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My view for the next hour as I wait for the parade.

Who ever heard of a Mud Bog without the mud? I ended up being out at the Hopkins County Fairgrounds tonight for the Mud Races. Unfortunately, while they did wet down the track a bit, there really was no mud. A tractor tilled the ground a few times, and a water tanker even wet down the ground a bit, but not a single person got stuck. When I go to a mudding competition, I want to see people not cross the finish line. Not only did everyone cross the finish line, but most of the stock trucks weren’t even dirty. Quite a few of them just had a little dirt on the treads, but none on the sidewalls or anywhere else. In all, while I was glad to be able to help, I was a bit disappointed in the show.

What a hard fought day at the fire station today.

Due to some newly acquired land the county has for a new courthouse, Madisonville Fire department has a number of buildings that we can demolish for training.  We had the opportunity to practice breaching concrete block walls, cut through exterior walls with a K-12 & chainsaw, attack basement fires with a piercing nozzle, and ventilate a roof with hand tools.

In all, it was a wonderful class, and I learned quite a few new techniques. However, due to the heat I now have a pounding headache.

We had a worker tonight!

Usually when an alarm comes in from Central Dispatch we can tell if it’s going to be the real thing or not due to the tone and speed of the dispatchers voice.

We knew as soon as we heard him that we would be out for quite a while. When we pulled up we had heavy smoke and fire showing. The flames were upwards of 20 ft in the air.

My partner and I secured the utilities while the first in crew made the initial attack. After we verified that our people were safe we pulled an additional hoseline to make an interior attack and perform a search. I grabbed the thermal imaging camera, we started breathing off our scba, and we pushed through the door fighting fire in every room we came to.

Because it was a trailer fire, and as is typical with most trailer fires, we started finging holes in the floor. This made it difficult to move around as our knees were always falling through these holes and getting stuck.

After searching the house twice and extinguishing all fire & hot spots, the job was through. An exhausting experience, but a very well executed attack.