Never Turn Your Back On Her

Firefighters are taught never to turn away from a fire. If you are forced to retreat from flames, you never turn around, always keep an eye on the fire and back out of the room. Because of the unpredictable nature of fire, it must always be watched so as to see what its doing. Flames can snake up over your head, bank down behind you and block your exit. A much simpler way for fire to kill you is to explode, blasting through your turn out gear.
It is important to realize that in such a profession, they are few normal days. Things never go as they are planned because we respond to emergencies. Our job is to bring order to the madness that we see everyday.
Something as simple as a locked door can turn into a real problem when attempting to reach a fire or a patient who needs treatment. Sometimes simply bashing on the door would take too long to break it open. In instances like that, you need to understand how the door is constructed and attack it at its weakest point. With just a flat head axe and a Haligan tool, two devices married together and called "The Irons", a well trained firefighter should be able to force his way into pretty much anywhere.
For our lesson in legal breaking and entering, we had one of the best, a lieutenant and technical rescue specialist from Springfiled Mass. For two days, he showed us how to tear out locks and manipulate the tumblers in order to gain access. We learned how to use a shoveknife, a small, thin piece of metal used to catch doorlocks and allow the door to slide open. Hinges were disassembled in order to open doors with stubborn locks.
In addition to forcing regular doors, we learned how to break padlocks and chains with simple tools like vice grips and monkey wrenches. But in the end, some locks can't be forced, some doors are too strong to be popped. At that point, you need to use one of the myriad of power saws, spreaders, hydraulic jacks or chain saws that we carry on our trucks. In extreme cases, oxyacetlyne torches, a seperate class altogehter, need to be used to slice open doors.
People find more ingenious and sometimes downright stupid ways to hurt or endanger themselves everyday. Firefighters and emergency repsonse personnel need to be ready for anything, they need to be able to gain access to people who have pretzled themselves into different situations.
When my time in the basic firefighting academy has finished, I will be taking specialized rescue courses. I'll be learning how to pluck people from the bottom of wells and other confined spaces, how to perform rescue rappeling (dramatically different from the basic rappelling I already know) how to scoot myself out onto thin ice to grab someone who fell in, how to rig ropes and swim out into rapids to secure drowning people and countless other skills.
But it goes far beyound rescue, over my Christmas break from school, I'm certifying as a weapons of mass destruction specialist. The course is designed for front line personnel such as myself, the first guys on scene. It will teach us how to recognize a terrorist bombing, formulate our plans and search for secondary devices. The second half of the course teaches us how to disarm bombs strapped to either dead or unconcious suicide bombers.
A firefighter is one of the last true "Jack Of All Trades" professions. On any given day we can be called upon to fight a blaze, rescue a someone who has trapped themselves in some sort of precarious situation, render medical aid, deal with a haz mat incident, cut apart a car or any of a million and one other possiblities. Its amazing to see the real life applications of all the stuff I am learning as I already work as a firefighter/EMT. In order to deal with the many challenges faced by firefighters everyday, you need to have a broad knowledge of almost all fields because you are the guys who get called when the shit hits the fan.
Just like you can never turn your back on a fire, you can never turn your back on learning. Something new comes out everyday, and if you don't stay on top of it all the changes in the world around you, you'll get burned.

Really Getting In There

In the winter months, people tend to have a lot more accidents. Ice makes surfaces slick which doesn't go to well for people walking and driving. The volume of calls for my department has gone up considerably since the snow fell.
Just the other night, I was the only one working a 6-11 tour durring a training exercise on electrical hazards. A call came through for an elderly male who had fallen on ice and was bleeding profusely from the head. My deputy chief offered to ride with me and the two of us arrived on scene in a little under seven minutes. The whole houese was dark, the lights from our truck illuminated patches of eerie black looking blood stained snow. Of course, the interior of the house, when we finally did get in, was cramped and dimly lit. A man was sitting on the toilet in the bathroom of the darkened house, a once white towel was now purplish black from the blood it was stemming.
His wife was nearly in tears when I asked her to leave the restroom to give me room to work. I immediately removed the towel to reveal about an inch long gash oozing a steady flow of dark blood. I slapped on a trauma dressing and held it in place while my chief found a kling bandage to wrap it off with. Soon my fingers felt something warm and I realized he was bleeding through about an inch of gauze so my chief tossed me another one to slap on top of it. By that time the paramedics arrived in their ambulance and were hauling a backboard into the tiny hallway. Since the guy fell down there was the possiblity of a spine injury and he needed to be immobilized, plus it would be easier to carry him out than to have him stumble and limp out on his own.
When we finally got him packaged, bandaged and boarded, we had the pleasure of carrying all 270 some odd pounds of him back out of the house and down a flight of icy stairs. At one point the medic helping me carry him slipped and i was forced to catch the boarded patient on my thigh, leaving a swollen red line.
After getting the injurded man squared away, we headed back to the station and were just sitting down for some videos of "stuff getting fried" when the tones came through for a CO exposure. It was in an area known as the maze, for its twisted and tangled street paterns. Our response for a CO call includes two engines, the tower and my unit for the night, the Squad. Upon responding, we found the entire family complaining of flu like symptoms and exhuastion, they had been suffering from the flu for a week and had seen a commercial for a CO detector so they immediately thought they were dying.
Performing a patient exam on an austic 18 year old boy is not an experience I had been looking forward to. Thankfully, the boy was only mildly autistic and did not recoild when we performed our initial exams. After running CO meters through the entire house, we confirmed our original thoughts, that the family was still under the grasp of the flu.
In an attempt to build up my experience as much as possible, I have secured employment with New England Ambulance Service, an EMS unit down in Rhode Island. I'll be working 24 hour shifts with the ambulance and random shifts with Holden. All I have to do is graduate and I'll be able to do the job I love fulltime.