Archives for the-angry-captain

See all posts in the network tagged with the-angry-captain

the Handover – Close Calls Edition

Last call for the Handover This month’s handover draws from our friends across the interwebs stories of close calls. Times when they or their patients, colleagues or family almost didn’t make it. I was inspired to make this the theme not just because of the holiday weekend here in America, but to remind us all that we are fragile and put ourselves out there sometimes. Hopefully one of these links rings back when you’re in an unsafe or curious situation.

Found with the Where did the angry guy go files-

“What do we do?” asked Eric, his eyes wide.

“I don’t know about you two,” I said, “but I’m about to jump through that window over there. I don’t know if that guy’s getting a gun or what.”

by Buckman who runs Gomerville

From the I don’t think you should be driving file-

“I was overwhelmed by the dreadful realization that I had just accepted a ride from a highly intoxicated snowmobile rider and we were hurtling through the dark northwoods at 70+ miles per hour.”

from Greg Friese of, among many, Every Day EMS Tips.

From the Thank God you’re driving category-

“This was a serious incident. This was no routine, boy, we almost had an accident. This was my death.

I don’t know if my partner would have stopped on his own if I hadn’t shouted. Maybe. Maybe he had it all under control and was already getting ready to hit the brakes.”

from Peter Canning, a new contributor to the FireEMSBlogs family, at StreetWatch:Notes of a Paramedic

In a section titled simply Gulp

“Jill and I found him lying on the floor, fully clothed and in a coat, eyes shut, but eyelids flickering. An almost certain sign of pseudo-unconsciousness. A fake. I took a step back and called out to him. Jill was still standing by the front door, uncertain how to proceed. Something still felt wrong, so I asked her to go and call for police back up. With hindsight, I should have gone with.”

writes Ben Yatzbaz, resident Insomniac Medic

Found in the Basement selection

“This moment, this intense moment, was where I made a decision the likes of which I hope I never have to make again. I knew that if I stayed more than a few moments longer, I would suffocate and burn to death right there on that floor.”

from our pal Chris Kaiser at Life Under the Lights

From the lost in the snow pile-

“Dear God, they’re working a search pattern. Please, not tonight. It’s not mutual aid to another fire department; they’re working a grid search with the police. I grab my boots, then pad to the garage to check the fluids in the IV warmer. Anyone caught in this weather without shelter will be near death, if not there already.”

by Mack505 at Notes from Mosquito Hill

From the trust your guts file-

“I give my partner the “time to leave pronto” hand gesture. “Code 3, hurry up”. I give a little oxygen and attempt the IV enroute with no success. I realize that something is not going well for this patient and I don’t have the means to diagnose or fix the problem.”

by Rescue Monkey of Paramedic:Life on the Streets

From the Old School section-

“The smoke level now was to the floor as I grasped the hose line to find my way out. The urge to rip off my mask was strong but my training had taught me this would be fatal for sure.”

by HMHQ Contributor the Angry Captain

and finally, from the Hmmm…that looks wrong category

“A back board was brought up and one of the other Paramedics on the engine teams attended to him pulling off his jacket. Justin asked us if the building was still on fire. We we told him that yes, it was still on fire, he asked us to put his jacket back on. Not completely out of it.”

from yours truly and the event that launched me into the blogosphere.

Next month’s handover will be hosted by Ambulance Driver, theme TBD, watch his space for details as they develop and, above all else, be safe.

HM Clear.

Posted by Justin Schorr on November 27, 2009 • Filed under: Administration & Leadership, Command & Leadership, EMS Health & Safety, EMS Topics, Fire Rescue Topics, Firefighter Safety & Health, Firefighting Operations, Fires, Line of Duty, Patient Management, Rescues, Technology & Communications, The Handover, Uncategorized, technology-communications-ems-topics, the Angry Captain, training-fire-rescue-topics • Tagged: the Angry Captain, The Handover

the Angry Captain’s Close Call

View Comments

This month’s EMS Blog Carnival, the Handover, will be hosted here and the theme is “Close Calls.” With November in the US including Thanksgiving, I thought what better time to share an experience when we had that thought go through our mind “I/they might not make it.”

Send in your submissions about a time when you, a patient, or someone you know had a close call and I’ll put them together to share. If just one person can use that information to make their job safer, then we’ll have succeeded.

So with that theme in mind, here is the Angry Captain’s Close Call.

8:30 pm February 1982

The call: Structure fire, “house across the street has black smoke coming from it.”

It is a cold winter night with temperatures well below freezing; we are in a relief unit that had no inboard seats so I was belted in on the tailboard. On arrival, we found a residence with black smoke pouring from the rear. Reportedly, no one was home.

The home is typical for the area in that the base of the home started as a house trailer with several additions around it. As the first engine to arrive, we pulled a 200’ preconnect and forced entry on a side door that appeared to be the entry. The captain and I crawled in below the smoke and worked our way through a maze of doorways to what appeared to be a fully involved kitchen area. The ceiling was flashing over as I trained the nozzle at the base of the fire. Suddenly, my air pack warning bell went off.

We could not have been on air much longer than 5-10 minutes. I patted the captain on the back to notify him that we needed to back out. He gestured for me to head out and took the nozzle from me. My training from my previous department was never to leave anyone alone in a fire. As I turned, my air pack quit entirely; no air at all. The smoke level now was to the floor as I grasped the hose line to find my way out. The urge to rip off my mask was strong but my training had taught me this would be fatal for sure. Holding my breath was all I could do as I struggled to focus on following the line out amid my disorientation from lack of oxygen. As I moved along, I remember hearing a loud mechanical sound further confusing my strange journey through this black maze. The sound grew louder as I slowly followed the hose line hand over hand in the seemingly longest moments of my life.

Suddenly light appeared as the noise grew to a roar, but I crawled out, finally ripping off my face mask, gasping for air, and collapsing in a snow bank. My next memory was lying on the gurney in the back of the ambulance. At the hospital, they ran blood gas tests and flooded me with plenty of O2. As my color returned to normal (apparently I was quite gray), I was told that they found me outside our entry point where the truck had hung a mechanical fan at the top of the doorway for ventilation. (The loud disorientating mechanical sound.) I am not sure how long it was that I lay there in the snow bank before I was noticed. But Mrs. AC got the frightening call about 11 pm to pick me up at the hospital….no one likes that call.

Lessons learned:

1. The air pack I was wearing was found to be working properly back in a warm station house and in fact still had about ½ its air. The speculation at the time was that the moisture in the diaphragm froze causing it to stop the air flow. Had it been checked at the scene, it could have provided the exact problem.

2. Never allow a member to leave alone or leave a member alone in a fire. This was long before 2 in 2 out.

3. Always follow your training; i.e. following the hose line out and keeping your mask on in heavy smoke.

4. Do not block the egress of the hose line with ventilation. Had I been on all fours coming out feeling ahead with my hands, my fingers may have been lost to the whirling fan.

This was a true wake up call for me and cemented in my mind how important my training had been and how things can go wrong in a matter of seconds.

Posted by Justin Schorr on November 7, 2009 • Filed under: Command & Leadership, Fire, Fire Rescue Topics, Firefighter Safety & Health, Firefighting Operations, Fires, The Handover, Training & Development, the Angry Captain, training-fire-rescue-topics • Tagged: Close Call, Fire, the Angry Captain

Sunday Fun – And we’re walking, and we’re walking…

View Comments

the Angry Captain recently returned from spending my inheritance his well earned retirement in Washington DC and New York City. He and Mrs AC(Ma!) had a wonderful time and were tech savvy enough to send constant updates via PDA to facebook. The HM jrs also got a number of postcards in the mail, which still makes their eyes light up.

Angry, at first, sent photos of DC fire units responding or parked near his double decker tourist bus. For those of you not in an area where these giant red buses block traffic on a regular basis, when you’re in the jump seat of your engine you’re just high enough for the folks up top to get a possibly embarrassing picture.

As the trip progressed they started posting pictures of the Tomb of the unknown Soldier, the Korean War Memorial and some other really emotional stuff.

Later, the NYC pics showed more fire apparatus, since they were right near E54 L4 in the theater district. No surprise there. Then they trekked to the Today show with giant posters so the grandchildren could pick them out and sure enough, there they were up front, signs clearly visible and Ann Curry talking to the folks next to them with no signs who were simply squealing. Dang media.

But the reason I share this all with you is because no matter where we travel we seem to find ourselves passing by a firehouse or ambulance posted and want to say hello. But what to do then? Years ago I developed a walking tour of San Francisco that takes you around the original Station 1, Coit Tower, the fortune cookie factory, the building used to film Towering Inferno and a brief walk down the street where the great fire of 1906 decimated one side, but the firemen saved the other. The difference in architecture is clear.

I’ve tested the walk on friends before, but the real test will be Mark when he arrives 2 weeks from today. Hopefully it will go well and he’ll tell you all about it, with pictures. If he approves it, I’ll post up a map and things to see so when you come to San Francisco you won’t be chasing sirens like I was in Chicago a few years back just to say hello and buy a T-shirt.

BUT – A few rules on visiting San Francisco Firehouses:

We do not trade patches on account of we don’t wear them. Only the Ambulance EMTs and Paramedics and Firefighter/Paramedics wear patches, so if you ask to trade you’ll get an odd look and an offer to post your patch on their wall. Most houses’ patch walls are quite elaborate with Station 2 having easily hundreds.

Lunch is at noon, dinner often at 7, so 1130-130 and coming by after 6 PM is not usually the best time to visit.

Each house has it’s own logo and T-shirts, sweatshirts etc. We do not sell the official screen printed T-shirts in the stations, don’t ask. Those are issued to us and us only. But usually the members of the house are more than happy to show you their extensive collection of Company apparel. Some houses even have websites like Station 1.

And I’ll leave you with a quick video so Mark can get ready for his engine time:

That will be UK Paramedic Team Leader Mark Glencorse responding with Engine 13 (Engine 35 in this video) in a little over 2 weeks. Are you ready Mark?

Posted by Justin Schorr on October 25, 2009 • Filed under: Fire Rescue Topics, Sunday Fun, Videos, the Angry Captain • Tagged: SFFD, the Angry Captain, the Project

Times they do a change

View Comments

Times they do a change.

When I was 1st introduced to the fire service I was in the 4th grade as our class had a field trip to the fire station. It was a short walk across the street from the school in a tract home that was fitted with a large garage to house the fire engine. Except for the garage and the flagpole out front it blended in well. I’d like to say how I remembered the fire engine and equipment, but my major memory was of the ice cream sandwiches they gave us at the end of the tour. My second encounter was quite different, about a year later a friend and I were flicking matches into the dry grass area in a local park. We would stomp the fire out, laugh and move to another area and repeat. We were tough dudes. Of course when we turned around on the trail to return one of our stomped out fires was ripping pretty good. We ran over and tried to stomp the edges with no luck. I took off my fairly new jacket, soaked it in the creek and beat the fire edges with it. By now the smoke cloud that formed caused a crowd to stand and watch. They of course were in our line of escape. We stayed till the fire crew arrived and put out the fire (probably about 2 1/2 acres) then faced the music of the officer (B.C.) Who loaded us in his pickup truck and delivered us home to our parents. Not a real happy experience along with being grounded the rest of the summer. Guess it could count as my first brush fire:)

Fast forward >>>>>>13 years when my brother calls needing a ride to the local office for the states forestry service to pick up an application. I take him there and the lady asks if I would like an application too. Bottom line I test and receive a job offer due to my high score with veteran points (my brother didn’t make the cut off). So right off the street I report to my first assignment at a local airport station (the county where I worked contracted for local fire service with the forestry). Huge crash rigs, loud claxtons ringing, gamewell alarms, 24 hour alarm watch duty and about 18 firefighters on duty working 84 hours a week. I had hit the mother lode…$533.00 a month! It was a pay loss for me from my last job but I was burned out in a low manager position and was ready for a change.

I got to see many changes in the fire service through various employers. Most change came about in the line of safety (usually brought on by some unfortunate tragedy) and a lot were fought for by our employee group and eventually our union. The educational requirements jumped tremendously as new areas of responsibility were piled on the fire service. First came specialty fires (oil, aircraft, propane, industrial, wildland etc.) then ambulance service (as EMT’s), then paramedics, then auto extrication, then came fire inspections of business, public education programs, dive teams, hazardous materials teams, swift water rescue, urban search and rescue and terrorism response. Just to mention a few.

Each specialty was multi-layered ranging from first responder rating to specialist. Each layer had minimum certitications and on going education to keep current. It was always a challange to become better equipted with knowledge, new tools and experience.

I saw the changes in requirements to be able to get a firefighter job both increase (education wise) then decrease (agility wise). The traditional method of progressing through the ranks put to the side of the road as promotional exams allowed those good at tests to leap frog over rank structure. It was always my theory that a manager should be able to perform each job of those they supervise. In an emergency that knowledge could save crews lives.

Also the public view of a firefighter evolved as many tragedies were faced, so many in such a short period of time. From earthquakes, hurricanes, riots, floods, major wildland fires destroying neighborhoods, terrorist attacks, the Oklahoma bombing, mass shootings and more, the firefighters held hero status for doing the job they were paid and signed up to do. I saw times when citizens begged us to let them buy us lunch or restaurants invited us for free meals (all as a thank you for a job well done) It didn’t matter that I may not have had anything to do with that particular incident, the out pouring was amazing. This hero image has attracted many who unfortunately appear to be more interested in the image of the uniform they wear then the job.

But the large majority appear to be in it for the long haul, making the best of a persons worst day and providing the best care and comfort for the situation or doing the best job you can with your knowledge, tools, team and experience. So a tip of my hat to you, and you will know who you are in spite of your denial to others.

Posted by Justin Schorr on April 11, 2009 • Filed under: the Angry Captain

The Angry Captain is on scene

View Comments

This is not a cartoon. This is an actual photo of the Angry Captain.

The Angry Captain got his nickname from his fellow workers when he was in charge of reconciling FEMA grants for his department’s Urban Search and Rescue responses to nationwide emergencies. The paper trail required to receive reimbursement was finite in FEMA’s eyes as well as requiring receipts for all purchases. These are foreign to the rescuers trying to get the job done in stormy weather and lack of any initial support at the scene. Simple things that we use every day get lost when power is out as well as cell sites, land lines, and stores and banks are closed; credit cards mean nothing. Sorting out these items later creates great stress on the person trying to get the money back. Hence the “Angry Captain” moniker.

The call 1 a.m. Saturday…cell phone call from passerby of smoke in the area of an industrial complex, no specific address.
This is a single engine response to investigate. We get many calls in the same area due to the nature of the businesses in this area and the proximity to a major road. As usual, we cruise by the buildings that have night shifts finding nothing. We continue, as my eye catches something from the corner of a building that appears to be smoke but dissipates immediately at the roofline.

We walk around the building not seeing anything except in the one corner above a rollup door that is closed. I remember this business from an inspection I did in the last year. It specialized in drying and preserving plants for use in household decorations. They had a special room inside (not unlike an auto spray booth) for drying the plants with a foul smelling preservative. I suspected that this might be something that was a normal part of the operation. However, to have something coming from the rollup door instead of the roof where the booth would normally vent was odd.

We called dispatch to contact a responsible party. They responded “no response” from the number on file. Now, with no means of visualizing the warehouse area from the outside and continued wisps coming from the top of the door, I elect to force entry to a man-door next to the roll up. No heat on the doors, but I just was not comfortable leaving (unlike the responsible party who choose not to answer the phone). We opened the door and found a haze from the top 6-8 feet of the warehouse. I called for a full structure response as we continued in (better to have them on the road and turn them around if not needed).

No heat, just the haze; as we inspected the drying unit, it was shut down and closed up. It was clear inside. We continued into the office areas, which were clear. Other units started arriving and the truck was sent to check the roof. We opened the other doors to ventilate and clear the haze. The rest of the units were released except for the Truck and the BC who hung out just to see what the deal was. Finally, dispatch received a call from the owner who said he would be there in 30 minutes.

About an hour passed until he arrived. He stated that a fumigation company had been there Friday to fumigate the warehouse. No signs were posted on the doors to warn us of any hazards. We placed all the units exposed out of service until their turnouts could be bagged and replaced. Luckily, everyone wore SCBA until the building was clear, but the unknowns of the fumigation process created mountains of paperwork and exposure reports, as well as activating our service center to replace 18 sets of turnouts for all companies at 3 a.m. The paperwork and documentation took me well past my normal relief time of 8 a.m. It took 2 weeks to find out what the fumigation company used due to “trade secrets.” The chemicals were then listed on all the exposure reports.

Lesson Learned – Expect the unexpected, always, no matter what you think you know about the situation.

Posted by Justin Schorr on February 14, 2009 • Filed under: the Angry Captain