By Mick Mayers
I was lying on my couch, trying to take a nap after being up all night at a fire, and got to thinking of some of the burnt things I have seen in my life. I have seen some things burn that have got me wondering: Just what were the individuals thinking in the moments leading up to that event?
I remember one Super Bowl a number of years ago, or shall I say, I remember what should have been the Super Bowl. I don’t remember who was playing or how it ended up because shortly after the beginning, we were sent to a house fire. Our arrival found a small residence with smoke issuing from around the closed front door and eddying around the soffit at the roof line. The moment I opened the truck door, however, I knew exactly the cause and ordered my crew to force the front door. Any firefighter worth his or her boots can distinguish the smell of a pot burning on the stove. The nasty, sickly protein burning smell that once on your clothes, you will always remember because it doesn’t come off for the rest of the shift, and sometimes you even smell it for days later.
In this event, the house was fully charged with smoke but lo and behold; nobody was home. The residents put a pot of beans on the stove, turned it on, and inexplicably, left. And while this was bad enough, we (more tragically) missed a significant portion of the game, while trying to exhaust the horrible stench from the empty house. In fact, they never did show up; we were forced to finally lock the home back up and leave a note for them to call the station when they got home so we could explain the situation.
I have seen more than my share of tragedy and the horrors of individuals burned, but you can only laugh a little when you arrive at a report of a burning home and find that the resident tried to cook a pizza in the box. This has actually happened more than once in my career (thus the reason for the warning on the box: Not to re-heat the pizza in the box). Fortunately, the worst of the calls was a difficult smoke removal scenario, but never anyone hurt or the loss of a home.
On one of these alarms, we arrived to find the babysitter and three very scared and upset youngsters in the yard with the smoking pizza box, trying to explain on a cell phone to the parents why all the fire trucks were in their neighborhood. While the crew put some strategically placed fans to work, I gave the kids a tour of the truck and they ended up with plastic fire helmets and we even passed the pizza delivery guy heading to their house as we returned to quarters.
I have seen a burnt postal truck with the neighborhood mail in it and wondered not only about the checks and invoices and other important business mail, but the unread letters and cards and missed messages that went up with it. I have been to any number of bathroom fan fires and thought, I‘d hate to have been in there, minding my own business (literally) only to realize there was a fire in the room with you. I have seen burned birdhouses, burned porta-potties, burned docks, and burned street signs.
I am never completely surprised. My father, also a fire chief, told us: “Nothing is fire-proof; a cinder block at the bottom of the ocean will burn if you bring it to the right temperature." I certainly understand that and realize that while a fire isn’t funny, the circumstances surrounding them sometimes can be.
