Category Archives: fighting fires

Firehouse Camaraderie

10 Friday Jul 2015

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Yellowstone PoolEvery week, Wednesday evening was devoted to training and work at the firehouse. As a minister, I found it difficult to give up Wednesday nights, which I had reserved for many years as “church night,” but my congregation no longer had any regular events planned for Wednesday nights, and several members of my congregation were involved in the volunteer fire and rescue services, so it made sense for me to join in their Wednesday evening activities. Besides, I desperately needed training, and I needed to do my share of the work.

As far as any definition of fellowship, mutual support, and service to others could be concerned, the crew at the firehouse measured up. They regularly responded to calls for aid, protected each other in threatening circumstances, and, for the most part, enjoyed their work and each other while doing it. Many times we could sense the exhaustion of one or more of the crew, and the difficulty of continuing to work into the evening after a full day’s work elsewhere, or an already hectic week of emergency calls. Still, our situation called for as much training as we could fit in, whether it was actual practice with our equipment, videos and accounts of events elsewhere, review of successes and failures in recent calls, or formal hours for certification.

Every fire engine and emergency vehicle had its idiosyncrasies, every new piece of equipment had its peculiar instructions for use and maintenance, and every individual had strengths and weaknesses that needed to be learned. Sometimes maintenance tasks consumed so much time that we had little time for instruction. We always had “on the job training,” but the citizens of our community took little comfort from earning that some of us were unprepared for the unique tasks we were facing in any particular call. Who had not used the “jaws of life?” Who had not performed CPR? Who had not operated the new engine #4? Who had not fought a chemical fire? Who could not drive the old manual transmission water tanker that required double shifting? That person would probably be called upon to do that very thing sometime during the next few weeks. We regularly received lessons in humility provided by difficult circumstances.

The few officers of that volunteer team proved their rank by the experience and leadership they provided. The rest of us knew each other by the work that we did and our performances under pressure. Our vocabularies, educational attainments, bank accounts, wardrobes, and possessions did not matter at all when the time for duty arrived. Only the capacity to respond counted for value.

Once in a while someone planned an event that was supposed to be a party or a recognition of our service. No one could imagine a more awkward or useless event. We partied when we gathered to work.

In some ways the volunteer fire and rescue service provided a model of what a church could be.

Fire Call #6, a Train Derailment

24 Wednesday Jun 2015

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Tilton was a village of heavy industry at the edge of a larger populated area, and train tracks crisscrossed the village, as well as a switchyard planted in the middle of it, so a train derailment was not an unexpected event. Minor derailments were common, and this call, that came late one evening,  described a minor derailment. The problem arose when one of the tanker cars bumped into another, and a leak developed. In those days there was no identifying information on the tanker car itself, describing the nature of the liquid contained in it, and the railroad personnel, who presumably called the volunteer fire department in the first place, were nowhere to be found.

The smell coming from the car was not extremely pungent, but sufficiently strong to make us wonder whether we and the neighborhood were in danger from the fumes. We kept our distance, knowing that the water that we had available, with our hoses ready to be charged, might not be usable for certain chemicals that were transported through the village, although diluting the chemical would be useful in most cases. The leaking chemical did seem to sizzle and foam when it touched the ground, but that in itself might not indicate severe danger. Without any information about the nature of the chemical, we were not in a position to know what the correct course of action might be. Evacuating the neighborhood, even the whole town, was not out of the question, but we didn’t want to be alarmists if it was simply a mild acid.

For thirty minutes we waited, trying to find and contact someone with accurate information so that a proper course of action could be followed. Finally a railroad representative arrived. It seemed that no one on the train itself had the correct information about the leaking chemical, and they decided to keep their distance until they could learn about it. They finally had discovered at there was no danger and that we could hose it down. It was instructive for us to learn that the local firefighters and the community itself were considered expendable if the information had turned out to be different, and a dangerous chemical had been involved.

We poured on some water, packed up our equipment and returned to the station, not much older but wiser.

Our Dear Departed Sam

16 Tuesday Jun 2015

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I had just driven home for lunch, when Jan looked out the kitchen window and commented, “Smoke is coming out of Sam’s hood.” Sam was our 1960 Ford Falcon, and the year was 1976. I had just parked Sam in the driveway behind our house.

I grabbed the multi-purpose fire extinguisher and headed for Sam. The likely embarrassment of calling the fire department for a fire in my own backyard, when I was a volunteer firefighter, kept me from making the wise decision, which would have been to call the fire department. Sure enough, smoke was pouring out when I popped the hood, and I took the risk to do it all myself, and I did succeed in putting out the fire before it did a lot of damage or spread to the nearby dry field of grass.

I was lucky. No burns on me, no explosions, no fire spreading across the field and threatening our neighbors’ houses or the farmer’s livelihood behind us. It could have been much worse, and it probably should have been, to teach me a lesson. Sam was a leaky old car that left its mark on many a clean parking pad. She had covered a lot of miles, survived a windstorm that blew a camper off a truck in front of us on the Mackinaw Straits bridge, endured mistreatment at the hands of a street gang on Chicago’s south side, and, in spite of her plain habit—no radio, no air conditioning, no accessories—she was a member of the family. I sold her to a guy who had the time and know-how to put her back on the road.

After that, I always carried a fire extinguisher in my car.

Fire Call #5: Somewhere in Pennsylvania

31 Sunday May 2015

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The siren sounded, and I was out of bed in a flash, pulling my pants on over my pajamas, reaching for my shirt, and heading for the door. A volunteer fireman learns to respond quickly to that sound and to take shortcuts to get to the firehouse and into the suit and boots that will be necessary to fight a fire or, in the years that I served, to hop into the rescue truck to provide emergency medical assistance.

Only this time, my wife interrupted my preparations with the loud question, “Where are you going?” Then I realized my mistake. We were in a motel in the middle of Pennsylvania, sharing the room with a couple of close friends, and headed toward a friend’s ordination in Massachusetts. We were five hundred miles from our hometown, five hundred miles from the town where I had joined the fire and rescue squad.

I would not make it in time to help. No, the siren call belonged to someone else, not to me. In the confusion of automatic responses, the full realization actually took a few moments.

When I finally withdrew from that volunteer responsibility, it also took a while to unlearn that response that had become a part of my body.  As important as it is to have people ready to respond immediately to provide help, the duty and its adrenalin rush take a toll on the responder and those who are close. People need to learn to be ready; people also need to learn not to be ready.

Fire Call #4 at the Guns and Ammo Store

11 Monday May 2015

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The siren blasted on a fall evening after dark, calling us volunteers, not to an retail merchant’s store, but to a single story ranch-type house set on a one acre wooded lot, with several other homes nearby. The house was smoking heavily when we arrived. The owner had been smoking heavily also, but he awoke in time to escape and stood nearby. We responded with a full crew and three trucks and had the hoses out and charged when the explosions started inside the house. We began to hear whizzes and pops against the side of the new firetruck where I was adjusting the controls, and I felt something hit my helmet hard.

“What’s inside that’s doing that?” Don, our chief, asked the owner, and he answered, “A hundred or so guns, positioned around the house, and lots of ammo. They’re worth a lot of money. I’d like to see you get busy and save what you can.”

Don called out in his loudest voice, “Pull back. Pass the word. Pull back now.” As the explosions continued and the occasional sound of stray bullets, also, the crew repositioned the hoses and the trucks about thirty yards farther back, aiming the new high pressure hoses from a distance, breaking the few windows that remained, blasting holes in the burning sides of the house, but mostly watching that the wind did not carry flames or debris toward the neighbors north and east of the house.

The owner was angry, and protested the decision to pull the crew back and away from the house. It was obvious that the house was going to be a total loss, after the delays and the new orders from the chief. “As I see it, I’ve got three duties that come before saving your house. Saving my firemen. Saving your neighbors’ property.  And protecting our equipment.”

“What about my stuff?” the owner asked.  Don answered that the owner had already taken care of that, when he set fire to his own armory and shooting gallery. The owner did not respond well. The year was 1974, before the country as a whole had gone gun-mad, but this man already had the conviction that he had to be ready for anything. That’s why he had loaded guns and ammunition in every room of his house. Unfortunately, he was not quite ready for anything.

Fire Call #3 at the Foundry

10 Sunday May 2015

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Yellowstone PoolThe fire siren split the quiet spring afternoon with its insane blare, and I was the first to respond to the station. Earlier I would have tried to drag my feet, but it would have been obvious since my office and home were just two blocks from the station. I put on my firefighter suit and boots, and had opened the main door and started the engine when a couple of other volunteers arrived. The bad news that I had to relay was that the call came from the General Motors Foundry, a five block long complex of oversized buildings filled with molten iron and steel. The good news was that they were asking for precautionary backup. They didn’t think that we needed to call for mutual aid from other departments. Their own crew was fighting the fire already and they thought they would have it under control when we arrived.

We hurriedly drove, siren screaming, to the east end of the complex and the open hangar door that looked like it could admit two or three fire trucks simultaneously. A little Hyster lift-truck preceded us down the aisle past employees standing nonchalantly, waving, obviously out-of-work for the time being while the problem was being resolved elsewhere. As the building swallowed our fire truck and we tried to look ready for whatever task awaited us, we at least felt some relief that the workers seemed unconcerned, not panicky and not ready to flee.

Turning a corner near the far end of the building we saw an area of smoke and steam ahead, water hoses charged and spraying under the command of three other volunteers that belonged to our squad, but also worked for the foundry. They did in fact have the fire under control, and I said my silent prayers of thanksgiving as we learned what had happened.  It was a vehicle fire, and grease fire, that had ignited some storage boxes nearby. Fortunately they had an in-house plan for immediate response. This was the first time that anyone remembered that they had called in an outside fire department, and they were grateful to learn that we could respond so quickly.

Whether they knew it or not, they were not more grateful than I was that they didn’t need the help of three volunteers who were ill-prepared to do much more than they had already done. We were deep inside the belly of a building that looked like nothing less than a Towering Inferno even when it was not on fire.  We took even more seriously the immensity of tasks that we might face and the training that we needed.

Fireworks do not make a pretty fire

29 Wednesday Apr 2015

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Our town, though small, about 3000 residents, lay adjacent to a town of 43,000, with other small towns nearby. The town boundaries encompassed railroad yards, an Interstate highway, a major automotive foundry, and a variety of industries, businesses, and housing stock.

When the fire alarm came, in the evening after sunset, from the fireworks factory, we expected the night might prove interesting. Knowing how many chemicals and how much explosive material could be involved, the chief did not wait to call for mutual aid from the surrounding volunteer departments. He appealed for help immediately. Memories of the Crescent City propane explosions were still fresh among the crew. Many buildings and several firetrucks had been lost in that conflagration.

Sprawling over thirty acres, the fireworks factory consisted of many small metal buildings widely separated and scattered around a level field. The distance between buildings was a benefit. When we arrived one building had already exploded, leaving small fires in evidence in several places. That looked dangerous. Surely time was short and the prediction of what might happen next, impossible.

Our vehicles provided the light beyond the fires, and we began the fight with the water from the tanker trucks, while we hooked up our hoses to the distant hydrants and ran great lengths of hoses onto the property. We had to position ourselves between the fires and the potential sources of further explosions. A trailer park and more housing sat on lots just beyond the fences. We hurried to put out a score of small fires, and grass fires, and we succeeded. We spent the next two hours combing the grounds for smoking coals and hotspots. With little fanfare, the mutual aid companies and eventually our squad rolled our hoses, packed up, and went our separate ways.

There were no multi-colored displays, no “ooh’s” and “aah’s,” no entertainments of any kind. We were glad.

Sometimes you just have to chop a hole in the roof.

07 Tuesday Apr 2015

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IMG_0002Two weeks after I had volunteered for the Volunteer Fire and Rescue Squad, there was a house fire in our town, and it was my first time to suit up in my new gear. The call came in the evening just after dark. When we arrived on the scene, the floodlights illuminated the smoke curling around the edges of the roof of the one story kitchen wing of the house, while the two story section next to that wing showed no involvement yet.

The fire chief, Don, asked me to get an ax, while he carried a hose on his shoulder, and we would climb the ladder just set up onto the roof of the kitchen wing. While I was thinking to myself,  “Me? Climb onto the roof of a burning house?” he asked me, not as a question, but as a dare, “You can chop a hole in a roof, can’t you?” And I said back, “I’ve been choppin’ wood since I was ten. I guess I  can.”

All the time, I was thinking to myself, “I hate heights. What am I doing, climbing onto a roof?” But peer pressure can be a good thing, especially when there is no time to reflect. Ax in hand, onto the roof I climbed.

“The best way to learn,” Don said, “is on the job. You’re going to ventilate this attic.” So he showed me where he wanted the hole, and how big to make it, and warned me to be ready to jump back, if there were more flames than he expected, when we opened it up. Meanwhile he had signaled to charge his line, and he held that hose secure and ready to release. Then I chopped my first hole in the roof of a burning house, and stood downwind of the smoke that began to pour out of it. As the smoke began to turn red Don directed the stream into the hole in the direction of the light.

Five years later, another alarm came, this time in the afternoon, when I was the senior volunteer on duty. The fire was burning at a church down the road a mile from my own church, and when we arrived on the scene, we saw smoke pouring from the vents under the roof of the one story fellowship hall next to the main church. Only a small amount of smoke wafted into the hall underneath a false ceiling that allowed no access to the attic. We prepared to climb onto the roof and ventilate the attic.

The minister of the church stood nearby, and when he saw what we were preparing to do, he said, “You’re not going to chop a hole in my roof!” Part of me wanted to say, “O.K. I don’t want to climb up there anyway.” Instead I said, “We have to. We can pour all the water we want on the outside of this building, and all you’re going to have when we’re done, is four walls of concrete block.”

Not appreciating my vast experience, he said he’d make sure I was kicked off the squad. He thought I was just wanting to burn down his building. We saved the building, though the hole in the roof needed  some patching, and the water damage required a new ceiling, and new wiring had to be installed according to code, among other things. No one asked me to resign my unpaid volunteer job, but for several reasons it seemed a fitting time to move on to other jobs that needed doing. I left the chopping of holes in other people’s roofs to other people.