Our Good Deed For "D" Day

We do some interesting public assistance calls from time to time. There are some things that the fire department is uniquely equipped for that no one else can really handle. It is not an emergency in any way, but 'who you gonna call'?

Today (D-Day) we brought our ladder truck out to repair an 80 foot tall flag pole for the Masons. The wire that runs inside the pole and to which the flag is attached had gotten caught and they were unable to put their flag up. They had no way of getting up to the top of the pole without renting a crane. So, in the interest of good will and PR, we went out with our reserve ladder truck which has a 105' aerial ladder to see if we could fix it.

It was a steep angle but we were able to reach the top easily and the firefighter went up to free the wire. He had quite a view from up there.

He was able to unhook the wire and send it back down without a hitch. We stuck around to help raise the flag which was huge (20' x 30') and get a tour of the place before returning to quarters.

Hand Holding

A lot of times my job amounts to hand holding and reassuring. It's not dramatic, daring, or exciting but it needs to be done and I think it is important to do it with true compassion and professionalism. I found myself doing this a few times this past tour.

We responded out to the same address twice in the same day for a "lift assist". The 80-something year old female who lives there has very little use of her legs and gets around in a motorized wheelchair. She can usually get herself from the bed to the commode by her bed and back as well as into her wheelchair and back. Today her feet slipped out from under her while trying to get to her chair and she slid off the bed to the floor. She lives with a couple of forty-something year old males, at least one of whom I believe is related to her. The other gentleman has a bad back and cannot assist in lifting her and it truly is more than a one man job. So, we go out and help her up and into her wheelchair.

The first time we went out there the woman was quite embarrassed and apologetic. We assured her that it was no problem and we were glad to help. The second time we went out she was just despondent over the situation and crying (not from pain but from frustration at her situation and inability to handle it without calling us). This time it took a bit more talking and reassuring on our part. I hope we left her feeling a little better about the situation and that there is nothing to be embarrassed or ashamed of. I hope she understands that this is indeed one of the things we are here to do and that we will gladly help whenever needed.

The second situation of that shift came in the form of a very upset 17 year old girl. The call came in as a report of a 17 year old female with difficulty breathing. When we arrived we were told the girl had asthma and they had given her albuterol (which would have been fine if this had actually been an asthma attack). The girl was on the couch crying and hyperventilating and complaining of chest pain, headache, and low back pain. We went immediately into calm and reassure mode and set to work getting her to slow her breathing down and relax. I listened to her lungs and they were clear, definitely not asthma. I never even found out why she was upset but spent a good twenty minutes holding her hand, supporting her back and coaching her breathing until she slowed down enough to talk in full sentences again.


Once she was able to talk normally I asked some of our standard medical history questions and found out she also has a history of stress induced ulcers (at seventeen). I wasn't about to get into what had triggered this whole episode and risk her getting worked up again so I avoided that whole line of questioning. We were in an upstairs unit and when we tried to get the girl to stand she felt too weak so the firefighter and I picked her up and carried her to the ambulance gurney downstairs.

Now, I'll admit, our whole crew was probably picturing the scene from Airplane where Leslie Nielsen was slapping the hysterical woman while a line of passengers waited with a variety of weapons for their turn, but we never showed it.


She was still upset when we loaded her onto the gurney and embarrassed to be seen like that by the neighbors but she was breathing at a much more reasonable rate and her hands had stopped tingling. It was definitely going to take a lot longer for that headache to go away but she'd be OK.

Of course the next day, I got to wrestle in the street with a combative bicyclist who had been hit by a car and was seriously altered and fighting us, so I guess it all balances out.

Something Different Every Day

You really do learn new things all the time in this job. For instance, I didn't know that lumberyards and sawmills simply packed semi trailers completely full of sawdust to get rid of the stuff.

I suppose that seems obvious now that I think about it, but it hadn't occurred to me before.

I know this now because one of them caught fire.

We had started our day off with a code blue first thing after breakfast. The rest of the day had been training, exercising, and a couple more medical calls. About 8:30 that night the structure fire tones went off and we responded to a "commercial structure with a roof on fire" in the next district over. We were second on scene and were initially assigned water supply, which is not a great assignment for our particular rig. Fortunately another rig got there right behind us and took the hydrant for us which left us free to do truck work. We followed the first engine into a pallet yard where one of these sawdust trailers was sitting inside a covered structure of some sort. There must have been some sort of spontaneous combustion or else something got in the sawdust and smoldered until it broke through the top of the pile. There was active fire out the roof of the structure when we arrived.

The trailer itself is open at the top and so the flames had gone straight up and started burning through the roof. I put the aerial ladder up to the roof and the rest of my crew climbed up to start pulling the plywood roof sheeting off and then try to extinguish the fire from above. I set off to help the first engine with the water supply and connecting hoses. Pretty quickly it became apparent that we weren't going to be able to do much more than knock down the initial flames until someone could come and tow the trailer to someplace where we could access it better. It was just so packed full that the hoselines couldn't really penetrate. Parts of the side of the trailer had burned through and if we just tried to flood the thing with water, the weight would probably have caused the trailer to fail and burst open.

After awhile someone from the business showed up and moved the trailer out into the open. Our crew was assigned to overhaul the structure and extinguish any remaining fire there. When we finished that we went to see what was happening with the trailer. We found the other crew using a circular saw to cut open the panels on the side of the truck and attempting to poke at the sawdust with pike poles and roof rakes to get it to spill out. They were then hosing down what spilled out. It was like fighting a fire in the worlds largest hamster cage and it was not very effective. We decided to put a ladder up to the trailer and a couple of guys went inside with a hoseline flowing foam and just doused the thing. It made a hell of a mess but it worked. The foam helped the water penetrate deep enough to get the smoldering stuff and they'd pulled out enough sawdust to give the guys room to work and move around inside.

The whole thing took about three hours. By the time we got back to the station, cleaned all of our equipment, and showered it was after midnight. I laid down in bed at 12:13 and we responded to a medical at 12:23. We got back from that one about 01:00 and got up for the next one at 01:30. I think I fell asleep about 02:30 and slept until 07:00 when we got up to start day two of the tour.

But, hey...I learned something new.

Beware Of Dog

I learned an interesting fact recently concerning our city's police dogs. It turns out that we really shouldn't go around the police dogs in our turnout gear because apparently we look like we're wearing the attack suit they train them with and they will go after us.


I find it a little disconcerting that I just learned this after ten years of working here.

Dog bites can be pretty ugly. It's gotta be scary as hell being attacked by a dog, police or otherwise. I've seen a few bad guys who got the K-9's set on them and none of them were too happy. As highly trained as they are, the K-9s are pretty single minded and not too discriminating. You really don't want to get in the way of one of them, no matter who you are.

We got called out a while back for a police dog bite. The street was closed off and blocked by police cars when we arrived on scene. We approached one of the officers to find out who our victim was. He was leaning on the hood of his patrol car and when he stood up I noticed a large tear in his pants. The pants were opened up from just below the crotch to almost the knee. It turns out this officer had got between the dog and the bad guy and the dog went for him instead. He was bit in the leg before getting the dog under control. It was one of those bites that had it been a little more posterior it could have hit an artery and had it been a little more lateral he would have been singing a lot higher. The cop had some good punctures to his inner thigh and it was already turning blue but he had no real bleeding. This is not necessarily a good thing, the lack of blood just means the germs are trapped under the skin in the punctures. This guy was tough, one of our more bad-ass cops, but he was in some pain when I cleaned up the wound. Really, all I did was rinse the wound and bandage his leg. When he gets to the hospital and they really get to cleaning that thing out he is going to be hating life, or at the very least hating that dog.

Stay On Target....Stay On Target

Very early on in my career I responded to a report of a kitchen fire. When we pulled up on scene there was no smoke and the residents were standing in the driveway and a few still inside the house and garage. In my inexperience I took this as a sign that there was no fire and very little to be done. This turned out to be true but it is still the wrong attitude. The emergency is the emergency until proven otherwise. As my Captain headed inside to check it out I noticed that a teenager in the driveway looked like he had dipped his hand in wax and all the wax was running off the tips of his fingers. I then noticed the hose and the bucket of water at his feet and realized he was burned and that the skin was sloughing off of his hand.

Again, in my inexperience, I got tunnel visioned. I stopped to deal with the kid instead of following my Captain into what could have been a kitchen fire. Again, it wasn't, but I did the wrong thing. As a new medic and relatively new firefighter it can be very difficult not to get that tunnel vision. It is definitely a discipline to look at the bigger picture and prioritize your actions accordingly.

There had been a small grease fire in the kitchen that was quickly extinguished by the residents. The boy's hand had been burned by the boiling grease. There was no extension of the fire in the kitchen so we were able to turn our attention to the medical aspect of the call. We provided pain relief and continued cooling measures with the garden hose and the bucket until the ambulance arrived and took him off to the hospital.

That call really stuck with me. No harm was done by my mistakes and I handled the medical aspect well, but it definitely taught me a lesson about not letting my guard down, staying on task, and not taking anything for granted when it comes to fires. I had also never seen anything like that kid's hand before that day; it is truly a bizarre sight.

Too Close For Comfort

It's amazing how lucky some people are. It has been said that one of the reasons our job is so stressful is that we spend such a large percentage of our time dealing with the worst 1-2 percent of other peoples lives. This is true, we see hundreds of people at some of the absolute worst moments of their lives. But, I swear, we also see some of the luckiest people on the face of the planet. Maybe it's because we work in the realm of random chance and "accidents" and we see so much of it, but every fire, every car wreck (almost) could have been so much worse. We say our city lives under a white cloud because the fires that could have been disastrous never get to that point, the gunshot wound could have been an inch to the left, the pole could have come through the driver's side of the car. I'm sure every department believes the same thing about their city. We just see so many close calls.

We responded last night for a call from the police department to determine the structural integrity of a house that had been hit by a car. We see these from time to time. Someone fails to negotiate a curve or steps on the wrong pedal and smacks into someones house. Usually they are not too bad. Last night a car apparently doing donuts in the street lost control, crashed through a chain link fence, sped across the lawn, and took out the entire Southwest corner of the house. The car literally took out a space about three and a half feet high and 5-6 wall studs deep in both directions. It also knocked down a metal pole that came crashing through the living room window.




There were many amazing factors to this crash:

One: the car then backed up and drove away. The fact that it was drivable is amazing to me. Granted, it only made it a block and a half before being abandoned. Still....

Two: there was no collapse

And most importantly-Three: the thirteen year old girl on the bed in the bedroom the car drove through was unharmed! The car wound up at the foot of her bed and the headboard held up any wall collapse that would have landed on her.



Other than being understandably freaked out, the girl was fine. Had she been anywhere else in that room she would have ended up under that car or hit by debris. Instead, she just rolled off the other side of the bed and left the room.

Disaster for the house, yes. A really bad day for the family, yes. But from my perspective, just ridiculously, unbelievably lucky.

The police even picked up the drivers a few blocks away too.

(pictures not of the actual call)

Choose Your Weapon

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