The Month of February

As noted below our big fire call was the structure fire Feb 7 in southwest Wolfskin District. For some of us this was the largest conflagration we've experienced.

But as also noted there was a vehicle fire earlier that week, and the notable thing was that it netted us a new enthusiastic beginning firefighter, who along with Scott, will have attended all the meetings this month and will both be taking FC Mike's intensive Mod 1 Course (see header at top of page) in March and April.

There was, in addition, a wildland fire technically in Athens-Clarke County at the edge of western Wolfskin on Sunday, Feb 18, I believe it was. It was a relatively small fire, about an acre in size, but Athens-Clarke County did request support from Wolfskin VFD and FC Mike was on the road with our old white knocker and at the scene within 15 minutes. He was joined by at least six or seven others of us within a few minutes more, and followed the directions of the ACC Incident Commander. A very good performance that was rewarded by the thanks and praises of the professional firefighters of Athens-Clarke County.

I believe that counts three fires we responded to in February, correct me if I'm wrong. Good job, everyone.

Can't forget to mention the Oglethorpe County Firefighters Association meeting on Tuesday Feb 20, in which Mike and the Unknown Firefighter were recognized as Rookies of the year, and Frankie was very appropriately awarded our highest recognition - Firefighter of the Year, from Wolfskin. Our Frankie is the guy who keeps the trucks and firestation apparatus working, and we could not do without him.

The fete of the evening was, of course, Our Phyllis. Fire Chief for longer than some of our firefighter babes can remember, we had the opportunity to snag her for special recognition after twenty plus years of running things from the early years, ca 80s, until last year when she asked that we lift the burden. From the dark ages, the mid 90s until four years ago, she and WingateD and JimK kept things going by themselves. And then about four years ago Phyllis got us all back together again. What would Wolfskin Community have done without Phyllis? There are fewer people than there should be who know the difference she's made.

There's no single crowning glory for Phyllis, but there is this, which would mark a pinnacle for anyone. Let me emphasize this, if I may. If you didn't catch the arrival of the Watermaster Supertanker, and if you didn't catch what I think are some really ecstatic photos of Phyllis, then GO HERE NOW!. It was a big day for all of us, and really did sort of mark a rite of passage.

Congratulations to Phyllis, Mike, The Unknown Firefighter, and Frankie especially, and as soon as Phyllis gets me photos I'll post them (but not of TUF, of course).

The training sessions during the month of February really deserve a post of their own, and perhaps I will shortly. Mike and Ed have put together some amazing sessions this month. We're now doing three Thursdays a month of training, and nine or ten firefighters are showing up for each session.

Third Thursday was the hose maze, crawling around in the dark with BA finding your way out of the building without vision and only by following the hose. I'm pleased to report that the Unknown Firefighter and I made it out in 7 minutes, a 4 minute lead over our nearest contenders. Combine that with training on drafting from the portable drop tank (holds 2000 gallons) as well as nursing from the watermaster tanker, and it was a big evening.

Fourth Thursday was ladders. Simple, you say, but you'd be wrong. There's a choreography here that has to be seen to be believed. Deploying the ladder, getting it to the site, and raising it are all done with a flair that the Unknown Firefighter described as written up by caffeine-maddened bureaucrats with a control problem. Anyway, we scurried up 15 feet of extension ladder to the top of a gasoline drum out back, and then sprayed water from the top of a roof ladder set atop the famous WVFD barbecue pit building out back.

And that was the month of February. Who knows what March will hold in store for us, but the tentative schedule is at the top of the page.

--Wayne

Wolfskin District

We here at WVFD have had a number of reasons for wanting to get a good idea of the extent of our community. We're working right now on a map that defines the boundaries in a way that will assist us in several ways, not the least of which is a nice wall-sized map of the area. We want a county-wide map, of course, but a county is way too big for our primary responsibility area. Within Oglethorpe County areas are mapped out by 911 Emergency definitions, watershed definitions, Fire Districts, insurance maps, all kinds. Here I suggest that at least some, if not many, of those definitions can be traced to a map drawn up more than two hundred years ago.

The maps that I present here are from one I had located from this source for a finely detailed map of Oglethorpe County. I spent quite a number of hours downloading sections and pasting them together and coloring in roads and creeks.

The other day I was idly googling for the origin of the name "Goulding" as in Goulding Creek, and ran across this site which details the history of militia districts in Oglethorpe County. It appears that Wolfskin District is mentioned as early as 1797, formed for the purpose of defense during post-Revolution colonial times.

(That site, by the way, is an extremely interesting source for information about Oglethorpe County history, including scans of maps from the 1800s onward, prominent families in Oglethorpe County, and essays on towns. It is part of the USGenWeb Project, and you might just find your county listed there.)



The other districts on this map are also still in evidence - Beaverdam, Crawford, Lexington, Glade, Goosepond - all retain their names. Falling Creek District doesn't ring a bell for me, but might now be referred to as the District under Maxeys's jurisdiction.

The reason that this is of interest is that the outlines of the militia districts appear to have been conscripted for present day fire protection responsibilities. That is, Wolfskin Volunteer Fire Department has primary responsibility for the region fully outlined in purple in this section of the detailed, colorized map:



(I have linked the above, admittedly fuzzy map to a much better, larger 373KB map for local readers who might want to print it out. And I also have a much, much larger 1.8MB map of the entire county, rather than just the above section, but email me if you want it.)

This doesn't tell the whole story. Arnoldsville VFD to our north would appear to be part of Crawford Militia District, and yet it has its own fire jurisdiction today, so some changes have been made. The above map should not be taken as accurate even for WVFD. It simply appears that at least some present-day fire jurisdictions have derived from late 18th century militia districts. But how accurate is it?

Present day fire jurisdictions are multiple and overlapping - there are Primary Responsibility districts, which the purple above purports to outline, and then there are overlapping lines that map out Automatic Aid from neighboring districts. Automatic Aid refers to structure fires, considered to be rather important. If WVFD is called out for a structure fire in its Primary jurisdiction, then our Automatic Aid friends, Arnoldsville to the north, Crawford to the northeast, and Maxeys to the south, will be automatically paged too. (Each VFD has a number - WVFD is F4, and each member has his or her own number that starts with that one - I am 411, and Glenn is 418. Maxeys is F3, Crawford is F6, Arnoldsville is F11. And so on. Too much information, I know, but this is documentation, right?)

As it turns out, all those assignments are made by 911, with input from the fire chiefs in the county. It may surprise some, but we didn't have 911 here in Oglethorpe County until about ten years ago - we even had to vote in a referendum to get it. But now that we have it, all maps are standardized to that. The nice thing is that 911 will give us, if we ask nice, maps of the area along with details like road names and address numbers.

Glenn has located a map of those assignments and is in the process along with Bill, one of our civilian WVFD Board members, of applying that so that we eventually have a full-featured wall-sized map. But we can at least test the "militia district hypothesis" here.

Here is a blowup of the area to our southeast, along Bull Bray Road.



The jagged horizontal purple line is the demarcation between "Falling Creek" (now referred to as Maxeys) and Wolfskin, according to the late 18th century militia district lines. I've noted three addresses along this road and circled them in red. 911 claims that Wolfskin has jurisdiction from Box 476 to Box 869, and Maxeys has jurisdiction from Box 0 to Box 475B. It really looks to me like the militia district lines successfully predict the 911 assignments, and that the county fire chiefs used those lines as a guide to drawing up primary responsibility areas a decade ago.

Now you might ask, "who cares, Wayne?" Well, here's something: we ask for donations now and then, and we don't want to go outside our area and trod on the feet of our adjacent VFDs. Here's something else, which complicates things a bit: fire insurance is graded in Classes, and we are at Class 9 right now, which means, well, not very good. We want to be Class 8B, which will save all the residents of the Wolfskin District a fair amount of money. So we need to know who would be promised that Class change. But the Insurance Service Organization that makes those assignments doesn't necessarily follow the 911/militia maps, and we have to determine who we can promise and who we can't. That's the next step: How does the ISO divvy things up?

Oh yes, Goulding Creek. Did I ever find the origin of the name "Goulding"? No, but it is interesting that one of the militia captains (1820-1821) is Thomas W. Golding. None of the maps at the USGenWeb site is detailed enough, except possibly the 1894 map, to show Goulding Creek, and that one is 70 years in Captain Golding's future. Miss Flossie Smith might have something to say about this, but it's a little hard to get her book!

--Wayne

Feb 15 Third Thursday Training

A busy and productive training session for the seven of us who attended. Temps were around 30 degF but PPEs and crawling around on the floor make you warm.

WVFD Fire Chief Mike Geraci's email this morning:

Great training session last night……..

Hose maze always a good reminder of the basics to ensure we all go home at the end of an incident and the drafting / nursing enabled us to increase our confidence in our ability to sustain a water supply.

Appreciate all the enthusiasm and participation.

Make plans to attend the FF Association meeting next Tuesday. FF of the year / Rookie of the year recognition. Covered dish as well. I don’t have the details on time and location nailed down. Lisa, can you help with that????

Be looking for details on our Mod I course schedule shortly.

Thanks again for all the support, Mike

And there you have it. Several things were going on.

First up was setting up and filling the drop tank, a big swimming pool thing for holding a couple thousand gallons of water for general drafting by trucks on the scene. NO PROBLEMS! Unless you count wanting to move 500 gallons of water instead of moving the truck. NOTE: use padding under the tank. Sometimes we have to walk around in the swimming pool, and don't want to poke holes. Also - close up the drain before pumping water into tank :-)

Second: Hose Maze! Prizes for the fastest (The Unknown Firefighter and I won at 7 minutes). Lisa set up a maze of snaking hoses in the firehouse and the object is to crawl about and follow them with PPE and BA tanks, blind, with hoods pulled down over the face masks and in the dark. TUF is an excellent navigator with great communication skills. Smooth bump bump to the pump! - Mike

Third: Drafting into the Margarita truck from the drop tank. Couldn't have gone better. Should have photographed the setup for documentation. Got the pump primed quickly, started it up, and the truck was sucking water into the pump and out of the booster hose.

Fourth: Nursing by the Margarita from the Tanker. Setup was a little slower - we'd done it before about six weeks ago and no one wrote anything down. Note to me: bring camera! Finally figured out the connections. We need a properly sized connector for hooking the six-inch hose at the Margarita intake. Were reduced to using the 2-inch (?) intake with a reducer coupling, but we DID figure it out. The pumper then sucks water directly out of the tanker and pumps it directly into a hose.

Fifth: Cleanup and refilling of the tanker. No problem - we've got that down.

It was a three-hour session but everyone was pleased.

--Wayne

Busy First Week in February

It's always a pleasure to get called out for a fire at 4am and meet up with your fellow firefighters at a time when most people don't have get-togethers. It's too bad that the Hospitality Truck didn't make it with cookies and coffee, but we'll get over it.

This one was a big one. A storage building filled with lots of vehicles and equipment, and the added touch - a propane tank that went up. Wolfskin was first on the scene, but at least five other VFDs were involved and there were a total of at least ten firetrucks, and probably fifty firefighters. With that number you might expect chaos, and it certainly looks like chaos, but in fact things went quickly and in a very orderly fashion.

One of the peskiest problems was a large truck filled with pine straw bales that had been ignited. Burning compressed pine straw is very difficult to put out, and that situation occupied several of us for the entire three hours, pulling out pine straw and quenching it, then pulling out more. It's a task that couldn't be accomplished without those nice SCBA tanks that supply you with air for twenty minutes or so.

Unofficially, the building was a complete loss, of course, as were at least half a dozen vehicles that had been stored close by or in it and were involved upon arrival. But the fire didn't spread to any other structure close by and that was the main thing.

This actually wasn't the only callout in the past week. We were all on our way to our First Thursday business meeting last week when there was a call out for a vehicle fire nearby. That one only involved our own VFD, but it rated both our pumper and tanker.

And in neither case did I take the camera :-(

January Structure Fire Training

I should have gotten this up ten days ago.

On January 20 four of us - Phyllis, Mike, Ed, and the mystery guest - went to Washington, GA for a structure fire training course. All are old pros at this by now but it's a good refresher and apparently 24 hours are required per year for Class 8 fire insurance purposes.

This one was a little different than the one described in November. There we had actual houses to burn down, a fairly rare opportunity, but the action was all at one level. Here the structure is a metal building whose sole function is to be burned down, over and over, and the action takes place at two levels. It's a more rigorous training, since heavy hoses have to be dragged quickly up and down stairways.

Phyllis sent the following two pictures, with the narration below:

2 pics--that's all I brought to UGA to send on fast
internet. I took no action pics because either I was
in the action, or it was too hot for camera. The
photographer didn't have much unassigned time to
wander at leisure.

First - Aliens - Ed standing, pointing to Darth Vader
on 2nd Floor Back-Up assignment. Interior team is locating and
extinguishing fires on 2 floors. Negotiating the
stairs with hose & gear is the hard part.

Second - YES! We're done. Phyllis, Ed, Mike. Survived
one more time, and good time had by all! Already had
part of our PPE stripped off by picture time. Mike,
you look good in white.

Nice outfits, I think, and they're getting well worn too. Thanks from the rest of us to all who went.