Tim Szymanski to speak

Join us for an interesting and informative evening with one of the unsung heroes of our community. He’ll explain fire and rescue chain of command, standard operating procedures in a variety of situations, the anatomy of a 911 call, and basic first aid procedures, equipment lists and terminology.

He has been in the fire service for the past forty-five years. Before his over twenty years with Las Vegas Fire and Rescue, Mr. Szymanski worked eight years in metro Cleveland, and nineteen years in Atlanta. He worked every position from firefighter/paramedic up to fire chief, including fire marshal, fire inspector and arson investigator. Nearly thirty years of his career has been working with the media as department spokesperson, while a member of the incident command staff–meaning he has been to thousands of fires and various other incidents and disasters. He was the fire & emergency public information officer for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. He won several national and local awards including Las Vegas and Atlanta employee of the year, meritorious conduct medal for life saving a trapped woman in a burning home, along with awards from Fireman’s Fund, Liberty Mutual Insurance and the Nevada Broadcasters Association.

Tim has written two books about the history of Las Vegas Fire & Rescue. He is a nationally known photojournalist with his work appearing in several publications and on TV shows. He also writes a monthly column for the largest fire service magazine on media relations and education. He helped numerous writers including those for the long running TV show “CSI” on the workings of the fire service, or how a fire burns and much more. On average he issues over 400 media releases each year.

He is open to working with mystery, thriller, crime, non-fiction and other writers who want to get the facts in their writing. Be sure to bring any questions related to fire or rescue scenes in your own writing.