My fire department radio sounded the paging tone at about 3:17 AM, waking me from a very deep sleep. It’s never something small when it goes off in the wee hours of the morning, so I stumbled into the bathroom where I keep the radio at night, and picked up my phone, which I charge right beside the radio. We have an app that gives us a printed version of whatever the dispatcher said over the radio, and given that I was just waking up as the dispatcher spoke I needed more information to see what was happening. Nothing on the phone…
I quickly used the restroom and started putting on clothes, hoping to learn more. A minute or two later the radio blared out another tone, and I understood that our ladder truck was needed in Belfast, the county seat 18 miles to our east. That had never happened before. This was probably bad. By now I was headed down the stairs to the garage where I started pulling on my turnout gear, which I keep in my vehicle because I’m so often late to the station due to where we live. Still nothing on the phone app, which is how we also let people know we’re on our way. Not good.
Our chief, who is also a good friend, was out of town, in charge of the annual fire chief’s association for the state. He always acknowledges the page for our department as he starts looking at the phone app to see who’s showing up. I hadn’t heard any of our department acknowledge the page so I did so via the radio and asked the dispatch center to issue a third tone as I told them about the problems with the phone app. Then I jumped into my truck and sped through the March mud to the station. Frankly, I was sweating bullets that I might be the only person turning out for this, and being forced to drive the giant ladder truck into town all alone while trying to figure out where I was going gave me a pit in my stomach. I hadn’t operated the ladder truck in months as I usually help drive and pump the tanker with our chief’s wife, who is also one of our department’s officers. I was relieved to see my friend Luther starting the truck as I pulled into the station parking lot. I hopped in with him, and we sped off toward Belfast.
Three other members of our department showed up on the scene a little later. The fire was at a large potato processing facility, and we spent over 14 hours on scene with 11 other departments and probably more than 100 firefighters. You know it’s bad when the governor shows up while the fire is still going. The facility was a total loss, but no one was injured and we managed to keep tanks of dangerous and explosive industrial gases from blowing up, and contained the fire. I feel terrible for those who have lost their employment for a while, and for the business owners, but it could have been much worse. I’m glad we were able to help as much as we could.
The only upside to something like this is the on-the-job training we get from it. Being in a small, rural, volunteer department means that you don’t face this sort of thing nearly as often as a career firefighter in a city (but trust me, we have our own challenges). I operated the ladder truck aerial for hours, pumped the truck for a similar amount of time, and manned an attack line (big hose) with my friend Sam for a couple of hours as well. The local news got us on video, so that’s me you see in the front (number 714). It’s a tough way to get this type of experience, but you learn a lot in a short amount of time. I just hope the occasion to do so again doesn’t happen for a long, long time.
