Workout August 7, 2010 - Structure Fire and Pack Test

This afternoon at work, my station was dispatched to a fire in a non-sprinklered apartment building. Dispatch reported heavy smoke and fire with multiple calls received. My company was the first truck to arrive on scene, meaning that the other firefighter and I were tasked to search the fire occupancy and the surrounding apartments. From the street, it looked like the column of black smoke was coming from the rear of the building. We took off down a side alley way, entered through a gate in the back into the courtyard and found dark smoke pushing out of one of the apartments. The engine crew was stretching a fire hoseline through the front door to attack the fire. Since there were about three people in the doorway, I grabbed the other firefighter and went through the sliding glass door to the right of the front door, in an effort to get around the log jam of people and search for anyone that might be inside. Turns out the sliding glass door actually led to an adjacent apartment.

We cleared that one quickly and then went back to climbing over the engine crew to search the apartment. The thick black smoke was banked down to the floor, so visibility was pretty minimal. I was able to use the TIC (thermal imaging camera) to see a little more clearly through the smoke. We started our search along the right wall and ended up in a bathroom. There appeared to be a small closet to the left of the bathroom, which we scanned quickly and then headed out looking for the bedroom. After searching the living room and kitchen and not finding the bedroom, we doubled back to the bathroom to search it again. That just seemed and odd place for a closet. It turns out this "closet" was actually the bedroom, but with a night stand directly to the right of the door frame and a book shelf on the left wall a few feet directly in front of the door made this room initially seem to be closed in like a closet. We were crawling to stay under the heat, so these felt just like walls.

The engine crew made an excellent knockdown of the fire, holding it to one apartment when it had the potential to be much worse. After the fire was out we overhauled it (removed smoldering and charred debris from the apartment and looked for any hidden fires or hot spots). This involved tearing out cabinets, window moldings, door jambs, and sheet rock and hauling it all outside.

While this was a workout in it's own right, it didn't really do anything for my cardio. Once we got back to the station, cleaned up our gear and equipment, I had a little bit of time to squeeze in a workout before dinner. I donned my 40 lb weight vest and vibram five fingers, hopped on the treadmill, and set it to mystery hike, max incline, max speed of 5. I was able to get in a good 10 minutes before the called chow. This was about half as long as I would've liked, but did prove to be a decent workout.