The question gets asked quite often, "How do you guys get to fires so fast?" 5280Fire has official agreements with several metro area departments to provide volunteer incident photography. We are granted access to scenes by these departments not for news media purposes, but for training, investigations and historical documentation. In jurisdictions where we have no agreement, our photographers get as close to the scene as possible while taking photos from public view. All of our photographers carry the latest in scanner technology and almost constantly monitor dispatch channels around metro Denver. In addition to scanners, our members also receive and report incidents to the Mountain News Net messaging system. Most of the time our photographers begin responding to reported fires before units arrive on scene. This gives us a 3-9 minute faster response time than if we waited to hear a size up.
We realize that first due photos are what everyone wants to see and that is what we try our best to attain. We've been averaging between 2-5 first due, pre water fires per year. We welcome recent (past two weeks) incident scene photos from anyone who was in the right place at the right time. If you have incident photos you'd like submit, please email us via any email link on our website. If you're a photographer who is interesting in emergency photojournalism and becoming a contributor feel free to contact us. Our largest gap in "first due" coverage is currently Aurora and eastern sections of Denver.
We typically publish between 8-16 photos per incident on this website that best display the operations that took place on scene. Additional photos which can be purchased are sometimes linked if the incident is significant enough. We welcome firefighters to use our photos for training purposes in house. We are happy to provide larger or additional images from incidents by email if requested. Our photographers generally charge a fee for training photos only if a profit will be made by the instructors while using them.
