Fire Week

This past week must have been fire week or something. Our Department gets calls everyday but here in the past few months actual fire calls have been little to none. I always know that when its quiet for too long the sh*t is fixing to hit the fan and it always does. Extremes in the weather seem to play a part in it too. Very cold or very dry conditions, windy and dry, or storms.

Wednesday afternoon was one of those windy and dry days. I didn't get to make this call but we had a grass fire, trailer fire and a couple out buildings on fire on this one. Ended up having three departments working the incident. Combine all of that with about 95 degree temps and you can have problems.

Thursday afternoon it happened again. Close to the same time, 3ish. What looked like a double wide mobile home that had been modified caught fire. The home owner seemed to think it was the timer that had multiple a/c units plugged in to it that caused the problem. Well, sounds like the culprit to me, but we usually leave that up to the Insurance investigators. This became fully involved real quick and ended up as a total loss, though the front part of the structure is still intact. Again we had mutual aid from two other departments, mostly to help supply us water. I did make this fire though I got there a little later in the game as I was working, but once I was able I took an engine over and assisted with salvage and overhaul. Thats the fun, nasty stuff where you have to tear out walls and look for hidden fire. Then you get to reload all that hose that was pulled off. Another fun job. Its not all just putting the wet stuff on the red stuff. Firefighting is a total team effort and you may have a crappy job one day and the heroes job the next. You just never know whats going to be handed to you. This was another one of those hot windy days.

I was hoping to get some good sleep Friday night as I had plans to drive to Lake Degray to bike with Gary, Curtis and a few others. Well, that wasn't going to happen. About 11:30pm we had a shed fire. It was just up the road from Station 1 so they had a crew there pretty quickly. It was about a 9 mile drive for my station. 3 of my guys showed up so I had one roll the tanker and I drove the engine with Reg playing Captain. When we arrived we gave engine 65 water from the tanker and I took over operations command. I had three guys fighting fire but at this point it was pretty much out. Looked like a metal out building so all the metal had fallen on top of what was burning. So, we had to pull all the metal off of the fire so we could finish putting it out. The home owner claimed they were not burning but it seemed obvious that they had done come bull dozing around the shed. They probably was trying to burn it and it just got bigger than what they expected. No big deal, just a waste of our time and sleep. By the time we got done it was 1:30am before I made it back to bed. I was thinking then, I don't think I'm biking Lake Degray on Saturday. I was soaked from head to toe with sweat so I could probably count this as my workout for the day!

Luck as it is, Saturday morning came and it was raining and thundering so the bike ride got canceled. That was good but I missed getting to bike. After three days of back to back fires, somehow we missed the bullet Saturday. Must have been the rain and change in the weather. In fact, we never even had a medical call all day or night which is really weird.

I have been having problems with my left heel since the 2 mile race last Saturday so I have just laid off of running all week. I have an appointment on the 9th with a foot specialist to see what it is. So, I guess I am on the IR list for now as far as running goes.