Sometimes Perfect Isn’t Good Enough

This past Friday morning just after 3 am, the Holts Summit FPD was tapped out for a house fire in a non-hydrant area.  The engine was responding with 3 including Fire Chief Scott Brooks in the seat when they got a report that there were three children known to be inside the house.  The radio report that you never want to hear.

On arrival they find a split-level, brick home heavily involved with fire.  Brooks said the thick smoke and flames shooting through the roof gave them the initial impression that “no one’s going to survive that.”

With the size-up mental process on auto-run, Chief Brooks takes into consideration:

• He sees heavy fire coming out the front door and burning throughout the side 4 half of the house.
• From experience and knowing his territory, he is familiar with the layout and construction of the homes in this area.
• Brooks determines that the most-likely locations of the bedrooms in this house are at corners 1-2 and 2-3, not yet in the fire zone, but pushing heavy smoke already.
• No hydrant, but the 1st-due tanker is already en route.
• Five FF’s now on scene, including the engine operator.
• Decided to go with all-out rescue attempt.

While the FF’s were placing a ladder at the window of the suspected bedroom, the engine operator blasted the front door with a “water blitz” from the deck gun, attempting to slow down the fire and preserve the escape route for a while.

The firefighters then took out the bedroom window and just then the ceiling over the dining room collapsed into the house.  The interior pressue immediately dropped and the FF’s were able to get into the bedroom without a hose line.  A primary search of bedroom 1 was negative and search moved to bedroom 2 where a 2-yr.-old was found and handed out that window.  Search team then returned to bedroom 1 where a second search found a 4-yr.-old child.  Just as they were handing him out, the fire began rolling into the bedroom and they evacuated.

By that time a water supply was established and a handline was available, so they made another attempt to return inside with the hose line to look for the third child that was still missing, but were rebuffed by the fire that was now in full bloom throughout the house.  The upstairs hallway, which later collapsed into the basement, was engulfed in flames when they attempted to re-enter. The body of the third child, a 6-year-old boy, was found in that debris later that morning.

“It was obvious the children were attempting to exit,” Brooks said, noting that the 6-year-old made it the farthest.  Autopsies later determined that all three children died of carbon monoxide poisoning. 

There it was….the toughest challenge that they could ever expect to face.  An extremely accurate size-up.  Perfect execution of the rescue effort.  And the most grievous of outcomes nonetheless.

So what do you do?  You ache, perhaps cry for a few minutes.  You wonder and 2nd-guess yourself.  And you finally recognize that you did all that you could, even though everbody lost.

Columbia Daily Tribune / Eshelman

And you come back the next day, ready to do it all again.

So let’s get this equipment checked out, it might be our turn next.  I’ll get some fresh coffee started.

You can visit the Holts Summit FPD at their website HERE.

What are your thoughts about this fairly recent trend to send unedited 9-1-1 tapes out to news services to be broadcast publicly?  It seems to me that within the past year this practice has accelerated.  Now hardly a day goes by that we don’t hear some poor victim’s anguishing cries as “…he’s stabbing me!  He’s stabbing me!”  Yes, I’ll admit that I have been posting some of them here, including one similar to that example (HERE) where a man was being bitten by his wife after she handcuffed him to the bed. 

But there are three points that I want to consider here.  Some of them are relatively harmless snippets that can legitimately be used to fill out a news story, such as a few seconds of someone’s relaying what they are seeing to a call-taker.  These are enlightening facts that help inform the readers/viewers/listeners while a story is being told.

Then there are the interesting but inconsequential calls that are put out there for the entertainment value like that recent call from the dimbulb in Kissimmee, Florida, who was “locked” inside her car (HERE).  I don’t have much of a problem with that, but still harbor some hesitancy.  Not enough hesitancy to keep from posting it, obviously.

But what really bothers me personally are the ones like that episode last month where a woman was being hideously mauled by a pet chimpanzee and the monk’s owner was in full panic calling for the police to shoot it while she was trying to rescue her friend.  In my own set of standards, that one went over the boundary of good taste.  By running the entire tape, as some outfits did, I feel they were not only pandering to prurience, but exposing the victims to an unnessesary indignity.  As a comparison, when we run a call that involves a horribly torn body of a victim, we take a sheet and cover it.  But do we wait a while and then pull the sheet off  so that the curious bystanders can file by and take a good look?

I’m also going to hold a double standard here.  My readership is 99% comprised of people who are involved in fire and EMS activities and we have an entirely different approach to hearing replays of 9-1-1 calls.  Our outlook on the poor sap who was talking to the dispatcher while a train obliterated his Ferrari (HERE) is probably a bit more cynical than the public at large has.  Do you think that tape should have been released?

Getting back to where we started, here’s where I’m having  a problem.  It’s looking more and more like some public service agencies are racing to get the tapes out to the news services just to do it.  It appears to me that they are subtly trying to call attention to themselves, the emergency communications agency, rather than just being a bit more cautious about what effect they are having on the parties involved with it.  There’s also a gray area about whether these recordings are automatically determined to be public documents that anyone has a right to hear regardless of their reason.  I’m still uncomfortable with it.

Let’s get back to our comfort zone and get this equipment checked out.  I need to start some more coffee.  See you later in the day room.

Wow.  I see a lot of sleepy and disinterested faces around here this morning.  Well, I don’t blame you.  I’m slow off the mark myself and having trouble getting motivated for the day.  There is a bit of F & R news waiting to be explored, though.  So I’ll find something interesting to pass along.

With this prolonged and dry winter and the seasonal winds there have been a lot of major brush fires in the unlikliest of places.  Last week it was Staten Island and this week there have been some newsworthy wildfires all around New England.  Even now there is what’s being called a “major forest fire” ongoing in south-central New York State. 

(The video that was previously in this place has been
moved to a later posting HERE.)

I always hated brush fires.  While we had a pretty good-sized fleet of brush trucks and Jeeps, we weren’t really geared up for them when it comes to proper boots and workable clothing.  They just beat you to death and when you’re done you don’t feel like you’ve really accomplished much.  But you can never presume that when you respond to one that it will be “just a brush fire.”

I’ll never forget an afternoon when I was just a pup in my first year on the job.  It was standard practice in the station I was assigned to take the reserve wagon with just two people out on brush calls.  That left the others back with the frontline piece for structures, or so was the line of thinking in those days.  So the call came in for a brush fire in an area that was mostly commercial along a 4-lane highway with the occasional undeveloped plot here and there.

When we approached the highway coming down a side street that exited directly on the block that we were headed for, we were met with an unbelievable amount of smoke rolling low across the highway and bringing traffic to a standstill.  We crept across the road and tried to find out just where the fire was burning and after about a half-minute our size-up disclosed that not only did we have a lot of underbrush on fire, but it had already spread and involved 4 dwellings and a furniture store warehouse.  No wonder there was so much smoke.

So what do two FF’s on a reserve engine do in that situation?  Simple, we just called for help.  Then we laid out a supply line from the nearest hydrant, drove right into the middle of the whole thing and picked out a house at random and started working off the booster tank until the rest of the gang got there.  That land is completely filled with a shopping center and parking lot now.  Yeah, all the furniture was gone, too.

Speaking of furniture, let’s get this equipment checked out so that we can go test the furniture in the day room while we wait for Sunday breakfast.  I’ll make sure there’s plenty of coffee.

Do any of you go to businesses to give fire extinguisher classes to the employees?  For me that was one of the most enjoyable and rewarding public education things that we did.  And it’s tremendously effective, too.

We’d use the entire engine company for this after already making arrangements with the management well ahead of time.  It works best with a group of about 8 to 15 employees.  More often than not, it would be an office-type occupancy, but once we had a very constructive class with a fast-food restaurant shift.

The trip would start out with loading up the pumper with 3 or 4 dry powder extinguishers and one pressurized water extinguisher.  When I was on the job we would fill our own extinguishers in the stations (except for the CO2′s) using our air compressor and keeping a box of ABC powder in storage just for that purpose.  We would also take along a burn pan which was the bottom 20 inches of an oil drum and a 5-gal. can of diesel fuel.  Prior arrangements were made to ensure a supply of cardboard boxes were already at the location.  And that’s one of the key training tools, we would do this at their work site.

Once we had everyone assembled outside, usually in the parking lot or alleyway in back, we’d give a brief introduction to the extinguishers and go over the basics of using them.  This would include how to properly handle them, pulling the pin and triggering the can, and the principle of applying the agent at the seat of the fire.  Then we’d light off the trash pile and get everyone used to being close to a hostile flame, demonstrate the water can and let some of the employees take turns putting out the cardboard fire until the extinguisher was emptied.

Then the real fun would begin.  After filling the pan with some diesel, we’d start warming up the fuel with a road flare hooked onto the lip of the pan and while that was going on we would explicitly go through the basics of the powder extinguisher.  And we would emphasize over and over that you apply the powder on the edge nearest you, not the other way around.

On this phase of the training session we would make sure the everybody had a hands-on shot with it.  We would usually pick on the supervisor to lead the way, and “break the ice” with it.  That always added some fun and relaxed the more timid members of the staff.  That’s why I took several powder extinguishers along, to make sure there was enough to give everyone some live experience with it.  And one more thing that I made sure of, I would always use one of the firm’s own extinguishers for the last few evolutions.  This way the workers would be familiar with their own tools and be confident in using them.  That’s important.

But here’s where the real bonus comes in this type of training.  While it is extremely unlikely that they will actually have a fire in their office or shop while they are there, you have just taught them something that they will carry with them for the rest of their lives.  After having carefully gone through the basics and then physically doing it a time or two, the simple method of using an extinguisher effectively will always be in their sub-conscious and you have just trained a squadron of property-savers who will carry that skill with them wherever they are, be it at another job later or while visiting another site on a shopping trip or visit.

What brought this to mind was that fire the other day in the Tennessee Dollar General store that started in a toilet paper display while the store was open.  (see Firegeezer report HERE.)  Just maybe, if somebody, anybody, in the store at the time had the presence to grab an extinguisher early on, then perhaps it would have prevented the million-dollar burnout that they had.  I always wonder why big outfits like that don’t arrange to have their own employees trained a little better.

Well, hold off on the wondering for a little while because we have to get this equipment checked out.  I’ll go start another pot of coffee.

It’s supposed to be Springtime, but the word hasn’t quite gotten around yet in my part of the world.  Still going into the 30′s every night and this is getting tiresome.  I’m ready to get out my short-sleeved shirts and turn off my furnace.  What do you want to bet, come May it will suddenly jump up to the middle 90′s and we’ll have missed the lovely Spring weather altogether.

Yeah, it’s supposed to be in the 70′s for the next three days, but now “they” are saying that on Monday it will be back in the 50′s again.  I guess you folks in Florida are really touched by my lament, aren’t you?  Despite all this, Mother Nature is sticking to the timetable and the trees are budding and it’s getting harder to see through the woods now as they start greening up.

Speaking of green trees, following our “report” yesterday (HERE) about the man who had a tree growing in his lung, one of our readers who is known by many of you as “Alaska Dave” plunged into the web to see if any of the debunking websites had been able to disprove the story.  So far, nobody has cracked it.  He even came up with a purported photograph of the pulmonary twig:

But I still have my doubts.  While I will agree that it’s conceivable that an inhaled seed could just possibly sprout despite the body’s natural tendency to cough up foreign materials, what queers it for me is the fact that it came out green.  If I was staging this stunt I would have colored the twig a pale brown or even a blackish gunk.  But I just don’t see how it could possibly be green without ever being exposed to natural light.  If any of you have studied some advanced biology, please help me out here.

Update:  We’re getting closer to debunking this story.  Read the Comments section for FireTech1′s contribution.

On the other hand, catch this fable that Reuters is putting out as “news.”  Under the headline Man Bites Python, they write in part:

A Kenyan man bit a python who wrapped him in its coils and hauled him up a tree in a struggle that lasted hours, local media said Wednesday. .. “I stepped on a spongy thing on the ground and suddenly my leg was entangled with the body of a huge python,” he told the Daily Nation newspaper….. When the snake coiled itself round his upper body, Nyaumbe resorted to desperate measures: “I had to bite it.”

So far, so good.  But then they started to liven up the story:

The python dragged him up a tree, but when it eased its grip, Nyaumbe said he was able to take a mobile phone out of his pocket and phone for help.

After you stop laughing, they tell you how it all ends up:

When his supervisor came with a policeman, Nyaumbe smothered the snake’s head with his shirt, while the rescuers tied it with a rope and pulled.

“We both came down, landing with a thud,” said Nyaumbe, who survived with damaged lips and bruising.  The snake escaped from the three sacks it was bundled into.

A policeman without a gun, a farm manager without a machete, but all three of them have “sacks” just in case they need to bag a python which conveniently escapes before the photographer gets there.  Now that is a story that I’m not likely to believe.

But I believe I’d better get this coffee started, so let’s get the equipment checked out.  I’ll see if I can find something more plausible to show you in the day room.