It’s April, so what I should be writing about is something related to FDIC International 2018—maybe about the more than 700 exhibitors, or the more than 33,000 expected to attend, or how there isn’t a bigger conference and exhibition for the fire service in North America. But, as it often happens in life, events occur that change your plans.

Back in February, the Mid Atlantic region of the country had two Nor’easters occur within days of each other. The first tricked many meteorologists—although at this stage of the game my preferred way of weather prediction involves looking out a window—and what was supposed to be a rain and wind event became a wet snow and wind event. The nature of the storm took many by surprise, and it was not long before the whole area became gridlocked.

We got through most of the day without any calls, but the way it usually goes during weather events like this is that once the calls start, they don’t stop. Most of the calls involved trees into houses, wires down and arcing, and “trees and wires.” Every so often a noncommercial or commercial building fire dispatch would be thrown into the mix, and it was for a noncommercial building fire that I found myself behind the wheel of our first-out pumper.

It was slow going, and as soon as we left the ramp of the firehouse I turned to our captain and told him I was going to take my time as much as was feasible. Driving conditions were not good at this point, and there was no reason to make matters worse by driving like a madman.

We weren’t far from the address of the fire when we were recalled. I checked quickly with the captain to see what way he wanted to head back. We had a very curvy hill coming up, and if he wanted to try turning around, I was open to it. We decided to proceed down the hill. As I approached the hill, I noticed a few twigs falling from one of the trees to my left, which drew my attention to a line of trees. As I looked to see which tree was dropping branches, a large tree fell right in front of me within 10 feet. It was kind of slow motion watching it fall, and there was enough time for me to stop, thankfully.

As it came down, several things went through my mind in rapid succession. First, it became obvious that the timing was right, and I was not going fast enough for it to hit the truck, but if it did it would probably clip the front bumper. Once that computation went through, and concurrent with trying to stop, I thought, “If I slide, I’m going to hit this tree.” As luck would have it, I did not slide and came to a stop. Before I could even breathe a sigh of relief, a light show started to my right as the wires the tree briefly rested on snapped. Quickly, I started to back up, but there were vehicles behind me we had to contend with before I could really get far enough away. Eventually, we did end up turning around to start the 10-minute journey home that took us 25 to 30 minutes because of traffic conditions.

I’m not bringing all this up to tout my driving techniques. I’ve had some time to think about it and my actions, and I have to think I probably would have been going a little faster if it was raining—not much, but potentially fast enough that the tree could have hit part of the truck. It was very unnerving even backing up because there was a whole line of these trees, and the wind and wet snow were not letting up.