Fire tale time…
No rest for the wicked. We got back from Indiana on Thursday, and by 11 PM that night, I was out on a fire page. That one was a BS false alarm. I was riding the tanker, and we never got out of the driveway.
When I arrived at the station, one of our fog nozzles was laying in the road in front of the station, and about to be run over by our ladder truck, having fallen off the engine that left just before. I made a save, which was a good thing because those beasties are about a grand a pop.
Firday was back to work day, and it contained a double portion of Teh Suck. After work I went to Sam’s Club, and when I parked, the radiator blew its load of coolant all over the lot, leaving me stranded. I wound up having it towed from Chesapeake, VA back to The Land o’ the Rednecks to get fixed, and I know I’ll be taking a big financial reaming for it.
Oh well. We got our groceries when VWife rescued me, so that was taken care of. We went to bed, tired and bummed. Around 0130, the pager went off for a house fire in Skeetertown.
As soon as my engine arrived on scene, I was told to draw an airpack. Oh goody, I might get to play inside… Something I’ve done in training, but never live. I took my pack, and went to where my station was staging.
I happen to have rather bad eyesight, and being late night and all, I wore my glasses instead of the usual contacts, which caused a problem because my face mask wouldn’t seal. Solution? I handed my glasses to the safety officer to hold, and told him I was willing to go in, but I couldn’t see more than a foot in front of me, literally. They put me on point, and told the second guy to steer me. If it glowed orange, I was supposed to shoot it.
We went in, and it worked well, Ultimately, it didn’t matter that I couldn’t focus because the smoke was so bad that all I could see was within that 1 foot focus range anyway. Our attack was on the fire just over our heads, which is always good for an extremely tight anal pucker. We shot what we could, but it was obvious that we wouldn’t extinguish it from the inside. Just before we were ordered out, I was under a minor ceiling collapse, and got hit in the head with come ceiling tile (I think). No injury or anything, just a good thump on my helmet and right shoulder. It seemed like we were in there about 10 minutes, but with the stress time dilation, it was probably more like 5.
We pulled out, and I went over to our staging area to doff the airpack and report to the Safety Officer. I was soaked, and shaking a bit from the adrenaline. The SO wasn’t there, and he had my bifocals, dammit. Then I checked my gear, and my month old, new-in-the-box radio that the rescue squad issued me was gone. *&%@! I had it when I came off the truck, because I hung my mask on the antenna while carrying my gear before I went in. Great. I have an unknown car repair bill hanging over my head, and now I’ve lost a $300 radio inside a burning house. I reported that to the rescue chief, who was also there double hatted like I was; he drove my engine. You should have seen the stinkeye he gave me for the radio.
In the meantime, I also heard a page for a second rescue crew for another call, and there was trouble getting a crew for it. It was a busy night. Then I found the SO and got my eyes back.
I helped where I could, on external lines, pike poles, gofering. Our ladder truck came in and set up, because it was the best way to handle the fire from the outside. The platform can knock down a house fire in quick order when it’s done right; that fire was a fiasco through no fault of my station, and the aerial could not be kept in water. Skeetertown, which I’ve never trained with because they never show up for the inter-station exercises, was running from one drop tank, and feeding multiple lines. I won’t bitch more about the Charlie Foxtroting because it’s pointless for telling tales, but what should have been a 2 hour call went to 5.
To backtrack a bit, about an hour after I came out of the house, I noticed the SO had 2 radios, one looking just like mine. Hmmm. I kept noticing, and after a while, I cornered him and half asked, half accused him of having my missing radio. He’s a bit of a jokester, BTW.
SO: “Yeah, it’s your’s.”
Phew. “How did you get it? I’m sure I had it when I went in.”
SO: “No, you handed it to me when you gave me your glasses. I didn’t know why.”
:smack:
SO: “Do you want it back?”
Me: “Are you using it?”
“Yeah. This one is set on the dispatch channel, and your’s is on fire tac.” Fire tac is what we use on scene to clear up the dispatch channel. Since he was using it, I let him keep it. It was important to me when I was inside the house.
I tottered over to the rescue chief, and reported my radio was no longer MIA. “I knew that. David told me he had it before you did, and one of us was going to give it back at the station.” The bastards.
We cleared at 0630, just as the sun came up. I was beat; took my customary post-fire shower, and took a nap. Brekkies, then another nap till noonish.
I told the story to VWife, and she said the dispatcher had called about 0230 looking for me to take the second rescue call, and was told I was at the fire.
“Shit. I knew that…” Five of us usual suspects at the rescue squad were playing fireman, so that was why they had trouble filling the second crew.
Saturday was a lovely day. I cleaned up all the winter deadfall from the pecan tree, and pruned the apples. VWife finished picking up pecans. Then I headed to the rescue station for an overnight shift. My crew personally had three calls, and a fourth was taken while we were handling one. The first one was a report of a guy slumped over the steering wheel of a parked car; when we got there, the car could not be found.
The second was a GI bleed in a 90 year old woman, and she had extremely low blood pressure. No one could get an IV going in her because her veins had collapsed.
The third was weird; an old guy who was notorious for bad hygiene and a bit of a frequent flyer. It was boring otherwise.
We got back around midnight, I tried to do the reports, and literally fell asleep typing. When I finished them in the morning, I was kind of tickled to read the text, because none of it made any sense.
When I got home, I slept past noon again, then played handyman outside for a while, before switching to Domestic Sunday mode inside. No more calls for the weekend, so I could enjoy the nice weather a bit.
How was your weekend?
