DATELINE: September 1978, Alachua County
It is early evening and I am at home in my small wood frame rented home that became my first place to live when I moved out of my parents house a few months after graduating from high school. While I found it to be great (because it was mine), I recall that it made my mother very sad because it was so spartan. Mom would never use the word “tragic”. There was also the fact that the small kitchen was an “add on” to the house (done by the owner with no permit) and seemed to be leaning at an angle that made eggs roll off the counter.
My pager screeches and announces a house fire off of County Road 241. A few moments later I can hear the wail of the fire siren on top of City Hall as it starts it slow up and down call for help. The fire department here is volunteer and I always help out with calls during my off duty hours from Alachua County EMS where I was working as a paramedic. I drive about six blocks to the fire station and meet up with several other volunteers who are grabbing their turn out gear. The first two units to leave the station are the rescue truck and the engine. Depending on how many other volunteers are in town, we may - or may not - get any other support on this call.
It is a quick two minute drive to the scene and I pull up in front of a small single story wood frame house in one of our depressed neighborhoods. Thick black smoke is rolling out of the front door and I can see some flames coming out the windows toward the back of the house. One of the firefighters is pulling an 1 3/4 line off the back of the pumper and I am throwing the SCBA air pack over my head while letting the mask hang around my neck. I need to do a size up and don’t want my vision hampered with the face mask.
One of the first priorities at the scene of a structure fire is to determine if anyone is inside causing you to perform a rapid rescue or if the house is empty you can then focus on putting the fire out. My attention is immediately turned to a man standing on the front porch of the home. He is calling out to someone in the house and his actions appear frantic. I run up to him and ask if anyone is inside. He tells me that his wife is in the house. He had walked to the store to buy some cigarettes and when he returned he found the kitchen on fire. He told his wife to get out, but she was laying on the sofa and told him if the house was going away, she was going away with it. He tried to get her out but was forced to run out the front door when the smoke got too thick. I have him run around the side of the house and point to the room where he left his wife. We are now standing on the side of the house and I realize that we only have a few minutes to effect a rescue. I am not sure if any other firefighters are coming to the scene and there are only three of us ready to fight the fire.
Please remember that in 1978 there was much less focus on firefighter accountability, staffing and safety procedures. When you are faced with a situation like this, you don’t really think about what you should do, or take time to weigh the risks and benefits, you just “do it”. Later I would realize that I made several errors, even by 1978 standards, that would nearly cost me my life.
Using my helmet I smashed the window to the living room. More black smoke is rolling out. Denise, my EMT partner on the rescue truck, is standing next to me. I tell her I am going in and to get the firefighter with the hose line to come to this window to support me.
Fire is always fought from the unburned side. You try to push the fire back across the area that is already burned where there is less “fuel” and materials to feed the fire and to stop further damage. The approach is not to start spraying water randomly which can actually push the fire faster into other areas - but to instead “put the wet stuff on the red stuff”. I am sure the other firefighter has taken the hose line in the front door of the house and is advancing toward the kitchen.
As I climb through the window into the living room I have no idea that I have just placed my partner in a very uncomfortable situation. She should not leave me because I am inside a burning house with no water supply, she should be at the pump panel to make sure that nothing happens to the fire truck that would stop the flow of water to the hose line which is the life line for the other firefighter, and finally she should be at the front door of the house making sure that the other firefighter is OK and ready to assist him if he calls out.
In a professional fire department with full time employees, all of these tasks (and then some) would be accomplished by individual firefighters. But in the world of volunteer firefighting, you do the best you can with what you have - and try not to get killed in the process.
I am now in the living room on all fours. The smoke has banked down to the floor leaving me with zero visibility and I am only aware of the sound of the regulator which pushes air into my mask with each breath. In today’s environment, a firefighter would take a Thermal Imaging Camera and sweep the room to find a person or animal in need of rescue. The devices are about the size of a police officers radar gun and seek out anything that produces heat. In 1978 no one has even thought of such a device and firefighters must perform a thorough and slow manual search. In the absence of any visual ques to the layout of the room, I start what is called a “right hand search”. Crawling on the floor, I start to my right and while one hand is touching the exterior wall, my other hand is reaching out and sweeping the floor and any furniture that I encounter. Movement is slow since you keep bumping into things that you have to identify. During the next sweep my gloves hit a small table which overturns and a lamp falls on top of me. I continue moving toward the first corner. The cord from the lamp is now tangled in my air pack and I can feel that I am dragging something along with me. I keep going, realizing that I only have a few minutes before the smoke will have killed the wife and only a few minutes before the fire will reach me and force me out.
I reach the first corner and make my turn. I immediately encounter a sofa. I reach up to feel the seat cushions for any sign of the wife and I feel a person. A sense of “finally” comes into my brain. I now have to figure out her orientation on the sofa so I can select the best method to move her to the window and get her outside. The thick gloves that we wear do not allow for anything but a basic awareness of what you touching and feeling. However, my sense of relief is instantly gone with the developing realization that the wife is a very, very large woman and probably weighs about 350 to 400 pounds. She is laying on the sofa.
There isn’t much time to mull over options. I am by myself and we can’t have much time left. I decide to roll her off the sofa onto the floor with the intent to roll her to the window. I will figure out the rest of the rescue plan when I make it to the window. Getting her off the sofa and onto the floor was not difficult. I don’t waste time trying to position her for easy rolling. I did not expect for us to crash into the coffee table that was between us and the window. And I unknowingly made an error when chosing a direct route from the sofa to where I thought the window was. In fire school you are taught to never lose contact with your hose line, because it is your escape route back out in zero visibility. Opps..we didn’t have one of those with us.
Having kicked the coffee table out of the way, I am struggling to roll the large woman toward where I think the window is. All I can hear is the huffing and puffing of air rushing through the regulator into my face mask. I have a signal in my brain that I need to keep a good awareness of the situation around me. This is much harder than you might think. Imagine you are on the floor, on all fours, with a large air bottle on your back and a helmet on your head and a face mask. You can’t see very well side to side, because of the air mask and you have to turn your head to get a good view. You can’t look up, because the helmet prevents you from seeing much above the horizon. With some significant effort, you can turn your head sideways and stretch and see above you. I make that effort and out of the corner of my mask, I can see a horrendus orange glow as fire is roaring across the ceiling ahead of me. I can also feel parts of the ceiling falling onto the top of my helmet and hitting my back. I do two or three more rolls of my patient toward the window and have an uneasy feeling that I am not going to make it to the window. At some point instinct kicks in and you make that awful decision that you have to save yourself and that you must abandon the person you are rescuing. I had calculated that I was still about five feet from the window, that I had no rescue line, no water supply and a lot of fire over head. The heat was also building and you can usually only feel heat on your face mask, but I was aware that my boots and the back of my turn out coat were very hot. All of these factors led to a spontaneous decision to scramble for the window over the top of the man’s wife.
I remember reaching the wall and starting to feel for the window when the entire ceiling and portions of the roof came crashing down on top of me.
My next recollection was laying outside the house, on my back and feeling a blast of water on my face and chest. As I opened my eyes I could see another firefighter standing over me yelling very loudly and using some - how shall we say - strong language.
I would learn that several other firefighters were at the window and were about to come in after me when the ceiling collapsed, and that they nearly tore the side of the house off to reach me.
I was very lucky that evening. The man’s wife had clearly perished in the fire and I felt bad about the outcome, asking myself many times what I should have done differently, what if I had started a left search instead of a right search? would I have reached her earlier and had more time. The good news for me would come from the Alachua County Medical Examiner the following week. The woman had died from smoke inhalation and was already dead during my rescue attempt. There was no sign of burn damage to her lungs, which would have occured if she had still been alive at the time the ceiling fell in.
This was one of my first near death experiences and I must say that it didnt’ phase me in the least. I decided that this was just a part of the job, was what I signed up for, and that I was smart enough to keep myself out of danger. This specific incident proved to me that I was able to make quick decisions and get out of harms way.
Oh, I must say I was so very young and naive at that time in my life.
