Story Time

This will be a short story about one of the risky predictaments I got myself into while I was a fire fighter.

Now a thing you learn as a fire fighter is when you are doing any kind of search in a house you keep the wall on your right and you circle the room with the handle of your ax out to feel for anything thats soft. Which may or may not be a body. So me and my partner enter a room and clear it and then back in the hallway we cleared another room.

On the third room we cleared when we were about to exit back into the hallway and make our way out of the house the entire thing flashed over. Flashover is an instance of a fire spreading very rapidly across a gap because of intense heat. Thats what I could find online. However those gaps between items which are on fire becomes fire itself. The air explodes in a whoooomph and everything is on fire and ignites at the same time. Including the air…

So we see this because its brighter than the smoke is dark and instantly I know what it was so I closed the door as quick as I could. This wouldn’t give us long because it was a wooden door not even solid. Now we are in a bedroom or at least that’s what I thought it was and we have no way out. My partner busts out the only window in the room and its a small window neither of us are fitting through it.

I noticed we were in a room that had a wall to the exterior of the structure. So my bright idea is to start hacking at that wall with my ax, knowing full well we have some thick wood to get through between the wall and the outside.

Still trapped we now had other fire fighters hacking at the other side of the wall on the outside. Finally what we had to do to escape was take our tanks off (which still had o2 in them) and pass them through the wall to our team outside and then we got through the wall and out to the outside.

That was one of the closer times I come to death I believe in my career. The thing about still having o2 in our tanks was we practices skip breathing and also didn’t use our tanks the entire time.

If you liked this story please let me know on discord.

-E