A Hot Life Lesson

A firefighters first fire that he enters into to fight. The fears, excitement and the unknown all rolled into a short time period

A Hot Life Lesson

Have you ever met the Devil? I have. Several times actually. He is unpredictable. He has many faces. Trust me, believe what you have heard about him. He will be right in front of you one second then disappear and be on your backside the next. He eats and breathes just like us. He has no compassion. He will kill you the first chance he gets. The first time I met the devil I was scared. Each and every time after that was just as frightening.

The bells rang echoing throughout the building. This was the moment, the moment I had been waiting for my entire life. Well, at least since I can remember. I had just turned 19 the previous month. I was still a rookie, didn't know s**t. It was a freezing January evening just after 6 PM. A steady snow was falling. You could smell it in the air long before you could see what was going on, but I knew. I hopped in the truck and put on my gear. I looked at my partner and he looked at me. We knew this was the “big one”.

I wanted to be a firefighter all my life. It was my dream and had come true on my 18th birthday. I finished all my firefighting classes and Emergency Medical Technician before I was off probation. I had never been first crew inside of a fire, more commonly known as the attack crew. I had never been inside a fire at all. I always remained outside and assisted the experienced firefighters. That's right just a gopher.  I knew how to do everything that needed to be done, at least how the book taught us how to do it. As far as actually fighting a fire was a different story. It is dangerous. Was I afraid of dying? Sure who wasn't.

The adrenaline was flowing through my body like I had never before felt. I was operating on what seemed to be an animal instinct. I was excited. I was scared, no I was terrified. I could feel my heart beating through all the gear I had donned. Many thoughts were going through my head. I must remember what I had learned, control my emotions and my breathing. If I didn't do this someone, including me, could die. I surely did not want to die that day. I trained a long time for this, yet these questions remained. What do I do when I get there? What is going to happen? What if I make a mistake? My partner was a veteran and that gave me comfort. I felt safe.

Training took almost a year. I learned how to fight fire and what fire might do. I learned terms like back-draft and flash-over. Back-draft is when fire eats all of the oxygen and all that remains is super heated air. When oxygen is instantly introduced to the fire there is an explosion. This can kill firefighters instantly. Flash-over, this is when the temperature in a room becomes so hot that anything that is combustible in that room catches fire spontaneously this includes couches, beds, tables or anything else that can burn. The smoke that is in the room also ignites. This too is very dangerous and can easily kill or seriously injure a firefighter. I had to worry about these two conditions where we were headed to. I kept this in the back of my head. I kept the videos that I had seen of the conditions for both of these phenomena in my head. I did not want to see either today and if I did I wanted to be prepared.

We traveled through downtown, the smoke getting thicker as we approached the scene. It was like a foggy day except the fog was black. Visibility on the street was almost zero. It was a smell that you would never forget plastics, galvanized wood, and fiberglass all burning. It made your nose burn and eyes water. Although we only traveled four blocks it seemed like an hour because of the anticipation. Before the truck ever came to a complete stop, my partner and I hopped out of the back seat and grabbed a pre-connect hose line off the side of the truck. I took a look at the building to get a visual of what I thought the inside might look like, where the fire might be, and the obstacles that I might have to overcome. It was a marina with boats inside. Along with boats I knew that there would be several gas cans, oil containers and aerosol cans all very flammable and could easily explode and kill someone. There was a lot of fiberglass which burns very fast and very hot. Heavy black smoke was coming from the roof and the eaves. It was billowing out, breathing like a animal breathes, inhales and exhales. I could see a faint orange glow through the windows which were, at the moment, still intact. They were not clear anymore. They were blackened by the heat of the fire inside the building. The real rage of the fire was hidden by the heavy smoke that the fire produced.

All my trainers were excellent firefighters. They taught me well. I sure hope they taught me well, I was about to find out. They would always teach us that the citizens and our life safety was most important. There are two ways to fight a fire. The book way, the way they teach you in class and The second way which is the way that it is really done on the scene of a fire. I always knew that when you went into a structure fire that you could not see. They would  say you cannot see your hand 2 inches in front of your face. I really found that hard to believe. How can you not see when there is fire everywhere. They would tell us to Hold your hose line like your life depended on it. They told us that because your life did depend on it. Your hose was your escape route. Stay low to the ground and if you start left, go right to get out. Never leave your partner, ever.

When we opened the large steel door to the building, smoke came out of the opening with such force and heat, it almost knocked me off my feet. My partner and I went to our knees and prepared to enter the building. Once we entered the building we dropped to our stomachs and crawled on the floor like a baby who is just learning to crawl. I could no longer see anything, not even my hand in front of my face just like they taught. We had to rely on touch to get around. I now knew how a blind man felt. The heat was more than anything I had ever felt in my life. Temperatures were seven to eight hundred degrees just feet inside the building. No one could survive without proper equipment. My partner led the way in an effort to find the fire. I grabbed onto his right ankle with my left hand so that we would not be separated. We crawled into the building about 10 feet when my partner began to scream through his mask. I immediately became frightened, I did not know what he was saying. I could not understand. He grabbed me and pulled me to exit the building. He had some kind of problem or malfunction. When we exited the building he threw his mask off it hit the ground with a loud thump. His face was cherry red, like he  had been holding his breath for several seconds. He was breathing very hard and fast. Before I could find out if he was ok or what was wrong the incident commander paired me up with another firefighter commanding that we get back in before we lose the building. It was chaos. We re-entered the building. This time it was even hotter. I could feel my body, skin and face burning.

Fire doubles every 30 seconds. Time is of the essence when trying to control a fire. In 5 minutes a small fire becomes very large. They never taught us about the noises that you encounter in a fire. They preached hold the hose, find the red stuff and put the wet stuff on it. Seems pretty simple saying it that way. We practiced  in school. We would black out the mask, get on our hands and knees and crawl through a training tower full of obstacles. Sure it was hot especially on a 90 degree day. We would sweat, become fatigued, and cry that we can’t do it. We had to find a training dummy then drag it out of the tower. The dummy weighed 150 pounds. We had 80 pounds of gear on. With an extra 230 pounds and 90 degrees, pulling it from a building with no fire and completely blinded was hard enough. How much different is having a real fire?

The noises that I could hear inside the building frightened me. I could hear small explosions, crackling of wood burning like wood in a fireplace but magnified 100 times, the steel beams expanding due to the heat. It sounded like Freddy Krueger from the Nightmare on Elm Street when he was in the boiler room of the school, unknown things falling on the floor, and the previously intact windows breaking due to the extreme heat inside of the building. I could hear the aerosol cans exploding.. I was praying that a can would not hit me. An exploding can was just like a missile being launched. We advanced further into the building and at one point I could start to see a small orange glow of fire. It looked calm from where I was like a cozy fire in the fireplace. I knew though that the fire was vicious and dangerous more like a huge bon fire that had just been exposed to gasoline to get the fire going. How close or how far was the fire? I did not know. We pushed forward towards the glow. I heard a loud explosion. The sound made my ears ring! It sounded like an M-80 firecracker going off right next to me. To say I was scared was an understatement. The first thing that came to my mind when I heard the explosion was that the roof had caved in somewhere. I could feel things falling from above hitting me in the helmet, legs, and back. The heat became so intense that I actually thought I was going to catch on fire. My partner started to spray water on the both of us. He seen it coming. I did not.

The videos were scary. Firefighters caught in a fire and could not get out. They mostly do not survive if they are caught in a back-draft or a flash-over. If they do they are severely burned and spend months in intensive care. They get skin grafts, surgeries and live in more pain than you could ever imagine. The burns themselves do not cause pain as it usually kills all the nerve endings. I would never want to go through that. They told us all the signs to look for, the smoke breaths, in and out in and out. Fire rises and takes the path of least resistance. Watch what the fire is doing. When and if you are caught, get on your belly, spray water over your gear and get out. Get out now!

I could see the fire climb up the far wall in front of us, travel below the ceiling to the other wall where it began to spread down behind us. Now I had fire in front of me, above me, and behind me. It didn’t click in. Then it happened! I saw a flash of bright orange all around me. The smoke disappeared, It was gone. All the smoke had ignited and turned to fire.  A flash-over had occurred. The heat was more intense, something I thought couldn't happen. I could feel it most on my face. It was burning. It felt like putting your face just inches from that bonfire in the fields where we used to party. My breathing was fast, I knew it shouldn't be. It can’t be. we only have 30 minutes of air in our breathing apparatus that's at normal breathing rates. Some people run out of air in 15 minutes or less. I couldn't start to hyperventilate. I would surely run out of air and suffocate. Many deaths of firefighters are from suffocation and not fire itself. The water that my partner was spraying on us was evaporating before it even hit us. We were receiving steam burns from the evaporating water. I thought for sure I was taking my last breathes. Training came back to me. If you are caught in a flash-over you have only seconds to get out. My partner just grabbed me, he told me to drop the hose line and get out NOW. You could not see how to get out with the fire engulfing everything. I grabbed onto the hose line like we were taught and followed that out to safety leaving the nozzle end of the hose line in the building. It took only a matter of seconds to get out of the burning building, yet being so close to death it felt like a much longer period of time. Shortly after we were out of the building the roof partially collapsed.

In all we spent about 19 minutes in the burning building. Our gear was singed, the helmet visor slightly melted, and some minor burns on our face and neck. I came minutes maybe even seconds from death. At an extremely young age I learned what life was truly about. You have to cherish every day, every minute, every second of your life. You never know when your last day will be.

Some time after the fire I watched video that was filmed by civilians and the media. It is astonishing that 

no one died or was seriously injured. My dreams to fight a fire came true that day, on that same day my 

worse nightmare almost came out of my dream.