Omaha Professional Fire Fighters Association, IAFF L385

Omaha Professional Fire Fighters Association, IAFF L385 Omaha Professional Fire Fighters, IAFF L385 is committed to providing excellence in safety for the citizens of Omaha and the fire fighters we represent.
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Omaha Professional Fire Fighters, IAFF L385 is the organization that represents the Omaha Fire Fighters for safety, wages, benefits and working conditions. The association is also a proud member of the International Association of Fire Fighters.

Happy Freedom Day - most commonly referred to as Juneteenth - celebrating the end of slavery in the United States!
06/19/2026

Happy Freedom Day - most commonly referred to as Juneteenth - celebrating the end of slavery in the United States!

06/19/2026

Let’s get into some science today from a question that was posed to us in a simple way by a kiddo recently – how does your siren work?

The question caught me off-guard because I know the basics of how our Federal Q sirens work, but not specifically, requiring me to dig into the issue a bit, and it’s interesting enough to share with all of you! So, when our lights are on, we have a button inside of our rig (commonly on both the captain’s and driver’s side so that either/or can operate it) that powers up our “Q-Siren.” This works like a fan inside of a container with vent holes in it. When the button is pushed, that fan spins, drawing air in from the front vents and hurling it back outwards. The expelled air is forced through a stationary part called a “stator,” which has specifically cut slots. As the “fan” blades pass the stationary stator’s slots, they “chop” the airflow, creating intense acoustic pressure waves.

What does this do? It physically vibrates the air and surrounding vehicles – “moving” rather than “pushing” sound, creating an alarm that is easier to hear inside of vehicles that are becoming more and more soundproof! Additionally, since the device is operated by a button/pedal, it gives us the ability to “wind up” the sound (make the fan spin faster) the longer we hold it down, creating that high-pitched “REEEEEEE” sound you’re likely familiar with. Then, when we let go of the button/pedal, that sound starts to “wind down” again slowly, allowing us to control the variance in the sirens tones! When we want the siren to stop quickly, we also have a “siren brake” button that slows the spinning blades quickly, allowing the sound to stop.

A fascinating explanation to a simple question asked by an extremely insightful kid!! Here’s a video allowing you to see the spinning blades a bit more clearly!!

Stay safe, Omaha, and happy Friday!!

Code save award!! This one is a pretty cool one, because it highlights a new process our members have been following for...
06/18/2026

Code save award!! This one is a pretty cool one, because it highlights a new process our members have been following for a little while now in partnership with our hospitals!

Engine 53 and Medic 52 on B Shift recently saved a woman from cardiac arrest (and for those unfamiliar with our protocols for “saving,” code save awards are only given when the patient is able to leave the hospital with no additional deficits and return to normal life) utilizing a pre-alert to the hospital’s ECMO team. ECMO stands for “Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation,” but in layman’s terms, the process brings oxygen throughout the body, bypassing the heart, to allow cardiologist’s and specialists to diagnose and correct any problems that may have originated with the heart that likely contributed to the cardiac arrest. Confused? Totally understandable – let’s break it down.

Let’s say your body is a car that needs to stay in motion, and the heart is its engine (it’s not a perfect metaphor, but it will help). When there’s a problem with the engine, the car stops, and if it can’t get going again chances are the car will not run ever again. CPR gets that car rolling, but only temporarily until that car can get to a mechanic (hospital) to quickly fix it. ECMO allows the hospital to fix that engine while the car continues to move, ensuring that when they restart that engine (which caused the problem in the first place), it will run smoothly rather than cause the same problem and stop that car. That’s ECMO.

It doesn’t work in every situation, but our medics have been trained to recognize the situations in which it DOES work and act fast – recognizing specific heart rhythms, giving specific medications, and transporting to one of our ECMO team facilities (UNMC and Bergan Mercy) FAST to give our patients the best chance at survival. Once again, this isn’t just us that makes this successful – it starts with our dispatchers, it starts with YOU doing hands-only CPR, it goes to our medics and EMTs, and then it goes to our hospital staff. Success only happens with teamwork between everyone.

Kudos to everyone involved in this code save – you are all making Omaha a safer place!! Stay safe, Omaha, and enjoy this absolutely gorgeous day!!

ASK A FIRE FIGHTER!Q: How do you wash your gear?A: Great question! Since our turnout gear is usually covered in the bypr...
06/17/2026

ASK A FIRE FIGHTER!

Q: How do you wash your gear?

A: Great question! Since our turnout gear is usually covered in the byproducts from a house fire – drywall dust, soot, etc. – it can’t be washed in a normal washing machine. Fortunately, our stations are equipped with special machines used specifically for washing turnout gear – extractors.

When we’re done at a house fire, we typically do a “gross decon” on our gear on scene (a fancy term for spraying our gear with a hose on a low pressure setting to get rid of the larger pieces of debris). Then, we bring the gear back to the station and “break it apart” – the gear includes both a softer inner-layer as well as a harder outer layer, which can be separated by hidden snaps/Velcro/zippers. We will then wash the inner layers and outer layers separately, and then hang our gear up to dry. In the meantime, we utilize our second set of gear so that if another fire comes in, we have gear ready to go. After the gear is dried (typically takes about a day – we will work with the “other” shift to get our gear dried and hung so it’s ready to go by our next shift day), we put it all back together, and we’re good to go!

For the inevitable question “What happens if you get another fire while your gear is drying?” in that scenario, we continue to utilize our gear until the first set is dry enough to swap out (and yes, putting on wet gear you’ve already sweated in AGAIN is like putting on a wet swimsuit. 0/10, would not recommend).

Thanks for the excellent question!! Stay safe!!

We’ve been sharing Code Save awards that our members receive here on social media for years now, and in each of these po...
06/16/2026

We’ve been sharing Code Save awards that our members receive here on social media for years now, and in each of these posts, we emphasize the teamwork necessary between several different individuals and departments to make that successful outcome possible. The most important part of that link is early hands-on CPR, and that starts with people that the public – and even our members – never have a chance to see: our dispatchers.

Each certificate these dispatchers are holding represents a life saved here in our city, and they’re just the ones that have been recently saved. These dispatchers each are personally responsible for not only ours, and our police officers’, safety, but coaching a bystander or family member through what may be the toughest time of their life. They do so with calmness, professionalism, and a desire to help the public.

When you call 911 for a medical emergency, the dispatcher starts off asking “Is the person conscious?” If the answer is “No,” the next question is “Is the person breathing normally?” If that answer is no, the dispatcher begins providing CPR instructions, ensuring the quality of those chest compressions, including proper hand and body positioning, adequate depth, proper rate, and adequate chest recoil. They instruct, encourage, coach, and coak the bystander (even untrained bystanders!) through the basics of CPR.

These people are amazing, and deserve every bit of praise that WE receive for helping keep Omaha safe and for saving lives. They truly are the very first step in a chain of survival that, hopefully, ends with your loved ones walking out of the hospital and celebrating many, many more birthdays with loved ones.

We know we have dispatchers following our page – please take a moment to offer these folks the kudos, kind words, and thanks that they deserve. From all 670 of our members, we’ll start with a huge THANK YOU for being the calm voice helping navigate the chaos.

Stay safe, Omaha, and THANK YOU to our Douglas County Dispatchers!

We absolutely love our jobs, but one of the few downsides is that, after a serious call, when the patient is transferred...
06/15/2026

We absolutely love our jobs, but one of the few downsides is that, after a serious call, when the patient is transferred to a higher level of care at the hospital, we often don’t find out an outcome for that patient or hear from them again. There are definitely some patients that make us wonder later, “I wonder how they are? I hope they’re OK.”

It’s for this reason that the crews at Station 34 on the B Shift were so excited when a patient that had previously been in cardiac arrest that the crews at the station “coded” walked in the station to offer thanks and shake the hands of the crews that had saved him. These are the most touching encounters we have, bringing closure to those random thoughts of “I wonder if that call turned out OK?”

YOU can make a difference also! Learn hands-only CPR – it’s easy, it takes less than a minutes, and it can save a life! Learn how here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wR3rJ6Gswag

As always, if you received care from our paramedics and EMTs and are doing better, don’t ever hesitate to stop by a station, talk to us, and let us know! It really does give our members a morale boost to see the results of our training and hard work!

Stay safe, Omaha!

06/12/2026

Congratulations to all of the teams playing in the 2026 College World Series! Omaha Professional Firefighters welcome all of the great Baseball Fans to our Great City. We hope you enjoy the CWS! Omaha Firefighters will be working at the stadium and all over the city to ensure Baseball Fans and Omaha residents Stay Safe!

ASK A FIRE FIGHTER!!! (Archive - our social media guy is on vacation, so we're rehashing some old questions from years a...
06/12/2026

ASK A FIRE FIGHTER!!! (Archive - our social media guy is on vacation, so we're rehashing some old questions from years ago that you may not have seen!)

Q: I pulled over for a fire truck that passed me with its lights and sirens going. It got on the interstate and turned its lights off – were they just trying to get to the interstate faster?

A: Another great question that shows a policy of ours that the public doesn’t know about – this is why we answer these questions! So, our drivers – called Fire Apparatus Engineers (FAE) – have to follow our standard operating procedures, which do not allow us to run “lights and sirens” on the interstate unless the call we’re responding to is on the Interstate and we’re approaching it. Why? Well, on residential streets, we’re typically traveling at speeds you would see on residential streets (in fact, for our engines carrying hundreds of gallons of water, which weighs 8.34 pounds per gallon, it’s often hard to accelerate or decelerate quickly). Our sirens are really only effective up to 50 miles per hour – traveling at speeds above that, people often won’t hear our sirens until we’re right up behind them, and many people when they’re surprised by a fire engine all of a sudden behind them with their lights and sirens going will hit their brakes and attempt to pull over immediately. On the interstate, this is a recipe for disaster – not just for our rig responding to an emergency, but for the other drivers on the interstate. Because of that, if we’re responding to an incident where an interstate is the quickest way to get there, we’ll run “lights and sirens” up to the interstate, turn our lights and sirens off on the on-ramp, and then turn them back on when we’re getting on the off-ramp to get back onto residential streets.

This also isn’t the only time we’re turning our sirens off while en route to a call. Many fire alarms we respond to are false alarms, and they often have maintenance people calling our dispatchers shortly after we’re dispatched to a fire alarm to let us know that it’s a false alarm. In this situation, many battalion chiefs will tell the engine to continue in “alpha” (no lights or sirens) to make sure they’re able to put the fire alarm system back into service without issues. As such, we often start off responding to a fire alarm with lights and sirens only to turn them off halfway through our response.

In short, you’re never going to find a rig responding with “lights and sirens” unless they’re responding to an emergent run, and if you see them flip their lights and sirens off while still driving, they’re either getting on the interstate or they were just notified by dispatch that they were cancelled from their run or that it was a false alarm and they’re responding “alpha” (because responding “alpha” is often safest for our citizens and our own personnel, rather than going “emergent”).

Great question – and we’ve got another one a citizen asked us recently that we’ll get to this week!! Stay safe, Omaha!

ASK A FIRE FIGHTER!!! (Archive - our social media guy is on vacation, so we're rehashing some old questions from years a...
06/11/2026

ASK A FIRE FIGHTER!!! (Archive - our social media guy is on vacation, so we're rehashing some old questions from years ago that you may not have seen!)

Q: Can I drive over a fire hose in my vehicle?

A: Nope!!

Q: Well, what if…

A: Nope!!

Q: But, let’s say…

A: NOPE!!

While we carry a lot of cool equipment on our engines and trucks, our hose is probably the most important equipment that we have – without it, the fire isn’t going out until it’s done consuming fuel (which, when the fuel is “everything you own,” it’s a big deal).

Driving over an empty hose line is putting a tremendous amount of weight on the hose, not to mention causing a tremendous amount of friction between the wheel and the tire, as well as the tire and the ground. Hoses are designed to withstand moderate pressure inside the hose from the pressurized water coming from the fire engine to the nozzle; they are not designed to withstand crushing pressure or weight on the outside of the hose from vehicles, and this can absolutely cause enough damage to a hose to cause it to become inoperable when we need it most.

Even worse is driving over a charged hose line. It may not look like much, but our smaller lines typically have between 150 and 250 PSI (pounds per square inch) of pressure from the water going through them. When you drive a vehicle over this hose, that’s adding a tremendous amount of external force on the hose, causing that PSI to grow, and the hose potentially to burst. A burst hose is a dangerous hose – our hoses have couplings that, with pressurized water continuing to flow through the hose, will fly around wildly and can strike and potentially kill one of our fire fighters. Additionally, it can cause severe damage to our engines, our hydrants, and (as mentioned before) the hose itself.

Ultimately, what it boils down to, is that without fire hose, we can’t put out the fire…so if it gets damaged and we have to scramble to shut down the hydrant and/or engine and replace the line or pull another, that fire is growing and the chance of us saving the house, business or structure and the people or animals inside of them decreases with every passing minute. Also important to us, and our families, is that if we’re inside of a burning structure and we lose water, there’s a very good chance that we’re not going home.

We understand the temptation to do so, but if you see a fire hose crossing a street, find another route. Never, never, never drive over it!!

Stay safe, Omaha!

ASK A FIRE FIGHTER!!! (Archive - our social media guy is on vacation, so we're rehashing some old questions from years a...
06/10/2026

ASK A FIRE FIGHTER!!! (Archive - our social media guy is on vacation, so we're rehashing some old questions from years ago that you may not have seen!)

Q: Why do male fire fighters always have a mustache, but rarely have a beard?

A: Great question, and you hit on something that bugs nearly every fire fighter when they’re watching a show on TV about structural fire fighters and see an actor with a beard (or see someone performing bad CPR, or an EKG with a nonsense rhythm, or any of the things that I’m sure every nurse on here also yells at the TV about, to the annoyance of others).

Fire fighters don’t have beards because we wear SCBA’s in smoky environments – we call it IDLH (Immediately Dangerous to Life or Health). Now, before we ever wear our SCBA’s (by the way, it’s similar to SCUBA, but minus that U that stands for “underwater”), we go through extensive training in donning and doffing, operation, etc. but, most importantly, we go through a fit test. The fit test ensures that, while we are wearing our SCBA, we are only breathing the clean air in our cylinders and no hazardous smoke/gas/etc. is able to squeeze through between the mask and our face.

For the fit test, we put the mask on, create a tight seal, and go through several tests while wearing the mask – moving our head around, speaking out loud, looking up and down, etc. – while a hose hooked up to monitoring equipment ensures that the seal on our mask doesn’t break.

Imagine you’re adhering a suction-cup nerf dart to a window – is it easier to do so to a clean window, or a rippled window like you might see on a shower with textured glass? It’s the same concept with our masks; they adhere to our faces better when there is no hair around the jawline, and thus only mustaches and “lip beards” (the little patch directly under the bottom lip) are “acceptable” facial hair in our SOP, while beards are not.

There are some exceptions, for example fire fighters with pseudofolliculitis barbae in which hair shaved down to the skin can grow back underneath the skin creating a painful foreign-body reaction…these fire fighters with a doctor’s note, or those with a religious exemption, can have a very light beard but are still required to pass their annual fit test. Outside of that, though, our fire fighters are very limited in their facial hair due to the equipment they have to wear in fires. Of course, if you’re watching a show about wildland fire fighters, this doesn’t apply…just the ones that go into burning buildings.

Excellent question and I’m sure one others have had – thanks for asking!!!

Address

6005 Grover Street
Omaha, NE
68106

Telephone

(402) 551-5770

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