A long Thursday

Last week we all got a good laugh from junior as he ran to the engine at the sound of my cell phone. This week he did the same thing. We got a bigger laugh because of that.

While doing his checkout of the engine junior removed a couple of the tools. When he was done he forgot to put one of the tools back in the rig. In fire service we generally like to "discipline" someone through exercise. That way they don't have anything on their record (like getting a write up). So juniors punishment was first, don all his equipment, second, carry 50 feet of 4 inch hose from stop sign to stop sign and back (it's a lot tougher than it sounds). Third, do 50 push ups with a wild land hose pack on. Fourth, run out back to engine 2 and tag the hydrant with a four inch line. Fifth, grab the 1 3/4 preconnect and deploy it to the back fence. He would have had to do a little more but at this point he started to get dizzy. That's the stopping point. He says he learned his lesson.

We then headed over to the park and drilled together. Junior and I did a ventilation exercise where we ladder the building, climb up with our tools (pike pole, chain saw and two axes) and do a mock ventilation. We then took turns tying off different tools on the ground so that we could raise them to the roof. We had a minute per tool. All of us except Eric messed up on at least one tool (Eric was the only one to get the ladder tied off properly). As a result Eric had us do bear crawls (on our hands and feet) in full turnouts through sand. That was a lot tougher than I thought it would be. We then packed up and went home for lunch.

Around 1700 we started to fix dinner (a little late for us). A few minutes later we were toned out for a woman with chest pain in a jeep at Circle K. We dropped what we were doing and responded. The woman had all kinds of medical problems including a recent heart bypass. We did our assessment and started to treat her. Once the MBA showed up we turned care over to them in hopes to get back to chow. Unfortunately as soon as we cleared the call dispatch had a smoke investigation for us. The RP (reporting party) stated that she saw smoke several peaks away. We went and made contact with the RP and she told us what she thought she saw. It was probably clouds (there was some nasty weather this week in Southern California) but we had to go look just to be sure. About 45 minutes later we were pulling into the station, very hungry. About 30 minutes later, just when dinner was about ready, we were toned out for a vehicle rollover on the Morongo grade. We went in search of the accident with two engines from Riverside county. We finally found it about 3 miles outside of our coverage area with one of the Riverside units already on scene. We got canceled and started for home again. By now we were really getting hungry. We got back to the station and had to reheat the food. We ate dinner around 2100 that night.