Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [56]
“A fire, Daddy! A fire!” Allyson yelled. It was funny to see her shed her matronly manner so quickly. “Can we go?”
Britney was so intoxicated with the thrill of it, she couldn’t speak at all, just stood next to her older sister gasping for breath. Morgan pretended to be above it all, but I could see she was amped, too.
Any other day I would have said no, but this might be their last chance to see me doing one of the few things I did well.
I tossed Morgan the keys to the Lexus. “Do not go over the speed limit. Adjust the mirrors. Obey all the traffic laws. Don’t worry about missing anything. If it’s a good fire, it’ll still be burning when you get there. Park off the roadway. Watch out for firefighters and incoming apparatus. Volunteers out here get pretty jazzed. Don’t get in anyone’s way.”
“Yes, Mr. Swope,” said Morgan.
Ian Hjorth, who had already kicked off his station boots and put on his bunking boots and pants, was climbing up behind the wheel of the engine. Without taking off my civilian clothes, I climbed into the cab next to him. Karrie and Ben Arden were seated behind us in the crew cab. They would finish dressing and don air masks while we drove, prepared to step off the rig and fight fire upon arrival.
Manned by the first arriving volunteer at the station, the tanker would respond to refill our pumper when we ran out of water. Empty, it would then be driven to the nearest hydrant to be refilled. Our engine carried a thousand gallons, enough to put out most structure fires in their incipient stages. The tanker carried an additional five thousand.
Just below Mount Washington, I spotted a pall of heavy black smoke rising from behind a low hill. The color and the speed with which the smoke was rising were indicators that we had a structure fire.
On the radio I confirmed that we had a column of black smoke. This would let our volunteers on Wilderness Rim know to bring the engine we kept parked up there at our satellite station. It would also let Snoqualmie, our mutual aid department from the next small town over, know we really had something. It would let the first volunteer to arrive at the station know that he should bring the tanker.
We exited the freeway and rolled up a narrow road shaded by trees on both sides. Here and there a driveway or an open yard fronted the road. Two horses in a field lashed out with their rear legs and galloped off at the sound of our siren.
Half a mile from the freeway, we found smoke coming from the rear of a large lot mostly hidden by trees and brush. “It’s Caputo’s place,” Ian Hjorth said, swinging our engine into Caputo’s driveway.
“I spotted a hydrant about two hundred yards back.”
“I’ll tell the tanker guy when he gets here.”
Because I was the first officer on scene, I would automatically become the incident commander, which meant I would remain outside the fire building and coordinate fire-fighting efforts, remain in contact with incoming units on the radio, and dole out assignments to individual firefighters as they showed up in their private vehicles. It would be my responsibility to make sure everybody on the fire ground worked as a team, that rescues were made promptly, that nobody was injured.
The first rule of fire fighting was: Don’t get hurt.
If all the civilians weren’t out of the building, or if we didn’t know for certain whether they were out, our priority would be rescue. Most of the time, though, rescue and extinguishment went hand in hand. You put the fire out—the victim was no longer in danger.
I can’t tell you how much I loved this job.
Right away I needed to determine whether there were exposures we had to protect with hose lines, whether there were nearby structures that might be damaged by fire. As in all building fires, we needed to ventilate the occupancy at the same time we put water on the fire; otherwise the smoke and steam had nowhere to go. The oldest way to ventilate was to go to the roof and cut a hole over the fire, ideally about four feet by eight feet.
We would also need firefighters