Brussell's Blog

This past weekend I was covering the truck my normal Friday night. I had Brandon Davis as my medic, Brian Tolbert was out b\c of work at RPS. We wasn’t getting swamped, but we kept a steady flow of calls, a total of 4 from 5pm till around 10:30 pm. It was around 10:30 pm or so that I was sitting out in the parking lot on the phone with Rachael when my chief David Waid came running out of dispatch ( he works a shift as a police officer on fridays, so he was policing at this time ) and told me we had a structure fire. It took me a good minute for it to register what he was telling me, as I hung the phone up and began grabbing my fire gear the tone goes off and says theirs a trailer fire off of Markland Rd. ( off of Empire Rd. ).

By this time I’m in full sprint with gear in hand running for Engine 1 over in the engine bays. David yells for me to crank it up for him while he takes off his holster and police gear. We are off the hill shortly after the 2nd tone as I see Ricky Lee coming up on the hill to grab Engine 3. I know I have a good 2-3 mins. at least to get my gear on, pack up with the SCBA ( oxygen tank we use to breathe with inside a fire ) and get my senses about me before we get on scene. Try doing all this while screaming down the road in the dark, it’s so exillerating =). I was fully suited up and ready to go on air by the time we find the road the trailer fire is reported at. We don’t know if it’s already fully involved or just starting. Trailer fires are by far the fastest fires to engulf and take off, and not to mention they are by far the hotests as well b\c it’s nothing but a Tin covered oven.

As we pull on scene we jump out, and I round the front of the engine and we notice it’s only in one part of the trailer in what appears to be 2 rooms. Dave looks at me and says if we jump on this we can knock it out and save as much as we can. I didn’t even hesitate I jumped up and grabbed the hose and nossle and approached the front door. I didn’t have to pry much before it opened, the smoke was thick and dark and I quickly realised I wasn’t on air … LoL. So I reached down and attached my oxygen resperator and took in a good breathe of fresh air. I tried to kneel down as much as possible and headed down the direction of where I knew the fire was seen on the outside.

It’s one thing to go into someone’s house that you’ve never been in before and try to navigate to where you need to go on the first try, it’s completely insane to do this in complete pitch black darkness. Put your hand in front of your face and close your eyes, this is what it’s like inside a good smoked up house fire. Your other senses have to take over, sound and touch. I felt my way down a long hall with obstacles I kicked and pushed out of my way all while dragging a fully charged hand line ( hose ) down the hall. I came to a doorway where a door was partially off it’s hinges, I kicked and pushed the door out of the way. Then the heat met me in the door way, I knew I was in the right spot now. A few steps inside the room and I found myself crawling now b\c of the intense heat, and there she was in all her beauty. The fire was dancing up a wall and above my head in the ceiling, all that could be seen was her yellowish orange glow. I took a second to watch her, then opened the nozzle up and hit her a couple good times with some water. She quickly died down, so then I started doing my counter-clockwise spray pattern to finish her off. She had managed to move over to my left trying to spread through the ceiling to the rest of the trailer so I straight streamed the ceiling tile down so I could get a good view of rafters and cut her off. This all took about 2-3 mins from truck to inside and fighting the fire when Wayne Butler “Opie” showed up behind me tapping me on my back. I had expected him to be in soon when I seen him pull in behind the engine as I got out initially. He found me in the doorway which is where I had backed out to so he could find me after I knocked the fire out. I gave him the hose and showed him where I had put the fire out at and where it was, and we went back into the room. I busted out a window I had seen going in the first time so I could get some good ventilation. I heard Opie do the same on the other side of the room. The smoke was really thick now b\c of the steam I generated from putting water on the fire. We had to get the room vented as soon as possible b\c the initial heat and now the steam made the room a super heated oven and staying in the room for very long was next to impossible even with our fire resistant gear. We was joined by 2-3 more fire figthers soon after searching the room for fire or victims. I instructed one of them to bring in some radios, thermal imager, and notify David who was outside pumping the engine that the fire had been extinguished.

So long story short there’s my tale of fighting a Fire solo, which rarely happens now a days in our department, especially for me. I had fought a house fire by myself once before during the day in almost the same conditions, only 1-2 rooms envolved. So I had done this before, yet was happy I hadn’t lost the touch and handled the situation as we was trained to do. You know, you hear soldiers talk about being in a fire fight it’s like the go into automatic mode where all their training kicks in and takes over. The same is true for Fire Fighters, thats exactly what happened soon as I stepped foot inside that trailer. It was in auto-mode with my training taking over. Of course I did alot of praying the entire time I was doing it, so I know thats over all what guided my hand through it all and do not deny it =).

The good lord blessed me to fight fire another day … and gave me yet another story to tell.

-Brandon

Today I managed to get some small tasks ( yet important ones ) taken care of. In preparations for moving Sumiton Fire and Rescue over to this dedicated box, I finally got my email server installed and properly configured. The longest part was probably configuring the Webmail portion of the server. My IIS and ASP.Net 2.0 didn’t go over well with this slightly older version of email server software, which wanted ASP.Net 1.1.

After some tweaking, and old school manipulation ;p … I got it to finally take. Now I have a email server with good Spam blockage, Virus Scanning, and a versatile Webmail site that can easily attach to those sites I wish to give email functionality to.

So far so good, just one step closer to moving over the Fire Dept. site. Although, the major things left still lie with me finishing up the ASP.Net 2.0 coding I have left to do. This will be the 3rd major over haul for the site within a 5 year span. Not too aweful bad, considering it’s staying on the cutting edge of what software and servers have to offer.

My heart goes out to each family member and firefighter affected by the tragic loss of the brave 9 fire fighters killed in the line of duty Monday. For those who haven’t heard 9 fire fighters lost their lives while fighting a fire inside a furniture store monday evening when the roof suddenly collapsed on them. It happened in Charleston, SC.

You can read the full story here:
Firehouse.com