August 21, 2010 - Water Vac Day

Sometimes at work, the shifts tend to have themes. The theme for Saturday was flooding calls with us responding to 3 such calls. During a flooding call, we secure the water supply, do what we can to salvage personal property and belongings, and then remove as much water as we can from the building through the use of water vacuums and squeegees. We have two water vacs at my station. One is a backpack unit and the other is a larger one with wheels on the bottom.

On the second water vac call of the day I was wearing the backpack unit while the other firefighter on my crew operated the bigger vacuum. Luckily this apartment was unoccupied at the time so we didn't have a bunch of furniture and possessions to worry about. Good thing too, because there was a ton of water in this place.

Now, due to the amount of calls we were running that shift combined with cooking, I wasn't able to get in a workout. Still though, this water vac call just might count as a workout. The water vac I was wearing holds 6 gallons. When you figure 6 gallons of water weighs a good 50 lbs., and that I filled up and emptied the water vac 11 times, I removed over a quarter of a ton of water from the residence. Then bigger water vac no doubt removed much more than that, meaning "a ton of water" might actually not been that far off the mark.