This One Is Ours

Sometimes it's tough to get the story straight. For us, there are many things that have to take place, correctly no less, for us to get dispatched to an emergency call. The emergency has to be properly reported for what it is - smoke, smoke and flames, smell of gas, etc. The caller has to know the proper location of the emergency - correct address, proper cross street, north bound or south bound on the freeway, north or south of the exit, etc. The proper units to be assigned have to come up on the CAD (computer aided dispatch) and be sent on their way.

My department's communications center also serves other cities and jurisdictions and we hear their dispatch and radio traffic along with ours, which can occasionally be confusing. The other night, we heard a call come in for the neighboring city at a location right on the border of our two jurisdictions. There was some debate over which side of the line it was on. The call was for a fire so my firefighter and I went out on to the balcony of our station and looked out in the direction of the border. Yep, we could see a column of smoke all right. Couldn't tell how far away it was though, or on whose side.


Unfortunately, the other city's department is a little, shall we say, stand-offish and doesn't like to include us unless they have to. So, we figured we weren't going to get to go play on this one. However, we started hearing more radio traffic stating that the location was actually an abandoned store well within our city limits and that the original call was only for smoke seen in the area (see what I mean about getting the story and the location straight). Our battalion chief radioed to strike a first alarm and send our units to the new location.

The closest unit was on scene in about two minutes and reported a commercial structure fire with flames blowing through the roof. We all knew this building to be abandoned and in fact when they closed up shop we were allowed to train there, cut up the roof, and pretty much wreck the place. This was a large building with some serious accessibility problems - locked up chain link fencing all around, locked roll up metal doors for entry, and a large debris field all around it. We were ordered to "put the stick up right away". I drive the aerial ladder truck ('quint' really, but we're not going to talk about that) and that meant that I got to go to work. I positioned the truck so we could raise the ladder and attack the fire from above with about 1000 gallons a minute flowing down onto the roof.


I put the stick up, secured a water supply, and my firefighter climbed the 75 foot aerial and manned the nozzle at the tip. We had pretty good knock down of the fire from up there. By the time the other crews were able to make entry into the building we had a great deal of the fire put out. We shut down so the crews could safely get inside, search the place, and extinguish the rest of the fire.

There was a lot of hose pulled to attack the fire and even more to supply the two rigs flowing water, so we were on scene for quite a while loading hose and cleaning up. For not actually fighting fire up close, I was surprisingly dirty when it was all said and done. It made for another very late night with very little sleep, but I'll take that any day. If I have to lose sleep, I'd rather it be for this kind of call and not something ridiculous.