This is a close call that I had when I had been on the job for about two years. I was on what was called the quad. We only had 100 gallons of water, but we did have a cutting torch, a circular saw with a 12-inch metal cutting blade in it to cut cars up, and we had pry bars and stuff like that. It was like a mini truck, but it didn’t have the aerial ladder on it. We did have some safety equipment though. We had one of those five-story nets where you unfold it and you have about eight guys on it, and people can jump from five stories up. We used to get that net out and jump from the second or third story onto it. At first it was scary, because  you had to land on your butt. Your natural reaction is to land on your feet, so to pull your feet up and land on your butt was a difficult thing to start with. It got to be fun. But anyway, back to the story. 

We had this rig with very little water on it, and we went to a car accident on the freeway where this car had rolled several times and came to rest on its roof. It was really mangled, so it was hard to get into. There was gasoline leaking, and nobody had seatbelts on. In those days, seatbelts weren’t always in the cars and were an aftermarket thing. There were four people all over in this car, and being on its roof the gasoline was leaking through it. We got the passenger door open, but the seats were so mangled that we couldn’t get anybody out. There was a foot just hanging by a thread right where we were working. We worked on that thing for 15 minutes and still couldn’t get anybody loose. 

So I told the Captain that I was going to go and get the rescue saw with the metal cutting blade (which throws sparks all over). The 15 minutes we had been working had given the gasoline more time to leak through the car, and there was a chance that we could blow that car with all of the gasoline and turn it into a fireball when we only had 100 gallons of water. So we called for another company, and we figured that we would get another rig with 300 gallons on it. That would give us 400 gallons total, which is only about a minute and a half to two and a half minutes of water stream. You really have to be prepared when you have that little bit of water to fight a potentially big fire.

A few minutes later this other rig pulls up, and guess what: it only had 100 gallons of water in it. So we had a total of 200 gallons of water to fight this potential gasoline bomb. Anyway, my Captain and the Captain of the other rig went off to the side and started stretching out their hose lines. In the meantime, I got the rescue saw and started cutting at the base of the seat which was above me because the car was upside down. As soon as the saw went through the brace, the seat fell and unlocked this person’s legs which were underneath the dash. The foot that was hanging by a thread fell down and hit me in the face.

Once we got him out, we were really quick in getting the other three people out, and I’m glad to say that all four people lived. But we had to make a decision to leave them in the car where they could die of their injuries, or take a chance on making a fireball out of that car with the sparks from our rescue saw. There was a potential for us getting burned too because we had gasoline on our turnouts, so we were at risk also. So that was a scary run, but it worked out well in the end.