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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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Inside The Beast
Thursday 28 October @ 00:42:58 |
 See also "Slow Burn: Anti-Tax Politicians Risk the Lives of St. Paul Firefighters."
by DAVID RUBENSTEIN
“You know how a camp fire crackles when you got some good pine in there? Magnify that by a thousand times and that’s what a good rippin’ house fire sounds like,” says St. Paul firefighter Mark O’Dell.
 Usually by the time you go through the front door the smoke is most of the way down to the floor and you have to get on your knees to see anything, he says.
“A lot of times you are better off closing your eyes. You move toward the crackle, and the heat. When you get right up to it, within five or ten feet, you can just kind of pick up the hint of a glow. Then you know you are there.”
You go into the building with a hose, but contrary to most people’s notion, not with the water turned on. If you spray too soon, you “upset the thermal balance.” That can bring the ceiling heat down and turn the water to steam. It’s a good way to get baked, and in any case it doesn’t help.
“You are looking for the seat of the fire,” O’Dell says. “Otherwise you are just going to beat yourself up.”
Searching for people has its own rules. Again, you’re mostly working blind. You work in teams of two and typically you are crawling.
“If Jason is on the wall, he’ll keep one hand on the wall and spread out as far off the wall as he can and I grab the end of his pants leg, so we get as far out into the room as we can. You’re feeling with your legs, with your arms, or you’re swinging your ax handle back and forth feeling for bumps, anything that stops the ax – ‘Does this feel like a body?’”
Kids are a special case. Most of the time they go to a closet or under a bed.
Radios are another equipment issue in St. Paul. In some of the more progressive fire departments in Florida and some of the western states, every person on a rig carries one, according to O’Dell. If there’s trouble inside, they can signal.
 “If Jason and I get separated in a building and one of us has a radio and the other doesn’t, he has got to have the presence to not panic and activate the personal alert system that we have on us. That’s an extremely loud audible alarm.
Or, he has to have the presence of mind to keep his head and find a window so he can signal people. Or just try to find a wall again and hopefully find his way back out.”
O’Dell says there are three situations where a firefighter would want at least two people outside and ready for a rescue operation: You’re out of air, you’re trapped, or you’re lost.
When you’re lost, though, there are tricks for getting yourself located. In a commercial building, you can feel for the stress seams in the cement, he says. “They are always 90 degrees true. So if you find a seam and follow it, it’s going to take you to an exterior wall.”
While inside, the firefighter is on a self-contained breathing unit. With the exertion involved in firefighting, the standard 30-minute bottles typically last about 20 minutes. Studies have shown that a firefighter’s heart rate accelerates to as much as 200 before he even leaves the station.
“It’s a very stressful situation,” O’Dell says. “It’s not like, ‘We’ll get this done in the next half hour. You have to give it all. It’s a competition: Can you beat the beast? Can you cheat death again tonight?” - D.R.
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