House fire for a cardio workout
The Marathon program called for a light cardio workout today with cross training. We had originally planned a family bike ride but with the constant rain and drizzle during the day the ride was ruled out.
My fire brigade pager went off with a call to a house fire and I responded for a 4 hour workout.
The call was to a lounge room on fire in a unit but when we arrived the whole place was well alight. I was thinking workout when I had to drag 120 metres of fire house up a hill, climb a ladder to remove hot roof tiles, pull down the smoldering ceiling inside the house while wearing 15 kilos of Breathing Apparatus and take one and a half hours cleaning and rolling up hose to pack up the truck afterwards.
Thankfully the occupants all managed to get outside safely. It seems that the fire had started from an electric heater in the lounge room. Normally this may have been contained to the one room but someone over the years had covered the whole roof space in newspapers. This was done as a poor attempt at extra insulation, creating a dry and ready to burn fuel that spread fire very quickly and was hard to extinguish.
I have lost count of the amount of house fires I have been to in 8 years with the Country Fire Authority but I never stop feeling sorry for the occupants. I couldn't imagine having to sit on the side of the road watching your house and belongings being destroyed. It must be a very hard thing to experience.
In this colder weather please be careful with heaters, dryers and anything else that can create heat. This misfortune could happen to anyone.
My fire brigade pager went off with a call to a house fire and I responded for a 4 hour workout.
The call was to a lounge room on fire in a unit but when we arrived the whole place was well alight. I was thinking workout when I had to drag 120 metres of fire house up a hill, climb a ladder to remove hot roof tiles, pull down the smoldering ceiling inside the house while wearing 15 kilos of Breathing Apparatus and take one and a half hours cleaning and rolling up hose to pack up the truck afterwards.
Thankfully the occupants all managed to get outside safely. It seems that the fire had started from an electric heater in the lounge room. Normally this may have been contained to the one room but someone over the years had covered the whole roof space in newspapers. This was done as a poor attempt at extra insulation, creating a dry and ready to burn fuel that spread fire very quickly and was hard to extinguish.
I have lost count of the amount of house fires I have been to in 8 years with the Country Fire Authority but I never stop feeling sorry for the occupants. I couldn't imagine having to sit on the side of the road watching your house and belongings being destroyed. It must be a very hard thing to experience.
In this colder weather please be careful with heaters, dryers and anything else that can create heat. This misfortune could happen to anyone.
posted by Spark Driver at 5:21 PM
4 Comments:
Great work Sparks, and good, timely advice too. Now get out there and enjoy this cool training weather!
Fire is one of my biggest fears. In fact I had a stove fire on Dec 31st, and I have yet to use my stove top since, even though I've been told it's safe...I'm just too scared. I leave the kitty's kennels out by the door in case they need to be rescued...do I need therapy?
My housemate had a couple of occasions where he left the gas stove top burning! You can imagine my horror when I would get home at 9pm to find it had been burning merrily away since 9am that morning - thank god nothing had been nearby enough to catch fire. As you can imagine I had a few not very pleasant words to say to him when he got home...
To lose all your posessions like that would be truly awful - I also worry about my kitties being trapped inside too :-( They would prolly hide from the nice men trying to rescue them out of fright :-(
Wow SD, what a night. All of that was a workout alright. I'm so glad it had a reasonable happy ending.
It must be sooooo frustrating for you knowing how preventable these things are, or even knowing that people can minimise the impact.
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