a firefighter ( not in Ocean City) volunteer and paid. I hate the terms firefighter or fire department. I would like it to be renamed The Emegency Services Department. You come off as an intelligent guy except when you start talking about public safety. Let me get back to my "Emergency Services department" soap box. Who shows up when your house is on fire? Who responds to the beach for water rescues when lifeguards are off duty? Who comes with the jaws of life when your trapped in your car? When your water heater shorts out and your house flooded who shows up to pump out the water? When there is a medical emergency who gets called? When members of fairness in taxes cant remember their bike lock combination who cuts off for them? Fire department and firefighter limits the skills that these guys possess. High angle rescue infrastructure and building collapses? do guys with just an EMT certification show up? The answer is no you have highly trained personnel in everyone of these aspects.

The Ocean City Fire Department didn't come to your house with brass knuckles and billy clubs and demand your tax dollars. Men and women you voted in to political office negotiated with said department and felt that at the time that this what they deserve. You want to talk about a waste of tax dollars lets look at the high school how many residents of Ocean City attend the high opposed to non residents. Also what about the developers and builders who built tri plex after tri plex which sell for a million a floor and made property taxes sky rocket. The same people who drove year round families out by the hundreds because Packing 800,000 people in Ocean City 3 months a year because it lined their pockets. These are blue collar locals who get slammed day after day for doing their job and the come to work regardless and keep doing it. What I saw yesterday was friends and neighbors in fire turnout gear doing everything they could to save an entire block putting themselves in serious danger to help the members of their community. Shame on you for discrediting their efforts. If you need the $35 dollars a year you save by cutting jobs in our community then let me know I'll write you a check.

Does anyone remember a similar fire on the same weekend in 1989-1990? The house was the one on the corner of Garden's Road and Beach Road. Actually I think there were 2 houses that were ablaze. Odd.

Enough of the political crap and everything else! Everyone should be thanking the fire department for arriving on the scene recognizing the home was A loss and quickly set up and saved so many other homes! This could of ended up being A whole block going down with the winds and so on! What A great professional job in an emergency situation! Lets give kudos to these men what an excellent job! Leave the politics out of it and focus on knowing we are safe with these men in our great town!!! Thank you to all who responded and saved A disaster!

Insurance would never replace the love and character if someone's home! Does anyone know how old the house was. I know it was rehabbed.

OCFD great Job! As always!
Eric, buy a clue pal. You get paid less than emergency service personell because you pump gas. Emergency service personell are highly trained and skilled, and perform dangerous life saving work.
The Hartzell (with Ping in tow as usual) proposal was a farce. It was replacing firefighters with emt's, and had no practical merit. It was grandstanding for a mayoral run in 2014. Eric, unfortunately you attend council meetings and get just enough information to sound informed. That is different than knowledgable. It has the worth of all of your conspiracy theories (remember the crazy "organization" letter?).
Please get a hobby other than posting uninformed nonsense on patch.

Purdy I responded to your comment but deleted it since I found I was only repeating myself. I worked as a professional for many years and I understand the difference between pumping gas and working in a highly skilled job (thanks anyway). The point is we don't all make 6 figures and some of us are on fixed incomes, and its a struggle to pay those salaries (and associated pension and benefit costs). I did attend those meetings and if using EMT's as firefighters was proposed I missed it. That's not what I heard. As to whether it was grandstanding or there was an ulterior motive, that's immaterial to me. I took the proposal at face value. You say it didn't have much merit and maybe you're right, but I do think it was good to open a dialogue. The fact remains that we pay our civil service employees 40% more than surrounding communities and those communities seem to be getting by. We need to do what we can to control costs. Revenue is largely capped and we're about to incurr expense from major capital expenditures coming down the pike.

As for the organization letter, of all the letters I submitted it received the most favorable response, so I guess its not just me? You might think it was "crazy" but a lot of other people related to it. As for "uninformed nonsense" I can accept that as your opinion, much as you ascribed your interpretation to Hartzell's motives.

I could probably use a hobby but staying abreast of what's happening here takes up most of my time :)

Duffer- do I know you?

Why does everyone attack one another on this site? Just read the story and move on- no one cares about your opinions. If you want to thank the fire department, then go to a station and thank them. Don't do it on the patch.

I do know the real Dr Raab and two of his brothers. Known them for many years. Don't know who the person calling himself Dr Raab on Patch really is though.

The fire department did an amazing job.

http://www.coachoutletonlinebfd.com/ Coach Outlet Online
http://www.guccibeltstb.com/ Gucci Belt
http://www.coachoutletonlineste.com/ Coach Outlet Store Online
http://www.cocoachoutletonline.org/ Coacsh Outlet Online
http://www.coachoutletonlinetsy.net/ Coach Online Outlet