We went on a call down into Mission Valley one time, to what looked like just a normal commercial building. We pulled up, layed out our hose lines, and we were about ready to enter the door when a guy ran up to me. He told me to watch out because they did a lot of work for the military and there were a lot of explosives in the building, so it could blow up at any time. So we had to make a decision to either continue fighting the fire, or to back way out and evacuate and hope that the explosion wasn’t too big. 

It might have been a mistake, but I made the decision to stay and fight the fire. So we opened up the doorways and we entered with hose lines. Other crews went up on the roof and cut holes in the roof to let the heat and the smoke out. We put the fire out without incident or explosions. But that was a really scary time because that building could have gone up at any time, and we weren’t informed about the hazard until we were ready to enter the actual fire.

Editor’s Note: Jim confirmed after the initial recording that after the fire was out, they were informed that there were actually explosives stored within the building.