Narritive

Narrative Fire Attack On the night of March 10th I went to bed around 11 o’clock so I was not too tired for school the next day. I was sleeping great until about 5:30a.m on the 11th when the call went out. The call came in from the dispatcher as an occupied structure fire in Cardington. So then I had to get up and get ready to go work my ass off. Once I got to the fire station we had to figure out what trucks they wanted us to bring and see how many people we were going to have to man the trucks. We asked the dispatcher what trucks they wanted us to bring and they told us that they wanted us to bring just an engine with a full crew. Since I was still pretty new I did not get to go on the engine. So I got to sit there and watch them go to the fire. Then dispatch came back over the radio and said that Cardington’s Chief got on the scene and said that he wanted us to bring the ladder truck over because it was a big house and we needed to vent the roof of the structure. So my dad drove the ladder to the scene and then there were three others that rode along. It took us about five minutes to get to the fire scene from our station. As we were poling up to the scene my dad gave us the assignments that we had to do to set up the ladder so that we could get the ventilation as soon as possible. The assignment I was given was to look for overhead power lines and help to set the outriggers to help stabilize the truck when the ladder is up. Once we got the truck all set up we had to go check in with the incident commander for accountability so they knew we were on the scene and knew what we would be doing. Two of the guys that rode with us got in the bucket and started towards the roof to start ventilating. Since I could not go up with them I just stood there and waited for another assignment. So then one of our guys that went over in the engine came up to me and said “hey you are going to be my partner and we are going to slay the dragon!” as we call it around here. As I was standing there getting ready to go inside my nerves were going and my adrenalin was pumping like crazy because I was about to go into my first fire. Once we got to the door about to make entry my adrenalin was through the roof but that’s just part of the job. The fire ended up being in the second floor so we had to go through the house to find the stairs and get up there. When we found the steps they were half gone and almost impossible to go up but we had to get up to the fire so we had to go up them, every time you went up a step they popped and felt like you were going to fall through them. We made it up the steps and the fire was right over top of our heads and was rolling out of the door way. It kept building up and was getting bigger and hotter so we needed to get water on it as soon as possible. We started to put water on it and got it knocked down a little bit but then my dad radioed in to us and told us that we had thirty seconds to get out of there because the conditions were getting worse and it was getting to where it was not safe for us to be in there anymore. Then we started to put as much water on the fire as we could and got it knocked all the way down to where it was safe for us to be there. So we had to have the guys outside put up a ladder to one of the windows so we could get out because the steps we came up were no longer there and that was the only way out of the building. After we got out my dad came up to us and told us that was a close one and told us good job getting it stopped. It felt so good knowing what I had just accomplished and even though we put the fire out there was still a lot of work that we had to do to get all the fire out. The whole call lasted about four hours and the rest of the day I was so happy and excited just knowing what I had done. I also ended up being about two and half hours late to class but that’s just what happens when duty calls.