Today I'm doing a work sub for Andre Lynch and I was placed at station 4 in Sandy Spring. Sandy Spring is one of the more remote areas of Montgomery County, with rolling hills, million-dollar homes and not many fire hydrants. Station 4 is one of the few stations in Montgomery County I had never even been inside of, let alone worked at. I know many people who have worked there and some who have even been assigned there, but I never had the pleasure of working there for any length of time. Today, however, was the day! And not only am I working here for 24 hours, I'm driving the fire engine!
4 was recently given one of the new CAFS (Compressed Air Foam System) engines. In checking the schedule for today, I saw that I was the only CAFS driver working at 4, which obviously meant I was driving the engine. This, admittedly, made me a little nervous. Yes, I'm checked off to drive the CAFS engines, but I've never done it before, and I'd be lying if I said I was completely comfortable operating all the CAFS equipment. But you gotta learn sometime, right? What better way than to be thrown right in the fire??? (I'm sure I COULD think of some better ways, actually...and sorry about the pun.)
When I got there, Geoff Blaine, the master firefighter from the previous shift, went over the engine with me, reminding me of some things and going over the operation of the pump. Things I learned from my CAFS training classes were coming back to me, but he definitely made me feel more comfortable in being the driver for the day. After he left, I spent some time going over the engine, performing the daily operational checks of all the equipment; that helped me feel more at ease as well. After about an hour, I finished my checks and made up my mind that I would do the best I could, whatever the day would bring.
After some PT in the station, I was doing some stretching in the living room and they tapped out a 25 box...smoke coming from an apartment! Station 4 is due on some 25 boxes, so I listed to the dispatch carefully, as my heart pounded at the thought of running my first CAFS fire...
"Units operate on 7 Charlie for box 25-08, 3764 Bel Pre Road...smoke coming from the apartment. Engines 725, 740 (the other Sandy Spring station! We were definitely going!), E723, E703, and...(here it comes!)...E703.
Really? Yes indeed. We weren't due.
That ended up being fine, because it wasn't a real fire anyway. Someone had left a pot of food unattended on a stove and it had smoked up the apartment. Nothing to do there except cut the burner on the stove off and removed the smoke. Oh well...
Later on, after some lunch, we went out to a part of 4's area where there is a dry hydrant (imagine a pipe sticking out of the ground that goes to a large pond. You hook up our hard sleeve (imagine a huge, six-inch diameter straw that's 10 feet long) to the hydrant and suck water out of it from the pond. I had never done that before, so we went out to do it. It was definitely a learning experience for me, although it's not too different than drafting from a normal static water source. The new engines pull a draft pretty easily, so once we got water sucked up into our pump, we opened up the deck gun and let the water rip. It was all nasty dirty pond water, but hey, it would put out a fire the same as clean water.
After we were done, we got a call to go to the nearby senior citizen's place to help a man off the floor after falling. Once we got him back on his feet and checked him out (he was fine), we left. We drove to where there was a cistern (same as the dry hydrant, except it's connected to an underground water tank which holds 10,000 gallons) and then had to back flush our pump. Basically, back flushing is where we clean out all the possible gunk that the pump might have collected from flowing dirty water. After that was done, we headed back to the fire house.
When we parked in front of the senior citizen's place, I drove through some tree branches and it scuffed up the engine a bit, so when we got back, we had to buff out the marks. Can't be marking up a brand new fire truck yet, right? Although if not now, when? It's definitely gonna get marked up sooner or later...probably when the "newness" of it wears off.
We're about to sit down for dinner, so I'll write more if anything interesting happens (in all honesty, I hope not...I need some sleep!)
