A few years ago I lost my grandma. My first shift back I hadn’t been at work an hour yet and we get a car wreck. It came in as 2 vehicles, one person complaining of a broken wrist and the other with a bump on the head. No big deal, our ambulance can transport 2 and dispatch said it was minor accident. I didn’t think anything more. We are a rural service so it took us about 15 minutes to get there. The next closest ambulance is 25 minutes away. When we got on scene, we had 2 vehicles that had hit head-on and a girl was hanging out of the passenger window, she was actually the driver. I called for another ambulance and a helicopter. The girl was really messed up. She was missing her lower jaw and her head was split open, from temple to temple and you could see her skull, but no brain matter or anything like that, and she was still breathing. We grabbed her and put her on a backboard and ran for the rig. I took a firefighter with me to the landing zone, that happened to be in EMT class, and a detective jumped in at the last minute. I told him we were leaving and he wasn’t getting her info then. He went with us and helped with patient care. I had the f/f bagging while I got my stuff ready to tube her. Of course, here comes the vomit, ya it was biscuits and gravy, ha ha. She was a hard tube. I kept telling the f/f bag the patient, A, B, C. Just what you learned in class. No she never survived, she coded before the helicopter got there. We were 45 minutes from the closest hospital. The irony of the story is that the detective kept saying I knew her, but she was all messed up so I wasn’t sure. I saw her license and said oh shit, I remembered her address. I worked her dad about 3 months before from a heart attack at their house.

Some personal observations of the many fires in Southern California this weekend - -

The fire doesn’t care who you are or what it burns.- -

In Montecito, a $1 million home is a tear down, a $10 million home is not uncommon. 100 homes in Montecito, some belonging to celebrities, burned in the Tea Fire on Friday.

In Sylmar, Saturday night, at the Sayre Fire, a mobile home park with 600 homes lost more than 500 homes. Firefighters were predeployed there before the fire, but had to withdraw when the fire hit. Tomorrow Search and Rescue will spend the day looking for possible casualties.

In Yorba Linda, at the Freeway-Complex Fire, a 250 unit apartment complex was entirely destroyed. The buildings were consumed before fire crews could even arrive on the scene. Street after street of homes were burning with no way for firefighters to respond to every blaze.

Southern California is a desert, and Momma Nature keeps reminding us of the fact. We are currently under a Red Flag Warning. Yesterday (It’s NOVEMBER) 7 cities in LA County had record high temperatures. (It was 92 in downtown Los Angeles today.) The humidity has been 5% - 8% for the last two days. The Santa Ana winds hit 75 mph during the last two days. These winds come in from the desert and are sucked through the mountain passes around Los Angeles. As the elevation drops 3,000 feet, the wind becomes stronger and hotter. Montecito has its own Sundowner Winds, which blow at night. Some hillsides haven’t burned for 20 years, others burned quite recently. The native brush, Chapparal, contains oil which burns at 1,300 degrees. Burning embers are blowing a half mile or more, starting spot fires.

The firefighters here are well equipped and well trained. The area can field thousands of firefighters on short notice. Under mutual assistance pacts, firefighters from cities, counties, states, and federal agencies work under unified commands. Years of fires have resulted in a detailed knowledge of how to fight these fires and where and when to deploy strike teams during Red Flag Warnings. Last night I watched Firehawks, (Converted Blackhawk Attack Helicopters), piloted by brave men using night vision glasses, dropping water at 3 AM. This afternoon, I watched the converted DC-10 drop 10,000 gallons of fire retardant. All day I watched weary firefighters fighting wildland flames and doing structure protection. Flame Fronts were 50 – 75 feet high. Approximately 2,500 firefighters are engaged.

There are limits, however, what any firefighter force can do. In the last 24 hours, SoCal has suffered 3 disastrous wind driven fires, any one of which would have strained resources.
Well over 15,000 people have evacuated their homes, major freeways were closed because of smoke and flames, well over 1,000 homes have been wiped out and two of the fires are not yet even 10% contained.

The sights have been sobering. I’m reminded how pathetic humans are in the face of nature, how brave firefighters are, and how lucky I am that my house did not burn in last year’s fires.
Kurt Kamm http://www.kurtkamm.com

3:00 AM November 15 - 24 hours after a wind driven fire started in the Montecito/Santa Barbara area of California and burned approximately 110 homes, another fire in the Sylmar area of Los Angeles (Sayre Incident Command) started around 10:30 PM on the night of October 14. Read the rest of this entry »

CAVE JUNCTION, Ore. — Bill Coultas said the nurses pleaded with his doctor to give them a few more days to scrape on his burned skin, hoping it would regenerate and spare him disfiguring grafts to his face.
Despite painkillers, he still woke up while they did it, scraping his skin down to the flesh, said his wife, Chris, who donned a gown and mask and helped with the gory task. Read the rest of this entry »

I was married to my husband, my soul mate, my best friend, my Marine, my Navy SEAL and my Irish Firefighter. I ended up losing him in a LODD [Line of Duty Death] as a firefighter doing what he loved most. This was many years ago, even though it feels like yesterday. I supported my husband for what he loved and gave him the ultimate of understanding. But, although I didn’t question it, I could not comprehend why he, or anyone else would have a “want” to be a firefighter. I’ve learned it’s just in you. And although people out there are ignorant to what a firefighter really goes thru.

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I can say that we are a different breed of people, and it isn’t just a job…it’s an addiction that they really need to offer a 12 step program for.
I am a 46 year old grandmother that does both fire and EMS. Two years ago, I was diagnosed with breast cancer and I never really stopped working, I missed a couple of calls and one day shift but, helping others took the focus off of me and my illness. It actually helped me through my journey. Easter Sunday morning, with no hair, I worked and responded to a car fire…I wondered how many 44 year old grandma’s that were going through chemo were fighting a car fire on that Easter morning. Towards the end of my treatments when my hair was growing back, we responded to a stove fire…I was pulled off my wig and as I was trying to put my hood on…it stuck like velcro and the officer and other firefighter were laughing so hard that they could barely function.

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We are trained not to go into a burning building or anything without your partner, and we are trained not to come out with out your partner. Where you go, you partner goes. We leave no one behind. So, when he passed I felt left behind in away. I know it was his time to go, and not mine. And I know that this was one journey that I couldn’t go on with him. But I wanted to take that final journey with him. I wanted to meet Jesus with him. But it wasn’t my time so all I could do was be there to help him go on his final journey that will never end. It was sad, and heartbreaking to us to let him go but it was happy, and joyful, and peaceful for him to go.
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ok . not a big story, only one fire still sticks to my mind,
House fire at 5am, 10 yr old boy still in the house.
I got the unlucky privilege of finding him. I could seem through a crack in a wall. The top part of his head was showing. When I got back home, I hugged my baby girl!!

The house burned again, This time the owner took it down & built a better looking house.

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First off, I want to thank you for getting the word out about what firefighters do, it’s not an easy job, but I love doing it.

I have been a firefighter for 5 years and in those 5 years, I have learned a whole lot. Firefighting isn’t for everyone, but for the ones called to do it, they love it. It has its trying times, but on the other hand it has times that make you extremely happy to be able to do what you do. I’ve been on calls where everything went well and everyone was happy, and I’ve been on calls where it took a while to get over what I had witnessed. What every firefighter needs to remember is that we are in a job to help other people, and sometimes whether the outcome is good or bad, we did their part and that’s all we can do. To all the firefighters out there I say keep on keep on!!

WHEN WILL THEY BE HERE???
People are always wondering why it takes so long for us to arrive in an emergency!

I realize that people are under unusual stress and that they are rarely calm about any emergency situation. All I can tell them is this!

To start with, when the tone goes out for any reason, it’s like a mega-dose of adrenaline that has been given to us. It makes our hearts beat harder, faster and gives us a boost of energy like no medication can. When we’re rising to the call of duty at 3:00 am in the morning. Read the rest of this entry »

Izak Janneke is a firefighter in South Africa. He sent the following:

I’m a fire fighter from South Africa. I will be a fire fighter till the day I put my head down for the final sleep. I love my job. To all my brothers and sisters over the world keep on what you are doing, it is the best calling one can have. I would like to share this with you. A friend of mine whose son was a Paramedic wrote this

WHEN GOD MADE FIREMEN AND PARAMEDICS
When God made these people, He was in his sixth day of
overtime when an angel appeared and said, “You’re
doing a lot of fiddling around on this one order”. Read the rest of this entry »

I have been a FF for 25 yrs. Was off 1 yr, Got tired & lost interest for a yr & found that I missed being with the guys. More than I ever figured I would. Hearing the sirens late at night. 2 nights in a row. Did make me wake up. Stopped by the station to chat with the Chief. Next thing I knew he asked me to come back just when I was going to ask to get back on!!! After getting back, 3 months later, I was made Lt. The Chief made the request, I love being a FF & will always be one in my heart,
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I just back from a bad wreck. It was a three car accident. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m 22 years old and I have been in the fire service for 5 years. I have been thru a flood in 2004 losing my house. I have pulled a dead guy out of his wrecked car that I have known since grade school. The motor vehicle accidents that get to me the most are the young adults losing their life to drunk drivers or losing it to racing. Being a fire fighter definitely shows a person how precious life really is.

The most memorable story would be the 4:00 am one story single family dwelling with heavy fire in the garage. Read the rest of this entry »

“One Foot In The Black”
A Wildland Firefighter’s Story

“Wildfires have personalities. Some of them creep around in the brush and try to lull you into a sense of overconfidence. They hide until they gain strength and then overwhelm you when you least expect it . . .” I learned this from the author on page two. On page 241, I realized I could almost write the same verbal illustration for the personalities of the book itself.
One Foot In The Black, the book, begins in an anchor point, that place from which firefighters start building a fire line, or in this case, the story. A gripping presentation of subject and plot and the two main characters comes in the ‘anchor point’ prologue with “. . . a year ago, I saw a man go up in flames.” Read the rest of this entry »