Run Sheet
00/11/18
Today was one of those days where being a Firefighter in my hometown is a unique experience.
I fight fires in my hometown, not only in my hometown but in the same neighbourhood that I grew up in. My grandfather was the first Chief of my firehall. Many of the people we get called to knew me or my parents. Today's family was no exception. The father had known my father quite well when he was alive and I went to school with their son, who is married to a gal that I worked with for many years before the Fire Department became my full-time job.
I think this makes me better at my job because the people I work for are very real to me. I don't have the luxury that some in my profession do, I don't have the ability to detach myself from these people. I knew some of them long before I orked for them and 'll be seeing them at the grocery store tomorrow, at the gas station the next day, and sometimes we'll be dropping our kids off or picking them up at school at the same time
Fighting fires can be a very strange occupation. We get to pop into people's lives when they least expect it or are prepared for it.
It may irritate you to have people visit unannounced, your friends just appear at your door out of the blue and want to have a cup of coffee, the house looks as though a battallion of Cossacks has used it to stable their horses for a week while they had a vodka and fistfight extravaganza (My house on a good day) and you are forced to smile weakly and invite them in, all the time wishing god would strike you dead.
Well, we get to see all that, and we get to see how people react under some of the most pressure they have ever experienced in their lives.
Today we got called to a fire, it was a car fire. Unfortunately the car was in a garage when it caught fire. The fire got a good hold inside before our pumper arrived, the issue was very much in doubt as we pulled lines and hooked up the hydrant. Our department is staffed by paid-on-call Firefighters for the most part, I do both, I work monday to Friday, 07:30 to 16:30 as a carreer member, and from 1630 to 0730 as a paid-on-call. It's 24/7 and I love it, Our department is very good at what we do, but because of how we operate we don't always turn up a lot of guys on the first truck. Today there were three on the first rig and the chief in his van.
One of the things that I love about our department is that we don't stand too strong on rank. Chiefs work just as hard as anyone, as do all the officers. For the most part we supervise and direct, but when its needed we grab a line and fight the fire. Today while the three guys on the pump hooked the hydrant, parked the truck, and donned air packs the chief grabbed a fighting line and advanced on the fire.
The car inside was going well, and the fire was rolling over well inside, it was a critical point in the process, another few seconds and it would all be lost. Fortunately for everyone things went as well as they could. The Chief is an old hand and is as good or better than any of us on the nozzle, he hit it hard from the door as he didn't have an airpack on, he hit it with a fog stream at the cieling (hottest area) and converted the water to steam which filled the garage immediately (Water expands 1700X as steam) In that confined a space the huge volume of steam flashed out and separated the fuel from the oxygen like a light switch. Suddenly what had been a sea of flame became a dark, boiling mass of steam and smoke. Right on cue the fighting crew thundered up in their air packs and took the fight inside. It was far from over, but it had been hit hard, if the momentum was kept up it was as good as out.
The chief stepped back to survey the big picture and start commanding, but he didn't get a chance right off. Suddenly he had a laundry basked thrust into his hands by a distraught old woman. She worked like a fiend in the smoke that rolled from the garage door, as he shouted at her to get back she pulled clothes off the laundry line like a woman posessed. I came up the driveway from establishing the hydrant to be met by one of those sights that you only get to see when you're a Firefighter. There was my Chief, running through the rolling clouds of smoke and steam that filled the backyard. He was carrying a rapidly filling laundry basket, bellowing at an old woman who was sprinting along yarding clothes from a line and shouting back at him over her shoulder that the smoke was getting her laundry dirty.
Eventually she got all the laundry taken down. As soon as it was secure she allowed herself to be moved to safety. She didn't emerge from the house again until we were clearing up our gear. She told us (While serving us coffee and cookies, god some old gals are the sweetest things) that she had been furiously cleaning the whole time we had been there in case her house caught fire too and we had to come in to fight it.
Bottom line, car in the garage was a writeoff, the building was saved, so was the laundry.
Its hard not to laugh sometimes.