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Firefighter


 

My wife got me started watching reruns of Station 19, a show about Seattle firefighters, a spinoff of Grey’s Anatomy. Like Grey’s Anatomy, it is a typical Hollywood take on an important job, meaning: cue the soap opera subplots. But it does have some realistic portrayals of the kinds of things that a firefighter might encounter, even if some aspects are exaggerated. Anyway, it got me reminiscing about when I was a firefighter.

I was a volunteer firefighter in a small coastal town. My situation was different than that of a professional firefighter working in a large city. In my 10-year career as a fireman, I responded to something more than 500 calls. That might seem like a lot in the abstract, but a firefighter in a big city department might do that many in a few months.

In station 19, much is made of the danger firefighters face and their stress it puts on their loved ones (of course they have to ramp up the drama). Firefighters do face dangers. Some of them are injured or even killed on the job. Training is done to alleviate that danger. There are dozens of critical tasks that every firefighter must know, and hundreds of less critical tasks. Even volunteers like I was, train not only to take care of the fire or other emergency, but for our own safety. We attended workshops and classes. We drilled every week. We knew our equipment, how to use it, what it was capable of, and what its limitations were.

But my experience was not that of a professional firefighter.  99% of the calls I went on were not ones that put me in much danger. Most of our calls were motor vehicle accidents or other medical calls. I only responded to maybe a dozen structure fires. But those, and even some of the others, could be intense. I saw some dead bodies, and there were other victims who looked like they were not going to make it (we seldom heard what happened to patients after they left our care). And, yes, there were some dangerous situations. This is stuff you must process. I never had to go into a burning building to do a sweep for victims. In each of my cases, the people were all accounted for by the time we arrived. Our job was to put the fire out and to keep the surrounding structures from catching fire. Compared to a professional firefighter, my accomplishments were pretty modest (Hell, I thought it was an achievement when I first managed to back the fire engine into a stall at the fire hall without scraping paint off the sides).

We learned how to “vent” a structure. This usually involves going onto the roof and cutting a hole in the roof to give the heat and gasses an escape route so they do not just keep accumulating and spreading throughout the attic or ceiling.  I learned how to do it, but I never had to actually do it, because all the fires I responded to were either too small, or too big (already self-vented) by the time we arrived.

Even though I didn’t see a lot of exciting moments, there were a few intense incidents that stand out. One time I was driving Engine #3 down a long hill and had to make a tight turn to the left off of the highway. Engine #3 had a known problem, that if you pushed on the brakes too hard, it would kill the engine. When the engine died, so did your power steering and power brakes. I miscalculated and hit the brakes too hard. The engine died and we were in trouble. I gripped the wheel and literally stood on the brakes as we crossed the oncoming lane of traffic and shot onto the shoulder. Fortunately, no one was  in the oncoming lane. Even more fortunately, I got the vehicle to stop before we went over the cliff.

Then there was the time that we responded to a medical call. A fisherman had climbed down a steep slope and fallen on the rocks by the ocean, breaking his leg. About five of us took a back board and medical kit and hiked down the very steep, heavily forested slope. We hoped that we were not going to have to carry the patient back up the hill. It was over 300 feet of elevation change through rough terrain. In the end it was decided to call in the Coast Guard helicopter to evacuate the patient. A medic was down on the rocks with the patient while I and others were slightly uphill watching the operation. The chopper came in and because the hill was so steep, he had to get (I thought) dangerously close to the hill. Those blades were right about level with my head, and looked really close. The helicopter was also wobbling around a bit from the wind. I stepped behind a tree, although if a gust of wind had pushed the blades into the hill, the shrapnel would fly unpredictably and my tree might not have been much protection. But they got the victim out. We all survived, and then had to trudge back up that hill to the road.

I never had a hankering to be a fireman as a kid. It was not something I ever dreamed about or had a desire to do. I am certainly not the bravest person in the world (I don’t like heights). But living in a very small community served by a volunteer fire department, I felt like it was my civic duty to help out. Even so, it took me a couple of years to get up the gumption to join up. I know my experience was but a tiny taste of what professional firefighters face. Station 19 is a typical Hollywoodization of firefighters so the drama is exaggerated, but the danger is real. I have deep respect for firefighters.

Star Liner

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