Car from Fort Knox

Around 2 AM we get called out to a carfire at a local used car dealership. I know those cars to sit very close to eachother, so I pictured 2 or 3 cars involved by the time we get there. I was wrong, it was only 1. It took our captain a minute or so to cut the fence using bolt cutters to let us in. There were 5 of us, and as I mentioned in the past posts, carfires to firemen are like chum to sharks. JK immediately jumps on the first nozzle, which he's known to do at every single fire we ever get, and I grab the second. It took a few mins to get water, and the fire wasn't too crazy, mostly in the right front wheel well, extending into the engine.

I took a halligan and walked around to the driver side window and took the window down in one swift motion, then reached in and opened the door. I tried the hood release after catching some water in the face from the hose team on the other side, and the hood release was obviously burnt out. I closed the door and the gruelling task of opening a hood without a saw began.

When I was a probie I attended an extrication class behind the local Boys & Girls club using some donated cars. My friend Jack and I, joining at the same time, usually attended all the same training and paired up as often as possible. Since the drill was a free-for-all anyway, Jack and I decided to try to get into the trunk of a car using only a halligan and ax. We pried, pulled, smashed, whacked and bent the shit out of the trunk for 15 minutes before giving up. The pin and catch inside is just too strong for standard tools.

Back to the car fire last nite, we tried the Rabbit tool, which is a handheld spreader that operates like a car-jack, the front release (which was burnt away), halligans, axes...etc. We tried everything before finally I gained access to, what ended up being 3 pins under the front lip of the car with a long set of bolt-cutters.

Annoying as it was, we did a pretty good job at gaining access using nothing but the tools we had to work with.