Tag Archives: RowleyFire

Reunion II

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This is part 2 of a multipart series. If you missed the beginning, you might want to check out part 1.  
 
So it was off to northern NH to retrieve the Howe. The current owner said she’s been well maintained and should be ready for the long trip home, but antique trucks can be full of surprises. I loaded the pickup with every possible supply and tool I could conceive of needing: oil, coolant, brake fluid, jumper cables, spare charged battery, air compressor with hoses and chuck, extension cords, fuel stabilizer, lead substitute, Marvel Mystery Oil, and an assortment of basic tools.  
 
Captain Murphy often rides with me. (I know he’s at least a captain because I’m a lieutenant, and Murphy outranks me.). Whatever breaks, it will be the one thing I didn’t consider. That’s why I also carry the number of a good heavy towing service.  
 
The GPS says it’s a 3 1/2 hour trip up. It’s pretty accurate, but it translates to a 5 hour return trip at 1963 speeds. It’s gray, foggy, and threatening rain, but at least the weather is still unseasonably warm.  
 
My first glimpse of her is in her owner’s driveway. We round a corner, and there she is at the top of a small rise. The last 18 years have not been kind to her, but I’ve aged a bit as well. Her body is not as good as I had hoped, but it’s much better than I had feared. If the mechanicals are intact, I can work with this.  
 
They seem to be OK. She starts quickly and idles well. Her original siren is missing, but I know where it is. Her original seat has been replaced with buckets, but they seem comfortable. She’s lost her 35′ extension ladder, and her nicely matched set of chrome suction hoses has been replaced with a ratty mixed set. The brakes need bleeding. I hope that’s all; it may be a bad master cylinder. The tires are iffy, and I’ll need to find and repair that exhaust leak. And I’m sorry, East Haven, but the lettering job is ugly. It will have to go. Some of the original paint may yet survive under it, though.  
 
In summary she needs a fair amount of work, but it’s not insurmountable. We take care of the formalities, and then I’m off.  
 
It’s a blast from the past. Low revving, lots of torque, lots of noise; but she doesn’t seem as hard to drive as I remember. Perhaps I’ve grown up, or perhaps it’s the lack of a deputy chief watching me from the right seat.  
 
It takes less than a mile for me to realize the first tool I’ve forgotten: duct tape. Fortunately there is a hardware store next to the gas station. With a full tank of gas/Stabil/lead substitute mixture, and with the headliner taped securely out of my field of vision, we begin the long hard climb south out of town on US 3.

 

 
 

Reunion I

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When I was a young recruit, we trained a lot on our reserve engine. Engine 3 was a 1963 International/Howe with a 750 GPM pump and 500 gallons of water. She was a legend in our department.
 
When delivered in 1964, Engine 3 provided an 88% increase in the department’s pumping capacity. Although only rated at 750, she was documented to pump 1100 GPM on multiple occasions. She was physically our largest engine until 1987, even dwarfing 1979′s Engine 1. I learned my chauffeur’s trade with her. She had a Waterous pump with a rotary gear primer. You had to pull a switch to drop the clutch, shift the primer transmission in, then release the clutch to raise water. Pumping required reversing the procedure.
 
Driving her was equally interesting. She was cold and unhappy in the morning. Of course, as a fire engine you had to learn to drive her cold. She had a constant mesh (non-synchronized) transmission which required double clutching all shifts. Shifting up was hard; shifting down near impossible. Missing a shift meant coming to a complete stop and starting over. Legend has it that a synchro-mesh transmission would have cost an extra $17 in 1963. Ahh, small town politics.
 
By my day, Engine 3 ran as our third-due pump and as a tanker to support the brush trucks. In that capacity, I drove her a few times in my first four years. By modern standards she was a bear, but she had character and style, and she was reliable.
 
When she was replaced in 1993, no one wanted to see her go to a collector or to scrap. We eventually sold her to our sister department in rural Vermont. The most they could scrape together was $3000.
 
This week I was contacted by a collector. Our beloved Howe has been in his care for a few years now, but he could no longer afford to keep her. He offered her to me for the grand sum of $3000.
 
You can bet I scraped it together. 
 
The saga continues in part 2.

What goes around. . .

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. . .comes around. Back in 2000, our fire chief was looking for a graphic scheme for his new Tahoe. It was our first white vehicle, so it was a clean slate. As a joke, one of the firefighters (me!) gave him a Matchbox toy Tahoe with Fire Chief lettering and great swooping red and black stripes.

He liked it so much it became the basis for the actual lettering scheme. For a long while the whole story was on the department website.
Later, and for other reasons, the rest of our fleet evolved from red to white with crisscrossed red and gold stripes. They look sharp, if I do say so myself. We now operate the only non-red apparatus in our county, and the white has become a major part of our identity and a source of institutional pride.
Today, while out shopping, I found these:

Now go check out our ladder. I’ll wait here.
Coincidence? Probably, but it sure is cool.

The Show Must Go On

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“We’ve got a fire on the stage!” I tore from the back of the Performing Arts office, sprinting for the Stage Right doors.

I grew up in a firehouse. I always knew someday I’d be not only a firefighter, but that special breed above all else, a ROWLEY firefighter. Episodes of ‘Emergency!’ piqued my interest and stealthily indoctrinated me with the value of EMS. Dad would leave at all hours of the day or night, answering box alarms sounded on the air horn in the center of town. He kept his turnout gear at the top of the back stairs, which he only used when going to fire calls. In later years we had an extension of the Red Base, a pre-911 fire department party-line emergency phone. I could listen in on the dispatchers as the emergencies happened! We could even sound the ‘fire whistle’ from our front hall, although I never succumbed to the temptation.

I used to attend drills on Sunday morning with Dad, learning all I could. I remember checking equipment; my specialty was the batteries in the flashlights. I have one vivid memory of sitting on top of the engine during a pump drill, guiding the deck gun and using it to blast the bark off dead trees.

I don’t exactly remember my first emergency call. I have one vague memory of sitting in the cab of Engine 7′s 1947 Howe on a flooding/service call. That truck was sold in 1980, so I was still pre-teen.

I remember my first call as a driver, and my first call as a Lieutenant.

On the medical side, I remember my first day on the ambulance as an EMT. We did dialysis runs all day long. First call as a newly-minted paramedic: an electrocution. I remember my first cardiac arrest, but that’s a subject for another post. I remember my first cardiac arrest SAVE, which should be yet another post. I remember my first fatal crash, and the first time I used the Jaws of Life.

First emergency, though, ummmmm. . .

First really big fire? Malden Mills, December 10, 1995. I doubt I’ll ever see another like that; it’s a story to tell the grandkids when I have some.

Very first emergency, uhhh. . .

As I rounded the corner, I could see my best friend approaching from Stage Left with a dry chemical extinguisher. He let loose on the small fire, barely missing me in his zeal. The charred remains of a smoke machine sat on the smoldering carpet on the stage riser.


While he unplugged the smoking hulk, I strode to center stage and waved for the sound man to turn up my microphone. I politely asked the milling crowd, waiting for intermission to end and the show to resume, to evacuate the auditorium. They didn’t hear a word, as our sound man had missed the cue.


Returning to the seat of the fire, we peeled back the carpet and checked for extension. Fortunately there was none.


I returned to the office to look up the phone number for the local fire company. This was pre-911 in our area, and it wasn’t a real emergency anyway. Just a little smoke, now.


When the first engine arrived, the Captain was irate we hadn’t pulled the box. We saw no need – the fire was out. What’s a little smoke?


The engine company inspected our work, evacuated the smoke, condemned our smoke machine, and stomped out. Dress rehearsal was over.


The date was March 16, 1989; second Thursday of the month and the night I was appointed to the Rowley Fire Department.

Reciprocation, and perspective

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This morning I’ve received my first official outside link. Kal over at TraumaQueen.net accepted my submission for this month’s edition of the Handover Blog Carnival. Read the post, and check out what some other great EMS bloggers are doing. From there you can follow the links to past monthly editions and see some of my inspiration.

It feels wonderful. I imagine this must be somewhat like getting your first magazine article published. Now people other than family members and those looking to install an iPod in their GMC will see my little blog. (You’d be amazed how many hits that one gets.)
In housekeeping notes, for my longer-term readers I hope you enjoy the new look. It was just installed last night.
And finally some notes on perspective for any new readers. I’ve been in EMS for 10 years and the fire service for 20. I’ve served on a fire company in a rural town which is transitioning to a suburban bedroom community. I’ve worked for two private ambulance companies in the neighboring metropolitan area, serving as both an EMT and Paramedic, doing 911/emergency work and routine transfers. What this all means is that stories from my career and life will be told from varied perspectives as a firefighter/lieutenant/EMT/Paramedic riding the Engine/Ladder/Ambulance in a rural/suburban/metro area. Got it? Good. Enjoy.

Sounds

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All is peaceful. The only sound is the whir of the Coke machine. A window pane rattles as the wind buffets one of the six garage doors. Suddenly, a klaxon blares out. There is a loud CLANG-CLANG-CLANG as the alarm sounds. All across town, men are awakened to the insistent BEEP BEEP of pagers.

All is again quiet in the building. After a few moments, there comes the thud and scrape of the first sleepy man trying to unlock the door. The building is filled with the sound of recently-awakened men stumbling inside. The air is filled with an urgent purpose, accompanied by the clomp of ill-fitting boots and the swish of fire-resistant coats.

There is the click of a switch, and the interior of the building is illuminated by flashing red and white lights. If anyone were listening, he would hear the soft whir of rotating beacons and the protesting ‘pwee-pwee’ of strobe lights, cold from days of non-use. No one is listening.

The walls of the building shake as the great, twelve-foot wide doors rumble up out of the way, and the air is filled with the clamor of “Low Oil” warning bells. With a ferocious roar, the Diesels come alive. The hiss of air brakes is the last sound to be heard before the scream of the siren drowns out all else. The deep bass of the air horn is added to the cacophony, as the trucks disappear down the street in a cloud of black smoke.

Eventually the sirens and horns fade away, and all is peaceful again. The building is left to itself, with only the few leaves blown through the open doors and a lingering smell of Diesel fuel to indicate that anyone has passed this way.

–
The preceding was written in a college creative writing course in 1989. The assignment was to describe a scene or place using a different sense than one would expect. It has always been one of my favorite creations and is presented here on the theory that Google Never Forgets.