House Fire!

Day shift again today. Since I passed the Water Tanker Course yesterday I got to drive the Tanker today! We were out checking keys this morning (we hold keys to premises that are monitored by the fire alarm so that we don't have to break the door in everytime we get called there, and we have to check that the keys are still current) when we got a fire call to a house fire in the area! The other two guys had to come out of the building and then all of us had to change into our turnout gear from our station uniform, then jump back in the truck then go to where the call was.

The Pumper from our station was turned out initially with another Pumper from a different station but because there had been a few exchange calls (phone calls) about the fire it was made a 2nd alarm so we were called on as well. We could see the smoke before we got to the street so knew it was a job.

There were two trucks on scene when we got there (about a minute later) and they already had two hoses onto the fire and people in BA (breathing apparatus) ready to go in to search the house. My job as the Tanker driver also means I am the pump operater of the truck so I grabbed a length of hose off our truck, connected it to our pump, then connected the other end into the Pumper that was first on scene to make sure they didn't run out of water.

Once that was done I put on a BA then went into the house to do a secondary search with another firefighter. There was no-one home which was lucky but the whole house was fire and smoke damaged. We put out the fire then checked for hot spots to make sure we had out it all out and it wouldn't reignite.

There was asbestos in the eaves so we had to bag up all of our turn out gear once we had finsihed so that it can be decontaminated, then we went back to station, got showered and cleaned up then we were ready for the next one!

I unfortunately didn't have my camera with me in the truck so didn't get any photos, but I took this one this morning on the way to work when I stopped to get petrol. I liked the mist coming off the dam with the sun rising behind it and the ducks in the foreground! I have increased the fill light and shadows in Picasa to bring out the ducks!

Large!