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- Story Listed as: True Life For Adults
- Theme: Drama / Human Interest
- Subject: General Interest
- Published: 03/20/2012
Knuckle-draggers
Born 1958, M, from Vancouver, WA, United States.jpg)
Knuckle-Draggers
In my fire department, stations are assigned different resources based on the surrounding community’s needs. For example, heavy rescue units are typically assigned to industrial response areas and wildland units to rural areas. Paramedics have found their way into most stations, much to the chagrin of some of our old timers, and a few stations are blessed with a Chief Officer, usually a Battalion Chief, much to the chagrin of just about everyone. All stations have an engine company, which is the all-purpose response vehicle of the fire service, and it happens to be the apparatus I serve on as captain. My station is located in a mixed residential response area: single-family dwellings and apartment complexes, some of the apartments are very old and built to burn. For that reason, my station has a truck company.
Having a truck company is like having a class of sixth-graders assigned to your station, only they all weigh in at roughly two-hundred pounds and are given the biggest apparatus in the fleet to use as they see fit.
The men of the truck company walk through the station dragging the stink of the last three fires they fought behind them like bad cologne. In training sessions they gather at the back of the room, make obnoxious, disgusting noises and laugh like hell when one sounds unique.
With the exception of the Lieutenant, their cell phone ring tones are “Crazy Train;” volume set to stun; the Lieutenant has “Hair of the Dog” on his cell, equally as loud.
Their protective gear is toxic, permeated with the residue of whatever building that has recently burned; their helmets sag, deformed by intense heat. New gear gets dragged through the mud that accumulates at the base of the training tower before it is ever worn.
This constitutes pride in their appearance.
The truck company Lieutenant has an assortment of t-shirts he wears around the station after hours. He has two favorites, each getting the same care as his turnouts. One is a simple shirt that says: I May Not Be Smart, But I Can Lift Heavy Things, printed across his chest. The other has a picture screened on the back of a gorilla in a fire helmet. Below the picture is a caption: Proud To Be A Knuckle-Dragger.
At one of the first fires I responded to with him as a truck company officer I asked him to give me a ventilation profile. It was a simple house fire, and the profile – a determination of what type of ventilation would work best under the circumstances, should have been easy to determine. Without another word to me, the Lieutenant walked up to a window at the rear of the house and put his helmet through the glass. The glass broke, the smoke ventilated, everything was good.
Except that his head was still inside the helmet when he shoved it through the window.
Being the ranking officer at the station, I get an office of my own. My office is adjacent to the truck bay and I can see the apparatus floor from my desk, as well as the exit from the pole hole. Upstairs is the living quarters where my engine company coexists with the truck company.
One evening I was relaxing in front of my computer, working on a report, when I heard loud thumping followed by laughter and profanity; not unusual by any means, though I was glad I was not up there. Thumps and profanity usually are accompanied by something broken, someone bleeding, or a foul odor, or any combination of the three.
It became quiet for a while, only the occasional sound of someone walking across the floor. It was the quiet that made me edgy.
Looking through the window out into the truck bay I saw crouching figures moving furtively between the apparatus. In their hands were Nerf bats. My engine company had engaged the truck company, in a game of Nerf-hunt.
Nerf-hunt. This is one of those activities not usually associated with adults. The game has few rules, and its only blessing, as far as I am concerned, is the Nerf bat is such a benign weapon that a person could be walloped repeatedly by one and feel no ill effect other than shame at having been walloped by a Nerf bat. There is no strategy or goal other than it is better to be the hitter, not the one being hit.
Occasionally, the truck company, lead by the Lieutenant who shoved his head through a window, takes it upon themselves to have an impromptu training session; usually a continuation of something we had gone over earlier in the day. The incident that sticks in my mind happened on a day we studied flammable gas, its properties and the safest methods of handling them.
It was a quiet Saturday afternoon, and I was in my office minding my own business when there is a muffled whoosh sound upstairs, accompanied by laughter and the sound of rapid movement, footsteps moving in every direction.
Experience told me something bad had happened and that I should go upstairs to make a first hand assessment of the situation; usually referred to as a size up. I was just getting ready to head up when my engineer appeared at my office door.
“Umm, sir, it would be best if you did not come upstairs for about an hour or so.”
“Why?”
“We were doing one of those demonstrations, you know, with flammable gas. We filled one of those balloons with hydrogen and ignited it.” He tried to smile, but it looked more like a painful grimace.
“So, how did that work for you?”
“The Lieutenant has asked me to inform you that we initiated a significant exothermic reaction.”
It was only then that I noticed that one of my engineer’s eyebrows was missing. “Anyone with injuries I need to be aware of?”
“None worth mentioning…or reporting.” He cleared his throat. “Umm, we may also have inadvertently liberated a significant amount of carbon. It may take some time to clean it up.”
I made a mental note to have a face-to-face with the truck company Lieutenant about refraining from drawing my own people into his knuckle-dragger’s crazy world.
“You have half an hour,” I told him. “How big is the mess?”
My engineer tired to smile, again only achieving a grimace. “We have already called dispatch about the smoke coming out of the windows.”
“What?”
“And we are pretty sure we can get the smell out of the curtains. We might have to use some Ozium.”
“Okay, you have an hour.”
There really was no point in arguing. Since I have a pretty good understanding of the properties of hydrogen, and of combustion, and knowing what the balloon was made of, it was not too hard to imagine that there was a sticky black patina covering every exposed surface on the second floor. One hour seemed the least I could do for the eight men who were probably vigorously cleaning.
There is a reason my station has a truck company.
We got the alarm late at night the next shift, at that wonderful time that some in the fire service call oh-dark-thirty. We saw the glow as we pulled out of the station. As we got closer the glow began to come to life, moving and shifting. The thermal column became visible against the sky as it reflected the fire beneath.
As we pulled in front of the three-story apartment complex, I noted that it had initiated a significant exothermic reaction: smoke and flame were rolling out from one of the first floor units at the end of the first building. It was easy to see that fire spread would occur as the flames breach the windows of the second floor unit. In fact there were indications that a breach had already occurred.
My first orders were for the truck company to do a primary search of the second and third floor units above the fire.
As I set up command and requested additional units, I watched the knuckle-draggers come off their apparatus and head for the fire building. Every type of tool that could possibly be carried was hanging off of them. This search would probably require some level of forcible entry – opening doors that were secured, or making big holes in walls when the doors would not cooperate, so they took with them everything they might need.
Knuckle-draggers can be destructive, but they do it with an amazing efficiency.
We were beginning to deploy hose lines and assign incoming units to operations when the truck company exited the building and gave the all clear. As the Lieutenant came up to me for a face–to-face, he said, “Nobody home.”
Flame was beginning to curl up past the roofline, and the front of the second floor unit was beginning to darken with pressurized smoke. “I think we write these three off,” I said, pointing to the end units. He nodded. “I need you up on the roof. I’m making you roof command. Let me know what you need.” The truck Lieutenant turned away to carry out the order when I yelled after him. “If I recall correctly, the roof is flat and has a common attic. You might consider a trench cut. I’ll leave that up to you.” He smiled at me and went back to his task.
The truck put down its stabilizers and raised its boom while extension ladders where thrown up and leaned into the side of the building. Knuckle-draggers crawled up the boom, heavily laden with even more tools, from circular saws and chain saws to pike poles, axes and pry bars.
Their destructive efficiency with forcible entry is only outdone by the speed and accuracy at cutting huge holes in roofs.
Fire began to show at the front of the second floor unit and smoke obscured visibility at the front of the third floor unit. Lines from my engine extended into the exposed units next door. We opened up the deck gun straight into the first floor unit, which was fully involved, adding gouts of steam to the thermal column, and cooling the smoke, soot and ash, making it rain down on us like snow. From experience I knew it would not be long before we were all covered in inadvertently liberated carbon.
Second alarm units began to arrive, and I was immersed in the responsibility of deploying lines, relieving crews, and updating my attack plan. We were making good progress on the initial fire units, but there was still the overriding concern in the design of the building: its common attic. Above each third floor unit ran an open space the designers had never considered a problem, because they never thought about what would happen if the building burned. On my last walk around of the entire building I paid special attention to the attic vents at each end. As I suspected, the vents were showing signs that fire had made its way into that common attic. If that happened, fire would spread laterally across the top of the building, making it difficult to fight.
Under normal fire conditions a ventilation crew, usually knuckle-draggers, would cut a square hole in a roof to allow hot gasses and smoke to escape, making it easier for attack crews to gain access and extinguish the fire. With a trench cut the idea was that the fire would only go as far as the trench, then vent up and out keeping the fire from extending across the top of the building.
The eastern horizon was beginning to pale with the coming of morning. Several fire streams poured into the wrecked front of the fire building while steam and smoke poured out, and angry flame still owned the depths of the first and second floor units. Firefighters walked past the command post, covered in soot and insulation, weary from the work, but smiling anyway. The sound of engines at full throttle pumping water nearly drowned every other sound out.
At that moment fire came to life where it had not been before: not past the edge of the roof, but shooting up from the center of the roof, between the units on fire and the ladders of my truck company. It was an angry tongue of flame leaping up in a robe of smoke.
Standing at the edge of the parapet wall was a firefighter, his turnouts black from the smoke, the edge of his helmet dipping unevenly, and something in his hand that might have been one of the many tools the knuckle-draggers had taken to the roof at the beginning of the operation. He was holding it like a spear, shaking it above his head.
All I could do was shake my head. That was the truck company Lieutenant celebrating the fact that the fire would make it no further; they had defeated the beast yet again. He was straddling the parapet wall, riding it like a horse, and the tool he signaled his triumph with was a Nerf bat.
Knuckle-draggers!
Knuckle-draggers(William Cline)
Knuckle-Draggers
In my fire department, stations are assigned different resources based on the surrounding community’s needs. For example, heavy rescue units are typically assigned to industrial response areas and wildland units to rural areas. Paramedics have found their way into most stations, much to the chagrin of some of our old timers, and a few stations are blessed with a Chief Officer, usually a Battalion Chief, much to the chagrin of just about everyone. All stations have an engine company, which is the all-purpose response vehicle of the fire service, and it happens to be the apparatus I serve on as captain. My station is located in a mixed residential response area: single-family dwellings and apartment complexes, some of the apartments are very old and built to burn. For that reason, my station has a truck company.
Having a truck company is like having a class of sixth-graders assigned to your station, only they all weigh in at roughly two-hundred pounds and are given the biggest apparatus in the fleet to use as they see fit.
The men of the truck company walk through the station dragging the stink of the last three fires they fought behind them like bad cologne. In training sessions they gather at the back of the room, make obnoxious, disgusting noises and laugh like hell when one sounds unique.
With the exception of the Lieutenant, their cell phone ring tones are “Crazy Train;” volume set to stun; the Lieutenant has “Hair of the Dog” on his cell, equally as loud.
Their protective gear is toxic, permeated with the residue of whatever building that has recently burned; their helmets sag, deformed by intense heat. New gear gets dragged through the mud that accumulates at the base of the training tower before it is ever worn.
This constitutes pride in their appearance.
The truck company Lieutenant has an assortment of t-shirts he wears around the station after hours. He has two favorites, each getting the same care as his turnouts. One is a simple shirt that says: I May Not Be Smart, But I Can Lift Heavy Things, printed across his chest. The other has a picture screened on the back of a gorilla in a fire helmet. Below the picture is a caption: Proud To Be A Knuckle-Dragger.
At one of the first fires I responded to with him as a truck company officer I asked him to give me a ventilation profile. It was a simple house fire, and the profile – a determination of what type of ventilation would work best under the circumstances, should have been easy to determine. Without another word to me, the Lieutenant walked up to a window at the rear of the house and put his helmet through the glass. The glass broke, the smoke ventilated, everything was good.
Except that his head was still inside the helmet when he shoved it through the window.
Being the ranking officer at the station, I get an office of my own. My office is adjacent to the truck bay and I can see the apparatus floor from my desk, as well as the exit from the pole hole. Upstairs is the living quarters where my engine company coexists with the truck company.
One evening I was relaxing in front of my computer, working on a report, when I heard loud thumping followed by laughter and profanity; not unusual by any means, though I was glad I was not up there. Thumps and profanity usually are accompanied by something broken, someone bleeding, or a foul odor, or any combination of the three.
It became quiet for a while, only the occasional sound of someone walking across the floor. It was the quiet that made me edgy.
Looking through the window out into the truck bay I saw crouching figures moving furtively between the apparatus. In their hands were Nerf bats. My engine company had engaged the truck company, in a game of Nerf-hunt.
Nerf-hunt. This is one of those activities not usually associated with adults. The game has few rules, and its only blessing, as far as I am concerned, is the Nerf bat is such a benign weapon that a person could be walloped repeatedly by one and feel no ill effect other than shame at having been walloped by a Nerf bat. There is no strategy or goal other than it is better to be the hitter, not the one being hit.
Occasionally, the truck company, lead by the Lieutenant who shoved his head through a window, takes it upon themselves to have an impromptu training session; usually a continuation of something we had gone over earlier in the day. The incident that sticks in my mind happened on a day we studied flammable gas, its properties and the safest methods of handling them.
It was a quiet Saturday afternoon, and I was in my office minding my own business when there is a muffled whoosh sound upstairs, accompanied by laughter and the sound of rapid movement, footsteps moving in every direction.
Experience told me something bad had happened and that I should go upstairs to make a first hand assessment of the situation; usually referred to as a size up. I was just getting ready to head up when my engineer appeared at my office door.
“Umm, sir, it would be best if you did not come upstairs for about an hour or so.”
“Why?”
“We were doing one of those demonstrations, you know, with flammable gas. We filled one of those balloons with hydrogen and ignited it.” He tried to smile, but it looked more like a painful grimace.
“So, how did that work for you?”
“The Lieutenant has asked me to inform you that we initiated a significant exothermic reaction.”
It was only then that I noticed that one of my engineer’s eyebrows was missing. “Anyone with injuries I need to be aware of?”
“None worth mentioning…or reporting.” He cleared his throat. “Umm, we may also have inadvertently liberated a significant amount of carbon. It may take some time to clean it up.”
I made a mental note to have a face-to-face with the truck company Lieutenant about refraining from drawing my own people into his knuckle-dragger’s crazy world.
“You have half an hour,” I told him. “How big is the mess?”
My engineer tired to smile, again only achieving a grimace. “We have already called dispatch about the smoke coming out of the windows.”
“What?”
“And we are pretty sure we can get the smell out of the curtains. We might have to use some Ozium.”
“Okay, you have an hour.”
There really was no point in arguing. Since I have a pretty good understanding of the properties of hydrogen, and of combustion, and knowing what the balloon was made of, it was not too hard to imagine that there was a sticky black patina covering every exposed surface on the second floor. One hour seemed the least I could do for the eight men who were probably vigorously cleaning.
There is a reason my station has a truck company.
We got the alarm late at night the next shift, at that wonderful time that some in the fire service call oh-dark-thirty. We saw the glow as we pulled out of the station. As we got closer the glow began to come to life, moving and shifting. The thermal column became visible against the sky as it reflected the fire beneath.
As we pulled in front of the three-story apartment complex, I noted that it had initiated a significant exothermic reaction: smoke and flame were rolling out from one of the first floor units at the end of the first building. It was easy to see that fire spread would occur as the flames breach the windows of the second floor unit. In fact there were indications that a breach had already occurred.
My first orders were for the truck company to do a primary search of the second and third floor units above the fire.
As I set up command and requested additional units, I watched the knuckle-draggers come off their apparatus and head for the fire building. Every type of tool that could possibly be carried was hanging off of them. This search would probably require some level of forcible entry – opening doors that were secured, or making big holes in walls when the doors would not cooperate, so they took with them everything they might need.
Knuckle-draggers can be destructive, but they do it with an amazing efficiency.
We were beginning to deploy hose lines and assign incoming units to operations when the truck company exited the building and gave the all clear. As the Lieutenant came up to me for a face–to-face, he said, “Nobody home.”
Flame was beginning to curl up past the roofline, and the front of the second floor unit was beginning to darken with pressurized smoke. “I think we write these three off,” I said, pointing to the end units. He nodded. “I need you up on the roof. I’m making you roof command. Let me know what you need.” The truck Lieutenant turned away to carry out the order when I yelled after him. “If I recall correctly, the roof is flat and has a common attic. You might consider a trench cut. I’ll leave that up to you.” He smiled at me and went back to his task.
The truck put down its stabilizers and raised its boom while extension ladders where thrown up and leaned into the side of the building. Knuckle-draggers crawled up the boom, heavily laden with even more tools, from circular saws and chain saws to pike poles, axes and pry bars.
Their destructive efficiency with forcible entry is only outdone by the speed and accuracy at cutting huge holes in roofs.
Fire began to show at the front of the second floor unit and smoke obscured visibility at the front of the third floor unit. Lines from my engine extended into the exposed units next door. We opened up the deck gun straight into the first floor unit, which was fully involved, adding gouts of steam to the thermal column, and cooling the smoke, soot and ash, making it rain down on us like snow. From experience I knew it would not be long before we were all covered in inadvertently liberated carbon.
Second alarm units began to arrive, and I was immersed in the responsibility of deploying lines, relieving crews, and updating my attack plan. We were making good progress on the initial fire units, but there was still the overriding concern in the design of the building: its common attic. Above each third floor unit ran an open space the designers had never considered a problem, because they never thought about what would happen if the building burned. On my last walk around of the entire building I paid special attention to the attic vents at each end. As I suspected, the vents were showing signs that fire had made its way into that common attic. If that happened, fire would spread laterally across the top of the building, making it difficult to fight.
Under normal fire conditions a ventilation crew, usually knuckle-draggers, would cut a square hole in a roof to allow hot gasses and smoke to escape, making it easier for attack crews to gain access and extinguish the fire. With a trench cut the idea was that the fire would only go as far as the trench, then vent up and out keeping the fire from extending across the top of the building.
The eastern horizon was beginning to pale with the coming of morning. Several fire streams poured into the wrecked front of the fire building while steam and smoke poured out, and angry flame still owned the depths of the first and second floor units. Firefighters walked past the command post, covered in soot and insulation, weary from the work, but smiling anyway. The sound of engines at full throttle pumping water nearly drowned every other sound out.
At that moment fire came to life where it had not been before: not past the edge of the roof, but shooting up from the center of the roof, between the units on fire and the ladders of my truck company. It was an angry tongue of flame leaping up in a robe of smoke.
Standing at the edge of the parapet wall was a firefighter, his turnouts black from the smoke, the edge of his helmet dipping unevenly, and something in his hand that might have been one of the many tools the knuckle-draggers had taken to the roof at the beginning of the operation. He was holding it like a spear, shaking it above his head.
All I could do was shake my head. That was the truck company Lieutenant celebrating the fact that the fire would make it no further; they had defeated the beast yet again. He was straddling the parapet wall, riding it like a horse, and the tool he signaled his triumph with was a Nerf bat.
Knuckle-draggers!
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