One of the most interesting runs I went on was when I was driving out of Station 17. This one night, we got a call that there was a fire in a house. We rolled on it, and the Battalion Chief rolled on it too. When we got there this house was really burning inside. The living room, hallway, dining room, and kitchen were all burning. We couldn’t figure out how this thing got going so much with the residents actually still in the house.

So we took our hose lines in and we started fighting this fire. There was a lot of smoke in there. One of the firefighters, Wallace (Wally) Eiter, went in and was doing his search like he was supposed to. He had an axe with him (the axe is a tool that we usually take into a fire because we can do a lot of things with it). During his search he felt a window, so he used the axe to break it to let the heat and the smoke out. But as soon as he hit the glass, all of this water came down on top of him and practically drowned him. After the smoke cleared, we found out that he had broken a giant aquarium with the axe. 

What caused the fire was the resident had a can of gasoline that he was pouring onto a fire that was smouldering in the fireplace. Well, the fire went up into the gas can, so the can was burning in his hand. He panicked and went running down the hallway with this thing pointed down so that the gas was running out everywhere he went. By the time he got to the end of the hall, the can was getting too hot on his hand so he threw it into the kitchen. That’s why all of those rooms were burning so hard and fast. So we solved that mystery. 

When we arrived at the fire, the Battalion Chief had parked his car across the driveway where the detached garage met with the neighbor’s garage. The neighbor was a little old lady, and during all of this she got into her car and backed up right into the Battalion Chief’s car. So now, here he has the whole side of his car bashed in, the resident of the home got his fishtank busted, and the house is badly burned. Adding to the chaos, when we were cleaning up the other firefighter, Danny Ignosci, realized he was missing his watch. We looked all over and finally found it in a pine tree next to the front door. When he ran past pulling the hose in, the branch on the pine tree had grabbed his watch and taken it off. 

And things kept going. The other neighbor, who was a big Ol' Navy guy and thought he knew all about firefighting, started arguing with our Captain about our firefighting tactics. It was not the way they do it in the Navy, but it was the way we did it. And everything had gone well...except we had a chase car that was busted, a busted fishtank, and most of the house burned. But we did find the watch and cleared the fire up. It was a fun fire, where everything possible happened all at once.