Respect for Fire

By Daniel P. Sheridan

In the civilian world, fire showing out of a few windows would seem to shake up a lot of people. For firefighters, the reverse is true. Nothing is worse than pulling up to a scene with smoke pushing out of all the windows and cracks of a building and not seeing the actual flame. When the flames are showing out of the windows, there is a good chance that the fire has flashed and is out of the growth stage and into the fully involved stage. Thankfully, most fires these days flash very quickly. I remember many times throughout my career as a firefighter and a company officer crawling around an apartment with high heat and heavy smoke and no fire visible. It was always a sense of relief when we finally could determine a faint orange glow and realize that we had found the fire.

What I worry about in theses days of bunker gear and protective hoods is that we may be going too deep without getting a realistic picture of our environment; we are in a sense insulated from our surroundings. When I first came in the department, we didn’t have hoods or bunker gear. Most firefighters wore three-quarter boots that were never pulled all the way up most of the times. The heat dictated where we could or couldn’t go. Unless there was a known life hazard in which case we had to take an extraordinary risk to save a life, we went as far as we could and then waited for a hoseline to be put in operation.

有两种类型的火灾中遇到first few months of my career that made a big impression on me for the rest of my life. These fires occurred within a month of each other and gave me a whole new respect for my new chosen profession. You don’t know what you don’t know, and these two fires gave me a tremendous education.

Flashover in a Brownstone

The first fire was a fire in the basement of a three-story brownstone. I had “the can,” and my fellow probie had the “irons.” He and I grabbed the captain’s coat and blindly followed him into the basement of this brownstone. At the time we entered the basement from the outside stairs leading into the front door, there was just a heavy-smoke condition with a moderate heat condition. Our job was to try to locate and confine the fire with the 2 ½-gallon extinguisher. After finding the fire, we would begin our primary search for any victims that may have been in the basement. We started making our way toward the glow in the living room in the rear of the building, trying to get close enough to get my extinguisher on the fire to try and contain it while the engine was getting the hoseline in place.

大约在走廊的一半，船长抓住了我们两个衣领，说：“滚出去。”我认为我一定没有正确听到他的声音，也没有足够迅速的回应，因为他再次抓住了我并重复了同样的命令 - 这次更大，更牢固。我们俩都旋转，开始急忙出发。我们被一场直接朝我们走廊上的火球追赶。当我们逃到小楼梯上时，大火就在我们的背上。我的独立呼吸器（SCBA）绑在栏杆上，所以我刚离开SCBA并将其放到地上。之后，这位不太快乐的船长毫不犹豫地告诉我，当他说出去时，他的意思是出去。我不知道他怎么知道，但他知道出了问题。

I just chalked this situation up to “things happen.” This was a dangerous job and flashovers are just a part of it. At the time, I don’t think I really knew what a flashover was. I just knew that when the smoke started to get really black and the little shoots of orange started appearing in the smoke, step back because it’s going to light up. It wasn’t until many years later when I started replaying the events of that night over in my mind that what really happened that almost-fatal night occurred to me. Our outside vent firefighter was doing exactly what he was supposed to do–going to the rear and trying to vent-enter-search. Brownstones have doors in the rear, so when he forced the door to make a search, he changed the environment by introducing a blast of fresh air into the fire. The lesson learned here is that you can do the absolute right thing and still inadvertently affect the fire situation, in this case adversely. Today, we have a very strict standard operating procedure about notifying the officer of the ladder company anytime we make any openings in the fire area, and that firefighter must receive permission to do so.

Flashover in a Multifamily Dwelling

The second flashover happened a month later; it may have been on Christmas Eve. My probie partner from the previously mentioned fire and I were together again. Early Christmas morning, we received a phone alarm for a reported house fire. We were assigned second due on the box. The first units in transmitted the signal for a workingstructure fire，10-75。大火在两层楼的木框架，多户住宅的一楼。那天晚上，就像上一场大火一样，我们有一个掩护的船长工作。我们的任务是搜索大火上方的地板。

En route to the building from the truck, we encountered a civilian in the street screaming that there still were people inside. Something about the way the person was carrying on gave me that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that made me believe her. We nowhadto get to the second floor. When we arrived at the front door, the first-in engine was already operating a hoseline on the first floor. They were in the rear of the first floor, which is the normal main entrance to an apartment, making a push into the apartment. The first floor apartment had a second door that was at the base of the stairs, at the front of the house. The fire had burned through this front door near the base of the stairs and wrapped around back onto the first-due engine. Our way up to the second floor was now blocked; we needed to find an alternate way upstairs. We ran out to the truck and grabbed a 20-foot straight ladder.

我们沿着梯子走去，进入了二楼锋线的卧室。当我进入房间时，我被高温所压碎。我以前从未有过这样的感觉。感觉就像有人在用虎钳握住我的耳朵。当时我可能还不知道太多，但我知道肯定是错误的。我快速搜索卧室，意识到我再也无法忍受了。我在地板上的肚子上，现在只考虑生存。我回到窗户 - 无论如何我都离开了那里！我再也不能留在我的地方了。我以某种方式把它拿到梯子上，尽可能快地离开那里。 The way I felt at that time was that I would have gone out the window regardless of what floor I was on or whether there was a ladder there or not. (Someone had videotaped the fire, and it appeared on the local news. In the video, you can see a firefighter in the window (me) and fire coming out the upper part of the window). After I had made it to the ladder, the room completely lit up and the whole window was full of fire.

Unfortunately, that woman was right. There were two victims in a bathroom at the rear of the second floor. Had we been able to make it up the stairs, we may have gotten to them, but there was a tremendous amount of fire on the first floor. Reflecting on this event years later when I had more knowledge of how fire behaves, I realized that what happened was a straightforward flashover, caused by the contents on the floor above reaching their respective ignition temperatures. That is the reason it is so dangerous to operate on the floor above the fire. In this instance, we were under the impression that we were going for a known life hazard and our actions were justified. That is also the reason it is so important to get that first line operating on the fire floor, to protect the members who will be searching on the floor above. Unfortunately, we did everything we were supposed to at this fire, but the fire was just too far advanced when we got to it.

一天晚上，当我仍然是中尉时，我们在五层楼的物业单位上回应了一场大火。我决定尝试一些实验。我们刚刚发行了掩体装备，因此对我们的部门来说仍然是新手。从头到尾，我都打算为整个火灾穿完整的个人防护设备（PPE）。我完全被“抚摸”；没有一英寸的皮肤暴露。大火熄灭后，我们大修了，我走上了街。我脱下空气，脱下我的PPE。我很惊讶，因为我没有感觉到任何热量，好像我什至没有在火上工作。唯一的事情是，我的衣服在我的装备下湿透了。 Consider that I had just operated in an apartment fire that was out four windows and involved three rooms and never felt any heat. In the days when we didn’t have the bunker gear, my ears would have been blistered, my knees would have been sore, and I would have really felt as if I had been through the wringer.

We have a whole new generation of firefighters today who are being taught from the very first day to wear all their gear and SCBA all the time. This is a great thing, but I worry that we may also be losing our respect for how bad fire can be. Over the years, I developed a sense of my surroundings at a fire by using all my senses. When we can’t see, like the blind man, our hearing becomes more acute. I find that when I can’t see, I pay better attention to what I am doing. If it is too hot, we need to be on our bellies. These days I have seen firefighters entering a burning structure standing up. Why? Because we are losing our sense of heat. Firefighters think that because you can stand up that everything is okay, but this is not necessarily true. The temperature at six feet is a lot hotter than at the floor.

我不确定热成像摄像头（TIC）是答案。我仍然来自旧学校 - 抽搐是一个很棒的工具，但它仍然是一种工具，它可能会失败。我不确定答案是什么。当我进入燃烧的结构并且尚未找到火灾时，我将手套放下并用裸手监视热量。当火在您面前，这很明显，那么每位消防员都应该从头到尾保持他的PPE，这也意味着在大修期间。