How to start your own LEGO Fire department

How to Start Your Own Lego Fire Department

People very often ask about how a person can start their own Lego Fire Department (LFD). It is the intent of this page to describe the basic ideas and steps concerning starting your own LFD and putting it online. This article is borrowed from Eric S. McDonald's website, Lego City FD, who inspired me and a lot of other people to do this. Sadly, Eric is no longer with us, but this information is important enough to keep up to date. (NOTE: You can click on the blue colored texts, those are hyperlinks and will take you to the mentioned page or site).

Myths

The first thing that needs to be cleared up is that you don't have to have 16 fire stations and over 100 fire trucks to have a LFD. My personal inspiration has 8 fire stations, but i started with only 2.It only takes 1 fire truck and 1 station to have a LFD. When the Westland City Fire Brigade first started, we began with 2 engines and 16 firefighters using one station. I hadn't even heard of the internet at that time. That was back in 1986. Things have changed since then.

First Things First

The first thing you have to do to start a LFD is have the desire, which you probably do since you're reading this, a Lego fire truck and a station. There are many ways to accomplish this. You can purchase the newest sets from any quality retail store. Another method is garage sales and that sort of thing.
A highly recommended way to purchase sets, especially older sets, is via Bricklink(BL) or via Ebay.

Especially Bricklink has many, many resources for Lego's, it has proven to be WCFB's most valuable resource. I purchased more than half of my collection via BL and Ebay within the past years. Once you have a piece of apparatus, you're ready to move on.

Organizing the LFD

Now that you have a piece of apparatus, you have a few things you need to do, the first of which should be a name for your LFD and it's host jurisdiction, most commonly a city, though counties are also common, especially in the fire service.
What you do from there is up to you and what you want to do with your LFD. Everyone does things differently. You can get ideas from this web site or by visiting some of the other LFD's by following links via the Links Page.

Pictures

This is probably the most important aspect of the LFD. The pictures of your fire department, it's fire trucks and stations are why people will visit and contact your LFD. Use any camera to take the pictures. These days most people will have a digital camera which let's you take pictures with great ease and you can easily upload them from your camera to your computer. If you still have an old style camera, you will need to have them developed.
The next step, and sometimes the most difficult for some people, is getting the developed pictures scanned. If you don't have a scanner of your own, you can go to any copy business and they will scan them and put them on a floppy disk for you for a minimal fee. Lastly, load those scanned pictures (also called pics) onto the web site. A very handy place to upload your pictures for free, is an internet gallery called Brickshelf. Create an account there and upload all your LEGO® related pictures, saving space on your website/server.

Options

Following are some of the things you can do:

a) name your personnel.

b) create fire and ems calls for the PageNet

c) provide links to other sites and other LFDs.

d) provide run statistics for your LFD.

e) form mutual aid agreements with other LFDs as well as joining a LFD association. There are currently three that I know of. WCFB belongs to the International Association for LEGO® Fire Departments, shortly IALFD.

f) calculate your LFD's ISO Rating. For more details, contact the IALFD for details and the calculator for determing your LFD's ISO Rating. This requires some details on a Lego city.

g) keep minutes of your LFD. This is a great way to keep track of the events taking place with your LFD. Either contact WCFB and I'll email our latest month minutes and you can use that as a base or create your own.

Again, the options are endless. Exactly what you do or don't do is totally up to you.

Written or Offline Records

For the first 17 years of the Westland City Fire Brigade, we were not online. I conducted everything on paper and offline. I didn't have pictures, but I kept Monthly Meeting Notes. These included any sets I purchased or built and any other major changes or additions. I STRONGLY recommend doing this. Even though you're online, this provides an excellent journal of your LFD's growth. Unfortunately, I didn't start doing this until 1995, 9 years after WCFB began. I really wish I had started it from day one.

Towns with LFD's

any people have Lego towns or cities that have a fire station in them. If that is you, feel free to form a LFD. Rather than concentrating on just your LFD, simply create a separate page of information on just your LFD. My inspiration did exactly this. This is, by all means, perfectly acceptable. Again, don't think you have to have a huge LFD - you don't!
In summary, the exact details are too vast to fully explain here. It is my hope that this page provides a mild map of the direction you should take in creating a Lego Fire Department. Good luck and as we say in the Lego Fire Service- "Stay safe and happy building."