I had just about turned twenty-two in 1974 and had been fortunate enough to be accepted into the Fire Department’s Training Academy for my city. There had been seven hundred qualified applications for what turned out to be nine positions that year, so I felt satisfied that I had succeeded when I was selected.
When I arrived at the Academy that first day, I saw that my instructor was a powerfully built, no nonsense Captain with thirty years on the job. We were never to call him by his first name. He was simply ‘Cap’ or ‘Captain P’. Like RSM’s (Regimental Sergeant Majors) and CPO’s (Chief Petty Officers), in the military, of which I was familiar, he carried a walking stick and an absolutely no nonsense attitude. He was a large man, not fat, sturdy. He was bald and had the strongest arms and grip I had ever seen.
During the first few weeks he instructed us in all manner of regulations, rules, policies and the department’s general orders, interspersed with drills that included marching and endless climbing of the drill tower, which held an exterior vertical ladder eight stories in height with no safety devices. If you slipped, or lost your grip and fell, the concrete apron surrounding the tower would catch you.
On the outside of the tower was a fire escape for training, standpipes and an interior stairwell with open windows on two sides of each floor. Every morning, you started your day by parade assembly, then you would climb the tower, after morning coffee break, climb the tower, at lunch time, climb the tower, so you get the idea. If you made a mistake or were guilty of an Infraction, yup, climb the tower. Within the first month, anyone who hadn’t arrived in decent shape, —was by the end of it.
Then came ladder drills, knot tying, catching hydrants, rolling hose, packing hose, water drills with fog streams, straight streams and play pipes, used to stick into the ground for drowning out at major fires. Drills upon drills, and finally we were to be exposed to fire, fire suppression, SCBA drills and climbing the tower, you guessed it, —with SCBA hoses and nozzles attached.
Training had entered its second month out of three, when we were exposed to the Smoke House including search and rescue of a 180 lb mannequin. We were broken into teams of two, instructed in the basic search and rescue techniques of buildings, and then after a week of practice inside the training centres classrooms, taken out to the notorious Smoke House.
The Smoke House was simply a small dwelling, like a wartime constructed home on any army base in the country. It consisted of a basement, main floor and second floor attic. The rooms included were a living room kitchen, bathroom on the main floor, with bedrooms, the attic was usually for storage, but often, as in the Smoke House, turned into a bedroom for a child, except in winter, because it would be too cold. Most were unoccupied in the winter due to a lack of insulation and the extraordinary low temperatures of a Canadian prairie winter.
The building contained an open propane burner under a metal pan in the basement that would be filled with combustible materials and set alight. All of the windows had been boarded and there two entrances, the front door into the living room, and the back door into the kitchen, which held a staircase down to the basement. There was no lighting in the structure, which was completely black when the doors were closed.
The ‘dummy’ was positioned in a different place within the structure for every drill, and once the building was completely charged with smoke, so thick and acrid that you could not see your hand in front of your face. A team of two firefighter trainees were to enter the building, maintain physical contact between them and effectively search the entire building to find the dummy, then remove it to the exterior before the on-demand air in their 30 minute Scott Pack SCBA or self-contained breathing apparatus reached its reserve and the warning bell on the SCBA’s regulator sounded. When the bell sounded, it meant you had five minutes of air remaining in your tank and you had to make it out within that time.
If the bell rang before the dummy could be extricated, the team would then have to exit the structure, and change bottles on their SCBA, while the dummy was once again moved to a new location, whereupon the drill would begin again. The temperature inside from the heat source, equipment carried and exhaustive searching on one’s knees, usually meant that one’s body temperature reached really high levels. Heat exhaustion was a real issue.
Obviously safety in those days, was of less importance.
The first day of Smoke House training, was warm. It was now July and the summer temperatures on the prairies could get over ninety degrees. It was so warm that a den of snakes under the stairs leading to the office of Director of Training , the training officers offices, the classrooms and lunch room would come out and sun themselves on the steps. Having grown up with a sister who kept snakes as pets, I wasn’t concerned, but couldn’t help but note that one of the training officers was deathly afraid of snakes, which we found somewhat funny, because he actually was the biggest man on the department.
More about this in a future article.
That afternoon, after lunch the trainee class assembled at the Smoke House, – there were two additional training officers in turn-out coats otherwise known as firefighting gear, standing beside the Smoke House. When we had assembled, Captain P. explained the drill and then paired us off as ‘entry teams’ who would search the building, rescue the ‘dummy’, and carry it out of the building, at which point the exercise for that entry team would be over for the day.
The first team entered, and were gone for a significant time, when we heard one then both bells on their SCBA sound. Within a couple of minutes they found the exit to the building and exited, ‘sans dummy’. Captain P. admonished them for not finding the ‘victim’ and stated that when the other four teams had completed their searches, they would be sent in again.
Both I and the other trainee that I was paired with were told we were to enter the building next. We kneeled at the side of the entrance to the Smoke House and when the door opened we waited the requisite three seconds as instructed in order to avoid a possible backdraft, which might be caused where ventilation of the building has not occurred, whereby air entering the superheated structure would mix with the red hot 1000 degree entrained carbon and ignite into a ‘smoke explosion, more commonly known as a backdraft. The rule was that entry would be made in any event due to the time constraints posed by a victim being in the building requiring rescue having limited time to survive.
We crawled into the house on our hands and knees, staying low to stay below the high temperature thermal layer inside the building which would occur in a real fire, as the super heated smoke layer, filled with carbon would be closer to the ceiling. We had decided to search the building systematically, starting with the main floor, which included the two small bedrooms, then the attic and return to the main floor and would then descend into the basement, if we had not found the ‘dummy’.
While we had never seen the interior of the smoke house, we believed the floor plan was somewhat obvious, with the two bedrooms coming off the living room. Holding the hand of the other searcher we stayed in contact with the walls of the interior space, always searching in a counter-clockwise direction. One searcher in contact with the wall while the second searcher extended his reach and swept the floor to his left.
When a door was reached, still maintaining contact, the team would again enter each room in turn and circumnavigate the building’s floor methodically, until they returned to the entry, which at floor height could be seen just below the smoke layer. On our search of the living room, we contacted the dummy on top of a couch, lifting it onto the floor. The dummy weighed 180 pounds, dead weight, so, aware of the heat that would be approximately 600-700 degrees Fahrenheit at head height in a real fire, we pulled the dummy around to the door, found the exit, and pulled the dummy outside the exit door to the building.
“Well done” stated Captain P., inserting a mark on one of the forms he continuously used to monitor our progress. We removed our gear, placed new air bottles in the SCBA’s and lined up to watch the next entry team.
The next entry team, entered into the Smoke House and after they had entered and had been gone for about two minutes, we watched Captain P. remove what looked like a canister, or grenade from the pocket of his turnout coat, whereupon he pulled its pin and threw it into the Smoke House. A very loud bang occurred with a blinding flash accompanying the explosion. No more than ten seconds passed, when a figure came lurching out of the Smoke House.
We watched, mesmerized, as Captain P. yelled at the trainee, “Where is your partner?” The muffled scream that came from within the face piece of the SCBA, said, “I think he just blew up!”
I had never seen Captain P. laugh during the first five weeks of our training, but his stoic face dissolved into a giant grin while raucous laughter rebounded off the training centre’s buildings, so loudly that I think the snakes crawled into their dens.
“Well get back in there, find him and bring him out.” He yelled, still laughing.
The trainee not knowing what the hell had just happened, crawled back through the door saying something about “he better not be in pieces.”
By now the rest of us were laughing so hard, we could barely contain ourselves. Captain P. was laughing so hysterically I was afraid he might stroke out.
So Endeth The Lesson…
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