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.
