Pallette fire - contant ave

Here's another fire blog. It was a Saturday night around 2:00 AM. The tones came through reporting a caller who saw flames. Whenever I hear flames, its a much better bet than someone reporting smoke or fire. Fire can mean very different things to different people, from a cigarette smoldering to a warehouse burning. However, flames universally means the bright red things.

Anyhow, we were short manned which usually means a much tighter, smoother operation. Huge flames were visible from blocks away. John and I came off and stretched a handline. What we saw was a van fully involved, a dumpster on fire, and a huge pallet stack leaning on a building on fire. John was on the nozzle but I immediately told him to forget the van and dumpster and lets just go after the pallettes since they were up against the exposure.

AJ, my Capt, came along and had us sweep more to the side so we can get a direct shot at the pallettes. Soon a tire blew out, making us all jump, and as we got really close, another tire blew out, probably about 10 feet from us, sounding like a shotgun. AJ brought us right between the dumpster fire and the van, so it got nice and toasty, and at one point we had 0 visibility and john was just blasting away with the handline. I remember having my hand on the back of his bottle so i could stay with him, while the other hand was pulling the line.

It took a good minute or minute and a half to get the pallettes under control before we turned to the van. The van was pretty well involved, with flames shooting out from under it, but we took that down eventually also.

Later I took the line and climbed on top of the stack to wet down the palletes from above and from the exposure side, since flames and embers were still visible as per the crew on the roof.

This was a really cool fire to fight because the situation was safe enough to walk pretty much right into the fire, with the dumpster to the left and van to the right. Visibility was horrible with the smoke, but we did a text-book stop. We protected the exposures first, then turned to the van, then to the harmless dumpster. Everyone was safe and no one got hurt.

Oh I did get yelled at for taking a ladder down on its beam by one of the truckies though.

Car fire on Albert St.

I was sick and went home from work early. I had promised myself not to get up for any fire calls, but around 7:30 PM a report of an "explosion" came through. Now usually explosion can mean anything from a pop / fizzle from a tv to a transformer going out, but rarely does it mean fire. I went anyway.

It ended up being in the trailer courts, and upon pulling around the bend, the smoke was obvious. John K.  already had his mask on in the engine, which i thought was a little rediculous ( i busted his balls for it later. ) I haven't been on a long time, but rarely agree with putting a mask on in the engine. It takes under 20 seconds to don a mask / helmet and tie in to the regulator, so to run off the engine blinded by a fogging mask seems unnecessary to me. I'd rather don at the front door and take the extra ten seconds.

Anyway, I thought it was a fire in a trailer, which got me a little nervous since I know how tight, messy and crammed they can be, let alone the minefield of things to get snagged on. It ended up being a car fire in between two trailers, so we had 2 exposures to keep cool while working on the fire.

To begin with we had way too many firemen around. Later, pictures revealed like 8 guys on a hoseline. Dangerous if something were to go wrong - let alone embarrassing after the fact. AJ took the saw to the front hood, which made an awesome shower of sparks that covered a few of us, making for some good photo ops.

Fire knocked down in minutes, both trailers unharmed.