The tones went off again at 0200 "Fire Commercial, lumber operation, multiple reports. Flames, Smoke in the sky, East of highway..." I wasn't really asleep yet, having already been up a couple times for nonsense since midnight. When Mike arrived at my bunk, knowing my pager was broken, I was alert enough to pop right out of bed and follow him down to the engine in
a stomping rush. We bunked up and headed north through town to the address, expecting engine 42 and aid 42 to beat us easily, to be first on the scene. We crossed the bridge, looking for the flames and smoke on our right. Nothing. I was still waking up, but "multiple reports" meant I probably wouldn't be climbing back in the rack anytime soon."Where's engine 42?" I hadn't heard them respond to the dispatch.
"Engine 42 arrived, nothing showing, investigating." We pulled east off the highway, behind the Battalion Chief, a quarter mile out, waiting for instructions, scanning the sky for the telltale smoke.
"There it is." Behind us a column of black rose in the night sky. After a long S-shaped detour, we rolled up on a burning conveyor in the middle of a log yard, fully involved. I hopped out, grabbing my BA (air pack) and helmet, and pulled a preconnect off the back of the engine. I had two hundred feet to work with, but we were only fifty feet from the fire. I tried to dump a flake off the top, by the engine, but lost several in a pile. Screw it. I trotted toward the fire, flipping loops of hose off my shoulder as I went. I laid the nozzle on the ground and ran back to tidy up my hose, but Mike was already straightening out my mess at the engine, so I ran back and grabbed some hose, pulling it away from the nozzle so that it would pop into gentle bends when Mike, my driver, charged the hoseline with the water from the tank.
Moments later the hose in my hands bucked and stiffened with pressure. I heard it slither on the ground behind me as water inflated the fabric. I cracked the bail and the trapped air hissed out, spitting when the water reached the orifice. The entire steel framework was afire, and at the end dangled a burning length of rubber conveyor belt. Piles of fine bark mounded on the ground below the machinery, each capped with a mantle of flame. Captain CB joined me and pointed me to the area where the wood chips fell onto the conveyor used to load dumps trucks. I hit it with the water and nothing happened. As I move in, the hosestream turned white and foamed from the Firewater added to the tank.
To step back a few years, I still vividly remember my firefighting baptismal: three floors of apartment, the upper two ignited by flames lapping from a busted window, and propagated upward from the ground-floor unit. It had been the perfect day, uncharacteristically busy, with a wide variety of calls, with my son, A, riding with us on the engine, observing his dad's volunteer firefighting hobby. With only two engines in the small department, we lucked out and I found myself first-on, first-in, at four o'clock, on a summer afternoon. I pulled the hoseline from it's slot, just like the countless drills, and subsequently dumped it in a tangled pile at the door. My lieutenant, DD, grabbed a coupling and yanked the hose straight out from the door before I could arrange the pile into an ordered coil. Our door was at ground level on the A side, but between the basement and second floors. Smoke filled the stairs and hall, and the fire alarm droned. I gave the nozzle to BT, one of the fellow volunteers from my academy, and bent my mass to the task of dragging hose for her.
Two guys, best friends from grade school, and instructors in our volunteer academy, squeezed past us, to force open locked doors, and search apartments for residents that hadn't gotten out when the fire alarm went off. We groped our way up the stairs and the first apartment on our left was charged with smoke when we cracked the door. I couldn't see anything, and I repeatedly wiped my facemask, hoping that my visibility was messed up from smoke and condensation on the lexan. No joy, just too much smoke, all the way to the floor. I tractored the hose into the room and BT yelled that she saw fire. I took her word for it, I couldn't see a thing.
"Hit it," I yelled back. I leaned into her as she sprayed the room with the nozzle. The moist heat came down upon us through our bunks, the water converting to billowing steam. She killed the nozzle and we moved in, struggling to understand what we had done. A couch, charred and smoking, bumped her shins, and I into her. Beyond, trees peeked through the smoke, in the distance through the broken bay window. In hindsight, ventilation would have been helpful, and we should have utilized a fog pattern to blow mist and air out the open window, drawing fresh air through the open door behind us. The couch had ignited when flames lapped up the outside of the building, and the heat compromised the window. A sudden understanding of the situation dawned on us simultaneously.
"There's fire below us!" The danger of this scenario had been repeatedly drilled into our heads.
"Back out!" BT spun around and headed, through the smoke, for the exit, but we found ourselves stumbling into a bathroom. Shit! Our first fire, and we're lost in the building with fire below us. If the floor collapsed, we might be killed. A number of options filled my head: open a window and yell for help, radio for assistance (Shit. Shit! I didn't grab a radio. BT must have one...), activate my PASS device (Personal Alert Safety System), and wait for the shrill alarm to summon help... The threat of certain humiliation quickly ruled out those strategies.
"Stay here, I'll follow the hose to the door and pull you out." I hand-over-handed along the hoseline to the exit. The door was only a dozen feet away, but not where I remembered it. I turned around and drew BT to me. In a second she was out and our lieutenant arrived in his mask to lead us downstairs to the fire floor. We mopped up the burned out unit, hitting hot spots. Another crew had extinguished it from outside, through the failed picture window.
We put the fire out and then spent hours overhauling the scene, pulling plaster, taking the fire room down to the studs. As first-in engine, we waited for the county inspector to arrive and got to watch him work, quite a privilege I'm told. Meanwhile, my son watched from the periphery, waiting in the engine, wearing the mandatory observer's safety vest. I had hoped he would see the heroism in the job, but he came away bored by the experience. He hasn't expressed much interest since.
It's several years later, I am hosing down a steel conveyor belt frame in the night, nozzle gated back both to conserve water and to create the necessary cascade to wash the smoldering bark from the crossmembers above me. A thousand tiny embers flutter skyward when disturbed by the water. It's three in the morning, and this small drama is all mine, but our engine only carries 500 gallons, and there's no hydrant in the area. Twice Mike has refilled his tank from other engines, working with their crews to keep my nozzle flowing. The scene lights on the engine illuminate the area, and my silhouette is thrown onto the side of the de-barker. I look pretty good in profile, I love this job. I'll sleep tomorrow.
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