Ok, a couple of things here before I go on. You may have noticed a completely different look here. I’m trying a different site to publish. I’m not sure how this is going to go, so… I guess we’ll see what happens. If you’d like to leave some feedback about how things look and work from the readers end, please do, I’d love to find out. If not, well, I got nuthin’
To the post.
Friday, on shift, I got a FaceTime call from a couple friends of mine from up by where I live. They were working up at their firehouse and felt the strong urge to share something we had previously discussed.
New guys.
We’ve got them, they’ve got them, and since I’ve poked fun at ours here fairly regularly, Dan and Matt have shared some of the pitfalls their new guys have put out for their (Dan and Matt’s) entertainment. Once I pointed out to Matt the error in the timing of his call, since it was 11:37 and we were just sitting down (the goal is to be done with lunch by noon so as not to impede our safety nap) to lunch, I was entertained by a live feed of a new guy doing lunch prep (see what I did there?) in the form of slicing an onion. It quickly became clear to me why we have “cut” gloves in our kitchen. Yikes. And, about five slices into the onion, sure enough, there’s blood on the onion. Not much, Matt had to zoom in to show it, but much laughter and good-natured ridicule ensued. Side note, no animals were harmed in the filming and the new guy needed only a small Band Aid to stem the flow. Moments later, I got this…
The comment followed, as it often does when stupidish stuff happens at work, that I should write about the new guy’s lack of kitchen skills. And I thought about it. I mean, I set this site up last week and I’ve kind of been looking for an opportunity to try it out. But I felt like I needed something more to flesh this out into a full post. Sorry, couldn’t help myself.
The universe provides…
Early Saturday morning… wait, let me back up… Friday afternoon we got a call; a single engine response for an AFA (Activated Fire Alarm) for smoke in a building. No fire but smoke from an unknown source. We got there, the Lt. went in and soon came back out to request more resources, an upgrade to a Full Still. In our FD that means one more engine, a ladder truck, a squad and the battalion chief. It wasn’t a fire, we just needed more resources, so I walked back in with Lt. Cal, cause I was curious to see what we had. Light smoke, no heat kind of thing. We talked about what it probably was and, ultimately, found a bad HVAC unit on the roof was the cause of the smoke. Problem solved.
Now, on to Saturday morning about 2:15, we get a call for a Full Still in a big box electronics store. We pulled up to the store and went to the back of the building to access the fire alarm panel. I waited in the engine while Cal and our new guy went in to check it out. I noticed a hydrant about one hundred feet from me across the parking lot. Cal came back out after a minute and asked for an upgrade to a General Alarm which increases the turn out significantly, including bringing in neighboring departments to man our stations while we’re working. Typically, this means we’ve got an actual fire, but Cal reported they hadn’t found it yet due to significant smoke in the building.
Brief pause here for editorial notes- Boss if you’re reading this, you might want to skip down a couple paragraphs. At least till next month. Tom, I know you read this, you might want to skip down too. Btw, you did a great job! Ok, that’s a blatantly shameless, suck uppy sounding comment, but nonetheless…
Moving on.
Of course, I couldn’t let this sit as it was. I had to go in and see what we had. Again. As before, I followed Cal back in, to the electrical room and asked him what he had. He and the new guy both described the smoke volume as “to the floor” as they headed back into the store itself from the back room. I followed them as we finished talking, out onto the sales floor and immediately hit visibility that would’ve fit right in on “Werewolves of London”. Light gray, down to the floor, maybe 10 feet of visibility. As I stood there, just inside the sales area, I heard the very distinctive “click” of the door closing, and locking, behind me.
Ruh Roh.
Now, in case you missed the relevance here, my job at this particular point in time, is to make sure the guys that are inside looking for fire actually have water to put on said fire when they find it. In oder to do that, I need to be at the fire engine. Which is, as you may remember, outside the building. You see my dilemma… I knew the dock area was around the corner and down to my left so I started down that way, and found the gate was locked. I went back to the original door, the one that caused my problem, and sure enough, it was still locked. Hey sometimes you get lucky, so I took a shot. Fortunately, I quickly saw an Emergency Exit about ten feet away from me. I thought, yup, this qualifies, and exited the building right next to my engine in plenty of time to pull over to the hydrant before anyone else got back by us.
I made the hydrant hook up as the next-in crew was pulling the hose off the back of the engine and, until now, no one was the wiser. As it turned out, the sprinkler system did a great job of holding the fire in check and our new guy was able to extinguish the fire with the pump can, less than three gallons.
There ended up being significant smoke and water damage to the store although it certainly would have been much. much worse had there been no sprinkler.
There are many things I won’t miss when I’m no longer “on-the-job”, waking up in the middle of the night being foremost; but the actual work, the camaraderie, the feeling after a successful outcome, and the often non-stop joking, even at my own expense, is going to be hard to replace.
Peace
PS- let me know how theist works and feels for you. Thanks. And again…
Peace