Is Fire Buffing In Western Pa Dead?

I have been seeing a definite decline in fire buffing over the last few months in our western Pennsylvania region that Hoopie World covers.  When I refer to fire buffing, I’m talking the traditional going to a fire/rescue incident and taking pictures or video and making a report about it.  I’m not including going onto the forums and discussing incidents and strategies as part of that fire buffing definition. I thought I’d share some of my thoughts about this situation, and throw out why I think this may be occurring.

Its getting to a point now if I’m wondering if there are any fire buffs out there any longer.  I haven’t received a picture or incident report in over 4 months related to a working fire or incident.  Its been over 5 months since someone that isn’t directly tied to the site has sent in an incident report.  Yes, I have received fundraising event notifications, parade pictures, apparatus pictures, and other general information, but any featured working incidents as of late have been reported by myself and shot by myself.  In prior years, Hoopie World would average around 10 submitted incidents a month.  Some months there would be less, but many months there were more than that.  There have been over 135 individuals that have sent incident pictures in since the site’s beginning.  Where did everyone go?

I’ve been putting a lot of thought into this lately and have some suspected reasons why the incidents have stopped coming in.  However, I’ve also come up with reasons why the submissions shouldn’t have stopped. Hopefully some buffs will read this  and give some feedback as well.

A couple of the reasons the incident pictures and reports shouldn’t have stopped coming in is the digital camera technology and other websites folding.  With advances in camera technology, practically every cell phone out there today has a camera in it, along with all the other electronic gadgets.  Its true that a cell phone camera won’t give the same quality as say a DSLR, but they have come a long way in picture quality.  There are a lot less sites now to submit your stories and pictures to.  Yes, they are still out there, but at one point it seemed like a new fire news/buff site was popping up once a month.  Hoopie World continues to be the longest running western PA fire buffing site.

Now, lets address why people don’t buff as much anymore.  I think part of it, was that back when these sites started, everything with digital photography and web publishing was new.  It was neat to be able to take pictures and post them for the whole world to see.  Now, with facebook and myspace and flickr and all the other social sharing sites its no longer a big deal to post pictures up on the net.  Which kind of ties into my next thought, are departmental sites taking all the love?

Now that 75-80% of departments have their own department website, a lot of guys just use the photos and stories to report for their website.  As a firefighter responsible for maintaining our department site, that makes perfect sense to me.  That is why Hoopie World created the Hoopie World Affiliate Site program where Hoopie World posts stories and a teaser picture or two from incidents and then a link back to the department site for the rest of the pictures and more information.  This program has worked great and has gotten good reviews from the departments utilizing it.  It allows Hoopie World to cover more content and brings more visitors to the department’s site which showcases that department some more.

I wonder if people are afraid of being accused of starting fires if they are covering fire incidents.  There have been so many arson cases this year, that I can see where they are coming from.  Think of it from the fire investigator’s point of view, arson case after arson case and this same photographer seems to be there at every one of them.  I can see how that could raise suspicions.  However, knowing a fire of the Allegheny County Fire Marshals, I can tell you that if you are innocent you have nothing to be worried about.  As per the article recently run on Hoopie World, the fire marshals would actually like to use your pictures if they show a good representation of what was happening.

The only other reason that I could come up with on why people don’t submit incident reports any more is because they don’t like Hoopie World any more.  If this is the case, I would really love to know why not.  I want to know if something happened along the way that turned people away from the site.

By writing this article I didn’t want to come off as whining about lack of picture incident report submissions, but more to bring to light that the email box has been empty when it comes to incidents.  I’m hoping that making people aware of this will help motivate folks to take the camera along more and get the pictures and reports submitted back into Hoopie World.  I spend countless hours on the site, always looking for ways to improve it.  I will tell you that incident pictures and reports are a major part of the site, and I can’t be everywhere at one time.  Hopefully we’re just in a slow period and things will pick up again.

I’d love to hear your feedback about this in the comments below,  or email me at support@hoopieworld.com.

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1. Happy New Year
2. June 2009 Update
3. So Where Do You Go For Fire Rescue News? Try HoopieWorld.com
4. In Response to FireGeezer . . . The Meaning of Hoopie?