Are We First In?

We were just about to clear a false alarm in the East end of our district when a structure fire call came in. It was on the Northwest border of our district and the next one over, technically the next station's first in, but there were a lot of units from our battalion working another structure fire at the time. As I turned the rig around and put on the lights and siren, my firefighter said, "Guys, we've got smoke behind us". When I got out onto the main streets again, we could indeed see a pretty good column starting to form.


Since we were on this other call when the fire was reported we were not initially attached to the alarm assignment. My captain kept trying to tell dispatch to attach us so we could get the address sent to our MDC (mobile data computer in our rig). There was so much radio traffic that they weren't answering him. Fortunately, I knew the street and could pretty much follow the smoke. When I got within a couple blocks of the street I needed to turn on, Truck 56 showed up behind us and followed us in. The smoke was really pumping now, dark and heavy. Finding the address was easy enough with the smoke and flames and crowd of people on the street, but not having a chance to see the map and not having it on our MDC, we didn't know where the hydrants were on this street and so far I hadn't seen any on the whole block driving in. As we approached the address, my firefighter suddenly spoke up from the backseat, "Are we first in?" Hard to believe, but we were. Now he would get to fight fire.

Turns out the fire was burning up an awning, a fence, some trees, and a boat in the backyard of the residence. The fuel and fiberglass of the boat were causing the thick, black smoke. I committed the rig to the long driveway but had to stop short due to some very low hanging cable/phone wires. I angled the rig to the left and my crew pulled a mobile standpipe (2 1/2 inch supply hose with 100 feet of 1 3/4 inch attack hose) to attack the fire. I heard some radio traffic about another engine who found a hydrant and would be bringing me a water supply (thank god) and more engines going to the court behind this house for a better point of attack. I got my crew's line flowing and waited for the engine to show up with my water supply before my tank ran out. I have a 500 gallon tank and the attack line flows 160 gallons per minute, so there really isn't much time.

Waiting.

Waiting.

Ahh, hell...no engine and no other crews or rigs except the empty truck on the block with me. A second BC pulled up and I asked him if there was a rig coming to give me a supply and he said he didn't know. Great. I radioed my crew and told them we were at 1/4 tank and had no supply. A minute later I radioed that I was shutting down their line. Fortunately, this was an outside fire, had they been inside a burning structure this could have been very bad.

Turns out, the supply engine went to the street behind and supplied the engine on that side and I was forgotten about. Meanwhile, another engine was getting ready to clear the scene as most of the fire had been knocked down. I stopped the captain of that rig and told him I needed his water. They quickly pumped their tank into mine so we could continue with our operation. It was pretty much just mop up work at that point so we were able to do it with just the newly filled tank.

A lot of little lessons learned on that one and fortunately a positive outcome despite all the miscommunications.