Downtown Fire and Teamwork
Today was quite an eventful day. While working an extra, I was on the nozzle for one of the more dangerous fires the city has seen in quite a while. One of the local businesses downtown rents its upstairs floors out as living space, and on the top floor of a 4 store building today we had quite a large fire.
Being at the downtown station, we usually have 2 fully staffed trucks that will respond to structure fires but today that wasn’t the case. Our second truck had been training out at Station 3 on the Hazmat truck. That only left me, another firefighter, and our officer to cover the initial response for the downtown area.
We’ve always talked about a fire downtown and how hazardous a situation this could become due to the construction of the closely spaced buildings. As we were toned out, the engineer of our truck looked out the window and saw the smoke rising from what appeared to be the roof of the building. As the scene of the fire was so close to the station, we actually arrived before we were fully geared up to make entrance. It didn’t take long thoubh before we grabbed the longest preconnect on the truck and made our way through the front door, to the back of the building, and up 3 flights of stairs.
Upon reaching the 3rd floor, I called back for water and made an the interior attack. The black acrid smoke billowed out the windows as we entered the kitchen area. Because the fire was getting such a steady stream of oxygen, it was burning hot and fast and as I entered the room I could see fire on the roof rolling over my head and walking up both walls.
Since the fire had self ventilated I wasn’t too worried about getting steam burns so I put the nozzle on a wide fog and opened it up fully to cool off the ceiling area, let the steam do its magic, and push some of the smoke out the window. This cooled off the room considerably and really helped improve the visibility. We finished extinguishing the hot spots before making our way back down the stairs to a rehab area since we knew that our work was far from over. It took members from the entire department a number of hours to overhaul the affected fire area, place salvage covers over filing cabinets and computers to protect them from water damage, and make sure there were no more hot spots that could rekindle later during the day.
In all, we were exceptionally blessed by a number of factors; the building construction had been updated to include sheet rock walls, the fire station was so close to the scene, and the fire ventilated out the nearest window versus spreading through the attic. These factors coupled with the wonderful amount of teamwork by both on-duty as well as off-duty personnel all made this a successful operation.
