Saturday Morning Urban Renewal Workout

It's that time of year and this morning before I could even get my second cup of coffee the pager went off for a structure fire. About 4 minutes later my Asst. Chief arrived on scene to find an abandoned house trailer fully involved and already pretty much on the ground. I responded driving Tanker 2 out of my station with one of my probie's. It was about an 8 mile drive for us from Station 3 and Station 1's crew was already on scene and working fire attack. Station 2 was right behind them. When we arrived my crew was tasked to assist with overhaul and final extinguishing of the fire. First being getting the metal roof off of the still burning wood floor. This took about 3 of us with pike poles to push and roll the roof so we could get to the fire

The wadded up metal is whats left of the roof of the trailer

After we had the roof out of the way we had fire under the floor so we had to pull, chop and hammer our way through the floor so we could get to the fire. This made for a pretty good upper body workout. The ax and pike pole gave me a pretty good workout with all the chopping and pulling.

You can see the fire coming up from the floor

Another view of the smoldering floor

Luckily this was just an old junk trailer behind another one so nothing was really lost. I'm sure the owner's only disappointment was that we arrived too soon and left some of the floor.

Marcus putting the wet stuff on the red stuff

We spent at least a good hour and a half putting out the hot spots. Really the only reason being we didn't want to get called out there again. It's always best to spend a little extra time making sure its out. It took approximately 3000 gallons of water to extinguish this fire.

Most of the fire was put out at this point

After the fire I had to do inventory at my station and equipment checks. Then I went to The Daily Grind for coffee and a late breakfast. After I got home I did 45 minutes on the bike trainer which gave me about an 11.5 mile ride. A quick shower and then we were off to the Fire Department Christmas dinner. But before we could leave the house we had a mutual aid call with Gravel Ridge for a house on fire. Station 1 had a crew on E65 so they took the call allowing us to run by Kroger's for some last minute goodies for the Christmas Party. It's always good to get to hang out with the guys and this is sometimes the only time all the wives are there too. Luckily E65 did the assist getting the fire out quickly and getting back just in time to start the dinner. As we drove home afterwards I told Annette this may be one of those nights. Its in the mid 30's now with 25 mile per hour winds and dropping. Has the recipe for another disaster somewhere. Hopefully not, I'd really rather sleep tonight than fight fire.