Neglectful

I've been neglecting this blog lately, and for no particular reason. A lot has happened, and yet nothing has changed.

I started a part-time job near the end of June. The work is incredibly easy, and most of the people I work with are fun to be around. We see a lot of people on a daily basis, but it's all minor things. It's very rare that we have to call a unit in to transport anyone to the hospital. Ironically, many of our patients, are employees.

I've been sent off to fill in at other stations more times in the last month than I'd care to admit. I've also been putting up with a fair amount of BS lately. The most recent, a pratical slap in the face.

Our crew has been in some degree of turmoil since the beginning. We've had multiple captains and rookies, multiple people fired, and we are used as both a "last chance destination" and the guinea-pigs. I'm getting tired of it.

My personal turmoil is watching not only my old academy classmates, but people hired after me, being given opportunities that I'm constantly denied.

Most recently, my car was totalled and I was stuck in the hospital for over 5 hours. I'm planning to take the other driver to court over my hospital bills and such, so only time will tell how that goes.

Pumping my 1st house fire

Now, Fridays are truck days, so we spend a good part of the morning really going over all the trucks. I did the normal truck checkoffs and then we caught a call. When we got back, we washed the engine and took apart 2 compartments to scrub them out and clean the mats. The chainsaw leaks bar oil and the compartment it's in gets nasty. Instead of being boring with more details, let's just say we went over almost every square inch of the fire truck.

I had to take the truck to motor maintenance because we were extremely low on power steering fluid, that took over an hour (because they're slow). As I was leaving the station, our squad was being put in service for the shift (takes 2 to run it and 1 of our guys was at another station for a couple hours).

We didn't really run much that afternoon thanks to the squad jumping our calls. Right around dinnertime the whole department got extremely busy, we had calls pending and radio was freaking out. Thankfully that didn't last very long at all. Engine and squad made it back to the station and finished cooking and eating dinner.

And then it happened, the last thing I expected, the one thing everyone else wanted but I sorta feared... A house fire in our territory!!!!!

We all ran to the trucks. As my Captain was getting his gear on, our Chief called and wanted directions, the nextel was thrown to me. So here I am, driving the firetruck emergency down the street, talking to Chief on the nextel, and he's giving me a hard time about the directions. Got off the phone just in time to cross a major intersection and spotted the smoke column.

It's workin'!!!!!!!!!

The house was a single-story, 1 family, brick house, and it had heavy (lots of) smoke coming out both ends.

**keep in mind the other stations are extremely closeby, so plenty of help arrives fast**
I pulled up just past the house (have to see 3 sides if possible) and put my truck into pump mode. As I hopped out and started pulling my first crosslay to the front door, the next engine arrived and their driver (a classmate from my academy class) told me he'd get me water supply. I ran back to my truck to charge the 1st hoseline and throttle up the pump to give the correct pressure on the line. The 3rd engine arrived and I passed part of my 2nd crosslay their driver and made sure it came off the truck. Moments later I was charging that line as I opened my intake, water supply was completed.

Now that I had hydrant water, I throttled down my pump and used as much of the hydrant pressure as I could, why overwork the pump if I don't have to? I pulled a 3rd line from my skidload but didn't charge it with water, we always have to have a spare line on the ground in case something happens. I also went ahead and pulled my cooler and cups out and set them on the tailboard. It was over 90 degrees outside and Air & Light wasn't there yet.

Air & Light refills our airpacks and also carries rehab equipment like cold water and usually some type of crackers.

Most of my work was done for now so I stood beside my truck and watched the action. The corner of the roof had been breached by fire as I was charging the 2nd line, but was now out. Crews inside had gotten the upper hand on the fire. I met a crew halfway across the yard with my attic ladder (heard them ask for it). They used the ladder (attic ladders are skinny) to be able to get to and knock out the siding and plywood in the corner of the roof and make sure the fire was out.

Later on, we reloaded the spare line and I was able to shut down one of the crosslays. It was also reloaded onto the truck. Once that was done, the crews inside wanted a fan set up in the door to clear out smoke. The ladder's driver beat me to it with his fan, but it wouldn't stay cranked so I put out my electric fan...BTW, I have a generator on my truck and can power quite a lot of stuff with it.

Once it started getting dark out, I set up my light tower, so did my old classmate with his engine. Water supply was no longer needed and was disconnected. Everything inside was soaked one last time using tank water (we carry 500 gallons) and the line was shut down and put away. We allowed a couple of the residents to go inside, with our escort, and get their belongings. We were the last to leave the scene.

Fire was determined to have been started by food on the stove. All residents made it out ok and nobody suffered any injuries.

My captain was a driver/engineer before the department took away the position. He pulled me aside and told me that *now* I was released as a driver. He had no complaints about how I did pumping the fire either. That alone is the BEST compliment from him. He did finally say I needed to anticipate what the crews inside would need, but that that will come with experience.

Went back to the station and I refilled my tank from the hydrant out front while my captain took a quick shower and my other guy put on a clean/dry shirt. We went searching for fuel, went 4 places that were out before finding any. 27 gallons of diesel later we were on our way back home.

We did run 2 other calls overnight. At 619am we picked up another house fire nearly across the street from our station. Some arsonist tried to burn a vacant house down...he failed big time. The oncoming shift waited for the arson investigator and we went offduty.

Dull

Not much to talk about lately. Work has been somewhat dull as far as interesting calls.

Not long ago we went into a house that appeared to have a marijuana growing operation. I'm currently working with local PD's narcotics unit by making them aware of the house, and giving them as much info as I can since I was able to go inside. I'm really looking forward to helping out and getting to learn even a little something about their investigation process.

That's really all I have for now.

4 calls to blog about

We went to a house fire that was room & contents. My energy was gone in about 2 minutes. Holy crap I didn't realize I was weakened that much from being sick (got sent home sick the shift before). I did my best to pull some sheetrock, then just stood around with everyone once we finished tearing stuff up. The fire was pretty much out as we arrived, so it was time to put away hoses about 30 minutes after we got there.

Then, we responded to a 13yo that was wrestling around with his mother. She simply stated "he has mood problems, shut the door, he'll run." Apparently, the kid is known to local PD, the officer was familiar with the kid's story. Kid's dad is in jail and mom says he wants nothing more than to be with him. Kinda feel sorry for him, until he swiped my partner's phone. When we first got there, mom was sitting on him on the steps just inside the house. My partner grabbed the kid's wrists and made him sit near the sofa. We ended up wrestling a tiny bit with the kid, and eventually left the scene to PD.

We ran a few other not so interesting calls throughout the day. Overnight, we ran 2 that were just, wow.

The first was in a house that I swear had a drug-growing operation. The smell of marijuana almost slapped you hard enough to leave a mark when they opened the door. I could see a pile of it as big as both of my hands in another room. There was 1 room that was blocked off, and from outside, the windows had a blueish glow....blacklight. I've already notified the local PD's narcotics division and plan to work with them in any way possible.

The other call, I felt for the person. Local streetwalker (aka hooker) was raped, beaten, and left naked and semi-conscious in 40-something degree weather. She looked to be about 40, had a nasty black eye, and was really skinny. I'm thinking she may not be able to afford food on a regular basis. The one thing that may make her case, is that the f*cktard who did this to her, left the used condom at the scene.

All in all, it was a long shift and we didn't get much sleep. In fact, the truck I was on usually takes the medical calls for the engine. In the wee hours of the morning, they took one of our calls, to give us a break. I never loved those guys so much as in that moment. I still came home and napped for 5 hours. It may not have hit me so hard if I wasn't sick, but I have been, and have 5 1/2 days left of medicine to take.

A long shift

We were up all shift with maybe a 30 minute nap around 330am. The only call of interest was a cardiac arrest, but I'm not sure if there will be a case in this one so I'm going to keep it to myself for now.

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The picture was taken shortly after arriving onscene under part of an automatic mutual aid agreement. We were dispatched around 0520. I had reported to command to let him know we were there if needed, and was walking back to my truck to get my jacket when I took this. The first engine onscene found it with the back porch fully involved and flames coming out of the corner of the roof. By the time they were ready to make entry, the whole roof lit off and command declared it a defensive operation (ie...nobody goes in).

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About 0550, the tiller was put into a better position so massive amounts of water could be dumped on the fire from above. When we were released a half hour later, the ladder was still flowing, but the fire was nearly out.

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I came home and played online for a few minutes before crashing into bed. I woke up when my phone rang at 430pm. Nice lil nap if I say so myself.

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PS...I like my paragraphs spaced out, blogger isn't cooperating so you get extra marks to make it cooperate.

Tree on 2 houses and a car

Our first call of the day, shortly after lunch. The house on the left is currently empty. The car suffered some damage from the tree, but the carport took the brunt of the damage. The house on the right only had 1 person home when the tree fell. You can't see it in the picture, but they had a metal roof over the front porch area. We ended up taking the chainsaw and K-12 to the tree and roof, respectively. The front door was the only means of entrance/egress so we had to do something.

Oh yeah...and I was driving the engine...whoohooo!!!!!!!!

I finally made it down to see this handsome guy today. He's doing so good right now. The ferrier wasn't trimming his feet correctly so there's a new(to us) ferrier. He trimmed the toe down a lot and put eggbar shoes on Leo to support and encourage his heels to grow. The other guy had let the toe get long to the point where the heel had slowed growing and since the toe was so long, it forced everything into weird angles. Thankfully, Leo turns 5 this month, since he's young there shouldn't be any permanent damage...I hope.

And in other news, that pit bull that attacked my dog went after a human yesterday while I was at work. The guy's hand was pretty ugly from what I was told. The dog is at the pound right now, and our court date is in 3 weeks.

Currently, the bills from my dog's injuries are totalled over $4,000. I'm not sure how much the ACL surgery will cost. Not that we expect the pit's owner to pay a single penny, it's just the principal of the whole thing right now. He's never once apologized, not for either attack on my 2 dogs, or yesterday. All 3 times his dog was off-leash, and off his property. The 2 most recent times, they didn't know the dog had even escaped.

Dog attacks

One of my dogs was attacked by a pit bull a couple weeks ago. She developed a bad infection (even with antibiotics) and had to have a couple drains placed and become a cone head for a week. Her drains are now out and she's healing great. Next week, we take her back to see if she's good to go to have her torn right ACL repaired. It was also torn during the attack.

Eventually, we plan to take the pit bull's owner to court for vet bills...Well, let me rephrase, if he doesn't skip town we're going to try.


More about this later, I'm at work and duty calls.