As a welcome back present I got a four alarm fire.
Not my first day back but a few tours in. My first fire in a while too. It came in just on the border of our district and the next one over, but technically their first due. It was a grocery and liquor store we knew well.
As we rolled down the street we could see Engine 50 coming the opposite way. The hydrant was on our side of the street but on their side of the intersection. I knew they would get to the building first and figured we would be taking care of the water supply for them.
E-50 stopped just short of the building and started stretching hose. I was just rolling up on their position when the front of the store exploded.
(something like that but without the people in front)
I literally watched in my side view mirror all this glass and debris flying across the street right behind my engine. My first thought was, "Where is the crew from E-50?". I was afraid they had just pulled hose in front of the explosion. They hadn't. They were setting up to go in the Delta side main door. The debris shot across four lanes of traffic to the gas station on the opposite side of the street.
We made the water supply connection for Engine 50 using our own 5" hose (which would later prove to be a mistake). Then we helped pull a back up line to that door on the Delta side (that's to the right of the address btw). There was quite a bit of flame showing in the Bravo/Charlie corner but visibility was still good and we could still see all the way through the building.
However...
Within just a couple of minutes of the smoke explosion the roof collapsed, the whole interior was burning and there was no hope of fighting this fire from the interior. My crew got reassigned to start forcing entry and checking the exposure businesses on the Delta side. There was some minor damage to the first unit but the others were clear. We ran into some trouble with ventilation though because it was a peaked roof built over a flat roof so the vent groups efforts were pretty much wasted. We wound up just doing some pre-emptive salvage work, covering up computers and electronics, and safeguarding plaques and awards, etc. As we did that, the sticks went up on two sides of the structure and the 'surround and drown' began.
We spent the bulk of our time after that putting out spot fires and several times revisiting whatever was burning in the bravo/delta corner that refused to go out. Whatever it was was buried under the roof collapse so there was no way to get to it yet.
All in all we spent about 13 hours on this fire. We were second in but last to leave. There were a few extenuating circumstances that caused that to happen but one being the fact that E50 was using our 5" as water supply and that was pretty much the last thing to be loaded.
It was a long fire (02:30 - 15:00) but not overwhelmingly strenuous beyond the first ten to fifteen minutes. But, it was still a good test for my return to work post surgery and a pretty exciting fire for a little while.
All of this reminds me of a joke:
A Lama with one L is a holy man.
A Llama with two Ls is an animal.
Do you know what a 3 L lama is?....
One helluva fire.
