![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Firefighter Intern: Day 2
Apr. 6th, 2018 11:54 pmMake your passion your profession. - Carl Holmes
After a thankfully uneventful night of sleeping in the breakroom in the second Intern/Volunteer bed, we all hit the ground running. After maintaining and training on the chainsaws on the engines and rescue rigs, we pulled a salvage cover off Engine 481 and practiced covering things from fire and water damage, making a containment pool, and creating a water drain chute from the cover and a couple of pike poles (and getting a sign-off on my task book). The other Intern and I took the utility vehicle to the two substations to replace the improved hand-held radios on all of the apparatus at both the substations. As soon as we'd gotten back, we got a medical call and I was driving Code 3 (lights and sirens) in the ambulance. It turned out to be a patient refusal, but that was the last sign-off for completing my first taskbook, my NFPA Fire Apparatus Driver/Operator certification. *smile* I started that taskbook in June of 2015, and I'm glad it's done.
We had another medical call that the other Intern took as we were (of course) sitting down to dinner, but we followed in the utility vehicle and helped with carrying bags and with the new gurney. Once back to the station, I finished and handed in my first assignment for my online class, took a hot shower, and wrote this with droopy eyes on my bed. Hope we have another peaceful night!
EDIT: We slept until about just before 0700 when the radio, the station alarm, and the app on my phone all went off. I ran down the stairs in running shorts, a T-shirt, and my socks for my damp turnouts. We had a chimney fire in Westport (about 20 miles west of our station), and we went and rendered mutual aid to the Westport Fire Department. I learned a lot of tricks for suiting up, including getting my helmet flash, radio, passport tags, and SCBA situated better. Once there, my LT put me on grabbing a salvage cover that I had just trained on the day before and getting it around the woodstove before they put water down the chimney in a special nozzle. We got back to the station later than our shift ended, but I got more sign-offs on my Structural Firefighter 1 taskbook and still made it on time to for a geocaching event at 10am in Portland.
After a thankfully uneventful night of sleeping in the breakroom in the second Intern/Volunteer bed, we all hit the ground running. After maintaining and training on the chainsaws on the engines and rescue rigs, we pulled a salvage cover off Engine 481 and practiced covering things from fire and water damage, making a containment pool, and creating a water drain chute from the cover and a couple of pike poles (and getting a sign-off on my task book). The other Intern and I took the utility vehicle to the two substations to replace the improved hand-held radios on all of the apparatus at both the substations. As soon as we'd gotten back, we got a medical call and I was driving Code 3 (lights and sirens) in the ambulance. It turned out to be a patient refusal, but that was the last sign-off for completing my first taskbook, my NFPA Fire Apparatus Driver/Operator certification. *smile* I started that taskbook in June of 2015, and I'm glad it's done.
We had another medical call that the other Intern took as we were (of course) sitting down to dinner, but we followed in the utility vehicle and helped with carrying bags and with the new gurney. Once back to the station, I finished and handed in my first assignment for my online class, took a hot shower, and wrote this with droopy eyes on my bed. Hope we have another peaceful night!
EDIT: We slept until about just before 0700 when the radio, the station alarm, and the app on my phone all went off. I ran down the stairs in running shorts, a T-shirt, and my socks for my damp turnouts. We had a chimney fire in Westport (about 20 miles west of our station), and we went and rendered mutual aid to the Westport Fire Department. I learned a lot of tricks for suiting up, including getting my helmet flash, radio, passport tags, and SCBA situated better. Once there, my LT put me on grabbing a salvage cover that I had just trained on the day before and getting it around the woodstove before they put water down the chimney in a special nozzle. We got back to the station later than our shift ended, but I got more sign-offs on my Structural Firefighter 1 taskbook and still made it on time to for a geocaching event at 10am in Portland.
