Here’s a run that you might want to leave out. The length of time it takes for me to tell this story is about the same as it took for this event to actually happen to me. 

We went to a house fire, which had started out pretty small. It burned until all of the oxygen was burned up and then it smoldered for several hours before it actually broke through where other people could see it. I was the first Firefighter to go into it, and I was told that there was probably a woman in there. Because of the amount of time the fire had burned, the mattress in the bedroom was totally gone and the springs were what we call annealed, which is when they are all soft and collapsed. It takes a long time at a high temperature for that to happen to bed springs.

We weren’t allowed to wear gloves during those days because we were supposed to be able to feel the bodies. So we had to go in bare-handed, and we couldn’t wear muffs on our ears because they were our heat sensors. When our ears started burning, then it was when we were supposed to get out of the fire because we didn’t have masks on. 

At the time, I didn’t know what was going on in there. I opened the door and it was completely black with smoke on the inside. There was tremendous heat and fire inside. I had to knock some of the fire down, and then I left my hose line and started feeling around for a body. Well, I stuck my hand into something that was really gooey, and it turned out that it was a cooked dog. As I continued on I found another one, where the same thing had happened. I had this goo on my hands from the dogs, and going around through the rest of the room, I stuck my hand into a burning foam-rubber pillow. So then I had burned fingers that I was blowing on, trying to cool down, that had just finished touching those dogs. 

Continuing on, I saw this glimmer of light. I knew it was a window, so I stood up and I started opening it up. It sure felt good to get fresh air. But then I started slipping and sliding, and I quickly realized I was standing in the woman’s stomach. I had to stay at that fire for quite a while because of the investigations, and because I was first on the scene I had to make reports. That was a sickening fire.