They Run Their Playbook, We'll Run Ours

Hello readers! It has been a while since I have done a post of any substance, but as I wrote before, things have been a little frantic in my "WWW".

A couple of weeks ago, I got to go to a fire in a neighboring company's due, which for me, proved that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

So, a quick history lesson: My fire department has three stations. They are laid out in one end of our county in roughly a point-right equilateral triangle on a map. For most of the last 15 years, I was assigned to the southernmost company. South of that company is a fire company not of our department with a long history of bad firefighting results. We would like to think, and it has been said, it is because they suck. This is not necessarily the case, because (in my maturity I have come to realize) they have some real geographic issues that contribute to problems in fighting fire. In a nutshell, this company's area is literally and figuratively a peninsula. This does two negative things for them. First, all of their help comes in a linear fashion (e.g., all units come in from the same direction and from progressively further away, rather than from all around) and they have no second due area, because if you step outside of their boundary, two companies are due there before they are. Accordingly, they don't ever get to see how other companies attack as first-in companies, and they have plenty of time to either have things go wrong or get into trouble before help arrives. Now, like I said, for 15 years I was assigned to this one company, and we made almost daily work of going down to this other area for one thing or another. Ask MedicChris of nightruns.blogspot.com. His medic unit gets brutalized down there. But now, I am at this other company. For those of you unfamiliar with Woodbridge, suffice it to say that my new company is far enough away that I would never expect to see the old "company to the south" again. Oh, how wrong I was.

So, the poker game started late, but at least it started. I have brought the poker game from the old firehouse to the new firehouse, and it is helping out with bringing out some bodies to the firehouse. On this particular night, MedicChris and Rookie Dan were starting to get one over on me, and my chip stack was dwindling rapidly. With all of the extra people in the firehouse, I was the boss on the ladder truck, with my driver Art (~25 year veteran), another fireman named "Matt" (referred to in other posts as "Other Matt"- rather than "Mini-Matt", which was already taken), and another "rookie" who is really an experienced vol. from another company.

Just as I was about to die out of the poker game, the ladder truck gets dispatched for a fire in the due of the old "company to the south". I had to laugh, because I recognized the address as a place just about as far away as we go. It seemed impossible. The four of us got on the rig and headed out. I didn't get dressed, because I figured our likelihood of arriving at this call to be zero.

I looked at a map to confirm my worst expectations. This run was to our engine's tenth or fifteenth due. Since most everyone knows New York City, imagine taking a call in Staten Island from the South Bronx. That's about what we were faced with. Literally a 25 minute response. Unheard of. Nucking Futs. Etc.

We got to the intersection near my old firehouse ten minutes into the response. I called the intersection by radio just because I wanted to let the officer on my old engine know how far behind him we were. The officer on my old engine was a friend of mine named Brian. Brian is a cop and has been a fireman for almost as long as I have.

Right after I did that, a familiar refrain comes over the radio. It is the voice of an excited officer, suppressing the excitement in an effort to make a level-headed radio transmission. Done correctly, we call that "being the iceman", but this was not done correctly. The traffic: "Engine 3 is on the scene, heavy fire showing from [the back] of a single-story residential" From his tone and based on the report, I grab my coat and start to put it on. Bear in mind that this guy is eight or ten minutes ahead of any help at all, it is nighttime, and he is at a big fire he should have seen from literally a mile away, and he says: "Engine 3 to [Dispatch], have Engine 12 hit the hydrant at [address] to establish a water supply".

I started to laugh. I started to laugh a hearty and maniacal laugh. The laugh of years of experience. The laugh of knowing that we were going to get to go to work. The laugh of confirming that I knew what would happen before it happened. The laugh of a guy trying to pump up his crew to go places that they don't want to go. This other engine was running their company's old school playbook to the letter.

That playbook is as follows: Bearing in mind our geographic isolation and the linear nature of the response by any assisting units, we shall make sure that on any working structure fire, we will do the following: 1. fail to establish water supply before running our tanks dry on futile, ineffective, outside operations; 2. pull all of our lines and leave them uncharged awaiting water and other companies to take them in. There are, of course, other elements to the other company's playbook, but this is the essence.

This playbook is a little disconcerting. Like any good team, we have a playbook too, and ours is geared to address theirs. It is generally: 1. Establish a water supply when we get there; and 2. Act like a fire department and put the fire out competently.

Now, here I am in the cab of the ladder truck, fifteen minutes into a response that I now calculate will take another fifteen. We are going to a known working fire, and the first-in company has totally fucked it up. Party time. Art knows why I am laughing. My guys poke their heads up front to see what I am laughing about, and I explain that I will show them when we get there. I yell something inspirational like "Are you ready to get some?!?!", or somesuch. I get my gear in perfect order, gather my radio and my personal tool and wait to get there.

We got on the scene, and it was pretty bad. I size up the scene. Big brick rambler. Lots of fire, but mostly in the attic now. Through the roof on one side. Three or four engine companies inside. One company in the rear not doing anything. I advise the incident commander that we are on the scene and we will park so that we can use our ladder pipe if necessary. Brian is doing my old engine proud, and through his mask radios out to me the simple request: "Matt, we need hooks NOW!"

OK so breach of radio etiquette using my name instead of my unit number, but the point is well taken. Big attic fire, lots of engines inside, but I betcha nobody brought anything to take down the ceiling.

We leave Art behind to deal with getting our aerial ladder up. We go up to the door, and I say a little prayer/joke that I have adapted from a movie:

"God of fire, thank you for this opportunity to kick some ass. Protect us and give us the strength to blow people's minds with our high-voltage offensive attack. My will be done. Amen."

Out loud, I tell a guy from the first due company "Well, you gotta die of something" (ripoff from "The Untouchables") and we go on in. We meet with Brian right away, and he directs us to a place were we can help him. For the next few minutes, we make pretty good progress, but apparently not good enough. I am proud of the way my guys, who are rather inexperienced laddermen, are doing a great job. Despite our efforts and visible progress, the outside commanders sound an evacuation tone, in effect, an order to leave the building. No one really understood why we were being pulled out. Especially my own ladder guys and the engine from my old company. We were collectively the last ones out, and when we got outside, things started to get ugly.

Once outside, everyone started taking off their masks and questioning why we were pulled out. I walked around the house, and got pissed off because quitting the firefighting effort turned an improving fire condition into a worsening fire condition. Many firefighters were upset and ready to go back in. I worked to get them back on discipline and staged them up in the yard. I made some smart assed comment to the incident command that if we couldn't work inside, they had better provide water to our ladder truck so we could hit it from outside, from somewhere, from anywhere. The IC indicated that they were trying to do that. I realize that the clusterfuck has snowballed out of control.

The funny thing is that I have been to this exact same type of operation about a hundred times with these people. It is the same thing every time. It seems to be burned into their institutional memory. Failed initial attack. Balls-out effort to redeem the whole fire by second and third arriving companies. First company's chief pulls everyone out. Fight in the yard (no, not really). Master streams for a while (big water from truck-mounted nozzles for the uninitiated). Second and third companies re-enter and finish, leaving first company in the dust. The same thing every time.

In this instance, the building never did collapse. We could have stayed in and been just fine and perhaps saved some more property. Tough call to make from inside, though. The guys on the outside are looking out for us and for our safety, but it is very frustrating when you get pulled out of a building that gets 80,000 pounds of water added to it from three water cannons, doesn't collapse, doesn't go out, and then you get ordered back in to finish what you could have finished beforehand. Its a pisser. It is not like this in most places.

Each and every company that serves this area works together in other areas of the county. Some fires are worse than others, but for the most part, all of the companies that surround the "company to the south" make good decisions and operate competently on the fireground using good teamwork between different departments. Why have things not changed here? I don't know. I don't think that I'll ever know. I don't know if I care. I may have made my last run down there. I am stationed so far away now that I literally may never have to go back. One thing that I do know, is that enough of our guys know what is up that if they continue to run their playbook, we will continue to run ours.