Marine Biology
This ain’t so bad.
Last time I was standing on top of a ladder, it was forty feet in the air, rescuing a kitten who was fifty something feet up a tree blowing around in the wind. Not a math major, but fifty something minus forty equals something more than my height. So there was some … um … creativity involved.
If necessity is the mother of invention, doggedness is its father. Back then, I was not coming down the ladder a second time without the kitten we were sent to rescue. This time, I am not leaving the house a second time without figuring out a way to stop the attic fire.
I have already figured out we need a leprechaun on the department. Or maybe a troll. Anyone small, compact and tough. Gimli would be great. The attic access panel in the bedroom closet is a no – go. It is way too small, and I can’t even get my head up into the attic to see because my air tank is getting caught on the ceiling. So, out the house I go to tell Chief 3 Brian that I need the attic nozzle, and ask Lt. Alan to send a new charged line (a hose full of water) into the house with the attic nozzle on the end of it. Then I go back into the house.
The house has a cathedral ceiling in its living room / kitchen, and FF Mitch (who has already knocked down the exterior fire) has punched a hole through the blackened ceiling drywall to get some water into the attic. But that is only going to get water on trusses near the hole, and that is not going to be enough. We need to get water on a much bigger area of the attic, quickly.
Hence the attic nozzle, a whirligig device that sprays water 360 degrees around. I thought I’d be delivered that on a new attack line but, when FF James comes in with what Troy and Alan have made for me, it is the other attic nozzle. It is a metal tube about the size of a bassoon, and only slightly less unwieldly as the ridiculously complicated instrument Colin mastered. The end is a spear with holes in it, spraying water in all directions. It works by punching it through the ceiling, working two valves, and letting loose with the water.
Well, in theory.
In practice, somebody has to pierce that thing through the ceiling. And because the ceiling is eighteen or twenty feet or something like that tall, the somebody doing the piercing has to be tall and has to stand on top of a ladder to get to a ledge so they can punch the spear several feet above their head through the ceiling into the attic.
The operative phrase being, “on top of the ladder to get to a ledge". Not close to the top, where the ladder gets wobbly and you worry about falling. On top, where you really have to set the whole worrying thing aside and focus on the task at hand. The pointy end of the ladder, to transfer to a ledge. While fully gear-up breathing bottled air in giant clumsy boots.
Luckily, pointy ends of mountains with ledges offering falls waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay, waaaaaaaaaaaaaay down into kinetically final resting places was kind of my thing for a bit, so … easy peasy.
Up I go. Top of the ladder, step to the ledge. Eight-foot fall, at worst. This ain’t so bad.
James hands the water bassoon up to me (which, by the way, is full of water and heavy) and, as deftly as I am able, I punch it through the ceiling. In theory. In practice, it hits a rafter and does not penetrate. Re-aim and PUNCH THROUGH and because of all my ballet training somehow I do not fall off the ledge and who am I kidding the ballet training thing is a joke.
But I say this as assuredly as George Costanza WAS a marine biologist that day, I WAS Baryshnikov on that ladder and ledge.
Just like not really remembering how I got Bailey down out of the tree with one hand holding her and one hand unclipping myself from the strap holding me onto the tree / ladder, I don’t really remember the nuance of how I stayed on the ladder / ledge while the attic nozzle was doing its thing. I was more intrigued by what was going on in the attic. I knew I was flowing water – I could hear it and feel it pulsing through the hose – but neither I nor anyone else could see exactly what was happening on the other side of the ceiling drywall.
Until we could.
A minute or so into my Baryshnikov with a water bassoon routine, the whole ceiling came down -- with a whoooossshh of hot steam -- at once. With my head being the first thing it hit on the way down. It must have made a racket, because the officers outside radio’ed that everyone had to evacuate the house. So that started to happen but it wasn’t fast enough so the order gets repeated and I’m thinking to myself, “Gentlemen, yeah. I’m up here on this ledge and ladder and I just got hit with a ceiling and haven’t fallen off so just give me a break ... as I figure out how to get down but first let me get a good look into the attic so I can report just how excellent we marine biologists on the inside were when we get outside to safety …”
The bad news, of course, is putting out fires is messy. The ceiling would have had to be pulled down in any event to make sure every part of the fire was out before we left.
As always, you feel awful the family is going to have to deal with water damage and hire someone to dry out the house and repair the charred roof trusses and all the rest. But the good news is we got on scene promptly and got water on the exterior and interior fires quickly, solving the cascade of problems which presented themselves in rapid succession as a committed team of volunteers. The family’s house, and their belongings, and their photos and treasures that can’t be replaced, are still there.
A bad day to be sure, but if fourteen Poynette and four Arlington firefighters would not have immediately stopped whatever it was they were doing when their pagers went off, it would have been much, much worse.
Save the whale George, for me.
