01/11/20
 

Two and a half inch fire hose weighs around a pound per foot. It comes in fifty-foot lengths linked together. It’s only used for water supply from one area to another or for heavy firefighting. It’s used when we need to deliver a lot of water fast and hard to a fire. It’s a heavy, clumsy, and unwieldy bitch.

Last night we got called to a “bush fire” way the hell out on the far side of our zone. It was raining last night, the pounding, slashing rain we get here on the West Coast of Canada. The call came in at 1700 (5PM) and it was getting dark. As we rolled to the call I wondered just what kind of bush fire we could possibly be having in this kind of downpour and I suspected that it would turn out to be something else entirely. I was right.

While we pulled up there was a long column of thick, black smoke rising from an area way the hell inside a big area of forest. We’ve been there before and a communal groan arose from all of us when we saw where the fire was. Actually, all we could see was the smoke and a distant glow. It was obviously not a brush fire. The black smoke told a different story. Wood and brush leaves white or grey smoke, black smoke always means hydrocarbons, gas, oil, plastics or rubber. Black smoke in this case likely meant there was a car somewhere in all that brush blazing away.

I left the pumper out on the road and jogged into the bush. There is a narrow trail leading in and I suspected that if I followed it long enough I would come upon whatever was burning. I counted my footsteps as I ran along. One of the things I was going to have to figure out was how much hose we’d need to reach it.

50..51..52.. nothing yet, not even a glow. Slipping and tripping in the mud. Swearing as branches swatted at me. 95..96..97.. I run regularly, three times a week, two or three miles on Monday and Wednesday and between six and ten on Fridays, that’s in running shoes and shorts, not in heavy steel-shod boots and turnout pants, coat and helmet. I was starting to pant and sweat in spite of the rain, still nothing. 112..113..114.. I can see a glow up ahead, popping sounds and a loud BOOM as a tire blew out, yep, must be a car. How they got it in here is beyond me, but not unusual. It seems to be a local teenage sport to steal a car, drive it around awhile and set fire to it, we deal with these things at least once a week. By the time I got to 150 I was there. A car was blazing away hard in the bush. I grabbed my radio mike and said

“Okay guys, it’s a car fire, we’re gonna have to pull 500 feet of two-and-a-half, connect the one-and-a-half and put this goddamned thing out.”

Back I ran. By the time I got there the guys had begun hauling up the hose. Two fellows with this stuff draped over their shoulders were heading up the trail at a run dragging hose. Doing this is a gold-plated bastard of a job. It’s fifty pounds a length, it’s as big around as your leg and it’s rough. You throw a fold over your shoulder and lean into it as you drag it through the brush and mud. It scrapes along your neck and catches on every exposed root that it comes anywhere near. Five hundred feet give or take, five hundred pounds of hose to drag, and three of us to do it. Combine this with rain and mud, in the dark. Boy, it’s great to be a firefighter.

A car fire usually is a matter of driving up, pulling two of the small fighting lines preconnected to the truck, and fighting fire for ten minutes. It’s usually a half hour to forty-five minutes from rolling the rig to going home. This fire took us close to three hours from beginning to end. Five hundred feet of hose, dragged through the mud means five hundred feet of hose to wash afterward. Air packs to fill and replace, gear to be cleaned and reloaded. Right down to washing the mud off our boots before going home.

Sometimes this job is thrilling and satisfying, sometimes it’s hilarious fun and sometimes it’s just a huge, throbbing pain in the ass.
 
 
 

Email me