Pictures in Record Time

Tired, sore, beat-up from today's training. But got the new pictures up as quickly as I could.

Click here to check out what we spent the day doing.

Saturday Update


Couldn't sleep last night, coughing. Woke up at 4:30 a.m., still up. Figured I'd jump on and upload a quick picture from Thursday night's training. We used extinguishers to put out gasoline and/or diesel fires on water at the local airport. The picture you see here is one of my favorites (you can click it to get a larger version). I'll put up more pics after today, when I've got more than one or two ready to go.

Today's training is Search and Rescue and Rapid Intervention Team training. Basically, it's looking for victims or downed firefighters in a burning building. For training, we'll simulate zero visibility (with smoke and/or blindfolds) and crawl around on hands and knees (or army crawl) while looking for victims, practice not panicking when an instructor randomly turns off your air bottle during an exercise, change out air bottles on the fly (while the victim holds his breath), find a way out of a building (by following the hose if you can't see, or even by chopping through a wall if need be). I can't wait to squeeze between two-by-four supports wearing an SCBA. I'll try and get pics of that one.

It's been said this is the toughest day of the course, most physically demanding. Why I had to get sick right before, I don't know. I'll be drinking a lot of water and eating high-protein and -carb bars throughout the day. And drinking Dayquil by the bottle, I suspect. Wonder if it'll make me more tired, or keep the symptoms under control long enough for me to breathe through an SCBA mask without suffocating...

Email Reminder

I deleted the brian@brianunderhill.com email address today. A lot of you have probably already gotten my new email (which I won't post here to deter spam-creating web-crawling robots), or if you need to get ahold of me there's a contact link on the main page of this website (http://www.brianunderhill.com/index2.html).

Here's hoping I'll be relatively spamless for a while.

In other news, the cold has become a full-blown hacking, wheezing, coughing, itchy eyes, burning sinuses cold medicine commercial. Tomorrow's Search and Rescue training should be a joy. . .

Not Good

Catching a cold. Throat is raw. Losing my voice.

Oh yeah, life is good.

Ladder and Ventilation Pictures

I actually managed to get pics from Saturday up in an uncharacteristically timely manner. You can thank me by mailing me American currency in especially large denominations. :)

We worked primarily on ladders, saws, and ventilation on Saturday, though we did spend a good hour practicing putting on turnouts in under two minutes (I'm down to 1:42, by the way, even in gear that doesn't fit very well!) and hooking up main water lines to hydrants. No pics of that though; not a whole lot to see, really.

For whatever reason, despite being really tired every Saturday, this one was especially fatiguing. When I was changing clothes into my uniform (to ride M-21 after fire training), my hands kept cramping up from forearm fatigue. My thumb or a finger would suddenly - and involuntarily - close, and I would have to manually straighten them back out with my other hand. It was painful and a little bit creepy. I ate a huge meal that night at the fire station (two heaping plates full of elk steak, pasta, corn, and garlic bread) and drank tons of water. The cramping eventually subsided, but I'm still feeling pretty beat-up from the weekend.

Captain Hembree says next Saturday (Search and Rescue) is the most physically demanding day of the class. [sarcasm] I can't wait. [/sarcasm].

Anyway, click here to see the most recent pics. Or if you missed some from the last few weeks, the entire list is below:

Week Four - Ladders and Ventilation
Week Three - The Apartment Fire
Week Two - Hose Handling
Week One - Water Supply

NEW EMAIL ADDRESS

Okay, I'm getting tired of getting 100+ emails each morning, of which maybe 4 are not spam. So I'm going to be closing my primary email address soon-ish. One of the big issues with getting spam is that my email is all over the Internet and web crawlers pick it up. So in order to prevent that from happening, here's my new email address, but not in email address form. If you have me in your address book using brian@brianunderhill etc., then please change the "brian" part to "bju." It will look something like:

bju (at) brianunderhill (dot) com

Admittedly there's a lot of spaces in there, and the (at) is obviously the "@" symbol and (dot) is the "." - I just don't want to start down the spam highway any sooner than I have to.

So please update your address books, and use the new email (bju instead of brian) starting immediately. The old email will stay functional for a while, but I will be deleting it at some point, once I get my mailing lists updated.

Thanks all, and please don't post my new email address anywhere on the web. :)

Catching Up on Pics

Okay, here's the last set of pics from recent fire training. These were taken about ten days ago during hose handling training. We spent the morning rolling hose, packing and unpacking it, coupling, hooking up to hydrants, and so forth. The afternoon was spent with live lines, getting soaking wet.

It was the most tiring day to date.

No, really.

Anyway, a page of pictures is available by clicking here.

Fire Training Becomes Fire Work

Had an interesting day today during fire training. A major apartment complex caught fire this morning around 7 a.m. It was fully involved by the time the engine got there. As I understand it, the fire started on the first floor, but had spread to the third by the time the crews arrived. They fought the fire for several hours, and then the department deployed our training batallion (which sounds more impressive than it is - it's just a fancy name for fire academy trainees).

Anyway, we showed up to help during cleanup, and ended up rolling and storing somewhere between 2,000 and 5,000 feet of hose (depending on who you talk to). The hose had to be drained, rolled, piled onto trucks or trailers, hauled back to the station, unrolled, washed, then hung in the hose tower to dry. Then the engines had to be restocked with fresh, dry hoses and stocked with air bottles and other supplies. Top it off with the fact that today was Open House at the station for Fire Prevention Week, and it was a pretty busy Saturday. We may not have gotten a lot of forced entry or extinguisher training, but we're all pretty good at hose handling now. :)

Click here for some pics up of the aftermath of the fire. And the Daily News should have a story on it by tomorrow or Monday, I would guess, if you want to read more about the fire itself.

I'll get some pics from last week's hose training online later this week.

Poof!

St. Helens burped off a huge steam/ash cloud minutes ago. Live webcam shot here, if you can get through: http://www.fs.fed.us/gpnf/volcanocams/msh/

Nobody knows what it is really. Saying "steam and ash plume" and "alerting pilots within 150 miles." Safe here, but fun to watch. This pic is from about 10 minutes ago, from Johnson Ridge:

Mount Saint Helens

MSH is rumbling pretty furiously lately, but to quell all the fear (or at least answer all the text messages and email I've been getting):

No, I don't think there's anything to worry about. Yes, I live nearby. No, I'm not in any real danger. It would take an explosion way bigger than the 1980 eruption that blew off half the mountain before I'd be threatened.

The biggest issue here, in the event of a serious event, would be ash fallout - which is hard on the lungs, eyes, car engines, paint jobs, whatever - and mud pouring down the rivers. Neither has me even the slightest bit worried. My biggest concern is that I'll get woken up in the middle of the night to go help out one of the FDs deal with the various medical issues such an event might incur - probably mostly chest pains, anxiety attacks, breathing difficulties and the like (if we get ash fall).

So bottom line, unless we see half the Pacific Rim break off and fall into the ocean, I really doubt there's going to be anything to worry about.

So don't stress about it. I'm not.

(PS - There's a live webcam set up at Johnston Ridge, giving a real time view of the mountain. It gets slammed when there's an event, so don't expect to get a good picture all the time. But you might get a peek now and then. http://www.fs.fed.us/gpnf/volcanocams/msh/)

New Fire Pics

Last night's fire training was pretty tiring, but enjoyable. We spent about two hours setting up a portable tank, filling it, emptying it, and repacking it - over and over. Then spent another two hours working with setting up hydrants and hoses. It was cool out. A nice night, really. But wearing turnouts all night made it kind of uncomfortable. They're designed to keep heat out so they - naturally - keep heat in as well. I start to sweat in my coat after only a few minutes, and by the end of four hours you could actually wring sweat out of my shirt if you were so inclined.

This Saturday we'll do eight hours of hose handling, and it's supposed to be warm and sunny. Great. I drank 112 ounces of water and Gatorade last night and never once had to use the bathroom. I'm bringing several gallons on Saturday.

Anyway, I had my camera for a while. Took some shots early on, until it got dark enough that when the flash went off all you could see is the reflective striping on the turnouts. So I've got some pics of the tank and drafting operation up if anyone wants a peek. I'll try and get some on Saturday as well.

As usual, the pics will open in a separate window. Access them by clicking here or on the link above. Enjoy!