Crash Into Me

I got mando'd on the first day of my four day. I could use the overtime and it was at my old station with a captain I like so it wasn't that bad, it's just that when you're ready to go home and are about to walk out the door you aren't in the mind-set of working for another 24 hours.

I packed up my gear and all my stuff and made it to the station by about 8:30 to relieve the engineer from the previous shift. I had not eaten breakfast yet, but I needed to check out the rig, especially since I hadn't been on this piece of equipment in awhile. I was the only medic that day, so I had to check all the medical gear as well. I finished all this in about 40 minutes when our EMS chief showed up followed by a semi truck delivering medical supplies to the station. We then had to unload the truck and organize all the medical equipment.

OK, with that job done it was finally time to go eat.

Just then the chief informed us that there was a structure fire a couple of districts over. We went to the rig and looked up the location on the map in case it went to a second alarm. Dispatch then rang our station down for move up to a neighboring district to cover for one of the engines that was at the fire. As we pulled out of the station we could already see the large, black column of smoke in the distance. Shortly after that, we got the dispatch for the second alarm and I hit the lights and siren.

It was a long run to get there and we could see the column go from black to white and start to diminish. And, just as we feared, the second alarm got cancelled when we were about two blocks away. Since we were practically there, we continued in and did a face to face with the IC (incident commander) to see what he wanted us to do. He wound up sending us back to the station we originally went to cover.

Now, I still haven't eaten at this point, so I knew I was going to be raiding their food when I got there. Unfortunately the station was not well stocked and all I was able to find were some Saltines and peanut butter.

We ran a couple of alarm calls while we were there but were cancelled on both. We didn't get released to return to our station until about 12:45.

The doors at this other station are on a timer so you don't have to close them when you leave, they close automatically after some set period of time. The crew from that house returned and after chatting with them for a few minutes we got set to get out of there. I started up the rig, and for some reason all the station doors closed. Now I'm just filling the ap bay with diesel exhaust, so my captain jumped out and hit the door open button and jumped back in the engine. I watched the door go up and checked to make sure it was all the way up and stopped before I headed out (as I always do). I had driven about 5-8 feet when I heard a huge crash. I stopped the rig and realized that the door had come down on us as I was leaving. The firefighter from the other engine had watched it all unfold and said that that is about the third time that has happened at that station and they still don't know why. He hit the button again and fortunately the door went up. I pulled the rig out the rest of the way and climbed up top to survey the damage. Surprisingly there was none, I couldn't even tell if the scratches on the aerial ladder were new since the whole ladder is pretty scratched up.

The station door on the other hand was wrecked. The bottom was bent out and the trim was ripped off and several rollers had gone flying off. it looked like a cross between these two photos (but possibly worse):




Luckily, we were able to manually release the door and pull it back down by hand using some very long pike poles.

We then returned to our station to begin the paperwork.