Alerter blog

Month: June 2010

  • House fire – Northgate, Lowestoft

    Eight days since our last shout and the pre-bedtime peace was shattered by my alerter springing into life.

    Gave Karen the phone, checked doors were shut and then the, now unfamiliar, jog over to the fire station.

    I was first in and opened the bay doors before taking a look at the tip sheet. I registered that we were off to 'House' and it was in Northgate, barely a 30 second drive from the station. Then it clicked. We were being tipped out to my old house…

    Before long I was sitting behind the wheel  – hand-held radio's onboard, main scheme radio fired up, blues on and our mobile message just complete as Dennis clambered up into his seat to complete our crew of six.

    I still hadn't heard the committed message from the wholetime crew who, by now, must be getting pretty close.

    I took a wide swing into Northgate and knew exactly where to go. In the gathering dusk I could see a girl flagging us down. Looking to my right, an orange glow was visible in the groundfloor extension. Pump in, hosereel run out, tank open, revs up but no pressure… Air lock. Drop the revs, open one of the main deliveries and force the air out of the pump. Next run out a length of 45, branch in and charge it.

    By now White Watch have pulled up behind us and Begz connects his tank to ours, just in case…

    Mel and Cheesey go in wearing BA, quickly extinguish the small fire and then carry on into the rest of the house opening windows to get rid of the smoke.

    It really felt strange standing outside my old house, remembering how it used to be when we were there. Karen had grown up in that house, bought it off the council with her Mum and then I appeared on the scene and it became our first home. And this is where we lived when Karen had her accident and spent six months in a spinal injuries unit. We'd adapted the garage into a groundfloor bedroom and bathroom and kept the place really nice. It's been sad to see the place get a bit neglected in recent years, rented out by the council, being more of a staging post than what it should have been – a family home.

    And it was thirteen years to the day since we moved out… A fact, once shared with my crew, they were happy to keep repeating (and repeating!) for me!

     

  • RTC drill – car on roof, person trapped

    I know, I know – it's been absolutely ages since I last wrote anything on the blog. My real job has been as busy as hell and we've been really quiet with shouts too – which is handy as if both were just as busy I'd be disappearing up my own a**e!

    So apologies are in order as this particular training session happened well over a week ago am I'm only now sitting down, bleary-eyed to tell you all about it.

    The scenario was that the wholetime watch from Lowestoft South (Green Watch) had been tipped out to a car on its roof and our crew from Normanshurst were second pump in. Normally with an RTC you'd get the nearest pump and PRT followed up by the closest ERT. But, for the drill, it would just be the ERT and the Normanshurst crew (minus our fire engine as this was in the process of being changed back over with the Div reserve pump).

    We were confronted by a single car on its roof. That's actually not that unusual. But normally the strength of the roof means that the roof supports the weight of the car and allows us to access the vehicle and its occupants fairly easily. However, this car looked like it had been driven off the top floor of a multi-storey car park and then landed on its roof. The roof had been well and truly flattened so that it was level with the ground at the tops of the doors – and I mean just the doors not including the height of the glass!

    In setting up the drill someone had used their initiative to make the drill a tad more interesting. The 'just driven off the top storey of the multi-storey' look had been achieved by enlisting the help of the builders working on our new fire station. Their digger pressing down on the floor panel of the car had effectiveely squashed the roof right in.

    So that's what we were confronted with. And their was a person trapped in there. OK, its was one of our dummies but there's every possibility that we could be faced with this scenario for real. And until such time as we can access the casualty, we're not going to know whether they are dead or alive…Car-roof-1

    Mark 'Frank' Saunders had volunteered from our crew to act as Incident Commander, so both he and I surveyoed the scene and came up with a Plan A and a Plan B. You always need a Plan B just in case Plan A fails or as a no holds barred method of getting the casualty out if the ambulance boys say the patient's condition is time critical and they want them out right now!

    Our Plan A was to lift the rear of the car using the high pressure airbags, chocking and blocking as we went. The idea was to allow us to pop the hatch, drop this down and gain access into the car. So that's what we did and the car was raised a good height and the hatch was duly opened. Our smallest firefighter – Horney Ben wriggled his way into the car to find the casualty. He could see the orange builer suited casualty but he wouldn't be coming outt this way as he was too heavily trapped.

    Time for Plan B…Car-roof-2

    With the car still raised at the rear we now started to gain access along the whole of the drivers side. The doors were popped along their underside (uppermost to us). More and more space was created, even a whole was cut in the floorpan so that someone could access the casualty and check their vital signs.

    If this incident was real we would be trying to create access for the paramedic's to check for signs of life. Until they tell us otherwise we are still trying to free a casualty. If there is no saveable life then we can take our time, recovering the casualty in a dignified manner.Car-roof-3

    But for the purposes of this drill we were going to get the casualty out because he was still 'alive'. And 35 minutes after turning up at the incident we had him out on a long board – not bad considering the state of the car.

    A great drill which we all learnt plenty from. Just hope no one ever does drive off the top of our multi-storey car park…