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by MICHAEL SCHOLL
A top congressional Republican in town for this week's GOP convention took some time yesterday to try out a new videoconferencing system that will link Staten Island borough headquarters with other Fire Department facilities across the city.
Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.) joined Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta at a demonstration of the new system held in the FDNY's Manhattan borough headquarters on Duane Street in Lower Manhattan.
The system is designed to improve the department's training programs by making it easier and less costly for its far-flung personnel to participate in training sessions and classes.
Because the system allows video and audio from those classes to be beamed to remote locations, firefighters no longer have to take time from their regular work schedules to venture to the Fire Academy on Randall's Island in the Bronx to attend training classes in person.
The system is also interactive, so firefighters watching a video feed at a remote location are able to communicate with instructors -- and with other firefighters who may be viewing the videoconference from other locations.
Within the past few weeks, FDNY installed videoconferencing equipment at its Staten Island borough headquarters at Sea View Hospital and at four other locations throughout the city. Those locations include the Manhattan borough headquarters, the FDNY's citywide headquarters at MetroTech Center in Brooklyn, the Fire Academy and the Emergency Medical Service Academy at Fort Totten in Queens.
There also are plans to install the equipment at additional locations as soon as the necessary funding becomes available.
The Fire Department eventually hopes to place videoconferencing equipment in every firehouse citywide.
The equipment already in place was paid for with a $750,000 federal grant that Weldon helped to secure.
"The challenge for us today is to build on our success," said Weldon, a former volunteer firefighter who is the founder and co-chairman of the Congressional Fire Services Caucus, a group of House members and Senators who fight for increased funding for local fire departments.
Yesterday Weldon said additional federal funding was needed to pay for technology that can reduce the on-the-job death rate for U.S. firefighters. Currently, about 100 American firefighters are killed in the line of duty each year.
"Our job is to keep the visibility of these people [firefighters] at the forefront of America," Weldon said. "We will never be satisfied until that loss of life in the fire service is reduced significantly from the 100 firefighters that we lose each year."
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