Walking a mile in a firefighter’s boots: Editor’s Note

Two-hundred fifty degrees, in the abstract sense of the word, is hot. Very hot.

But it takes sitting in a smoke-filled room, watching orange flames roaring up to the ceiling, to appreciate the incinerator quality of this level of heat.

I’m sitting in the sauna-like confines of a Nomex coat, cowl and trousers, sucking oxygen from a tank, surrounded by wafting heat and gas that would kill anyone without protection in this house-fire practice burn.

For me, it’s rubberneck city – my eyes are probably bulging out of my head with the wonderment of it.

For the crew of people surrounding me, competently going about their jobs, it’s just another day of being a firefighter.

With all the press we’ve seen lately on Prop. 1, the ballot measure that proposes creating a regional fire authority out of Kent Fire and Fire District 37, we need to know these men and women who will live with the outcome of our election process.

So I want to know – and by turns show – what happens to these people who put on 50 pounds of bunker gear and climb into a house fire.

My guide in this, veteran Kent firefighter Terry McCartin, explained the experience well. It’s about operating in one of the most hostile of environments, with a slew of unknowns.

“We are in zero visibility – truly we are operating in the dark, using our senses other than sight to do our job,” he said, of the smoke-filled interiors that must be navigated, to seek out the flames and the possible victims.

I asked him if there were any movies that really portrayed the experience of fighting fire, and McCartin couldn’t think of one he felt was authentic. “The movie portrayals show it’s not really all that bad, but really it’s not the case” he said. “It’s a different world that the average citizen will hopefully never experience.”

I fit the bill of average citizen for this event. And let me tell you – firefighters are fit. They have to be. It’s hard to adequately describe the feeling of crawling on your hands and knees, through puddles of water and grime, in furnace-like near-darkness. Your air tank is dead weight on your back, and the hose you’re dragging feels more like a bucking cement pipe. And you are more than vaguely aware that the mask on your face is keeping you away from a quick and bad death by suffocation.

But you’re not in there just to crawl around.

“We have all these other jobs going on simultaneously: search and rescue, suppression, ventilation control,” McCartin said of what happens in a real fire. “And as the fire is knocked down, we go into salvage and overhaul.”

In a real fire, you may be doing those things, just as our training exercise on this spring day is teaching us, but your priorities can change in an instant.

“You throw a wrench in there – you have a victim sustain a burn, we have to peel people off to deal with that,” McCartin explained. “And what initially may seem to be a lot of people (fighting the fire) – they get used up pretty quick.”

For that reason, staffing is a critical part of how these guys do their job.

A responding crew can be at minimum, three people. Four is preferred, but with levels the way they are now, three is the going rate.

But all it takes is a complication at the fire, and those initial responders are suddenly short on staff, meaning another three-person unit has to come out, and firefighting efforts can be hampered.

“We have all of these things that play into that labor-intensive piece,” McCartin said. “You can do so much more with four than you can with three.”

While he noted Prop. 1 doesn’t guarantee more staffing, it at least sets up a consistent flow of funding, that is not dependent on other agency budgets, making it possible to build on that in the future.

One major question in my mind, coming out there to watch these men and women train, was what kind of personalities are drawn to this kind of trade?

Given the methodical approach I saw going on out there, I realized it wasn’t about thrill-seeking as much as more mundane things like following directions and teamwork.

“If I were on the outside looking in, I would assume they’re adrenaline junkies,” McCartin said, noting those types get weeded out pretty quickly.

“We wish no ill will on anyone. We want to be part of the solution. But if it (an emergency) were going to occur, I would prefer it to be on my shift. That’s what we train for, and that’s what we’re good at.”

But there’s one thing McCartin isn’t good at.

Going to the movies when the film is about firefighting.

“I tend to shy away from those things,” he said. “I’m such a critic – ‘oh, it doesn’t happen that way.’ The person I go to the movie with, I drives them crazy.”

Given my several hours of clambering around in what feels like a deep-sea-diving suit, I am inclined to agree with him. You’re trudging, not acting.

And don’t even get me started on working with the hose – it has 100 psi of water shooting through it, and seemingly defies all attempts to be bent around corners.

But aside from the grind of physical labor, there is a deep of sense of satisfaction that McCartin exuded about the work.

“I love what I do,” he said. “I think that to a person, you’re going to get the same answer. We enjoy that sense of satisfaction knowing we’ve made someone’s miserable day just a little bit better.

“…To fibrillate someone back to life – geez, that is an experience.”