Daddy's Girl

So, I’m at this backyard BBQ when this guy walks up…

Listing, he points his wine glass at me, “Fireman, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

It always goes the same way…

Idyllic, awkward conversation ensues…

“Checkers and coffee all day, right?” He chuckles and slaps me way too hard on the shoulder in a way that is way too chummy for a guy who’s not my friend.

Who is this guy?

I smile back, “Right…”

“You guys make a lot of money,” he persists.

I take a drink of my beer as my eyes dart around looking for my wife.

Get me out of here.

“I hear you guys are never at work.”

“Well, that’s not actually true…”

I can feel it - here it comes.

“So…”

The obligatory ugly question.

“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen?”

“You don’t want to hear it.”

“C’mon man, tell me…” A misting of spit hits my face. He pokes me in the chest.

Others surround to witness the novelty - I can hear them now…

“He’s a fireman, how neat…”

I’m like a side-show carnie…

Tell us a story…

“No, you don’t want that in your head.”

“I can take it - c’mon give me a good one.”

If he had only raised his chin as he said it.

I snarl inside. Like hell you can…

Ok man, you want to take that ride?

Climb inside my messed up skull -

“Ok…

What do you think about when you drive to work?

I think about scars in the pavement - deep and angry.

Three cars…

Battery acid, gasoline, radiator fluid, crunching glass beneath my feet…

A dead girl, a screaming boy, a headless man, a dog…

120 days a year, cup of coffee in hand on my way to work- I pass the spot…

Trips with my family, there she is…

Its always there - if I try not to think about it - I’m thinking about it.

Right?

If I choose a different road so I won’t see the scars in the pavement it means I took a different road so I wouldn’t think about it, still thinking about it by trying not to think about it, an endless feedback loop.

Please pass the mind scrub, a wire brush to scour the slough from my mind.

So here it is.

Damn you for making polite conversation -

For making me think about it again.

I see a woman asleep drifting across the median into oncoming traffic -

A large truck with a lumber rack - you know the kind I mean?”

Fingering the neck of his glass he nods and shifts his weight.

“A boy and a girl in a tiny car - radio up, windows down - off together on an adventure…

A warm cloudless day…

Beautiful.

A horrific impact -

Front ends buried in the freeway - pavement gouged.

A woman sits beside the road - as if dropped from the sky - knees tucked to chest - head down - her face vacant.

She doesn’t have a mark on her.

Where’d she come from?

The boy is crushed. The girl is dead.

She was pretty as I recall… underneath blood matted shoulder length auburn hair - ribbons of ruby blood lay against ashen skin - life drained - her heart crushed by the collision.

I watch her chest for the heaving of breath.

Nothing.

I brush a wisp of hair aside and touch her neck - still warm, slick with blood - feeling for the liquid slamming of her heart.

Nothing.

She wore a sleeveless blouse - on her shoulders she has tiny freckles…

Slivers of glass glisten like pixie dust over her body…

She spills from her seat onto her boyfriend - the driver.

He screams a scream from a place I’ve heard too many times - that place of anguish I never want to go again.

‘HOWS MY GIRLFRIEND? SHE WON’T ANSWER ME…’

Her head lies on his shoulder - neck violently snapped on impact.

His torso pinned - he can’t turn to see her or free an arm to touch her…

I lie. I say we’re doing everything we can.

We can’t do anything for her- she’s dead.

I sort the dead and living as though reading a checklist.

No breathing, no pulse -

Next…

It’s nothing personal - it’s the job.

At times like these when you’re dead - you’re dead. If you’re close you’re probably dead too.

Close counts in horse- shoes, hand grenades, and triage.

That’s not it…”

He says, “Oh, God- it gets worse?”

I seethe.

“Yup -

Truck spins off into another lane…

A normal guy in a car…

Going about his antiseptic life when two vehicles explode in front of him -

The big work truck - the one with the lumber rack- careens backwards into his lane…

The bumper of the truck with a 50 lb. vice attached - shatters the wind shield - severing his head…

When somebody’s head is gone that’s an easy one to figure out - done.

Next…

Vice and head in the back seat.”

“No…” the guy says.

“Want some more?” I ask like a combat raged soldier, words are my ordinance.

He looks for a way out, “Oh my God…”

I lean in to him, temples throbbing.

“Wait, there’s more… You wanted a good one - right?

The car is really jacked up -

Now we have to get the boy out...

It takes about a half an hour or so.

He’s SO twisted up inside the car - every time we try to push, pull, or cut part of the car he screams from that place-

Long, drawn out, torturous screams until he loses his breath…

The veins in his neck bulge.

‘STOP! OH MY GOD, STOP!

HOW’S MY GIRLFRIEND?’

I try to soothe him - ‘Hang in there buddy - this is going to hurt - we’re doing the best we can.’

Pathetic right? That’s the best I can come up with under the circumstances.

I had a lot going on.

I can’t see his face anymore - only hers.

Hazel eyes open to stare at nothing -

A heart shaped pendant around her neck.

‘Daddy’s Girl’

Each time we rock the car, her head - held on her freckled shoulders only by the skin of her neck, no life to hold the muscles firm, bones turned to gravel - convulses side to side and front to back in a manner that I can’t describe.

Or maybe I just did - I don’t know…

Stop shaking the car!

We hold her head still so we feel better…

‘SHE WON’T ANSWER ME…’

We pop the door off with the Jaws -

Dashboard finally pushed off the boy - we lift him out.

Bones broken - his arms and legs hanging and bending like he has extra joints in the center of all his long bones.

Kind of like the limp tentacles of an octopus - does that make sense?”

The guy looks through me.

I gulp down some beer -

I boil…

Poke me in the chest again…

“My job isn’t so cute anymore is it?

And it’s still not over -

Sharp white fragments of bone stick through his skin from these newly formed joints in the middle of his arms and legs.

The jagged ends grind together as we carry him…

He screams…

His limbs shattered in too many places to count.

A gurney carries him away.

Just when I think it’s over… this dog appears.

Where the hell did he come from?

He limps along on three good legs. One of his fore legs angled in a way that doesn’t make sense.

Enough already -

He whimpers. Dazed, he hobbles past me.

His snout is bent at weird angle too, webs of blood and drool hanging from it.

‘Aw, Christ! Somebody let me shoot him…’ A police officer says to no one in particular.

We cover the daddy’s girl with a yellow waterproof blanket.

I look down and think, ‘Look at how deep the pavement is scarred.’

Anything else you want to know before you move on to the next conversation?

Every time I drive past- there she is.”

-Mark S. vonAppen

“Daddy’s Girl”

The terrible (and real) accident occurred a number of years ago (2003) on northbound Highway 280 near El Monte Road in Los Altos Hills, California. I was inspired - a strange choice of words - to write the piece when my wife asked me over coffee on a Sunday morning (2011) what it looks like when a train hits someone.

She had been reading an article in the paper in which a couple visiting our area were hit by a commuter train and were killed. I have been on too many pedestrian versus train incidents in my career- my answer, “Not pretty. You don’t want to know.”

I began to think of every person I had ever been introduced to - whether well intentioned or completely obnoxious - that laughed and asked me to “tell them a good one.”

Most of the time I’m polite and I decline to tell stories. The ghosts that rattle around in my head need to stay there, free to haunt me and no one else. They’re mine and not yours. My reality - our reality - is not the same as theirs. Not even close. I am glad it’s not. Most people are simply making polite conversation, they often don't realize that they've picked at a scab.

My mind says to me, “Remember when that guy doused himself in gasoline and lit himself on fire? Remember what it smelled like in the medic van as you drove him as fast as you could to the trauma center?”

I go back to the place...Mockingbird Lane in Sunnyvale, 1997. I was a 24 year-old kid EMT on a paramedic unit.

Charles Bukowski wrote a beautiful and somber poem titled “The Layover”. I think it sums up a lot of what I have seen - and what I experienced in my career - though years ago by measure, it is only one sentence back in my mind.

The Layover-

That moment- to this. . .

may be years in the way they measure,

but it's only one sentence back in my mind

there are so many days

when living stops and pulls up and sits

and waits like a train on the rails…

I look up at the window and think,

I no longer know where you are,

and I walk on and wonder where

the living goes

when it stops

-Charles Bukowski

I look at places around town in terms of where my first fire occurred, or someone was stabbed there, we delivered a baby on that corner, and scars in the pavement…

Someday the freeway will be resurfaced and then maybe she’ll go away, or maybe she won’t.

Every time I drive to work along the 280 Freeway my eyes always track to the exact spot where the pavement is gouged, and I go back.

There’s a demon in my head that starts to play a nightmare loop of what went on that day. Like a child passing a graveyard, I hold my breath until it’s more than I can take.

It's not polite to breathe when others can't...

Battery acid, radiator fluid, twisted metal, crunching glass beneath my feet, the sweet coppery smell of blood…

And there she is.

MAYDAY Minute

By Mark vonAppen

Just for fun assemble your personnel on the apparatus floor, then have them turnout and throw their air pack for time (if you're the one leading the drill you have to do it too - sorry).  Once they are sufficiently frustrated with you (because it is either too easy for them or they look like they are trying to fight off the rapacious spider monkey clinging to their back), ask them what their MAYDAY parameters are and have them call a MAYDAY. 

We conducted MAYDAY training for our folks (the whole thing - complete with insidious, diabolical props and obstacles) about 2 years ago and have subsequently trained about 20 probies in the intervening months.   At 6 months to a year’s time, the training seems to disappear - even after we tell them to practice calling a MAYDAY every time they check their SCBA.  The training seems to slink off into a dark nether region of the brain never to be retrieved again. There's a word for it - when vital training is allowed to lapse and we surrender to the pedestrian.  The word is complacency - and it is as nasty a word as you will ever hear in our profession.
  

Ask 10 firefighters to call a MAYDAY a year after the training and 8 of 10 will have the same reaction - if they never practice.  Their eyes roll back - they tilt their head and purse their lips in thought.  Their first words will not be, “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday.”  But rather, “Oh, (expletive).” Or, “Umm…”

We must find a way to reach our people though training in some way every time they report for duty.  The reaction to MAYDAY situations must be immediate.

MAYDAY and survival training are forms of “stress inoculation training” (SIT).  They are designed to create emotional responses to stressful situations in order to achieve a desired response.  These emotional bookmarks can become less vivid in the eye of our mind if we do not revisit these stressful training situations with regularity - this is true of any skill. 

Keep their heads in the game.  Make training relevant, interesting, make sure it involves everyone, and most of all, make it fun.

Ron Avery is a law enforcement trainer and a world-class competitive pistol shooter.  He pushes the envelope in terms of stress related training.  He calls the process “stress acclimatization.” The concept is that prior successes under stressful circumstances acclimatize you to similar situations and promote future success.  Avery describes the process this way:

“With proper training and the requisite conditioning and practice, we can achieve skills thought by others to be impossible.  There is a whole realm of possibilities we can teach and train (personnel) to perform.  Stress acclimatization is about measuring precise doses of stress followed by waves of recovery and then repeating these cycles very specifically.  There must be time for adaptation to take place and there must be enough training, repeated over time, to help it stick.”

Without regular practice, skills become dull, reactions to the stressor sluggish.

Individuals and crews can practice calling the Mayday using the following scenarios:

Have personnel read the following scenarios one at a time to give them an idea of the situation they have encountered.  When they have read one of the scenarios they are to call for help using the acronym NUCAN.

Scenario # 1

You are assigned to E1, your task is fire attack.  You and your partner enter a SFD via the A side door.  The floor collapses, sending you into the basement.  You cannot locate your partner, and are pinned under debris.  You have ¾ air remaining.

Call the MAYDAY.

Scenario # 2

You and your partner from E2 are backing up fire attack on the primary hose line when you lose voice contact with your partner and lose contact with the hose line.  You are in a large commercial building, approximately 200’ inside.  You attempt to find the hose line several times without success, and your low air warning device has activated.

Call the MAYDAY.

Scenario # 3

You are assigned to T1, your task is primary search.  You and your partner enter a 2 story SFD via A side door ascend the stairs and begin a primary search on the 2^nd floor.  During the search, the ceiling collapses dropping wires on your partner causing him to become entangled.  You attempt to free your partner, but succeed only in entangling him further.  Fire and heat conditions are getting worse.  You are both running low on air and neither of you have wire cutters in you turnouts.  You are both at just above ¼ air remaining.

Call the MAYDAY.

Scenario # 4

You are assigned to E3 and are performing a search with a partner in a SFD when the roof collapses on you and your partner.  You entered on the B side of house via an exterior window.  You are uninjured and mobile, but your partner is unconscious and pinned.  You are cut off from your primary exit and the fire is advancing on you.  You have ½ a tank of air remaining.

Call the MAYDAY.

Example:

•                Utilizing FACT parameters, call the Mayday based on the scenario listed above (NUCAN report)

•                State the actions you would take (turn on PASS, light, turn up radio volume)

•                State follow up information (sights, sounds, floor coverings)

Sample Mayday message:

Firefighter: “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday.”

IC: “Firefighter calling Mayday, give me your NUCAN report.”

Firefighter: “IC, firefighter Jones, Engine 3. (Name and Unit)

Searching first floor Bravo side. (Assignment and Location)

There was a collapse; I fell into the basement. I am alone, pinned, and cannot move. (Condition)

I am turning on my PASS and light. I have half a tank. (Actions and Air)

I need immediate assistance.” (Needs)

To add a greater degree of difficulty and realism, have the firefighter in distress don full PPE including SCBA mask and perform a physically demanding task prior to communicating the MAYDAY on their portable radio.  Place the lost firefighter in a remote location from the rescuer.  The rescuer should attempt to obtain NUCAN report from the lost firefighter (as the RIC group supervisor would) and take notes as they do so.  

Once the transmission is complete, the participants should get together to compare notes.  This is done to see if the rescuer (playing the role of RIC or IC) was able to extract key information from the lost firefighter.  Be sure to use a non - monitored tactical channel if using radios for practice.

Keep their heads in the game.  Make training relevant, interesting, make sure it involves everyone, and most of all, make it fun.

Successfully navigating the perils of a career in firefighting requires complete buy in - discipline, total commitment to training, and to the mission of safety.  It involves global awareness (meta-knowledge) a synthesis of wisdom accumulated over a career, training the right way, our perceptions, processing risk, and discoveries of the ever-evolving environment.  Only through this type of hyper-awareness are we better fire ground combatants.  Practice does not necessarily make perfect, practice makes permanent.



There is a great piece on FSW called "Stay the Course" by Gary Lane about guarding against complacency.  

Check it out.

Priorities

Intense search training keeps us incident ready.

So much of what we're willing to extend (risk) depends upon how much we are willing to put into our training (effort) in the form of sweat equity and mental preparation.  Brian Brush (The Fire Service Warrior) authors a nice article "You Will Search" on the responsibility we bear to perform a prompt and thorough search to fulfill our obligation to the public and - equally important - to each other. 


Hard work and preparation allows us to normalize risk.  Search is a top fire ground priority, not a luxury.


Think about it.

San Jose Firefighter Update

Knowing how to remove heated turnout gear is essential to limiting injuries

A San Jose firefighter who fell through a roof last week during vertical ventilation operations was injured more severely than initially reported.  Early reports were that the firefighter received burns to his hands and would not require surgery. It was determined late last week that he will require skin grafts to repair the damage to his hands.  The firefighter also sustained burns to his abdomen.


On Sunday two Modesto firefighters (members of The Firefighter’s Burn Institute) who survived of a roof collapse spent time with the injured firefighter at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center. The Modesto firefighters were in the area for a presentation for local firefighters on the near-miss that they experienced while conducting top-side ventilation on a single family dwelling in January, 2010.  


In addition to reviewing safety for top-side ventilation, this incident illustrates the importance of knowing how to remove heated turnout gear from an injured firefighter. Remember the following steps when attempting to remove super-heated structural turnout gear from an injured firefighter. This is just one method, the goal is careful removal of the turnout gear without compression or water application:

1. Loosen SCBA shoulder straps and unbuckle the waist strap.
2. Open the storm flap and unclasp hooks.
3. Open the coat, rolling it and the SCBA over the shoulders and off the arms.
4. Remove gloves and finish removing the coat.
5. Unclasp the pants, remove the suspenders allowing the pants to fall.
6. Roll the pants over the boots and assist in removal.

* If the firefighter is unconscious the goal is the same, though it will be more difficult to perform the skill.  Practice methods for both conscious and unconscious firefighters. Be sure to practice this skill while wearing structure gloves as the injured firefighter's heated gear - especially metal clasps and buckles - can cause burn injuries to those trying to help. 


We wish the injured San Jose firefighter a speedy recovery.


See: Firefighter Burn Injuries - Fire Engineering; April, 2010

San Jose Firefighter Survives Roof Collapse

Truck 14 firefighter pulls himself from the hole in the roof

A San Jose Firefighter is undergoing treatment for burns to his hands and waist at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center today after falling through a hole in the roof while conducting topside ventilation at a 4th alarm fire in an occupied 2 story apartment complex on March 15th.


The firefighter fell through the roof and hung up on the ceiling joists keeping him from falling all the way through to the apartment below.  A fellow firefighter was able to assist him safely from the roof.


Take the time to discuss ventilation operations in light of this near miss. 


Some things to ponder:


Topside ventilation is one of the most dangerous operations on the fire ground.  There are a number of possible disadvantages of vertical ventilation:

• Structural collapse, disorientation, and falls from the roof
• Topside ventilation takes time to perform and is sometimes impractical based upon response capabilities - not everybody has a truck company in the barn with them 
• Some roofs are difficult to breach
• Vertical ventilation is personnel intensive
• Topside ventilation must be carefully coordinated with fire suppression efforts 

The injured firefighter is assisted to an aerial ladder by a fellow firefighter

Prior to making any opening in a fire involved structure, the IC or firefighter must consider the following:

• Burn time - be skeptical before going up - favor a longer burn time as opposed to shorter
• What are we accomplishing by venting - do we need to vent here?
• What is the location of the fire?
• Where are the victims located?
• Where are interior crews operating?

Have pre-designated escape routes

LCES for roof operations:

• L - Lookouts
• C - Communication
• E - Escape routes
• S - Safety zones

Stay safe by staying informed.  Firefighting is an art that we are required to perform without adequate preparation or practice, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, failures, and botches, that are essential to training and developing our skill set.  The fate we discover is often dictated by our level of engagement and preparation.

"It was truly a life threatening situation," San Jose Fire Battalion Chief Robert Sapien said.  He stated that crews who battled the blaze "feel very fortunate" that the firefighter was not more severely injured.


Observe the present and learn from the past.  It all matters.






Additional links:
See garden style apartment fire considerations video from "A Firefighter's Own Worst Enemy."


Fire Engineering podcast on light weight truss construction by John Mittendorf