Time to Regroup
A message from Larry Davis & Roy Hoffman

Anyone who has ever developed an incident action plan for managing an incident knows that a plan is nothing more than a common basis for change. A refrigerator magnet we saw recently puts it another way: We plan, God laughs! When we created RFI, we had a lot of ideas that became part of our plan to establish the Rural Firefighting Institute and to provide the rural fire service with a wide variety of educational resources and other services. A major factor in the success of RFI was the work done by Ed McCormack, the Executive Director of RFI. Ed’s sudden passing not only affected us personally, but also forced us to regroup and rethink the future of RFI and what offerings we should provide.

As you look at the revamped RFI website, you will notice a number of changes. First off, we have eliminated the News Briefs column and replaced it with Other Training Opportunities. We felt that there are a number of websites (i.e. Firehouse.com) that can be visited for the latest news, and that it was more important to list or link to other training opportunities of interest to rural firefighters.
The major difference is a change in focus based on comments and questions from rural firefighters with whom we have talked. As a result of these discussions and a variety of emails, we have eliminated the Happenings of Interest to Rural Firefighters and replaced it with the RFI Information Relay.

RFI endorses the use of the confidential National Fire Fighter Near-Miss Reporting System and encourages its use by all Rural Emergency Responders.