off-gassing on earth day

I woke up at 0700 yesterday, after only two hours of sleep. I’d gotten off a 12 hour shift at 0415, and getting out of bed was sheer torture—until I remembered why I was doing it. We have a burn to learn scheduled. I drag my sorry tuckus into the shower and out to the car, slam a few shots of coffee, and make my way to station 1, where we pow wow and team up.

We drive up to the burn site in the Rescue just as Leapfrog Towing was dragging—er, towing—the last of the three mobile homes into place. “Mobile home” in the most literal and also most generous sense of the phrase, because these three structures hadn’t been decent living spaces for some time. I vaguely remember going on a chest pain call in one of them a couple of years ago; you know, the typical 300 lb patient naked in the very back bedroom, hallway barely big enough to walk through even before it was stuffed full of tchotchkes and National Geographics.

It’s a small crew today; five teams of two or three folks each, and then Incident Command, who has brought his lawn chair, two engineers, the Safety Officer, and the usual light team, who will also act as team leaders inside, since only a couple of us going in have our FFI certs. I’m partnered with a kid I’ll call DogBoy, since his official nickname is BeastMaster for reasons we won’t go into now. DB’s dad is a career firefighter, DB has been a volunteer for a while, he’s a good kid with a good heart and a great sense of humor. He looks dubiously at the third mobile home, a hulking brown mass of metal held up by wood blocks and tires that have been so flat for so long the rims are half-circles. He clears his throat. “That one makes me a little nervous. Why can’t we burn houses instead of mobile homes?” he complains. I point out that 1) we are in Deliverance country, or at least the Northwest version of Deliverance country, and there aren’t any houses out here, and 2) at least we are getting rid of some of the mobile homes. Three in one day, actually. He concedes, and quits whining. Briefly.

We start setting up, laying lines and filling the porta-tank, locating the cooler and the potty, identifying exposures. DB and I are first on exposures, so we get to hose down a couple of tall, moss-covered trees and a beat up old fence with foam that looks like drippy flocking on a Christmas tree. My feet and hose line get tangled in a Judas limb hanging over the side of the fence, and down I go. One thing I love about being a firefighter, though, aside from the fact that I get to squirt lots of water at big fires, is that everyone is klutzy in turnouts, and while I might fall down a bit more often than most, it’s nothing out of the ordinary. And unless you can see the back of my helmet, nobody knows it’s me. (Although on a different fire, I did hear somebody ask where I was, and Chief said, “Look for the firefighter who fell on her butt. That’s Firefighter Girl.” So maybe turnouts aren’t as anonymous as I’d like to think. . .) Anyway, one of the firefighters on RIT, or Rapid Intervention Team, whose only purpose is to rescue downed firefighters, came at me and the tree branch with his axe raised. Rescuing a firefighter downed by a renegade tree branch may have been stretching his job description a tad, but he rose to the occasion, and the branch was kindling after a few whacks.

DogBoy takes this opportunity to tell me that he had a small bout of diarrhea this morning. I’m not quite sure why he feels the need to share this with me. I ask him if he’s nervous, and he gets that guy thing going—you know, the squared shoulders, the look of disbelief and aloofness on his face. As if. By this time, it’s our turn for attack team, and I’m kind enough to let DogBoy have the nozzle for the first couple of attacks, and he’s new enough to not realize that later lights have better fire. Heh heh heh.
The teams managed a couple rotations each through the first mobile home, and then the second, which I would describe more as a hovel, had four lights before our turn comes up again. Captain Snappy and Chief lit the second of the two rooms, and Dog Boy and I sat and waited to go in. I watched our three-person back up team check each others’ gear, and nudged DB. They looked like nothing more than a bunch of chimps in a line, grooming each other. DB started laughing. I started having doubts about their competency. But then DB started poking around my mask and hood, under my helmet, and I made him promise to eat any bugs he found. He crossed his heart, hoped to die, and stuffed my errant ponytail down into my coat. Then we sat, and watched the light take hold.

A usual training light is nothing special. Maybe a couch or a pile of pallets on fire, lots of smoke, some good, controlled flames. But Captain Snappy knew it had been a while since I’d seen fire. And he also knew I’d let DogBoy have the nozzle the first few lights. I was about to head in, and Snappy held his arm across the doorway. “Oh, no, FFG. Wait.” So we watched as flames climbed the walls, and smoke billowed out the vents and windows. “Now?” I asked. Snappy shook his head. Flames started rolling over on the ceiling. “Now?” I asked. Snappy shook his head again. We backed away from the heat of the doorway, flames poured out the top, and Snappy said, “Take it whenever you want, FFG.” Whoot whoot!! And I got it. I got it all, and then they let the whole thing burn.

Afterwards, sitting in rehab, sipping on a Gatorade and munching on M&Ms that had only slightly melted in my turnout coat pocket, DB finally got it, finally realized that perhaps good things come to those who wait; ie, better fire. I promise him the nozzle for all the lights in the hulking brown thing. They’ve just started lighting it, and it goes faster than the other two—burning mobile homes is like starting a fire in a big metal box. They burn hard and fast once they catch. DB gets one good light, we’re rotating teams like nobody’s business, and we’re on backup just getting ready to go back in when the tones go off for a severe respiratory distress up valley.

IC points out an engineer—120mph—and DogBoy and I to take the call. We drop our helmets, coats, masks, packs, and gloves, race to the Rescue, climb in, and then race back to the packs to turn off the air and bleed them. Then back to the Rescue, me behind the wheel, 120mph in the officer’s seat, DB in the back. We go enroute, and this is much easier than driving an ambulance code 3 on the coast highway, but 120mph is asserting his testosterone and comments on my cornering. I bite my tongue to keep from mentioning the bucking sawhorse he ran over with the engine last year, or the fact that he tipped the engine into a ditch once. I look down at my mud-splotched, ash-streaked arms, the flotsam coating my turnouts. I slow the Rescue to appease 120mph, see DogBoy in the back with the paperwork, getting our gloves ready. And I feel a sudden flush of comraderie, that feeling you get at family reunion campouts after you’ve been bickering with your relatives all day but then you look at them in the light of the campfire and see how big their hearts are.

We pull in to the residence, grab the gear, and tromp in. Our patient is sitting in his LazyBoy watching his big screen TV. His new caregiver hovers nervously. I recognize this guy, seen him in the ER a couple of times, and he turns, looks at me, points his finger like a gun and winks like he’s some kind of dapper Rico Suave instead of an overweight, chronic respiratory train wreck. The caregiver may have exaggerated slightly when she called 911. I laugh, bat my mud speckled eyelashes at the patient, and get his vital signs. We chat until the Meth Central medics get there.

Once we wrap things up, we head back to the burn. DB seems anxious, and I ask him if three lights wasn’t enough for him. But he’s more concerned about missing lunch, and we pull up just in time for fried chicken, potato salad, and cookies with little tiny m&ms in them. It wasn’t just a good day; it was a great day, and even after two hours of clean up back at the station, when I knew exactly where my body would be aching the next day, and I knew I’d need 14 hours of sleep, 6 advil and a whole tube of BenGay to even move the next morning, I wouldn’t have changed a dang thing.