Santa Rosa Fire E1...
Well today I had my 12hr ride along with Santa Rosa Fire Departments, Station 1 (headquarters). I was really excited to get the opportunity to ride with these awesome guys. I have been waiting for this day for a long time.
But... I hate to inform you that it was a very uneventful day and nothing really awesome happened. But what can I expect... Since I was a 'ride along...' well... The 'Ride Along Curse' was very much with me today, lets put it that way.
Until next time... Keep it safe.
- Justin
Flare King...
Sunday September 4th:I know there hasn’t been much action lately and it wasn’t by any means an awesome call, but it was pretty fun after all.
It was a pretty boring day. A lot of work to be done on our new project at the firehouse. We are building a roof over our garbage dumpsters which we can use to train on roof ventilation. We got a lot done and it looks pretty darn cool... but anyway; other then that not a call all day.
At about 10:00pm we are dispatched 'code 3 for a man down.' We arrived on scene, couldn’t find anyone and no one knew anything about the call. So we declared it UTL (Unable to locate) and went home. I had just got back to bed at 10:30pm when we were then dispatched at 11:14pm, 'code 3 for a man down.' This time it was a different location.
When we arrived on scene we found a severely drunk man who fell down a flight of concrete stairs, and was pretty badly beaten. He had multiple lacerations to his head, neck, shoulders, arms and legs, and a possible broken arm. We packaged him up and sent him to the hospital. Nothing too great or worthy of much detail.
Finally got back to the firehouse at about 12:00am. But not for long... 1:10am, 'Code 3, for tree down power lines down, vehicle into the tree.' When we arrived on scene, we found a huge tree had snapped from natural causes fell across the roadway, took out a ton of cable, phone, and major power lines. We treated the lines as live and proceeded to check the vehicle for injuries. No one was injured so we called for our local utilities companies to start on there way, and begun work on clearing the tree. Here is where it gets good... ha-ha... just kidding.
My Capitan puts me on traffic control detail about a quarter mile up the road from the incident. He tells me he wants me to light some flares so people see that they need to stop and hands me a whole box of flares... so I walked. I got to the intersection where I was supposed to stop traffic. I light three flares to block the road.
As I sat there in the dark with my radio and a box of flares I started to think… I don’t think this is enough for people to see; and the Capitan didn’t tell me how many fares to light… so…
Well to make a long story short, you could have landed a passenger jet on the street in front of me. It was probably visible from space… I used all but three flares from the box. It was pretty fun lighting all those flares. I was the flare king last night. Well until 4:30am!!!
What a long night…
