What: Fire Service Women of New York State 5th Annual Training Weekend
When: September 22-24, 2006
Where: NYS Academy of Fire Science in Montour Falls, NY
Keynote Speaker Chief Rebecca Denlinger
Chief Denlinger leads Cobb County Fire and Rescue in Georgia, a 624-person career department that covers 305 square miles. Becky began her career with Cobb County in 1977, worked her way through the ranks and became Chief 20 years later. In 2004, President Bush appointed Denlinger to serve on the National Infrastructure Advisory Council. She is a member of the Terrorism and Homeland Security Committee of the IAFC, Chair of the National Fire Protection Association Nominating Committee, and a member of the Georgia Homeland Security Task Force. She was the 2004-2005 Chair of the Metropolitan Chiefs Section of the IAFC and NFPA, and currently serves as Immediate Past Chair. Denlinger was named Public Safety Employee of the Year by the Cobb County Chamber of Commerce in 2005, received the 2004 President’s Award for Distinguished Service from the Georgia Association of Fire Chiefs, and was awarded the 2002 Georgia Fire Official of the Year by the Insurance and Safety Fire Commissioner for the State of Georgia. Denlinger has served as the fire service representative on the Georgia Homeland Security Task Force since November 2001. Denlinger is a member of the International Association of Fire Chiefs; the National Fire Protection Association; Women in the Fire Service, International; Women Chief Fire Officers Association; Georgia Association of Fire Chiefs; and has met as a member of the National Homeland Security Advisory Group for U.S. Senator Saxby Chambliss. She participated in the Executive Session on Domestic Preparedness, John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University from 1999 to 2003. Denlinger studied German and history at Manchester College (Indiana) and in Germany; studied fire science at DeKalb College in Georgia; and is currently enrolled at Thomas Edison State College (New Jersey) where she received an Associate in Arts Degree in April 2004.
Saving Troy: A special Friday night presentation....
Author William Patrick and Actor Dick Nagle present readings from Patrick’s recently published book, followed by an audience discussion of the experiences and issues that unfolded during Patrick’s year living and riding with the City of Troy Fire Department — a life-altering year for a civilian.
About William Patrick...
William B. Patrick is a writer whose works have been published or produced in several genres: creative non-fiction, poetry, fiction, screenwriting, and drama. From the Saving Troy experience, he has also written a screenplay, Fire Ground, as well as a radio play, Rescue. Rescue was commissioned by the BBC for their Season of American Thirty Minute Plays, and aired world-wide on BBC 3 in 1997. An earlier teleplay, Rachel’s Dinner, starring Olympia Dukakis and Peter Gerety, was aired nationally on ABC-TV in 1991, and his third feature-length screenplay, Brand New Me, was optioned by Force Ten Productions of Los Angeles and allegedly used as the basis for the remake of The Nutty Professor, which was the top-grossing hit comedy of the 1996 summer. Mr. Patrick reached a successful resolution with Eddie Murphy and Universal Studios over this issue late in 1998. He has taught the writing of fiction, non-fiction, screenplays, and poetry at numerous colleges and universities. Since 1996, he has served four times as Writer-in-Residence for the NYS Writer’s Institute at the University at Albany, teaching courses in fiction, film, screenwriting and adapting short stories for the screen. Mr. Patrick founded and teaches at the NYS Summer Young Writers Institute in Silver Bay, NY. He is the recipient of numerous grants, most recently from the New York Foundation for the Arts, to continue work on Saving Troy. www.hudsonwhitman.com
About Saving Troy...
Saving Troy overflows with stories that are not only true but are alive in the telling, as vivid to us as they were when they happened. Whether bearing witness to the stabbing of an off-duty firefighter moonlighting in a liquor store, the frenzied attempt to resuscitate a frozen man, or the heart-stopping race to secure a runaway river barge, Saving Troy recounts the action with a gut-wrenching immediacy that will excite readers’ imaginations and open them up to a greater appreciation of the hazards, challenges, and dangers faced by firefighters and paramedics. In Saving Troy, William B. Patrick combines a poet’s sense of the language with a dramatist’s ear for peoples’ voices and an urban journalist’s gritty street smarts to bring us a powerful examination of life in a post-industrial American city. In these pages you will meet the men of the 1st Platoon at Central Station of the Troy Fire Department, in Troy, New York — truly a brotherhood of courage and compassion. You will come to know each of them for the complex, resilient, and committed man he is, and you will learn what it takes, and what it means, to serve the people of your community, again and again, at those moments when life and death hang in the balance. But Saving Troy, as heart-pounding and adrenalized as it is, is not about accidents and fires, stabbings and shootings and suicides: It is about people. In its untiring wonder at the wide array of humanity, seen through the eyes of the 1st Platoon, Saving Troy is a book about how we live now, about what we value, about how we understand ourselves, and about how we treat one another. Along the way, Patrick, himself a son of Troy, composes a kind of hymn to his native city — an appreciative, clear-eyed appraisal of its history and fortunes — offering us a lens through which we can look at any number of similar American cities struggling with changing economic times. William B. Patrick understands duty, its sacred call, its paramount claim on those who use their skills in the service of others, and here he has carried out his own duty as a writer — to honor the best in us by recording in the most vivid terms the deeds of these flesh and blood heroes — with a skill and integrity that is unsurpassed in the literature of firefighting. After reading Saving Troy, you will never feel the same way when you hear a siren or pass a firehouse. You’ve been inside, up close, and now you know. This is a book that will thrill you, that will make you laugh one moment and cry the next, that will force you to think. Saving Troy will open your eyes and your heart to the bravery, kindness, integrity, and self-sacrifice on which we all may one day depend for our very lives.