Rookie(William Cline) Rookie

“Do not call yourself a firefighter until you pull hose, crawl on the floor in smoke and heat, and fight a fire. Until then you are a rookie, a want-to-be.” So said my training officer during our training academy, lecturing us on what we could expect from the profession we had entered.

And the thought occurred to me, as I stared into smoky darkness, that I was no longer a rookie.

Beneath me, water surged through a two and half-inch attack line, jetting from the combination nozzle I could barely hold, using all my weight and strength to keep it aimed true. The water arched from the nozzle to a point just above a roll-up door that was the only opening in a thick wall that separated two very large spaces in the fire building. There was a place just above the roll-up door mechanism that was beginning to glow like the sun.

The roll-up door was the only opening between a ten thousand square foot space that was slowly filling up with dark smoke, and another ten thousand square foot space that was an inferno. If it breached the door we would lose the entire building.

The roar of the fire was deafening.

I am sure there was a smile on my face as I strained to keep the nozzle aimed true. This is what it was all about; this makes you forget about everything else except being a firefighter. I was beginning to understand what it was the TO was talking about.

Fifteen minutes earlier I was a rookie and had been sleeping.

“Never pass up the opportunity to go to the bathroom,” the TO once said. “Because you never know where you will be or what you will be doing fifteen minutes in the future. It is like that on shift, suddenly a call comes in and you have to drop everything and go. Oops, you lost your chance to go to the bathroom. It will have to wait.” Then he would have us either do push-ups or run laps. “Except for today,” he would laugh. “I know what you’re going to be doing fifteen minutes from now,” he would yell after us as we headed out in a straight line around the station.

Someone woke us up by pounding on the front door of the station. Lieutenant Johnson threw his covers off and headed out the dorm door, pulling on his uniform pants before hitting the hallway. Doug, the engineer, pulled his blanket up over his head and quietly swore.

There was a brief conversation between the Lieutenant and what sounded like another man. Doug and I both sat up in bed, instinctively reaching for uniform pants when the Lieutenant began yelling for us. We pushed through the truck bay door from the living quarters, found Lieutenant Johnson was already in the truck bay pulling on his bunker pants, flipping the red suspenders over his shoulders. “Guy at the door says there is a burning building just up the road.” I pulled my turnouts on and hoisted myself up into the driver’s side jump seat.

My mind was racing; my hands, as I reached for the seatbelt, were shaking.

This was it.

But, this was not the way it was supposed to happen. Alarms came in over the radio, with tones and light coming on, the dispatch voice blaring. It gave you time to get ready, time to acclimate yourself to a sudden change in routine. This was a break in the routine, and I was lost for a moment.

The truck bay door began rumbling upward on its tracks. I looked around; it was dark outside; it was raining.

The Cummins diesel engine came to life, with both a deep-throated rumble, joined soon after by a high pitched whine as the turbocharger kicked in, winding up to a scream as we pulled out of the truck bay and turned onto the street.

As we cleared the truck bay, the darkness of the night closed around us. The red beams from the light bar cut through the rain and reflected off trees and street signs. Everything else was a dark gray blur. It was difficult to tell what time it was, and I did not want to dig through my PPE to look at my watch. Suddenly it came to me: this must be oh-dark-thirty.

You hear it occasionally around the station; it is an integral part of any war story, because all the best calls seemed to come in at night.

Oh-dark-thirty.

The war stories our training officer told were tales of past calls that related to what we were studying at the time. True to form, it seemed that every call the TO remembered came in late at night: oh-dark-thirty.

Our class was studying fire behavior, focusing on the three phases of fire: incipient, flashover and free burning, when the TO favored us with a war story in which he recalled responding to a house fire at oh-dark-thirty. He smiled as he described seeing the glow of the fire from the station, even though it was several miles away on the other side of the district. It was an indistinct glow, illuminating the bottom of the clouds. When they got closer they could see pulsing plumes of yellow and black.

“What phase was this fire in?” He asked.

“Free burning,” we answered.

“Free burning,” the TO agreed, and continued with his war story:

As they got closer to the fire, the yellow glow came to life, dancing with frenetic movement. Fire was venting from several windows, and at some point the roof over the seat of the fire had collapsed, allowing gouts of thick, roiling smoke to geyser into the night sky, illuminated from below by the yellow - orange flames. Thousands of red glowing chips were thrown up into the sky on the thermal column.

“We came face to face with the beast that night,” the TO said, a skeletal grin on his face.

“The Beast.” Such over-dramatics always made me cringe; made my jaw clench. I hated it, especially when accompanied by a cartoonish picture on the back of a t-shirt.

I looked through the pass-through window, out the front windshield of the engine. There was a hard yellow-orange light on the horizon, unnaturally animated. I thought back on how galling it was to call fire ‘the beast.’ But I could not help but think that what I saw up ahead of us that night was a living thing; a very angry living thing.

What was burning was an industrial occupancy. We had done a walk-through not that long ago, but I could not recall what they made. The building was about two hundred feet long and fifty feet wide, with an area separation wall mid way through the length of the building. It had a large roll-up door in the center of the area separation wall.

The building was set back off the main road about four hundred feet, with a hydrant located at the entrance. Lieutenant Johnson opened the pass-through window and the noises of the cab came through: a different pitch to the siren, the radio busy with traffic. “I want a double header on the hydrant, charged,” he said. “Watch the overhead lines when you come up.”

“You have one minute and thirty seconds to get water from this hydrant to that engine, correctly,” the TO yelled at the start of our hydrant drill. We were lined up in front of the weathered hydrant behind the station, in full turnouts, our self-contained breathing apparatus – metal air tank connected to a backpack – strapped snug to our backs, waiting our turn to connect supply lines between the hydrant and the training engine. It was raining that day, and the TO stood behind the hydrant, stopwatch in hand, smiling while rain dripped from his helmet.

“How many gallons will this engine hold?” He asked.

“750 gallons,” we all yelled.

“750 gallons, correct. How many gallons per minute can it pump?”

“1500 gallons per minute.”

“1500 gallons per minute, correct. So, do the math. How fast can that engineer run this engine out of water?”

“Thirty seconds.”

“Thirty seconds, from the time he starts pumping, which for a good engineer will be within a minute or two after arrival. So you better be able to get this hydrant taken in one minute thirty seconds.”

They call it a jump seat because you just about have to jump out of it when you get off the engine. Strapped up with all your gear - your turnouts, the SCBA on your back – it is difficult getting off the engine any other way. Doug stopped just past the hydrant. So I jumped down with forty pounds of turnouts on, and twenty-five pounds of SCBA strapped to my back. The facemask dangled from a strap around my neck, bounced off his chest with every move.

The full light of the fire surrounded me as I ran around to the tailboard, grabbed the two ends of hydrant line that were loaded in beds above the water tank, and put my full weight into pulling the lines from the beds. There was six hundred feet of hydrant line in each bed – enough to reach the fire structure with hose to spare.

Doug drove away and the lines began flaking off the back of the engine. It was at that moment that I got a good look at the fire.

From behind the building the ball of flame fought its way upward, shrouded in a cloud of gray and black that flickered on the edges in red and orange. Everything in front was in silhouette; everything behind was surreal, caught in the intense glare of the flame. In the grassy field between where I stood at the hydrant, and the hellish spectacle of the fire, smoke crawled across the grassy ground like a fog.

The hydrant’s heavy port caps fell as I turned them, rolling down into the ditch by the road. After connecting the heavy gate valves to the ports I turned the knob at the top of the hydrant, opening it. Only after water was fighting its way through the hose and up the driveway did I realize I had forgotten to tighten the steamer port.

The TO would have given me ten laps and fifty push-ups. “If that steamer port was not secure, and came off under pressure, it becomes a missile, taking out any one or any thing in its way,” he thundered during hydrant drills. “End your career real fast.”

As I following the two charged hydrant lines up the drive, I found a thick blanket of smoke working to smother the entire area. Small cinders fell to the ground with the rain as the heat that had sent them skyward dissipated.

Doug had spotted the engine just past the end of the building. I watched him open the hose clamps that let water in the hydrant lines supply the engine. I stepped carefully over the tangle of charged hydrant lines, past the engine to the other side of the building.

An exterior roll-up door in the side of the building was door vomiting yellow-orange flame; a maelstrom of bright violence accompanied the sounds of destruction.

I found Lieutenant Johnson about half way down the building, standing near an open man-door, staring through it. “Take a look,” the Lieutenant said, turning toward me. “Tell me what you see.” He was surprisingly calm.

Through the doorway was a space, still dark and quiet. It was beginning to fill up with a haze of smoke, but there was nothing about this half of the building indicating temperatures that had to be close to fourteen hundred degrees were eating the other half.

“I figure we got about five more minutes before this wall gives way,” Lieutenant John said. “Look there, the roll-up door is starting to sag.” I looked again. The roll-up door that dominated the center of the wall had a brilliant line beginning to widen at the top. “We should have the second due here soon. I’ll have them bring up the gun.” Lieutenant Johnson stepped back from the man-door. “For now, you need to pull the blitz line and bring it right here. Loop it and sit on it. Keep that door cool until we can get more water on this thing.”

The bright edge at the top of the door widened while I waited for the line to be charged. It seemed like an eye in the darkness of the space, opening slowly, revealing an energized life where only cold, slow darkness had existed before.

As the roll-up door sagged and the eye opened, smoke thickened and churned like the tide seen from beneath the waves. The very air began to move in a quick and frenzied manner as heat from the inferno on the other side of that wall intruded through the eye. Whirlwinds of smoke danced above as the heat of the fire created its own wind patterns inside the building.

I did not hear other engines arrive, but they arrived. There was a partial roof collapse on the other side of the building, redirecting most of the heat of the fire. Later I would learn – or be reminded – that this facility manufactured components of water slides out of fiberglass. After the fire was contained and then extinguished, I learned that the side of the building endangered by the collapsing roll-up door was filled with fiberglass forms and wood packing crates, and would have made just as impressive an inferno as the other side.

The second due arrived with the deck gun and another line. It was set up and pumped nearly a thousand gallons a minute on the opening above the roll-up door. Other engines arrived; more manpower flooded the scene. A truck from a neighboring department arrived and began dumping water from above. The long, hard work of surrounding and drowning began, followed by overhaul and digging through the rubble to extinguish the fire completely.

The night wore on as the fire went out; the beast tamed, put back in its cage.

The rehab bus - a converted mass transit bus equipped to provide rest, warmth, food, water, and a place to go to the bathroom, for weary firefighters – was set up out on the street near the hydrant. It was still dark when I walked back up the hydrant lines, stripped my gear off, grabbed a cold bottle of water and sat down in the bus. The rehab officer took my blood pressure and pulse, said I was good, then left me alone. I closed my eyes for only a second, but woke several minutes later, no more refreshed, but a little warmer. Outside the bus, dawn was beginning to seep into the sky from the east. I could see up the road at the line of fire apparatus, idling, with their emergency lights still flashing. Further up the road a police cruiser angled against morning traffic, its blue lights misted over by smoke from the road flares.

Leaning back into the bus seat, I looked over at the fire: half of the building reduced to a steaming shell, water still being poured into it by the elevated stream from the ladder truck. The half of the building with the roof intact seemed out of place, alone, now connected tenuously to a smoking pile of rubble.

We had saved half, though.

I heard the bus door open and heavy, booted footsteps walk up the isle. My TO sat down across the isle, cracked open a bottle of water, drank, and said: “You stink.”

“I thought it went pretty well,” I mumbled.

“Not what I mean. You will never get that smell out of your gear. When you go home, when you shower, it will smell like that building. When you walk through the truck bay, past the turnouts on the wall, you will recognize this smell. It never goes away. It is part of you.”

“Wonderful,” I said, muttering.

“It’s a good thing. It’s how you tell the rookies from the real firefighters. And you just passed the last test, firefighter.”

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