Fire!!!!!

Ok everybody, here is a little log of some of fires I've been involved in since working here in Dalton, GA. There are a few more scenes I was involved with that I'm not posting because I was on light duty at the time due to the medical problems I had, so all I did was assist the command vehicle, no real action :). I put them in chronological order except for this first one. This was a paper recycling factory that burned down in January of 2007, unfortunately I missed out on it 'cause we were in El Paso on vacation!!! Our whole entire department was called in to help with it and it took I think 3 days to get it completely under control. However, when I got back from vacation we went back to it due to a rekindle fire of a pretty good size, and that was 2 weeks later!! It was the biggest fire Dalton has had in about 20 years.

Here is where I put out my very first "house fire". In February of '06 we came here because one of the bedroom beds was on fire due to a cigarrette, we got there in time to put it out before it spread thru the whole house, so this was my first!!

This was my first really good house fire in March of '06. I was on the first in engine and the entire porch and the entry way was blazing and fire was blowing out that far left window as well as the roof. We saw the flames over the trees about 4 or 5 blocks away, so this was a fun one to put out. It has since been remodeled and fixed, that's why it doesn't look so bad now.

This was also a really good fire, the best one I've fought. This was in February of '07. This driveway you see is where my crew arrived. What you can't see is the back of the house, it is actually a two level house and the fire was in the basement on the back side, so everything you see in the picture was extremely thick smoke as we arrived, but as we pulled our line off it turned to flames, so everything you see was on fire, even part of the basketball goal! As we extinguished the fire on the porch and the front door we made entry and found that the entire living room had collapsed into the basement as well as the stair case, so we backed out and made it a defensive fire until we had it all under control, then we went back in and hit all the hot spots. We were here for about 2 hours, so it was definitely the funnest fire I've had.

This one wasn't a big fire, but it was fun because when we arrived the entire house was pitch black in smoke from the floor to the ceiling. This happend this last April of '07. I was actuall out in a pickup truck running some errands when the call came in, but I just so happend to be right by it, so I hit the lights and sirens and flew to it in a pickup truck!! I got there at the same time as the first engine (which happened to be the one I was on anyway) and we jumped right on it and had to go in and search for the fire but found it right away and put it out, this scene went extrememly smooth and was really the perfect example of how a scene should go. The truck company did ventilation as we were searching and extinguishing the fire and another crew did a victim search and the whole thing was over and we were heading to the station in less than 1 hour.

This was the last fire we had at the end of April of '07, there wasn't much to it. Some bum set two fires in two separate closets on either end of the house. We were the second engine there, so we didn't get to put it out, however we did get to chop some walls down because the fire was hiding from us and got into the walls and the attick, so we chopped thru some walls and put it out, so it was still fun.

I will continue to document any fires or cool calls that we have, I hope you find this interesting!!!