The Lost (Fire) Posts, No. 2: Christmas Day

Minutes before Darla was to serve Christmas Dinner for Gabe, GramR, Mommy, and Daddy, tones sounded for a house fire. The initial dispatch sounded like it was not far away, and I didn't stop to look up the house number in my county map book.

Turned out, it was on a road that winds all over, and it was a good 10-15 minutes away.

More photos and story after the jump.

As I drove in the misty late afternoon, I pulled over to let a volunteer responding in his private vehicle get past. Eventually we neared an intersection where a responding fire engine rolled by.

The three of us continued toward the scene as responders struggled to actually determine where the call was. That's often a sign that the call is not too sincere, so I was not happy, considering what I'd left at home. Shortly one responder said he could see the fire and was trying to figure out how to reach the house.

About that time we came around a bend and could see the burning house. A man was waiting at a nearby driveway to show the fire trucks the way in, and I could tell that I didn't want to commit to the driveway. I parked off the main road, ignoring a volunteer who said I could drive down, since it was going to be a hike down and back.

When I finally reached the scene, there was only one fire engine there. Others were on the way. A crew was inside trying to knock down the fire on the second floor. As more crews arrived, there was some concern because the chief outside couldn't reach the interior firefighters. I feared I was going to have more to report than I wanted.

After a few minutes, though, the interior crew was fine, and the fire was knocked down.

This photo shows a firefighter on the porch roof. He's opening up the wall, more to provide an escape route for the interior firefighters than to get to the flames.

The fire chief blamed the fire on the stove pipe in the attic. The house was probably a total loss, but many of the residents' belongings were salvaged.

As darkness fell, I slogged through the muddy driveway back to my car. Turns out I'd made the right decision to park on the road. The long driveway was very tight, so I would have clogged up the scene's access. That, and the fire department's needed a heavy-duty wrecker to tow them out of the mud when the fire was over.

Posted by JRC at March 20, 2007 10:00 AM | TrackBack