Small Town News

Handling hose and putting out fires is only the beginning

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Fire Ops 101 event gives city leaders a taste of a firefighter's life

What little light there was is extinguished as the door closes. Drop to your knees and feel along the wall until you bump into the stairs. Haul yourself up; feel the weight of the pack that's supplying oxygen to your lungs, the clunky boots on your feet, the thick coat and pants protecting your skin.

Your mask is fogged up but there's no light to see by anyway.

Crawl up the stairs and try not to drop the hose that seems to be trying to pull you back down.

There's a victim somewhere in the house and there's no time to waste, but it's impossible to get your bearings in the blackness. Recall your instructions: feel for doors and stay to the right.

The minutes feel like hours as you crawl along, feeling the wall with one hand and scanning the floor for a body with the other. The sound of your breathing almost drowns out the shouts of your shadow: "Door! Door! Door!" You press on; you feel like you're going in circles; the frustration mounts and then you feel a lifeless leg.

"I found the victim!" you scream, relieved. With a lot of help from your shadow you pull the victim to the stairs and tumble down yourself, blindly reaching for the sunlight that drifts through the smoke at the door.

Outside, heaving and sweating, you fumble to disconnect your air supply and pull off your helmet, hood and mask. Your muscles burn from the crawling and your head reels with the confusion and intensity of the past 10 minutes. It's barely 9 a.m. and you've just completed the first station at Fire Ops 101.

The search and rescue station, the first of six you will complete today, gives a taste of the scenarios firefighters face daily. Though you struggled through this scenario, the conditions would have been much worse in a real situation.

"That smoke would be black and it would be hot," Cheney Fire Lt. Ken Johnson says. What felt like deafening noise from your air pack would be nothing compared to the roar of a real fire. Johnson, a nine-year veteran with the Cheney Fire Department, will be your shadow throughout the day, instructing you before each station and often taking over when you cannot handle the task at hand.

Today, May 6, there are about 3 0 participants --mostly pub-lic officials from cities through-out Washington--decked out in firefighter turnout gear to cycle through stations that attempt to replicate what real firefighters go through. The International Association of Fire Fighters, the Washington State Council of Fire Fighters and the Washington Fire Chiefs collaborate to host the Fire Ops event at Richland's HAMMER training facility.

Ricky Walsh, vice president of the IAFF 7th District and a captain with the Richland Fire Department, speaks to the participants and their shadows in the morning. He stresses the importance for local and state policy makers to understand what it takes to be a firefighter.

"It's not just about putting the wet stuff on the red stuff," he says.

The mantra of the Fire Ops event, repeated over and over by the 100 firefighter volunteers running the stations, is this: "Time critical. Highly technical. Labor intensive." Besides the intricacies of fighting fires, fire personnel perform vehicle extrications, confined spaces rescue and emergency medical services. It takes a lot of people and a lot of equipment, Walsh says.

The firefighter groups have hosted the Fire Ops event for the past six years, and Cheney's IAFF Local 1919 got involved last year, when City Councilman Doug Nixon participated. This year Councilwoman Teresa Over-hauser is observing the action, and she and Johnson discuss local issues related to the fire department between stations. Johnson says it's critical to give decisionmakers an idea of local firefighters' work because they decide where the money goes. There's a lot of equipment required for the firefighters' work, and City Council decides what purchases are necessary and what can wait for brighter economic times.

"We need council members to understand what we do," Johnson says, pointing out that just three percent of CFD calls last year were for fires. "They see we had six full-blown fires last year and they're thinking, 'We're spending x-amount of dollars so you can put out six fires in a year?' But it's a lot more than that."

As the day goes on, you learn a bit about what "a lot more" means.

You're performing CPR on a dummy in a moving ambulance. A fire fighter volunteering for Fire Ops tells you to widen your stance, just in time for the driver to take what feels like a hairpin turn. You pitch forward and you would have fallen onto the dummy if a fellow participant, an employee of the Department of Energy--which owns the HAMMER facility, hadn't grabbed your suspenders and pulled you back.

You try to continue compressions as you tumble around inside the ambulance, but you lose your balance often. When the vehicle stops, the firefighter says all the progress you made with compressions would have been lost after just three seconds without CPR. As you exit, the ambulance driver says his speedometer never passed 25 miles per hour.

Between each station, your group of five participants and five shadows shuffles over to a "rehab" station, where you drink Gatorade and eat granola bars. More volunteers--there are around 100 firefighters working here from departments throughout the state--check your blood pressure and pulse. As tired and bruised as you are in the first few hours of Fire Ops, it's clear this is a fairly watered-down version of a real incident, or even a real fire fighter training.

The Cheney Fire Department is staffed largely by residents--college students who live at the station for free, receiving training from paid staff in exchange for shift work. Johnson says that many day shifts, when the students are in class, have just two paid members on duty. If they get a call, two people are responsible for preparing the truck, getting into their gear, driving to the scene, assessing the situation and handling whatever they encounter.

The "labor intensive" focus is exhibited in the burn building, when you're charged with hauling a hose into a house with propane-fueled fires blazing. Astonished by the heat and intimidated by the flames spreading across the ceiling, you spray water blindly, almost losing hold of the hose when your shadow takes over.

You emerge from the building dripping sweat, but the propane fire and simulated smoke produce a fraction of the challenges of a real fire. There's no stench of burning plastic or thick black smoke, the volunteer at the station reminds you, no cars in the driveway to block your truck and no smoldering couches to hurdle to get inside.

The final station of the day is a vehicle extrication. Your shoulders ache from the weight of the air pack and your knees creak with every step; you're tired, but the volunteers remind you that the dummies involved in the two-car collision setup need to be removed safely and efficiently.

A wide array of equipment is spread out on the concrete, and you grab different things as instructed by the firefighters: punch glass out of the windows and slide inside the car to secure the victim; get out and pump the handle on a jack to expand the opening; use hydraulic spreaders--or "Jaws of Life"--to break the locks on the doors and try to control a sawsall as it rips through the frame of the car. It feels like five minutes have passed when you and another participant, a Seattle city councilman, lift the roof off the car and turn to get the dummy on a backboard.

When it's over, you ask one of the volunteers how long it took, remembering the 20-minute "window" emergency responders aim for--the ideal timeframe to secure the patient.

He looks at his watch. About 30,35 minutes, he says.

Exhausted, you pick up your air pack and trudge away, grateful to be able to leave the lifesavihg to the professionals.

Becky Thomas can be reached at becky@cheneyfreepress.com.



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© 2011 Cheney Free Press Cheney, Washington. All Rights Reserved. This content, including derivations, may not be stored or distributed in any manner, disseminated, published, broadcast, rewritten or reproduced without express, written consent from DAS.

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