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 :-(