You gotta be cool to be this H-O-T

Ok, so I've been a little slack in posting lately. What with extra choir practices for the church musical last weekend, tutoring two days after school, an almost-two-year-old who is wide open, I barely know what day it is. In fact, I wrote this post two weeks ago, and am just now getting around to publishing it.

I've mentioned before how Buddy and I volunteer with our local fire department. We both have our EMT certifications and he is a fully-certified fire fighter. In fact, he has the same credentials as someone who would choose firefighting as their career. Every Monday night we spend several hours at the fire station doing our weekly training. One week we have medical training, two weeks are spent on fire training, and the other week is our business meeting.


Back in November, our station hosted an LP Gas Burn. LP stands for Liquid Petroleum, and is used daily by many people. It could be someone grilling out on their deck with a gas grill. It could be used by a business. It could be traveling up and down the road on transfer trucks. We haven't had a training like this at our station since the first year Buddy was involved. I never got to see this, since at the time, I was not yet involved with the department.

Here are some pictures from the event.


Quinn couldn't help but notice that Daddy looked a little different once he got all his fire gear on.





What do you expect, when Daddy goes from looking as he normally does to this....




As with all fire scenes, whether it is training or an actual situation, you always have to meet with your OIC (Officer in Charge) to get assignments, information, etc. Here, our Captain (guy with clipboard) is letting the guys know which group they will be in.




You start with a couple of large tanks . I know this picture is hard to see, but there are two really large LP tanks. These tanks were actually hooked to a LP truck that pumped the LP into the tanks. Then different valves are opened and lit on fire so the guys could practice putting the fire out.




Now, there were about 30 firemen at this training, so in real life, it might not take this many people. But for training purposes (and to give everyone a chance to practice) there were several firemen on each hose. Two groups were "attack" groups, and the third group was a "safety" group. Basically, they had to push the fire off the tanks so they could get close enough to the tank to turn the valve off.




I was standing pretty far away from the setup, and the heat was so intense. I can't begin to tell you how hot it must have been closer to it.



It certainly makes for some pretty cool pictures!

If only all of our Monday night trainings were this exciting. And I'm sure the guys are glad that the LP Burn was rescheduled for November. We were originally supposed to do this back in the summer!