Firefighting

Upon browsing the internet, I came to the realization that I have not divulged anything about my life to people I don’t know for quite some time. I now plan to change that. I shall regale you with information that will make little, if any, sense.

First off, for the past 5 weekends I have been attending a recruit firefighting academe. (In case you don’t know, I am volunteer firefighter and have been for almost two years). The class I am taking however is not sponsored by my department. If is put on by another one that we sometimes have to work with. They are very happy to have me there in spite of the friendly criticism that is inevitable between to competing originations. There is always something that someone is heckling someone else about, such as “It took you 2 min to put your SCBA (self contained breathing apparatus) on? Man, you just let somebody’s baby die.” Or “how long did it take you to hook up that hydrant? The truck will be empty by the time you are ready for water.” And so on and so forth.
Being the unstoppable force of nature that I am, I was at the top of the class in most things. I have one of the fastest donning times for the SCBA, I have the fastest times donning my turnouts, I leave little room for criticism.


One of the things I have come to realize is that, as a firefighter, I am always in urgent need of a bath room. For example, one of the instructors wanted us to put on our SCBAs and walk around until we are completely out of air, thinking it would take about half an hour. Well, shortly after we started the call of nature took me, and I was torn between seeing how long it takes to use a bottle of air, and the urge to suck down the rest of the air and get it over with. To add to this dilemma, it was a team event. So, if I were to use all my air really fast it would hurt my partners overall time as well as mine.

In the end (64 minutes later) I opted to be a team player and tried not to think about how stupid I would look when I messed in my turnouts.

Also, being from a small bathroom break of a town, on top of the normal fazing of being a firefighter, training with another department, MY department sort of has been stereotyped as redneck/backwoods. As much as I dislike such a thing I have to admit that there is some truth to the assumption. The story goes as such.

The first fire I ever went on was at a sort of run down, half way house, for criminals in between jail terms. I was fast enough getting out of bed and getting dressed that I got on the first truck out (our pumper). One the way, the chief tells me that there should be a fire hydrant near by and he wants me to take it (connect a hose to it so we can get water to the pump on the truck). Being very new and not having very much training (like I said our department is kind of back woods) I was a little worried about my job. Never the less I was going to impress the chief, so I said “not problem, I will take the hydrant”.

As soon as the truck stopped, I jumped out and started looking for the fire hydrant. After ranging through waist high brush and freaking all the neighbors out, I decided that the chief must be wrong and the hydrant did not exist, I gave up the search and told the chief I could not find it. As it turn out, it was only a little fire, and we were able to put it out with the water already onboard the fire truck.
After the fire was out and we were putting all the hose back on our engine, I look over and see a refrigerator on the side of the road right next to the house that was formerly on fire. How odd. Thinking nothing else of it I continued relaying hose. Right before we left the chief and I took one last walk around to make sure we had every thing. As we came around the last corner, we saw that the refrigerator was right in front of a nice yellow fire hydrant, sitting right where we could not see it. So, if you ever come to my town, and need to find a fire hydrant, just look for the refrigerator on the side of the road.