Dirtiest Fire Job.....

One of the public schools in our area was under construction to add a new building when one the welders set off a fire on the roof where all of the roofing materials were being stored. The entire construction site was dirt, no temporary paved road yet even put in. There had been two days of rain before the alarm so believe me you can't even imagine the mud! I climbed the ladder to the roof to become Roof Ops with about an extra 20 lbs of mud on my bunker pants! By the time we put some water on the fire, handlines to the roof and master stream supplements- guys were losing their boots before they even got to the front of the building. I didn't lose my boots, but it was funny as heck watching from the roof as new arriving crews did. All the crews did a great job especially under those conditions, and we even got all the apparatus out somehow (great operators!) without having to get them towed. We did use frontloaders from Public Works to dig the 600' of 5" hose that was buried in the mud and bring them back to our station for cleaning! See the whole story here on our website: East Windsor Fire #2
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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by BIG_MIKE (A.K.A.: LFD 174) on December 31, 2007 at 4:24am
Capt,

Thanks for sharing your experience with the group. If there was one thing you could say your team learned that day, what would it be?

Also I might add that your company photographer did a bang-up job of documenting the incident. I think it would be of value to all departments to have a dedicated photographer. Capturing details of the incident for review at a later date could vastly improve our continuous improvement programs.

Regards,

Mike
Permalink Reply by Captain 46 on December 31, 2007 at 2:30pm
Top lessons learned:
1. Pre-plan and ICS does matter Know building construction and communicate with other agencies!
2. Fighting interior structure fires is still more fun
3. Nothing goes by the "book" making training and experience invaluable
4. The weight of 5" hose increases exponentially towards the end of every fire call especially when sunk in mud
5. The strangest calls make the best war stories.

Cindy, our company photographer is awesome. Her photos have been used in magazines and training brochures making us look and feel great. She's incredible and is right there beside us rain, snow, heat or mud so thanks for commenting on her work, I'll forward this to her!

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