It's Halloween today. Hope to be posting pix of Maike and her friends' costumes later tonight. Allegedly they have made their own zombie costumes, and there is a lot make-up involved in this effort. I can't wait to see this....
It's been a quiet week. Two fire drills, one really bad day at work, and one short flight.
The Captain invited me to the drill on Thursday, our dept. was going to practice working with the other South Brunswick fire companies. It was a fire in a self-storage unit along the Highway-from-Hell. Very mellow and relaxed evening, since I had gotten the adrenaline rush over with for the week after we spent a morning over at the Academy with my Work Fire Dept. in the new simulator. Two guys injured at that training, it was a great day. One of the firefighters was burned on his hand, went right through his fire-gloves while he was crawling around on the floor in the flashover simulator looking for mannequins. The instructor sprained his ankle jumping off a rescue truck. Me, I just got a teensy-weensy bit scared because I got lost on the second floor, in the smoke and 375 degree heat. (Yes, former-Chief, it was scarier than the time I had my ass on fire over on Pheasant Run at the structure fire.....) The rest of us all just needed about three showers each to get most of the smoke smell out of our hair.
The self storage unit was a novelty; I am 45 years old and I don't think I have ever been inside one. Need to get out more I guess. Great setting for a horror movie: the lights were out and the third floor filled with smoke, which made it even more surreal. The lines of closed, blank, uniform doors extended out 200 feet in every direction from the top of the stairwell. Hard to see to the end of each hallway, hard to get a sense of direction once you were in it. The setting made me think of that Pixar movie Monsters, Inc, and that storehouse filled with millions of doors.
We were on FAS team, so we we assembled our gear for downed firefighter rescue in a Stokes basket and waited on the D-side of the building for an assignment. The Lt. did a great job making sure a pre-survey was done, and that we had all the tools we needed and knew our assignments, and were on the right radio channel. Trust me, it is ten times harder than it looks. Ten minutes later , the call came through as a firefighter Mayday, lost somewhere on the third floor. Air bottles on, masks fogging quickly, we picked up the Stokes, the saw, and the box lights, and trudged up the three flights. Rescue line got attached to the hand-rail, and we proceeded into the gloom. It was too easy to find him, since he had his PASS device sounding. Next evolution we had to find a civilian, and we split into two groups and fanned out. Even with the primary search group attached to the assignment we never did find the victim. Still not sure if there ever was one to begin with......
Pix to follow once the Capt. downloads them.
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