Dan - Fire

Dan smelled the smoke. It was rich, earthy and clean. None of the usual sharp notes from melting plastic, foam and other trappings of the modern age. No, it was just plain wood burning.

Burning. The word snapped him back to the moment.

He was here to put out the fire, not analyze it. Not yet anyway. On with the mask and helmet.

He was right though. It was a log cabin and only natural oils, fabrics and untreated wood were lost. Dan hauled out the hose and got ready to go into the building.

Safety first, one should always assume that something worse was adding dangerous chemicals into the air. Not that all smoke wasn’t bad, but this was on the safer end of the spectrum. He made one final check of his mask before striding through the doorway.

It was like a camp-out. No. This was serious. Dan’s mind wandered. It was a poor defence mechanism to distract him from the hazards of going into a burning building.

Flames crawled along the logs. Slowly, methodically. Not accelerated by anything. Good. He relaxed.

A sharp crack above his head sent him back into high alert mode.

 

Spray the water – the thought was sharp and insistent. A voice seemed to echo in his mind with all the tips for extinguishing a fire. Nothing that would add up to much without pressure in the hose. Did he forget something? The seconds ticked by while the water made its way along the hose.

Water finally reached the nozzle and subsequently filled the space in front of Dan. He struggled with the settings, making the spray wider before doing the opposite and getting a narrow jet.

Panicking slightly, he tackled the flames that were closest to him rather than aiming at the bulk of the blaze. While it was important to extinguish everything, the nearer spots had nowhere to go, as the area was already soaked by the earlier sprays.

In the next room over, the flames had finally eaten their way through the logs and that brought more oxygen into the fire. Dan heard the roaring intensify and realized his mistake.

Bright orange tendrils raced along the ceiling. The air being drawn in was quickly heating and spreading along the top of the room, carrying the fire with it.

Dan muscled the hose back to a wide spray and doused the rest of the room. The jet could take care of hot spots, but nothing left in this room needed the full direct blast of the water. The fan of liquid he was using now proved sufficient to mop up the struggling flames here.

A wave of heat from the next room reminded him he was wasting time.

Flipping the hose settings again he finally gained enough nerve to enter the hottest room, the likely source of the fire.

In the centre of the room was a wood burning furnace, piled up around it was stacks of logs, all of which were aflame.

Dan blasted the nearest wood with the hose and it went rolling across the room. It stirred the fire and the air wakened the glowing coals. He adjusted the hose again and made sure the water wouldn’t move anything else.

A large rumble as part of the floor collapsed and the logs shifted again. There wasn’t a basement here, so he wasn’t going to drop down far. Dan tried to move backward as the logs and fire weakened another part of the floor.

Too late. He twisted his ankle and fell forward. Blackness. Then alarms.

Dan woke quickly in the upper floor of the fire department. Echos of his dream played through his mind as he got ready to put out another blaze.

He never forgot his first real fire. It haunted his dreams, especially when he was on duty. He was much better as his job now, but in sleep he was still stuck at that moment.