I was brand new on the job, and I was working out of Station 17 when we got a call. It was a really foggy night and it was about two o’clock in the morning. We had to go real slow. In fact, a lot of times the firefighters riding on the back of the fire engine would have to stand up and get off the rig to go and see what the street signs said because it was so foggy that we couldn’t even read them from the road. 

This house fire was probably about ten blocks away from the station. We pulled up in front of the house and we could smell it, but we couldn’t really see too much of it. So me and the Captain busted open the front door and we immediately felt that the fire had burned along the ground and the floor was burned out. We got banged up a little bit going across the floor joists and stuff. We crawled through that, and we started searching, and found this woman in her bed. Her head was out in the doorway where the fire had been, and so her face was badly burned on that side. 

The Captain told me to go outside so that he could hand her to me through the window. So that’s what I did. I went out front and he handed her to me out the window. At about that time, her daughter came up behind me. Here I was, holding her mom, and the side of her face was pretty well burned off. Steam was coming off of her because of the cold night. The woman’s bowels also let go, so I had that all over me. The daughter just started pounding on me screaming that I killed her mother. 

That run lasted all night because of the investigations. When we were about done, the Battalion Chief realized he had left his lights on on his car, and it wore the battery down. So the guys suggested that he just coast down the hill just beyond the house and start it that way. We waited, and waited, and finally here he comes walking up the hill. His car hadn’t started. So that meant that we had to go back to the station, get the battery out of one of the cars at the station, and then take it back and put it in the Chief’s car to get him going.

That run lasted through the night. By the time we got back to the station, the sun was up and it was past time to go home. That was a bad run.