Firefighting: The first 50 calls

I have the luxury of a fairly open schedule. I have mornings off (I have to catch the NYC bus at 12:30 or 1), and I don't teach on Fridays unless I'm subbing. As a result, I can attend a lot of fire calls. In the month of January, there were 48 calls to our fire department, and I made it in for 25 of them. I made it to a bunch in December and over the past week, and by today, I've responded to over 50 fire calls.

Fire calls come in a variety of flavors. The mildest, of course, are ones that get called off even before we arrive at the fire station. More often, we arrive at the station only to learn that the automatic smoke detector was tripped by a burnt food item in a toaster. We sign our attendance sheet, chew the fat a bit, and head home. Then there are the calls where we rush to the scene and don't find out about the burnt food until we've arrived. Still, it means we got to ride in a fire truck, and that's always fun. Many of these non-emergencies occur at SUNY, and since it's better to be safe than sorry, we take them seriously. Nonetheless, it was funny to learn that my latest trip to the campus came about because of an over-toasted bagel. We had a little chuckle and headed back to sign our sheet.

There have been some more serious calls in these past two months, of course. One involved a pedestrian hit by a car while on her way to class at SUNY. Luckily for her, the car was traveling rather slowly, but she was taken to St Francis as a precaution because her knees were knocked pretty hard and her neck was a bit sore [update: She's fine]. The fire department is on the scene when a car is involved because of the possibility that we might be needed for fire prevention or other assistance. We also rushed to the scene of an accident on the road that Shirra and I most often take to the Village: Route 32N. When that call came in, I was already on Main Street, and I knew that Shirra was driving Maeve to school. I had a horrid feeling that she was in one of the cars. Luckily she was a bit behind the accident. On that day, I helped hold the stretcher that we used to extricate the woman from her car. Her car was totaled, but she may have escaped with nothing more than a broken wrist and a sore neck.

A situation like this is called a PIAA (Personal Injury, Auto Accident), but not all of the ones we assist with take place inside of New Paltz. Last week, I was on the scene of a highway accident where the car went off the side of the road, flipped over, and smashed into a tree. The car ended up sunny-side down and rather flat, resembling a discarded child's toy, but happily (and amazingly), both occupants were ok. I think the driver ended up with nothing more than some bruising, and his passenger had a broken leg, but considering the condition of the wreck, they're lucky to be alive. Hooray for seatbelts. That morning, my job was to train a hose on the car in case it began to flame up. It didn't help that the temperature was in single digits. It only occurred to me a couple days ago that in my first 50 calls, I haven't actually seen a fire. In fact, I have not even seen smoke.

I have been around plenty of gas, however. On one occasion, we arrived at the scene of a serious gas leak. The propane tank outside of an abandoned house had developed a crack in the valve; a neighbor reported a strong smell of gas (actually, that smell is mercaptan, a chemical added in order to make gas leaks more noticeable). Within minutes, we had a hose trained on the gas tank in order to try to freeze the valve shut (which could have worked if the temperature had been even colder). Eventually the fire captain told us to use the hose to blow the gas away from the house, and a few minutes later the man from the gas company was on hand. He gave the valve a secret karate chop and had it fixed in ten seconds. When I got home, I felt a little woozy, but I don't know if that was from the gas, the cold, my exhaustion, or all three.

On nights like this, I sit in my living room with my pager clipped to my sweater, waiting for it to buzz, feeling like a teenager before Valentine's Day. The NPFD responded to nearly 900 calls last year, meaning that we average nearly three a day. When my pager does go off, I feel the vibration before the dispatcher's voice sounds, at which point I unclip it and hold it so that I can have a better chance of hearing the location of the emergency. Then I rush to the door, where I put on my boots and pants. Firefighters get dressed in a particular fashion based purely on necessity. We start with our boots, oddly enough. They're tall enough to pop out at the tops of our pants, so by stepping into our boots, we've put on both the shoes and the trousers. We then pull up the pants, work over the suspenders, and voila, we're half dressed. After that, it's jacket, helmet, and off we go, waiting to find out if it's a PIAA or a genuine fire or just another piece of scorched toast.