Incident No.
Date: 6th October 2007
Time: 0732
Type: Fire
Address: Normanston Drive, Lowestoft
Initial Attendance: Two pumps – wholetime crew (Red Watch) and retained crew on Normanshurst 02
Final Attendance: Persons Reported – three pumps (Normanshurst 05)
It seems ages since I've posted anything here, especially a shout.
Well as the title suggests, this one was, quite literally, on our doorstep.
I was driving and eager to know where we were heading – planning my route and all that, only to find it was about 400 yards away, still on Normanston Drive. Smoke had been reported issuing from a ground floor flat.
As we left the Station we heard a Fire Priority message going in from the Watch stating that the incident was now Persons Reported and that an ambulance was urgently required. You get an ambulance as part of the response when an incident is Persons Reported but to hear that it was required urgently certainly made the old ears prick up.
We entered via the very narrow service road, missing the parked vehicles by a gnats tadger! Our four guys in the back were told to don their BA and report immediately to BA Entry Control (BAECO). Dennis ordered me to run out the two lengths of flaked 45 we have stowed for quick deployment in the pump bay. It's quicker to pull out these two lengths than run out hose in the conventional manner. I had only just started with this when Dennis shouted over that I should go and attend to the casualty.
I ran round the corner and down the path towards the flat to see this guy flat out on the pavement. Just seconds before he had been dragged out of his flat by Rudi Mann and Rachel O'Connell of Red Watch.
I took over with Oxygen therapy, ensuring that the cylinder was fully turned on and we were giving him as much as we could.
The guy was covered with the blanket and I could see he was starting to take deeper breaths. Thankfully it wasn't too long before the ambulance arrived and I was able to handover to the paramedics. I kept our oxygen on him while they tested his blood oxygen levels. Although we were giving him 100% oxygen he was only at 80%. The paramedics were considering intubating him and called for another ambulance to attend. Meantime they got a line into his right arm and started to add some fluids.
The needle in his arm brought the guy around a bit but not enough for him to make sense or to fully respond to his surroundings.
While all this was going on other BA teams were committed to the flat to conduct a thorough search to ascertain whether there were any further casualties. Thankfully nobody else was involved.
And that was the excitement over… The police were involved as there were concerns that the fire may have been started deliberately – I don't know what their findings were.
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