A True Learning Experience

At the age of 47, and with the chances for an out of state fire trip only happening about once every two years, there may not be to many more for me. However, this year I got to do both, vacation with the family plus do an out of state fire call.

This years call was to Florida. Before I headed out on the fire trip, our family really did get to have a vacation. While on vacation we, like many people, had been watching the evening news and seeing the evening reports on the Florida fires. Only unlike some of you which had been watching the reports through the National News Reports or the 6:00 o’clock news, I had been getting mine first hand. Our family vacation this year was in Orlando and Daytona, Florida areas. We watched as the fires were getting ready to make their runs. We were there when they had the voluntary evacuation of Palm Coast Residential Area and when the Vice President of the United States was there to view the areas damage caused by the fires. We had headed back to Missouri about the time the fires really started to make their runs. We were at home when the area where we had been staying in Florida blew-up.

It was on July 2nd, when we arrived home at 1430 hours and the answering machine had the message: ..Do you want to go to Florida to fight fire?... at 1408 hours. Being that I am some what of a brain dead fire fighter, you can figure what the answer would be. If I hadn’t been able to go to Florida on a fire trip, then you wouldn’t have been able to read about it from me.

I can guarantee that there will be a lot of articles written about this years fire in Florida and a lot of them will have a lot more information then I would ever be able to tell about. Plus, they will be a lot better written. But I’m not trying to educate anyone, just letting you know a little of what I had learned. Being an instructor in the fire service, I have found that I can not teach people how to be fire fighters. I take information written by others, who are a lot smarted and better educated than I, plus information which I have learned or observed during my 25 years plus of fire service. I then pass that information on to others. I am a dissemination point of information. The catch in doing this is being able to have the ability to set the hook, so to speak. Being able to get the, ‘Want'a B a Fire Fighter’, interested enough in the subject to go and look for more information. If they don’t want to look for more information or seek more knowledge, then they won’t make it as a fire fighter or an emergency medical person.

Enough of that, (as I get down off my soap box), back to the task at hand. Now that the fires are out in Florida and for those of us which got in on them, it was a true learning experience. Anytime a person goes anywhere they learn something. Every time you do something, even if it is the same thing over and over, you learn. For those that are fire fighters and even EMS personnel, we know that we never have the same thing happen twice. Every run is different and things were a lot different than what I was use to in Florida, from the living accommodations to the medical care. Unlike most fire trips, we slept under a roof every night. Starting out in a high school gym in Bunnell, Florida and moving into a Ramada Inn in Daytona. Now some of the crews really suffered and had to stay a local motels on the beaches in Daytona and areas north. Now some of the Type I hand crews, Hot Shots, were moved from one school to another, but I am sure that it was a lot different then sleeping under the trees or in a tent. Although, for a couple of nights sleeping in a tent outside may have been better then listening to the Army cots squeak all night. Usually every morning started about the same up at 0500 and get ready to start the day. The there was a 10 to 35 minute bus ride to the Base Camp, ours was the Flagler-St. John's Complex. The meals in camp started a little sparse, since the military was serving, but as the camp change, so did the meals. We ended up with a real fire camp catering company, O.K. Cascade from Washington State. The meals went from about 4 ozs. of scrambled eggs, 4 ozs. of grits, a strip and a half of bacon, and a Danish roll, to the real fire fighter meal where the plate was rounded over and they ask if you wanted more.

Normally briefing is held about 0600 hours or before, however, down there they were at 0700 hours. Then we usually waited for another hour before heading to the line. So we had time to kill and look around base camp. Base camp had Alligators, yes right by where the buses parked, they were in a small pond right by the fair grounds. Luckily they weren't big, but for those who had never seen one in the wild it was a real treat. We also found out that all that stuff in camp, which was covered up, was donated supplies. Everything from soup to nuts, food, clothes, foot power, aspirins, drinks, razors, anything you needed, just like walking into a store and picking it off the shelves. All this stuff was donated, you have got to be kidding. Yes, the people of Florida were trying to take care of the firefighters which had come to help. One forest service employee was standing near the piles of stuff, with his hands on his hips and shaking his head, .." I have never seen anything like this...better than 15 years in the Forest Service and this is a first." I too have to admit, I have never seen anything like it. We were there to watch the camp change. Many of the perishables items, food stuff and donated items disappeared and were replace with the fire fighters normal items. Soda pop was replaced by sports drinks, candies were replace by fresh fruits, M R E's, (for those of you which have never had the chance to partake of Meals Ready to Eat, that's a story in itself) were still on hand for those with the strong stomach, but they were replaced with freshly made sack lunches. The camp became more organized, paths were changed, traffic routes were changed, equipment staging areas were changed, things started to look like a fire camp.

One of the most interesting parts of the transition was in the EMS support received. Normally in a fire camp you may have an ambulance and a Paramedic, if you're lucky. But 3 or 4 ambulances, along with an air conditioned tent for supplies and another for medical care. Actual Doctors and Nurses, plus a whole load of EMT's and Paramedics. The local professionals also donated there time. There were chiropractic physicians, physical therapist, podiatrist, and even a message therapist for your aches and pains. For those of us which looked a little shaggy, for the lack of a hair style, there were even local beauticians, which had donated their time to take care of that. At the Flagler-St. Johns Complex, medical care was taken care of by South Florida Regional DMAT FL-5, out of the Ft. Lauderdale area. I even think that they may have learned a little themselves, since for some of them it was their first large fire operation. Of course they are well versed on the problems that fire fighters face in their part of the country. Dehydration and heat related problems were the biggest problems for the fire fighters in Florida.

Normally Western Fire Fighters can get by with one set of Nomex for a good three days, due to the dryness of the air. However, in Florida, due to the heat and humidity, some of us couldn't stand ourselves by 1000 hours. If one of the deodorant companies wanted to do a commercial on their product, I guarantee, we would have welcomed the chance to change the air in the bus. It was HOT to say the least, with the heat index hitting 115 degrees on at least two or three days, while we were there. It was a true delight to find a cool place after spending about 10 hours on the line. On my first western fire, we had to work at 9000 feet of elevation and I thought it was hard to breath. But at 70 feet of elevation and 115 degrees, it's just as hard. I never really got to visit with any of the Western Hot-Shot Crews, but I bet they too had learned a few things also. Do to the extreme heat, which limited the work time on the line, there was some time available to develop some fine skills of crafting items from local flora. A couple of fellows in our crew designed and crafted some real interesting fans from the leaves of the Palmetto trees.

Due to the fuel type, the major part of the line cutting process was done with bulldozers with fire plows behind. In our base camp we had over 70 dozers of every size, from little John Deere 350’s to D8 Cats. In Missouri, we use the small JD’s 350 and 450’s and you may see a private dozer on a fire once in a while. A large amount of what we had to do was follow a Cat line and make sure the nothing crossed it. One day while we were working on a hot spot in a dozer pile on the outside of the fire line, we were advised by a dozer operator that we needed to watch out for snakes. It seemed that the day before he had been moving a dozer pile, when the pile started to move on it’s own. He said that the thing was full of all kinds of snakes. Water snakes, rattlesnakes, copperheads, and a few others that he didn’t get close enough to tell what kind they were. It seems that the snakes were looking for a cooler spot to stay and a fresh dozer pile met their needs. We then added another Watch Out Situation to the list of standard list: Only Safe way to work on a dozer pile is with a dozer or a Hela-torch. We were also told that the snakes liked to climb into the Palmettos, a funny looking tree, which looks like a big tall pineapple with long spikes. Lucky for us, the snakes usually only do that to get out of the water in the swamp areas, but we were working in the swamp area. However, the swamp areas were dry. One pump crew from Montana came up with another Watch Out Situation dealing with snakes: Never tick off a snake with a fire stream, unless you know how much water you have left. Their situation started when one of their fellows was working a hot spot, which brought out a snake. The snake was a little more than upset about being wet down, much less then being wet down with a foam blanket. About the time the snake came after the nozzle man, the engine ran out of water. By the time they found something to dispatch the snake with, the nozzle man was at the end of his hose, not the nozzle end but the end attached to the top of the truck. Being unfamiliar with this area and the area snakes, they had to wait till they could find out what kind it was. They said it was a real pretty snake, all brown with darker brown splotches on it, and it did have a rather nasty attitude. The perfect description of the Copperhead snake. For those of you in the north country who may have never seen one, that’s one of our southern, limb less, elongated bodied reptile friends, which has a set of hollow fangs, through which poison flows.