Summer of Fire - Linda Jacobs [43]
Clare had done most of the exercises and she knew well the feeling that the dragon was about to bite you on the ass. She saw it now in the faces of the Toro Canyon team; a heightened awareness while trying to look like they could give a shit.
She steeled herself and turned the propane valve to light the loading terminal. With a whoosh of ignition, orange flames billowed around the metal tanks and catwalks, accompanied by the open-throated roar of escaping gas.
Six firemen wearing heavy canvas coats, turnout pants and rubber boots tightened up on the hose. The man in front popped the valve and a fog of spray kept the flames away from them.
The team moved forward in a phalanx with their helmeted heads tipped down. One step, two, they counted in unison, until they were almost beneath the tank’s overhanging catwalk. Fifty feet away, another group of firefighters wielded their own hose, focusing a stream on the rear of the tank.
No matter how many times Clare watched an exercise on the simulators, it was never the same. Even with identical physical equipment and fuel, the air temperature, humidity and winds made all the difference. Now, on the two-story control tower that overlooked Brayton Field, an orange windsock signaled a wind shift.
“Back it up, back it up,” she shouted to the first team over the roar of the fire. “Do it now!”
The group on the hose retreated, one steady, controlled step at a time, toward a flight of metal stairs leading fifteen feet up to an elevated walkway. Before they could get out of range, flames billowed down over the catwalk rail and enveloped the first three persons on the hose. The man in front jerked his head like a dog shaking off water.
“Power cone,” Clare ordered.
He twisted the nozzle from the fog setting to a narrower stream. Clouds of steam rose and wiped out her view of the team.
After what seemed a long time, but was really three seconds, the heavy-set fireman who had manned the front of the hose staggered into the open. Big Jerry Dunn, the Toro Canyon Chief, stripped off his hat with its clear acrylic face protector and dropped it. He clutched his hands to his face.
The exercise fell apart. Clare ran to shut off the valve and the last of the fuel burned more quietly.
The Toro Canyon boys helped Jerry to a wooden bench beneath the open-walled shelter. She bent to look at the burn that covered his lower left cheek and chin. “Second degree.”
Thank God. In the moment when she’d seen Jerry abandon the drill, she’d imagined the worst. Another man down on her watch, and these guys probably knew she’d been the one with Frank Wallace when he died. News traveled fast in the community of fire.
What could she have done differently? She’d turned the valves the prescribed angle to release the propane at the appropriate pressure, had called the change from fog to power cone when the wind shift called for a stronger stream.
Jerry got up heavily and took off his canvas jacket and turnout pants to reveal jeans and a navy T-shirt that proclaimed Love a Firefighter in white letters. He gulped water out of a paper cone Clare filled from an Igloo jug and dumped a cupful over his sweat-soaked reddish hair. Jerry was perhaps thirty-five, but he looked like a big kid.
Opening her emergency kit, she felt the men’s eyes on her back. She straddled the dusty bench next to Jerry and pulled out a piece of gel-soaked gauze. Everyone here was as qualified as she to administer this kind of first aid, even if her Houston training and experience outstripped being volunteers in a smaller town.
Gently, she swabbed the dust and sweat away from Jerry’s burn, being careful not to break the dime-sized blister that had swollen at the center of the reddened patch on his cheek.
Jerry looked at Clare. “Tell