Specialization is for Insects

Yesterday at the fire station we watched a one hour show on the Science Channel called “Built from Disaster – Tunnels”. It was mostly about how the Mont Blanc Tunnel fire in 1999 has affected tunnel design. And we couldn’t believe one of the lessons they missed.
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I took a 40 hour firefighting class this week, and got a certificate proclaiming me a “Firefighter Rescue Technician”.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t a great class. The biggest problem is that the class lacked focus. I went there every day for five days, and I’m not sure what it was I was supposed to be learning.

When I signed up for the class, the class was called “RIT Company Operations”. I knew exactly what I expected to learn, and I was excited to see what they had to offer. However, sometime between the registration and the class, they changed the name to “Firefighter Rescue Technician”.

No problem, right? Firefighter Rescue Technician still sounds like it might have a lot to do with RIT. (Perhaps I should explain that RIT stands for Rapid Intervention Team. At every fire where firefighters are entering a dangerous environment, there is supposed to be a designated RIT company ready to rescue the firefighters.)

Unfortunately, the “Firefighter Rescue Technician” class didn’t have a whole lot to do with RIT operations.
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I’ve been real busy at the firehouse lately.

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I helped put out a train fire early last Saturday morning. The engine was blowing fire out of it’s exhaust stack. The engineer had shut everything down, but the engine continued to run because the fuel injectors had jammed open. (This is called “dieseling” . A diesel engine doesn’t need electricity to keep running — as long as there is a supply of fuel and oxygen, the engine will keep going.) The engineer said this is a fairly common occurrence.

We extinguished the fire with foam. It took surprisingly little foam to put the fire out. Once the fire was out, the engine shut down. We turned the engine back over to the train engineer and went back to our station.

I got to go to an apartment fire on Friday. It was a good time.

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We went to a fire in Flossmoor last night. One of our guys got injured.

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