Not So Peachy Kean

I’m riding the fire engine today. A call goes out to the ambulance crew and the engine to respond to the middle school just down the road—a twelve-year--old girl is having an allergic reaction. We rush over and pull up by the entrance of the school and head inside the nurse’s office with our medical equipment.

But I’m exhausted and can’t concentrate. Running through my head is the unsuccessful CPR we performed only an hour ago, that blank expression in the old man’s tan and wrinkled face. His eyes flash in my head as I think about his ribs crunching from the chest compressions I gave.

I shake it off and try to focus. I hook the dark skinned twelve-year-old girl with braids up to our blood pressure cuff, but from everything I’m seeing on our vital sign monitor, she appears stable. No wheezing, no hives, she doesn’t even look scared. Just bored and ready to go home. It’s just another obscure EMS call where there’s nothing we can do other than offer the patient a ride to the hospital. The girl’s parents were called to come pick her up, so no ride. We just wait for them.

That’s when the call went out over the radio for a high-rise fire in our response area. Only problem is that we aren’t parent of the response line-up, because we’re here, at a middle school nurse’s office.

Chen, the driver of the fire engine, checks his phone and reads us the dispatch notes: Caller says flames coming from behind the oven and spreading.

“Is it anything good?” asked Lieutenant Hertzel, our jacked bodybuilder of an officer who had been filling in for our Captain. Hertzel looks like a meathead, but he has the wits of a trial lawyer.

“I mean, it’s an oven fire.” Chen thought for a second. He knew most oven fires never turned into anything significant when they came from inside the oven because they were contained and ovens are designed to be hot, but from behind the oven? That doesn’t seem under control.

“Actually, we should add on, fire is coming from behind the oven. Plus, its Peachy Keen towers.”

“Oh, the place without sprinklers?” said Hertzel, who knows the area. “Alright, let’s go then.”

As I’m helping take care of this little girl, I see Chen wave me and the paramedic riding on the fire engine, Jay, over to the exit. His eyes are gleaming with intensity. “Yo let’s go, we got a box!” Box is code for fire.

My eyes widen, becoming alert, “wait, what?” I start heading towards him. “Where at?”

“Peachy Keen towers.”

My adrenaline immediately spiked.

“Medic crew, you need us for anything?” Hertzel asks as we make our way out.

Moe, the laid back, charming paramedic on the Ambulance, waves us off. “No, you guys go, her parents are coming to take her home so we’ll just wait with her.”

Hertzel gives Moe a thumbs up and the fire engine crew and I scramble out of the nurses office to the fire truck.

 My heart is racing because we’ve all been waiting for something big to happen at this apartment complex. No unit sprinklers, no hallway sprinklers and a lot of strange, lonely residents all housed in the same tinderbox. How has nothing gone wrong before?

The way our dispatching algorithm works is different for every call. For a high-rise fire, there are going to be a ton of units responding to it, typically, five fire engines. But the ones tasked with making the first charge towards the fire depend on which station has that building in their designated response area. This is what is called being first due in the fire service. And Peachy Kean towers belongs to us, but since we were still dealing with this girl in the nurse’s office, the dispatchers were unable to officially use us for the high-rise fire. So, they had no choice but to make the next closest station the first arriving unit and they were our rivals.

Chen hated them. Their captain used to work here, and Chen can’t stand him. Knowing that they were assigned as the primary unit is pissing Chen off and lighting a fire under his ass

We all jump into the fire engine, and Chen guns it out of the middle school parking lot with a ferocious tenacity. We hear the captain of our rival station, John, make an announcement over the radio.

“All units be advised we have a column of smoke showing from route 77.”

Yup. This is real.

I shift to firefighter mode. I stand up and hoist my fire trousers on, pulling the suspenders tight while trying to not get thrown side to side as we swerve around traffic and through red lights.

“Fuck!” Raskin said, “They’re gonna fucking beat us in.”

“Yea, looks like they’re about to pull in. Guess we’re gonna be second due. It’s all good.” Hertzel grabbed the radio mic, “Command from E314, we’ve added onto the incident, we’ll be your second due Engine.”

“Alright, I copy that 14, you’ll be our second due engine.” The battalion chief, the commander in charge of the whole incident, responded over the radio.

I fish my hands through the shoulder straps of my air pack, sinch the waist strap down, buckle my seatbelt, and take some deep breaths. I already know my next step: grab the high-rise packs, portable bundles of hose, detached from our fire truck so that we can carry to the fire floor and use it to connect to the building standpipe.

As we pull into the six-story brick apartment’s parking lot, a chubby out of shape woman frantically waves at us, then points to where the fire was. Around the corner, a small amount of smoke is coming from a fifth floor unit, and our rivals are standing below it outside of the tightly locked stairway door.

“Ok, that is not a fucking column of smoke.” Hertzel said, “Also, what the fuck are they doing over there?”

“Its fucking John, what do you expect? All this time here and this fucking idiot still can’t run a high rise.”

They were trying to go directly in through the stairwell, but the exterior door was sealed shut.

“So, are they gonna force entry or just stand there and fiddle their dicks?”

“I don’t give a fuck, this is our box anyway.”

“I mean, I announced we were second due.” Hertzel said, “I gave it to them…Fuck it, I tried.” He said sarcastically. “Guess we’ll take it from here.”

Chen drives over speedhumps to the front entrance of the building, blasting the air horn at a car who is just trying to leave.

“GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY WAY!” He yells urgently, trying to secure his spot next to the hydrant and get us inside so we could beat our rivals. As the air brakes hiss, Jay and I hop out and grab the high-rise packs and all the necessary tools for our ascent.

I smell the thick, grimy scent of smoke in the air. No doubt this is real. I just got to let instinct take over now.

Chen, unscrewing the hydrant caps, yells something at me.

“Ok! Got it!” I reply.

“What did he say?” Jay asked me.

“I have no idea.”

Chen stays outside connecting the hydrant to the exterior fire department connection outlets while Jay, Hertzel and I go inside. A confused, elderly resident with glasses is holding the door open for us as we hastily run through carrying one hundred pounds of equipment. Sales representatives at the leasing office were working out contracts with prospective residents when they heard our thundering footsteps rushing into the awkwardly silent lobby.

Looking at us wide eyed and in confusion, I can only imagine what those new residents about to sign the lease are thinking. These guys clearly don’t know what’s going on, which makes sense because the fire alarm isn’t going off.

Jay led the pack, darting to the left down the hall, carefully noting the direction of the unit numbers that would be stacked on top of one another.  He’s short, but agile with incredible endurance because he’s training for an iron man competition next year: a 2.5 mile swim, 115-mile bike ride and a marathon all in one day.

In his newly issued, flexible, light weight fire gear, he strides down the hall like a gazelle. He dashes past the elevators, cuts right at the intersection and sprints to the stairwell at the end of the hall.

Fuck I should have gotten the new gear. I think, breathing deeply. It feels like every part of my body is being dragged down by the sag and bulk of my coat and pants. Not to mention, the high-rise pack slung over my right shoulder, flopping up and down and crushing my right side at the same time.

But through my experience, adrenaline fueled energy propels me forward.

We stomp up the poorly lit, narrow, gray stairwell all the way to the 5^th floor, the unsettling fluorescent lights humming above us. I’m holding onto the railings and taking it one landing at a time, so I don’t psych myself out; six floors feel like fifty with this much weight and pressure.

When we finally get to our floor, Jay drops his equipment on the landing and opens the door to the hallway as a dark haze of smoke seeps through the top.

“Oh! We got smoke showing LT!” Jay announces without a change in his high-pitched voice.

“Smoke showing?!” Hertzel says marching up to us. “Alright, mask up guys.  Get the hose flaked out, I’m gonna go do some recon.”

A sense of urgency floods my body. I toss my high-rise pack onto the floor, drop down to one knee and put my face mask on without the regulator to conserve air. I bounce back up and jump over to the standpipe right next to the hallway door for step one, which is unscrewing the cap.

Step two: drain out dirt and debris possibly sitting in the standpipe to make sure it doesn’t gunk up our hose. I grab the wheel valve and try to twist it, but it’s glued shut. I quickly crouch and grab a specially designed wrench shaped like an F from our standpipe bag for extra leverage. I place the prongs through the wheel and crank down. Black water gushes out of the pipe, staining the white hose, black.  

I shut it back down, and quickly move to step three. I screw our flowmeter device onto the standpipe outlet, turn it on and then connect Jay’s section to it. Everything is almost ready; we just need to unravel two-hundred feet of uncharged hose in a cramped stairwell. 

Meanwhile, Hertzel runs down the hallway. Up ahead, he sees smoke pouring out of the room and as he gets closer, an overweight, scruffy third man in his thirties still in pajamas. “WHAT. THE. FUCK—Hey man, what are you doing?”

“I’m holding the door open, so you guys know where the fire is!” The mysterious neighbor said coughing through the thick smoke. Eddleman knows that all he’s doing is feeding oxygen into the rapidly spreading fire and polluting the hallway.

“WHAT…GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE MAN, THE SHIT IS ON FIRE!”

“I just wanted to help.”

“You’re a hero, man—the stairs are down the hall!”

“Ok! Thank you for what you guys do!”

As smoke pushes out of the apartment and the man scurries away, Hertzel stands there, flabbergasted “FUCKING PEOPLE MAN, FUCK.” He crouches and unclips his thermal imaging camera from his coat. He goes inside and sees the entire kitchen consumed by fire and charged with black smoke. Fire is creeping out of the galley window, starting to light off the ceiling to the living room. He knows it won’t be long before the entire living room flashes over and the sliding glass doors to the balcony shatter from the heat, allowing gusts of wind to turn the fire into a blow torch. Knowing it could be only a minute before the flames spread to the hallway, he knows, this is about to be a good one.

Backing out of the apartment, he looks down the hall to the stairwell. What is taking them so long?

 Knowing he has to do something; he sees a fire extinguisher encased in the wall. He opens it up, pulls the safety and aims at the fire. He shrugs and sprays the galley window where the flames are licking the ceiling, which temporarily diminishes them.

 Holy Fuck it worked!

 The extinguisher empties and he shakes it, then stares into the eyes of the fire. He shrugs again and chucks the canister into black smoke crashing into cabinets. Ok…Hose should be here any second now.

Back in the stairwell, I bring the nozzle and a coupling (a marker of a 50-foot connection point) to the hallway door as Jay scurries up and down the stairs, spreading out the hose. Time is ticking, and it looks like he’s about ready for me to charge it with water.

I run over to the standpipe, but realize the wheel wrench I used to open to the stubborn valve with is missing

Oh. Fuck. Oh Fuck. Where is it?!  

Now I’m panicking, which is cardinal sin since you’re the one that the panicking people called to get rid of the thing their panicking about.

Its not about the mistakes you make, it’s about how you recover from them. I remember Luke drilling this into my head. I had to think of something else.

I see the fourteen-pound Halligan bar, our main prying tool up against the wall and grab it. Its two and a half feet long of forged steel with a jagged pick and flat head end called adze that can crunch down on doors with extreme force. The other side has a prong like end called forks that are six inches long. It’s an extremely powerful tool.

 I’ll stick the fork end into the wheel valve, and then turn it. Shit. I’m getting pretty resourceful. I’m excited my quick thinking found the solution. I’ve come a long way.

 At an awkward angle, I shoved the forks into the wheel valve and twist it, causing the plastic wheel to break.

Fuck. Me.

My wide eyes shift side to side.

 I’ll let jay recover from this one.

“Ok, you ready Jay? Imma’ get on the nozzle I’ll let you charge it!” I said trying to pass off the problem to him. He’s more experienced so I’m sure he’ll figure it out.

“Hey Danny, don’t charge it yet I’m almost done though!”

“Alright, you charge it when you’re ready, I still gotta flake my shit out!”

I started spreading out the rest of my hose when I see the wheel wrench buried beneath it all. SON OF A BITCH.

Behind me, the first “truck” company, tasked with search and rescue, came up the stairs.

“Are y’all ready to go inside, what we got?” The country boy truck officer asks me.

I glare at them. “HEY! HELP ME GET THIS SHIT FLAKED OUT!” I grab a part of the hose and throw it at them.

“Ok, we got you!”

That’s when Hertzel came back through the hallway door. “Hey, are we almost ready in here, because I guarantee we got no victims in there, but we do have a fire that’s about to get out of control.”

Jay came down the stairs. “Danny, I’m all set up here, I’m going to charge the line.”

“Alright copy that, you’re charging the line!”

Everything right now just feels like controlled chaos.

Once we finally get it filled with water, I click in my breathing regulator. “We’re all set LT!” I yell.

 I grab the hose and charge down the carpeted hallway through the dark haze. I follow Hertzel and the truck crew into the apartment. Through gray clouds of ashes and smoke, I see sunlight creeping through the balcony doors and a cat scratching post in the corner.

I push a little further where the galley window is engulfed in a raging ball of smoke, a violent hue of orange bursting through its core. Somone’s house is possessed, and I’m the exorcist.

“Hey! We gotta move around the corner!” Hertzel relays to me.

But instinctively, I open the nozzle and blast the fire, black water slamming the cabinets.

Hertzel lets me do my thing as the flames taper down. He shows me the screen from his thermal imaging camera.

“Hey, we gotta move around the corner now!”

“Yes sir!” I turn over my shoulder to talk to my partner. “More hose, Jay! More hose!”

“You said more hose? I got you!” Jay vanishes back into the hallway and starts pulling more fire hose into the unit.

On my knees, I explode forward to the kitchen entrance, dragging the hose with me across the fuzzy carpet. Hertzel crouches beside me and shows me the thermal imaging camera again.

With the hose pinched between my legs, I aggressively whip the nozzle, hitting all sides of the room to leave no trace of smoke or fire. I douse the entire kitchen in the polluted water for the next thirty seconds until the entire emergency came to a halt.

Another rescue crew walks into the kitchen and violently tears out the cabinets, checking for heat extension into the dry wall, but there is nothing. Over the radio, the crew operating on the floor above us relays that the fire had gotten so heavy that it began to burn through the ceiling, making its way to the floor above. They quickly extinguished it.

“LT, you want me to keep spraying just in case?”

“Naw, we’re good here. Head to the balcony so we can get some air.”

Hertzel, Jay, and I all walked out to the balcony and unclip our breathing regulators. We inhale the remnants of the filthy haze as it wafts outside. I try to expel it from my throat, but to no avail.

The ladder truck had put its one-hundred-foot hydraulic ladder stick up to the edge of the balcony we rested our arms over. A safety officer on the ground walks over and points his phone at us.

“Oh shit, we’re about to be on the Instagram page!” I point.

“Oh shit, that’s right!” Jay laughed. We all give a big pose with our thumbs up.

When we make it back outside, we walk up to Chen outside the fire engine.

“Hey, what were you trying to tell us when we got out?” Jay asked Chen.

“I said to chock the doors open, because these ones don’t open back up.”

“Oh, that’s what you said.” I said. Chen shook his head in disappointment.

“Did you guys make it there first?” Chen asked.

“Yea, we smoked them in.” Jay says, “As soon as we got there, I thought, they can’t be that far behind. But they didn’t even make it in until after the fire was out!”

“So, you put the fire out?!”

“Hell yea!”

“Did you hook up to the standpipe, Danny?”

“What else was I supposed to use?”

“Nice bro!” I can tell Chen is proud, it always helps when I’m on his good side, “That’s how you save a fucking incident—John was outside the whole time dealing with the dead cat when he was supposed to be up there with you.”

“Oh…the cat died.” More death today. That makes me sad. I think about my own cat.

Chen shrugged. “Yea.”

“That sucks.”

“Yea. But then this motherfucker, John, goes around the lobby just trying to pull all the fire alarms and none of them went off.”

“Wait, what?”

“Bruh, I’m telling you this place is gonna burn down one day.”

A middle-aged Indian man with fascination and fear in his eyes walked up to us from the sidewalk.

“Excuse me, but was there a fire here?”

We all just look at each other.

“Not anymore.”

Later that day while lying in bed at the station, goosebumps begin to crop up long my forearms as it dawns on me just how sideways that whole thing could have gone. No sprinklers, not even the fire alarms worked, and the damned standpipe system was filled with sludge. Had we not decided to respond to this incident ourselves, people would have died. That fire would have grown much bigger and eaten up the hallway, since our rivals, led by Captain John, made the wrong move on where to go first and never made it inside. And if Hertzel never had the presence of mind to use that fire extinguisher when he did, the inferno could have taken out the whole floor. Residents wouldn’t even know they were being barbequed until it was too late. So much shit to consider.

All I know for certain is that we didn’t respond to this call because we wanted to save the day. We added onto this call because it’s our fire to take, and it was pride alone that rushed us to the scene.

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Danny Wang is a professional Firefighter/EMT, writer, and an avid practitioner of Brazilian Jiu-Jijtsu.