Glory Days

Central Florida Fire Academy

To orient you: On the grounds of the fire academy, the classrooms were in th5 buildings in the lower right corner. The building labeled “2966” was the burn building. Three stories tall, it’s where we did all of our practice fires. The building just above the word “Central” was set up for climbing, rappelling, and ladder drills. The field just below it and to the left was where we practiced natural gas and vehicle fires. The large building just below the pond had a fire station and some dark mazes in it.

There were field sessions and classroom sessions. Classroom sessions were where we learned regulations, fire theory, and which NFPA chapter regulated what activity. I remember the fire academy was divided into two sections- the first section lasted about 3 months, and we did about 1/3 field work and 2/3 classroom. Session two was flipped- another three months of about 80% field work.

We began every field day in the fire academy the same way:

We would line up in ranks on the pavement in front of that fire station with our gear on the ground in front of us. The chief instructor would walk in and yell “GO!” and you would have 60 seconds to get all of your gear on properly. Then the drills would start.

I went to the academy on a schedule that saw us doing field sessions all through the summer. That was brutal. You learn not to eat breakfast or lunch. All we would have for breakfast and lunch was gallon jugs of Gatoraide. I swear I was drinking two to three gallons of that stuff every single day I was in school. The instructors used to tell us that, if we did eat, we should eat something colorful so our vomit would be entertaining. They called it our art project. I think I threw up in training at least once a month. You try not to get it on you or your teammates, wipe your mouth, and keep going. For God’s sake don’t throw up while you have an SCBA mask on.

Half of the field days in session two was always us doing the “Big Three.” You would put on an airpack for time and score, then pull an uncharged hose from the hose bed about 200 feet, charge it, then use the water stream to knock down three cones that were 50 feet away. Then move over to pick up and carry a 100 pound ladder through an obstacle course and raise it against that ladder drill building. All in full gear, all for time, and all of it with the instructors grading everything.

You could lose points:

• If you forgot to sing out that both of the pressure gauges on the SCBA were within 100 psi of each other
• Didn’t call out that you had checked that the dogs on the ladder were both locked, points off
• staggered on your feet when water pressure was applied, points off.
• Face shield on your helmet not all the way down, points off
• If either end of the ladder touched anything it wasn’t supposed to (the ground, a cone, another student), you guessed it…

There seemed to be an endless list of things that got points deducted.

We did hundreds of drills that included:

• crawling through pitch black mazes that went up and down stairs, had ropes in them set up to entangle you, dolls and mannequins hidden in them you had to find, sometimes with choke points so small that in order to make it through you had to take the tank off your back while keeping the mask on, pass the tank through first, then put it back on after clearing the choke point.
• raising a 30 foot ladder to completely vertical, fellow students holding it there with ropes while you climbed up one side, went over the top, then climbed back down the other side.
• Rappelling from the third floor to the ground, then learning to rappel from the third floor in to the second floor window, tie a harness on to another student, attach them to your gear, then out that window with them to the ground.
• We ran the combat challenge once a month

And of course we put out fires: Basement fires, car fires, gas fires, you name it, we learned to put it out. It was an incredibly fun and rewarding experience. We did everything you could think of that a basic firefighter would do. Practiced with axes, saws, pike poles, air chisels, crowbars, you name it.

Even training like this was dangerous. Several firefighter candidates have been killed in training. One in Miami died from heat stress. Another in Orlando after falling from the ladder building was giving her class a thumbs up as they took her to the hospital. Her aorta ruptured after she got to the ED, and she died right there. It’s a dangerous business.

At the end of all of that training, a state examiner came and tested our skills. First a written exam, followed by “the Big Three,” then 5 random skills and an oral quiz about HAZMAT procedures. My class started with 30 people. Of them 24 graduated, and 22 of us passed the state exam.

As far as I know, all but two of us is now retired, and those two are now chief level officers.

For the most part, the women didn’t do as well. There were 5 women in my class. Two didn’t get certified. Of the three who did, one was a beast. She was a Native American and I swear her Indian name had to be Kicks Lots of Ass. That woman was a true warrior who didn’t know what the word quit meant. She was also the oldest one of us. I can’t imagine going through that class as a 40 year old.

One of the guys who didn’t pass was a heartthrob. Women loved him, he was a good looking guy who had abs that looked like he did sit-ups in his sleep. Strong as an ox and could run laps for days. He was a nice guy, but he was dumb as a post. He was so good looking that he was the one the local news channel did a story on how hard it was to become a firefighter. So why did he fail?

I spent 4 hours the day before the state test trying to teach him the eight knots you had to know to pass the state test. In that four hours, I managed to get him to tie one of them correctly on a consistent basis: a bowline. (Some of the others were clove hitch, figure eight, figure eight on a bight, chimney knot, sheep shank, sheet bend, I can’t remember what the eighth was, it’s been 30 years) Anyhow, as luck would have it, the knot he was asked to tie by the examiner was the one knot he had been able to master- the bowline.

He got it wrong and failed the exam.

That fire academy no longer exists. It shut down, and a chapter of central Florida history came to a close. 48 years of teaching young recruits to become firefighters. Three classes a year most years, usually 20-30 per class. Thousands of firefighters began their careers there.

Everyone seems to enjoy the inside information from the fire department. So here is a brief series about what the fire department in Florida is like. Of course details vary by department, and we aren’t like departments up north, where the department pays your way through the academy. (unless you are a minority or a woman- see below)

Licensure

Firefighting is a pretty popular career. To become a firefighter in Florida, the law says you have to be licensed by the state. There are two ways to do that-

• Go through the fire academy, which takes from 4-6 months (depending on how many hours you go per week). When I went, we trained three nights per week for 4 hours each, and 8 hours on Saturday. It took 6 months. About 80% of those who began my class went on to pass the licensing exam.
• Or, if you can prove you were a certified firefighter from another state, you could challenge the exam. Most who do this don’t pass, mostly because they don’t understand the little things the examiners are looking for.

That licensing exam is a beast. First, a written test, followed by a practical exam. The practical exam is things like knot tying, hazardous materials awareness, and the “big three.” There are many small places where you can lose points, and missing more than a few of them means you fail. Passing says you have passed “minimum standards” to work as a firefighter in Florida. The journey is just beginning.

Once you complete that hurdle, you have to become either an EMT-Basic, or a Paramedic. It isnt’ required by law, but I don’t know of a single fire department that hires firefighters who aren’t also certified in one of these. EMT takes 1-3 months, and Paramedic takes 6 months to a year, depending on how many hours per week your school holds class. Then of course, there is the obligatory licensing exam.

There are a few departments who will hire EMTs and Medics without fire certifications, but they can’t fight fire, and get A LOT less money. Some other departments will hire paramedics and then put them through the fire academy, medic school is more demanding than the fire academy.

Many applicants will work for an ambulance company somewhere while waiting to be hired. The pay is not very good (Taco Bell pays more than EMTs make driving an ambulance), and spending too long at one of these companies (more than 2 years or so) gets you labeled as unhirable. Departments just assume there is something wrong with you.

Hiring Process

So now you are a certified firefighter. How do you get a job? You look for fire departments that are hiring. Some departments are better than others. Each has different pay and benefit structures. Some are better at their jobs or better equipped than others. You really should research a department before you apply.

Some departments have additional requirements. Some require that you be certified as a HAZMAT Technician, some hire paramedics only, some require that you be a certified Emergency Vehicle Operator. It varies by department. Generally, the more certs a department requires, the more it pays, the better it is to work there, and the more competitive the hiring process.

Some departments don’t get enough qualified minority applicants, so they will hire a limited number of uncertified people. The competition is fierce for these spots. One department I know of got applicants from all over the USA for these spots. If selected, those departments pay you to attend the schools to get your certification. Some departments play it shady to increase minority applications for those programs- one even ran the ads for it only in Spanish and only in the Spanish only newspapers in the area.

When my old department would have an opening, we would get about 200 applications for each open position. Departments like Boca Raton and Orlando have very high starting pay and great benefits. As a result, they get the pick of the best, and will get up to a thousand applicants for each open position. There had to be a way to filter out the lazy and stupid. There are numerous ways to do that.

We had a written exam, as most departments do. Of those who took the exam, the top 25% were invited to return for the practical exam. The practical exam can be as simple as a combat challenge, or a more complex one. Here is the combat challenge, which looks easy, but certainly is not:

You have to finish that in less than 8 minutes to even be considered, many can’t finish at all. My best time is 3 minutes and 42 seconds, and that is a good time. The stuff you see them using in that video is full weight firefighting equipment. These guys in the video are some of the fastest in the world at that drill. In fact, the world record is 1:14.76, so the guy in that video is only about 3 seconds from a world record.

• That firefighting gear is heavy and hot. It’s like exercising while wearing a 40 pound sleeping bag.
• Those rolled up hoses at the beginning on the stairs? the one he carries is about 70 pounds. The roll he hoists with a rope is about 50 pounds. Those gloves are slick, and they make that hoist a challenge
• Your feet have to touch every step on the way down.
• That metal beam on the sled that he’s hitting and driving with a sledge? It weighs 150 pounds
• That charged hose he’s dragging weighs about 170 pounds with the water in it
• The dummy he’s carrying weighs about 200 pounds.

These exercises are designed to wear you down, upper and lower body, as well as cardio. It’s difficult. As I said, many people can’t do it. When I did my personal best of 3:42, I almost passed out at the end. I had to have people help me get my gear off because my arms refused to work and I was seeing stars, which before that point I thought was a myth.

Some departments have you crawl through mazes in the dark, with the mazes being very nearly to small to fit through. Other departments have medical scenarios. The end result is the same- the department generates a hiring list that narrows down those hundreds of applicants to a ranked list of perhaps 20 or 30 recruits, and the department hires from that list. The people who tend to be at the top of one department’s list tend to be at the top of everyone’s list, so most departments only consider their lists valid for six months before retesting to generate another list.

When an applicant is offered the job, they are background tested. Those requirements vary. All will exclude people with felonies. Some departments will exclude anyone with a misdemeanor, or require waivers. My department was no criminal convictions ever, and no traffic tickets in the past 36 months.

When I was hired, I tested for three different fire departments:

• In the first, I was #7 on the selectee list. They hired numbers 1-5, number 14, and number 19. Why did they skip? Number 14 was a paramedic, and number 19 was a woman. There are very, very few women firefighters. Quotas, don’t you know.
• The second one, I don’t know why I didn’t get it.
• I was hired by the third department- there were two of us hired that year. It was the first time in 2 years they had hired anyone, and the other firefighter hired with me was a woman.

Yeah, being a woman, a minority, or a paramedic makes it much easier to get hired. If you can manage to be all three, you can pretty much have your choice of any department you want. White EMTs without experience? Your odds are about 1 in 400 of getting hired by the time you consider schooling and the hiring process. Some don’t make it through training, and many people go through the licensure process and never get hired before their firefighting license expires. They will never get hired. Like sperm, they die off before ever becoming what they could have been.

Hired

From there, you are hired as a probationary firefighter. There is a training program for most departments, then you make it on to a crew. Once you report to the crew, there is still more training before you can operate on your own, and before you can get off probation. Your crew and the training officers decide if you make it all the way through your probation. That’s a future post.

Fire engines are all built the same basic way. They have a pump, some mounted in front of the powerplant, some behind. The vast majority of fire pumps are centrifugal pumps. That is, the shaft of the pump spins a sort of pinwheel called in impeller that throws water from the center of the impeller to the outside.

One thing is always in common- the intakes for the pump are always located at or below the centerline of the pump, and the discharges are located above the centerline of the pump. Here is a fire pump that has been removed from the fire engine and has cutaways for students to learn how a pump works.

Fire pumps on trucks are rated by gallons per minute that can flow from the pump while it is drawing a suction from a static source like groundwater up a 10-foot vertical lift and a discharge pressure of 150 psi. If they are being supplied by pressurized water, like from a hydrant, they can pump far more. The pump on my last engine was rated for 1625 gpm, but we went out and tested it for training once while hooked up to a hydrant on a 36 inch water main and got more than 2800 gpm.

You can quickly see a pump’s capacity without even looking at the data plate by just counting the discharges. The only ones that count are 2.5 inches or larger.

• 2.5 inch discharge: Rated for 250 GPM
• 4-inch discharge: Rated for 625 GPM
• 5-inch discharge: Rated for 1,000 GPM
• 6-inch discharge: Rated for 1,440 GPM

As an example, my engine had 4 inch and a half discharges, which don’t count. It also had 4 two and a half inch discharges and a 4 inch discharge.

For supply connections, we had one on each side of the engine, and one on the front bumper. Since that one on the front bumper had piping that had to bend around the engine, front axle, and other structures, it was not as effective due to friction losses as the ones on the side of the truck, which went directly into the pump itself.

Fire engines can have a water tank as small as 300 gallons, although 500 is typical. Since we were in a an outlying area of town with hydrants that could be farther away, the tank on my engine was 1250 gallons of water and 50 gallons of foam concentrate. The other engines in the city had 750 gallon tanks.

The hose carried on a fire truck is impressive, and the smaller the tank, the more hose and other equipment it can carry. My engine carried:

• 1200 feet of 5 inch supply line
• 500 feet of 3 inch supply line
• 300 feet of a 2.5 inch attack line in the hose bed
• 250 feet of 2.5 inch attack line in a crosslay
• a pair of 200 foot long 1.75 inch attack line in two different crosslays
• 100 foot of attack line on the bumper for car and trash fires
• other miscellaneous short lines for odd jobs, which totaled another 300 feet or so

An engine with a small 300 gallon tank has quite a bit more room for hoses and other firefighting equipment. In addition to all of the hoses, we carried hose fittings, spare nozzles, fans, saws, extension cords, power tools, 12 spare air bottles for SCBA, a ground monitor for big deluge operations, another 25 gallons of Class A foam, medical equipment, thermal imaging equipment, hydraulic and pneumatic extrication equipment, 5 different ladders, and more.

A person who was going to drive that truck had to have at least 18 months on the job, spend at least 50 hours driving it under instruction from a senior driver, had to attend and pass a pump operator’s course, and be able to navigate our obstacle course made of traffic cones. Also, he had to demonstrate the basic maintenance and operation of every single item on the vehicle.

A new guy at our station had to, within 2 weeks of being hired, be able to draw from memory a diagram of the contents of the entire truck. Additionally, he had to be able to go get any piece of equipment when asked, without opening any compartment other than the one where the equipment was found. Firefighters who couldn’t do that would have their probation extended, and if they still couldn’t do it in a reasonable amount of time, they were terminated.

In a future post, I will explain everything it took to become a firefighter in my department.

One of the things you learn when driving fire trucks is called “protecting the scene.” As the driver of a large piece of fire apparatus, you park it at an angle across the lane of the road where your crew is working and the one adjacent to it. You angle the front tires in such a way that, should the rig get struck, it won’t be pushed into your crew. A Fort Worth fire crew recently demonstrated why this idea is so important. The driver of this fire truck likely saved multiple lives when he did this.

From three years ago. I figure this is needed since there is a lot of misinformation about the hurricane response.

Many people see FEMA as some sort of large Federal organization that responds to emergencies. They aren’t. What FEMA is, is a guy with a Rolodex (Remember those? If you don’t, ask your parents, snowflake.) and a checkbook. There isn’t some magical team of Federal Employees sitting around, waiting for “the big one” so they can swoop in and save everyone. That isn’t how it works.

No, this FEMA guy’s phonebook is filled with the contact information of local and state resources that can be called in an emergency. Those resources respond, tracking expenses and man hours used, and the FEMA guy then breaks out the checkbook to reimburse the states involved. The Governor doesn’t call out FEMA for shit. If you want to get technical, FEMA can’t do a thing unless the President tells them to. (Didn’t Trump catch hell for that recently?) FEMA’s largest contribution is writing the check to pay for it all.

After 9/11, the US government came up with the concept of Urban Search and Rescue Teams. They follow a set of guidelines in equipment and training, so that all of them nationwide operate on a similar set of procedures. This makes them interoperable across state lines: a person qualified for one could easily fit into any of the others. A USAR is equipped with everything from power generators to food trailers and rescue equipment. They have medical supplies, fuel, and all other equipment needed to fulfill their mission. Each USAR maintains over 5,000 pieces of equipment and has 140 or so assigned personnel. They can operate independently for 2 weeks, longer with resupply of fuel, food, and other consumables.

While there are some variations in the mission for each team (a team in Florida doesn’t need to be equipped for blizzards, for example) the teams are remarkably similar in training and equipment.

Florida doesn’t need FEMA resources for a building collapse. The state has eight Urban Search and Rescue Teams, all of whom are trained and equipped for that. Each one is centered on a large city, and draws its personnel from surrounding first responders. These first responders volunteer for the team, are sent to special training, and then become qualified for the team. Specialists are trained in HAZMAT, trench rescue, building collapse, confined space, water rescue, dive rescue, high angle, and vehicle and machinery rescue. Every member is certified as an EMT or Paramedic. It takes 2 to 3 years of training to fully qualify for a USAR team, on top of the extra training that they do on a constant basis. Most USAR members are the best of what their employing agencies have to offer. They are the most motivated and able of emergency responders.

To be honest, I loved deployments. Not because deployments meant people were suffering. No, mostly it was because they were a test of all that you had learned. That, and a FEMA deployment usually pays pretty well. I was deployed to Katrina for 12 days and was paid more than $5,000. You want people who bring years of expertise and thousands of hours of training to come save you? You want people willing to live on 3 hours’ sleep a night without bathing while shitting in a bucket and eating old MRE’s for two weeks? It’s gonna cost ya. That kind of expertise and dedication isn’t cheap.

When talking about libertarian theories of government, someone always comes forward with the example that fire departments be privatized. When I point out that private fire departments were already tried in this country and didn’t work, someone always points to volunteer fire departments as an example.

And they are wrong. Fire departments are a subject in which I consider myself to be an expert, having functioned and worked in half a dozen of them over a three decade period. I have been a volunteer with at least four different volunteer fire departments. Three of them are no longer staffed by volunteers, and the fourth is in a VERY rural area.

The problems with running a volunteer department are many. Let’s start with the reason why libertarians want to use them- money.

Funding

While cheaper than a full time, paid department, volunteer departments still cost money, and in most cases those departments are nowhere near as effective as a career department. There are only two ways that a fire department can be funded: Through tax dollars, or through voluntary donations called “membership fees.”

The tax dollar funding model is self explanatory, so I will spend some time discussing membership fees. In order to become a member of the fire association, each property owner pays a voluntary membership fee, with these fees ranging from $30 to a couple of hundred, depending on the particulars. If a member’s property is responded to by the fire department, their membership fee is all that they pay. If the fire department responds to a nonmember’s house, there are two possibilities:

• The department refuses to respond to the nonmember’s property. This creates a lot of bad press, as people think that it’s wrong to allow a home to burn down because they haven’t paid. There are those who say “Just let them pay the fee after the house catches fire.”
• So the department has a fee structure where a nonmember is billed after they have a fire. That is not really workable, because the chances of any one person having a fire is exceedingly small, on the order of 1 in 10,000 or so. Many people will roll the dice in such a situation and wait until they have a fire to pay. If everyone refused to pay until they have a fire, the department would either have no funds, or the fee would be so large that people couldn’t pay it. Even volunteer departments charge fees of $5,000 or more to put out your fire.

All fire departments require large amounts of funding. There are fire trucks to be bought, a fire station, firefighting equipment, insurance, utilities, fuel, and a myriad of other expenses like training that all must be paid for. The larger and busier the department is, the more that costs.

Let me explain:

Volunteer department D: This was a very busy volunteer fire and rescue squad in a large city (over 400,000 people) that had been in operation since the 1950s. Over the years, more and more career firefighters were added to staff the station during periods when the volunteers were unavailable. When I was there, one fire engine and one ladder truck in the station were staffed 24/7 by a crew of 8 career firefighters, while several EMS units and a second fire engine were staffed by volunteers. There are no longer any volunteer firefighters there. While I was there, it was volunteer, but it still was funded by tax dollars and had an ISO rating of 4/9.

Volunteer Department H: This is a volunteer department in a very rural area of the Ozark mountains. It’s staffed by untrained volunteers, and while they work hard, they have almost no money for equipment. The fire engine that they had was a 1950’s era fire truck. In the year that I was there, they had exactly 5 fires: 2 brush fires, 2 chimney fires, and one house fire that saw the house burn to the ground. It had an ISO rating of 9. It is funded through mandatory fire fees that are collected through the county tax office, and has an operating budget of about $50,000 a year, even though there are only about 500 residents.

Volunteer Department B: This was a busy volunteer department that responded to approximately 4,000 calls per year out of two stations that contained a total of four engines, two brush trucks, two ambulances, a pair of tankers, and a rescue squad. The ambulance at each station was staffed by two career firefighters, and the fire engines were staffed by volunteers. The requirement was that one fire engine at each station was staffed 24/7 by two volunteers. Each volunteer was required to be in the station for four 12 hour shifts per month. The funding for this department came from tax dollars. Eventually, the department went to a full time career staffing model. When it was volunteer, it had an ISO rating of 5/8.

Volunteer Department M: This was also a busy volunteer department. It responded to about 1,500 calls per year out of one station. It served a small town of about 12,000 people until the late 90s, when the population (and 911 calls) exploded, with the town going from a population of 12,000 to 70,000 within just three years. The volunteer system collapsed under the weight of increased call volume, and it was taken over by a career department. The station had a rescue squad, a tanker, a fire engine, and a brush truck and was supported by tax dollars. Its ISO rating was a 6/9, but the station is gone and there is a gas station where it used to be.

There are some very successful and large volunteer fire departments. The Thibodaux Volunteer Fire Department is one such department. It boasts 500 volunteers responding to calls out of 10 fire stations, with 150 of those volunteers being active in responding to calls, the rest of them doing fundraising and other services. The department has an ISO rating of 3. However, the city of Thibodaux provides nearly half of the department’s $2 million in operating expenses from tax dollars. This is a great example of the best in Volunteer firefighting, but it still needs to be funded through taxes.

Staffing

The additional fact is that volunteerism is declining in this country, and has been for decades. A lot of factors go into the reasons for that. The demands on volunteers’ time is one- training, maintenance, and increasing call volumes are big reasons for this. Not to mention, it’s easy to get people to show up to the “exciting” calls like plane crashes, fires, and auto accidents. It isn’t nearly as easy to get volunteers to show up to EMS calls, because it isn’t “fun” to show up and deal with the demented old lady who is covered in her own shit. Firefighters, especially volunteers, are adrenaline junkies, and EMS runs just aren’t exciting.

Trust me- I was in charge of retention and response at department M during the end of my time there. We tried a mandatory staffing model like Department B, but there weren’t enough volunteers to do it. We tried paying a volunteer $5 an hour to staff it during the day when the other volunteers were at work. Then we tried paying volunteers $4 each for showing up to EMS calls, but that didn’t work either. The demands on people’s time was just too much to bear. The number of calls that went unanswered climbed steadily, until almost 10 percent of non-fire calls went unanswered. People just didn’t want to run the “boring” calls. As one volunteer told me- “I am here because I like putting out fires. I give the time I want to give, that’s what volunteering means. I am not about to come in at 2 am just to wipe grandma’s ass or deal with some homeless junkie.”

Training

Another demand on firefighter time is training. Everyone likes to do live burns. Those are fun. Where people don’t like to train is in the more dry subjects- classroom time in HAZMAT, medical training, and the hundred other topics that are required to run a fire department. It’s getting more and more difficult to get people to come to things like training. Even paid firefighters hate training- and there is a lot of it. To become a state certified firefighter and EMT in Florida takes nearly 2,000 hours of training, and then another 250 or so hours of training per year. It’s a lot, and volunteers just don’t have the time to engage that much.

It’s tough, and it’s getting tougher, to recruit, train, and retain volunteers. It’s tough to fund their operations without using tax dollars- in fact, it’s almost impossible to do so without some form of mandatory, tax funded source of income.

A recent article about a Lake County, Florida fire truck accidentally laying 1200 feet of firehose down the middle of the Florida Turnpike and causing damage to a number of cars made me want to post about the old days when I still did that sort of thing.

The hose that runs from the fire hydrant to the fire truck is called supply line. Most supply line is 3 inches or more in diameter, and in Central Florida, it’s usually 5 inches. (Orlando uses 4 inch, but that is because they typically have fire hydrants that are close together).

First, a bit of engineering.

The reason for this is hydrodynamics and friction loss. The average water main pressure is about 65 psi. At 1,000 gallons per minute, a 3 inch hose loses 80 pounds of pressure every 100 feet of hose length due to friction between the moving water and the hose itself, while a 4 inch diameter hose loses 20 pounds of pressure, and a 5 inch hose loses only 8 pounds. That means, if you want longer hose lays with high flow, the larger the diameter of your supply line, the better.

There is a lot of math involved in being the driver of a fire engine. You need to be able to calculate your friction losses in your head, rapidly, and remember that the lives of the guys in the burning building depend on you getting it correct. When you are flowing 2,000 gallons per minute through half a dozen different hose lines a 2 in the morning at a burning strip mall isn’t the time to realize that you are math deficient.

5 inch supply line has what is called a “sexless coupling” meaning that there is no male or female end, the couplings are interchangeable. This allows you to start laying from either the fire to the hydrant, called a reverse lay, or from the hydrant to the fire, called a forward lay. There are advantages and disadvantages to both, but we won’t talk about that in this post.

My fire truck carried 1200 feet of 5 inch diameter supply line. That means with standard hydrant pressure, I could get a bit more than 800 gallons per minute into my engine without having to put another fire engine at the hydrant to boost pressure.

The problem with this is twofold:

• 5 inch hose is heavy. Each 100 foot section weighs a bit more than 100 pounds without water in it. Filled with water, that increases to over 1,000 pounds.
• 5 inch hose is bulky. The hose itself lays flat, but the couplings are a pain. The hose has to be loaded on the truck in a specific way, or it won’t come out of the truck correctly.

In Practice:

Both of these issues mean that 5 inch is a pain in the ass. It’s worth it, but that is not much consolation when you have to lay and reload 1200 feet of it. Anyhow, if loaded correctly, that hose comes out of the truck like a scalded dog. Like so:

I sympathize with the guys that this happened to. I once laid all 1200 feet of my supply line without meaning to when I was on the way to a large multi alarm fire. We hit a bump, the hose began laying out, and I dumped all 1200 feet in the middle of the road.

There was another time that the water department had removed a hydrant without telling the fire department. I arrived at a fire at 2 o’clock in the morning with the assignment of “secure the water supply.” I decided to do what is called a reverse lay.

So I began laying my supply hose at the fire, and headed to where I thought the closest hydrant was. 1,000 feet later, I arrived at where the hydrant was (or so I thought) and it was no longer there. After the fire was out, the other guys on the engine were not happy with me at all as we loaded all thousand pounds of hose back onto the truck.

The reason for that, is the hose is loaded by the driver backing over the hose as firefighters standing on the back of the truck lift it and load it back on the truck. The driver doesn’t do a thing but drive, the firefighters load the hose. I wasn’t a popular guy that night…

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For those who are interested, the amount of hose and other equipment carried on the engine I was assigned to for the last six years of my career as a firefighter was pretty impressive. We had:

• 1200 feet of 5 inch supply line
• 300 feet of 3 inch supply line
• a single 30 foot piece of 5 inch supply line in the side running board
• a 250 foot length of 2 1/2 inch line preconnected to a smooth bore nozzle (cross lay)
• a 300 foot piece of 2 1/2 inch line preconnected to a gated wye
• a pair of 1 3/4 inch line that were 200 feet each, with nozzles connected to them (cross lays)
• a 100 foot long 1 3/4 inch “trash line” on the front bumper
• another 200 feet of 2 1/2 inch line, and 300 feet of 1 3/4 inch line in the storage compartments.
• a “high rise pack” with another 200 feet of 1 3/4 inch hose in it.

That comes to 4,000 feet of hose. Plus all of the connectors, hose tools, breathing apparatus, spare air bottles, medical equipment, thermal cameras, 100 gallons of various types of foam, a set of hydraulic rescue tools, air tools, hand tools, flashlights, a gasoline powered fan, a power saw, extension cords, 2 chain saws, 6 axes, a set of pneumatic lift bags, 2 cases of Gatoraide, 2 boxes of energy bars, and a dozen other tools. The truck itself has a 1500 gallon per minute pump, a 10 kw generator, and 1,000 gallons of firefighting water onboard. In all, there were more than 10,000 pounds of equipment and supplies on that truck.

I loved driving and working off of that engine. I did everything on that truck- I rode as firefighter, paramedic, driver, and even as the officer in charge. There are times that I miss doing it. Life was easier and less complicated then. All I had to do was put the wet stuff on the red stuff.

When the world gets to be a bit overwhelming, I like to sit and think about when things were different. Times weren’t necessarily easier then. This day, I’m thinking about this time of the year, but in 1987. It’s been 36 years and so much has changed since then.

Reagan was still President, I was in the military and also broke. I had an infant son. Still, I was young and the world was filled with the promise of things that could yet still be. Let’s listen to what was on my radio then and remember a time when things were different.