Paul Bebbington

Tonight’s the night! Station 304 is officially the hottest (and chilliest!) place in town. Swing by, enjoy some delicious chili, and support the Coldest Night of the Year #CNOY! ❄️💙 Let’s turn up the heat for a great cause — see you soon!

@HIGHVALLEY @BootsandHearts As long as it doesn’t say Marner on the back..you’re good. 🤣

Is this the right jersey for today @BootsandHearts ?

@douggilmour Bobby McMann

To OT we go, who will be the hero tonight? #BattleofOntario #BringThePassion #GoLeafsGo #LeafsForever

@BramptonFireES @ChiefRuller @BPFFA1068 Congratulations Aaron!

Congratulations are in order! Welcoming newly promoted District Chief Aaron Brown to Bravo Platoon. All the best in your new role! ^mg @ChiefRuller @BPFFA1068

@OroMedonteFire Congratulations Chief!

Thrilled to announce Roree Payment as the new Chief of Oro-Medonte Fire and Emergency Services! With 25 years of experience, Chief Payment joined us last June 2024 as Deputy Chief of Operations. His leadership has been invaluable. Welcome, Chief Payment!

Flag Day #Canada 🇨🇦

@BramptonFireES @CityBrampton Congratulations Chantelle!

We are pleased to announce the promotion of Chantelle Cosgrove to Deputy Fire Chief - Community Risk Reduction. Deputy Chief Cosgrove brings over 26 years of experience in community risk reduction to this demanding leadership position with @CityBrampton.

@CaledonFireES A great evening, nice to see so many out supporting it. Kudos to the ladies from the office for organizing.

What a night! 🎉 Just wrapped up our third annual Staff Recognition and Award Night. Stay tuned over the next couple of days as we share more pictures and some incredible stories. 🚒📸 #CaledonFD #CommunityPride #Firefighters

@BramptonFireES @BPFFA1068 Congratulations Madelaine. Well deserved Richard. All the best!

We are pleased to announce Madelaine Raiz to the position of Division Chief - Administrative Services, and the appointment of Richard Murdoch to the position of Deputy Fire Chief - Operations. Please join @BramptonFireES in congratulating Richard and Madelaine! @BPFFA1068 ^RB

@BramptonFireES @ChiefRuller @BPFFA1068 Congratulations Ed!

Congratulations to Ed Schaale on your promotion to Captain on A Platoon. All the best in your new role! ^rr @ChiefRuller @BPFFA1068

@NickRuller @BramptonFireES Congratulations Chief!

.@BramptonFireES is an outstanding organization, delivering exceptional service as a result of committed individuals possessing high standards of service to their community. It is an absolute honour to be serving alongside each and every one of them in this new role!

@HRMFireNews Appreciated following along with your posts. Thanks for all you have done.

Good morning all: Effective immediately, I have decided to take a break from the day to day operations of HRMFireNews. For most of a decade now, the operations of this fire news outlet have been an all-consuming every day commitment. One cannot do such things forever. Despite the occasional rant/troll/dust up, this has been a tremendously positive experience. That said, quite frankly, I am tired out. The time required to do this correctly, in the way I want, is substantial. It is an every day thing, and it times, it completely takes over life. To operate that way has been a choice of mine and a fulfilling one, but I’ve also found myself looking ahead and somewhat dreading continuing to be glued to my keyboard. This is new and has caused me to re-evaluate. Half-assing it isn’t an appealing option. I’ve always felt I would only do this as long as I could give 100% commitment. While many things have changed for the better and I feel this project has accomplished lots, I am fatigued. I can’t tackle advocating on certain issues with the same enthusiasm I used to and while keeping the public informed during emergencies is a privilege, like I said, it’s hard to maintain that pace forever as a hobby. I've basically been giving the fire gods a free claim on all my spare time for most of a decade, which is tough to maintain. I will be honest, I do not know if this is a temporary or permanent break. Since starting the page, I have not spent any serious amount of time away from the page, so this will be new. I’m going to simply put things on hold for now and give thought to next steps. To the members who are pushing for positive change: keep pushing. HRFE has an amazing number of incredibly capable, talented, and knowledgeable people who have made things better and will continue to. Much change is needed but the public is in good hands. I need some time to think about what, if anything, I want to do next, and in order to do that, I need to get away from all of this. To head off any questions that may follow, I should note there is nothing personally wrong. Also, nobody has forced or pushed me into doing this in any way, shape, or form. I simply have decided to think about the future. To be honest, I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while but given the Tantallon Fire and the floods that followed last year I felt a responsibility to try to keep people informed through the full unfolding of those events from end to end, including the PIA. I appreciate everybody’s tremendous support, including the public who follow and the many members who provide information/insight etc. Thank you. There are too many people to thank individually, but seriously, thank you. In other news, I'm really, really, really looking forward to going hours or weeks or days or months without addressing "what's going on near so and so" or the latest problem. After today, I will not be posting, responding to DMs, or writing the Sunday update during this hiatus. I will make a further announcement later on once I’ve finished reflecting on the future of the page. Thank you all and enjoy your long weekends.

@BramptonFireES @CityBrampton @ChiefBoyes @BPFFA1068 @NickRuller @murdoch_r @Michael_C_Waite Congratulations Peter.

We are pleased to present the Fire Services Long Service Bar to Captain Peter Musytschuk for 30 years of courageous and dedicated service to the residents of @CityBrampton. Congratulations. @ChiefBoyes @BPFFA1068 ^MW

@Sid_Seixeiro 🤡

Full marks to Connor McDavid for not coming out to receive that playoff MVP. He’s not in the mood man.

@TracesofTexas Thank you! What an amazing story!

I want to tell y'all a crazy family story, a story that I've never told here on X, a story involving a remarkable coincidence. It involves the young man shown squatting down on the far right of the first photo. His name was Manley W. Darsnek, and he was my second cousin. He was killed in a bombing raid over Germany in 1944. In early 2007 I was talking to my dad on the phone. My dad was already 70 years old, living a quiet, retired life, and didn't have any use for computers. He'd say things like "I've been on the planet for 70 years and never needed one ... why start now? Let's go fishing." Anyway, my dad and I were talking on the phone and he said "Hey, why don't you go into that Google thing on your computer and search for some alternative spellings of our last name? Maybe we have some cousins out there that we don't know about." My dad's father had immigrated from Latvia through Ellis Island about two years after his older brother and, via the capriciousness of the functionary behind the desk at Ellis Island, the two brothers ended up with slightly different spellings of our family name. A common story, of course. I've read about five family members arriving at different times and ending up with five different spellings of the family name. While on the phone with my dad, I typed in the word "Darznick." This random misspelling of my last name brought me to the weirdest coincidence of my life. I happened upon an account written by a man named Lt. Col. Raymond E. Jones of Hemphill, Texas. Seven years prior, on June 3, 2000, Lt. Col. Jones posted a message on the 91st Bomb Group website, a site dedicated to preserving the memory of the 91st Bomber Group, a World War II bombing group that flew out of Bassingbourn, England, and bombed various Axis sites, primarily in Germany. If you've seen the series "Masters of the Air" on Apple TV you know the story of how incredibly brave these men were. 56 years after it happened, in 2000, Lt. Col. Raymond E. Jones posted this message: "We were shot down on the 20th of July, 1944, over Zwickau, Germany while on a Leipzig mission. We lost 4 crew members that day. They were Donigan, Darznick, North and Callahan. Don Knapp and I and Bob Hart wound up in Stalagluft-I at Barth, Germany. Jim Veres was taken to a German army hospital and treated. I got Jim out of his station bloody, incoherent and without a chute. I got him a chute on, fastened a snap to his d ring, fastened that to the aircraft and pushed him out wishing him well. He was treated and released and sent to, of all places, Bergin Belsen consentration camp. A Luftwaffe officer and a SS doctor discovered American airmen in the camp. They were released and sent to a regular POW camp. When American troops reached Bergen Belsen they found approximately 30,000 corpses! I am the sole survivor of the crew of Winnie, Frank and Joe. Jim Veres, my very good friend, passed away in August, 1999. I can be reached at HC 53, Box 335, Hemphill, Texas 75948. My phone number is 409-579-3670." I read this post to my father and he said "the Darznick that he's referring to is my cousin Manley, your second cousin." I didn't know anything about Manley. He'd died when my dad was seven years old and neither my dad nor my grandparents had ever mentioned him, nor could my dad remember ever having met him. As soon as I read the part about the plane's name, Winnie Frank and Joe, my dad made the connection: Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin. My dad told me what he knew, which was that Manley had been killed in a bombing mission in 1944. This was news to me. My dad said, "you've got to call Mr. Jones." I said "Dad, it's p.m. and Mr. Jones has to be 80 years old or so. He might not even be alive. I'll call him tomorrow." My dad said "You'll call him right now." So I did. After a couple of rings, Raymond E. Jones picked up the phone. I explained who I was and that I was calling in reference to the post he'd made on the 91st bombing group's webpage seven years earlier. He said "and who are you again?" I said "I'm Manley Darsnek's second cousin." He said "hold on." I heard him rummaging around for a minute. He got back on the phone and said "I'm holding in my hands a piece of paper that has Manley's parents' address and phone number on it. It also has the names of the other crew members. All of us wrote this information down so that, if the plane went down, any survivors could write letters to the next of kin and explain what had happened." I was stunned. 30 minutes before I had never heard of Manley and now I was talking to the sole survivor --- the pilot, no less ---- of the plane in which he died. Col. Jones related to me the whole story. He said that the plane had been shot in half, so that the tail section fell away. Manley, whom he knew pretty well and with whom he played quite a few games of poker, was a bombardier, right up in the nose of the B-17. The plane had sustained fire in such a way that Col. Jones could see that Manley had been killed instantly. In the next chaotic moments, Col. Jones rescued Jim Veres by snapping a parachute on to him, pushing him out the door, then jumping himself. All this as the plane was plunging to the earth. Col. Jones spent almost a year in a German POW camp before the war ended. Then Lt. Col. Jones told me something that neither me or my dad or my grandparents or Manley's parents ever knew: that sometime after the war Manley's body was disinterred from where the Germans had buried him after the plane crash and returned to Arlington National Cemetery, where he was buried alongside the other three members of the crew who died on that fateful mission. Nobody in my family knew anything about this. But I later looked it up on the Arlington National Cemetery website and there was the the photo. I listened to all of this in amazement. I told Col. Jones that I was going to give my dad his phone number and that he would call him the next morning. I hung up,called my dad back, and related what Col. Jones had told me about his cousin. Now, you have to understand that my dad is himself a retired Lt. Col. who served two tours of duty in Vietnam. He's not prone to sentimentality or expressing emotions. But when I told him the story that Col. Jones told me, he was completely silent. When he spoke, it was with a voice croaking with emotion. I've never heard him like that on any other occasion before or since. Dad said "I'll call the Col. in the morning," and I swear I could hear him crying. There's nothing like an old war story to make a tough old soldier really feel it, I guess. So my dad called Lt. Col. Jones the next day, and they talked for about two hours. I called Col. Jones back and said that I'd like to visit him over the summer, which he said would be fine. However, whenever I called him back, I got no answer. I could never reconnect with him. I I didn't know if he got sick or was off visiting kinfolk or whatever but I feared the worst. I later found out that he died on Dec. 22, 2007—just a few months after I spoke to him. He's buried close to where his comrades in arms had been buried all those years ago. On November 17, 2009, U.S. Representative Poe read the following into the Congressional Record: LIEUTENANT COLONEL RAYMOND ERIC JONES, A MEMBER OF THE GREATEST GENERATION Mr. POE of Texas: "Mr. Speaker, Raymond Eric Jones got married at the tender age of 19 to Lucille, and then he was off to serve his country 2 years later in the great World War II. Raymond flew B-17s over Germany,including bombing Normandy to prepare for the D-day invasion. In 1944, before his 25th mission, he was informed that upon completion of that mission, he would be taken back home to America as a hero and do public relations for the Air Force. But that was not meant to be. His B-17 on that 25th mission was shot up and quickly crashed in a German field. Four members died on impact. Even though he was wounded, Lieutenant Colonel Jones pulled the remaining two from the wreckage, and he would remain in a German prisoner of war camp for the next 11 months. Fifty-eight years later,Lieutenant Colonel Jones received the distinguished Flying Cross for saving his two crew members. He has also received the Purple Heart, the Air Medal with six oak leaf clusters, the POW medal and the Presidential Unit Citation. Monday, in the presence of his family, Taps will be played at Arlington National Cemetery, where Lieutenant Colonel Raymond Jones will be buried with full military honors, another member of the Greatest Generation who made America proud. Amazing breed--a rare breed, these World War II veterans. And that's just the way it is." After all of this happened my dad went out and bought himself a computer. He reconnected with all sorts of Army buddies he'd lost track of and made some new friends, too. They visit each other etc... And, as his mobility has become a bit limited, his computer has been a lifeline to whole other worlds. The guy who, at 70, had no use for computers is now sending me digitized films that he's made with music and everything else. Life's funny. I look at Manley in this photo, the one trace I have of him. He was a handsome young man. He arrived in Bassingbourn and was dead just 3-4 months later. I'm not sure what the life span of the average bombardier in a B-17 was but I don't think it was very long. Like everybody else I've written about today, he had his whole life in front of him. I have to say that, from the comfort of my air-conditioned chair, I just don't get it. I can't understand the rationale of war. You and I try to kill one another and destroy each other's industrial bases and we don't even know one another. In another circumstance, we might meet over dinner and become great friends. The man who fired the guns that killed Manley might have met him after the war, given him a cab ride, and stopped with him for a drink. But if there's one thing that doing this page for all these years has illuminated for me it's that the killing and the sorrow are endless. From the Comanches going against the Apaches to the current troubles around the world, we just can't stop ourselves. World War I was to be the war to end all wars. And surely after World War II we learned our lesson, right? They say that if the men who choose to start the wars had to fight the wars there would be no wars. I wonder if that's true. I'm sorry for this digression. It's just that looking at Manley in his rakish jacket just brings it all home for me. So I raise my glass to Manley W. Darsnek and to every lost soldier, sailor and airman. The only way we can truly honor your sacrifices is to resolve our differences peacefully. Sadly, I don't know if we can. Traces of Texas

@BramptonFireES Congratulations Grant! Seems like yesterday.

Congratulations to Brampton Fire and Emergency Services’ Grant Taylor on 20 years of service^mdc

@ONwxchaser I will miss your posts. All the best to you.

@BramptonFireES @BfesGuard @CityBrampton @ChiefBoyes @BPFFA1068 Congratulations on your retirement Jared!

Today we celebrated the retirement of Captain Jared Newcombe with a @BfesGuard tribute. Captain Newcombe has served the @CityBrampton citizens for over 30 years. Congratulations Jared! @ChiefBoyes @BPFFA1068 ^MWn

@BramptonFireES Congratulations Richard!

Congratulations to Captain Richard Kelly on 20 years of service! Also, another huge Congratulations on his promotion to District Chief. Congrats DC Kelly^mdc

@CaledonFireES Congratulations Scott! All the best in your retirement.

Mixed emotions this passed weekend as retiring District Chief Scott Jay was presented with his helmet after 36 years of service. Thank you DC Jay, station 306 won’t be the same without you. #Retirement