| > "All hazards" really is the name of the game these days. Absolutely! One of the more recent calls I attended was a 'residential [smoke] alarm sounding', with no further details. Call turned out to be a woman desperate to turn off the water to the house, after a hot water pipe had burst in the kitchen with no other way to turn it off. Not sure how dispatch got 'smoke alarm' from 'hot water pipe', though panicked people tend to do and say bizarre things under obtuse acute stress. Some digging (the mains tap was burried under a decade's worth of pine needles) and one multi-tool later, we had the water turned off. > I mostly gave up firefighting due to the demands of my day job, but I still consider myself a firefighter at heart and may well join up with a volunteer department again some day. The 'job' is very much Hotel California. Whilst I'm 'career' in my day job (which only turns operational in an incident management sense during the 'on' season), I still regularly volunteer with my local brigade when I can, which isn't much these days unfortunately. We've always said family and work come first, though even an hour or two here and there definitely help, even if its only with odd jobs around the station. It also helps keep one's skills sharp, as monotonous as maintaining BA sets can be, it helps keep the muscle memory exercised. |