By Bill Adams
There’re times old people should just sit in the corner, listen to the birds sing, and keep to themselves. This probably is one of them, but I just can’t help myself. A raisin squad member at morning coffee was showing a video or movie or whatever they’re called on the Face-Tube or whatever setting on his “Smarter-Than-Me” cellphone. I can’t remember which career department it showed, but it doesn’t matter because they really didn’t do anything wrong.
It showed what looked like an apartment building–a very large two-and-a-half story wooden structure with flames blowing out of a couple side-by-side windows in a top-floor dormer directly impinging on the roof eves. It appeared two or three rigs had arrived simultaneously. An aerial was coming out of its bed, and you could see a crew had already entered the front door with a handline. A firefighter gave the “flaming windows” a good blast from the street with a handline obviously trying to darken it down before it got into the attic.
The Squad discussed the video in depth. Those of us needing glasses watched it carefully. We agreed the first line should be humped inside to the seat of a fire–except in extraordinary circumstances. Bear in mind our real-life experiences happened a long time ago with boosters and inch-and-a-half lines. Most of us haven’t been close enough to a fire to get warm in years. We were not in agreement in the benefit of darkening down a “room and contents” job from the outside. We couldn’t tell if the tactic we saw in the video actually prevented extension into the attic. It was all speculation, guesses, and what-ifs–just like Monday morning quarterbacking. White hairs are good at that. We weren’t there but we all agreed a good attempt was made and it didn’t appear to harm anything or anyone.
The squad began reminiscing about calls we’d actually been to where it took a long time for a line to reach the fire. Multi-story apartment buildings and large homes converted into four of five small apartments were examples. Some houses had front, rear, and side entrances to apartments. I think one white hair might have been stretching it a bit (his story–not the hose line) when he said the third line pulled at one call finally found the fire.
Regardless, we started repeating the same stories over, and over, and over, when the cell phone owner interrupted saying, “Hey look at this–some guy just made a comment about the clip saying it looked like ‘volunteer’s tactics.” Passing judgment on transitional attacks abruptly halted and we started giving opinions on the on-going animosity between “some” career (aka permanent and paid) firefighters and “some” volunteers. I addressed it once before here. Maybe it’s a topic to address again.
If you’re interested in the pros and cons of transitional attacks, I used my computer’s search engine thingy and typed in “transitional fire attack.” There were more than two dozen links to sites and blogs with commentary on the topic from most all of the trade journals and from volunteer as well as career firefighters. Opinions vary–worth reading.
Button Pushers
Talking about opinions, I was jawboning via email with a young guy I’ve known for quite a while. He’s from out of town—a former volunteer not old enough yet to collect social security but well versed in the fire service. He sounded just like a raisin. I told him I’ll call him a junior raisin or a semi-raisin–seasoned, somewhat wrinkled but not dried out enough to be a real one.
I think we were talking about fixing our own fire trucks in the fire stat