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Public
Safety Building Question: Why bring the big fire truck and all those fire fighters to a medical call when you don’t really need them? Answer: The answer is simple. We do need them. Our standard response to any medical call involving chest pain, cardiac arrest, auto wrecks, unconscious people in Station 1’s district and all medical calls in Station 2’s district within the city is to send an engine to assist on these calls. These engine companies are the same ones that respond to all fires in the city. We do not enough bodies available to separate fire-fighting assignments from medical assignments. We do not have enough vehicles to divide them into fire fighting vehicles and medical vehicles. To do so would cost the taxpayers several hundred thousand dollars, and most of you would find that alternative unacceptable. Therefore we are forced to respond to medical calls where the ambulance needs help with the big truck. The average citizen seldom considers fire department procedures until he or she needs help. Imagine that you and your spouse are relaxing at home some evening and suddenly your spouse starts to experience tightness in the chest. You dial 911 and request an ambulance. Soon you hear sirens and a fire truck and ambulance pulls up in front of your house. Three or four fire fighters pile out of the engine and two more out of the ambulance and cross your threshold with a confusing array of equipment. You protest that you want an ambulance not a fire truck. You complain that your spouse gets nervous with so many strangers hanging around asking questions. You make a mental note to call city hall the next day and complain. Meanwhile your spouse who was just having chest pain takes a turn for the worse and loses conscious. The fire fighters who you were complaining there were to many of the there check for vitals and hook your spouse up to the monitor. Your spouse has stopped breathing and has no pulse. The heart is malfunctioning and needs to be shocked back into its normal rhythm. While one fire fighter starts to compress the chest to manually pump the heart, another manually fills the lungs with much needed oxygen. Another firefighter prepares to deliver an electrical shock through the defib to try and restore the heart rhythm. Yet another fire fighter who is also a paramedic prepares to intubate your spouse to protect their airway. Another fire fighter/ paramedic or intermediate prepares to start an IV so paramedics can give much-needed drugs. Your spouse has a chance to survive because the fire department responded with enough people to do the job right. Do you still want to complain? So many times we respond to a call that sounds routine but turns out to be much more. A woman has fallen. We respond thinking that she has injured a leg or ankle. We discover that she fell because she had a heart attack. We respond to a report of a car fire, but the burning car is in a garage attached to the house. If we subscribe to the theory of take a little fire truck to a little fire, what would we do if it turned out to be a big fire? Imagine the outcry if we had to run back to the station to get a bigger truck. What about those rare occasions where we respond directly from a medical to a fire, or vice versa? How sympathetic would you be if your emergency had to wait until we could switch trucks to accommodate your situation? Fortunately you do not have to worry about that because our big truck and the firefighters it carries are trained and equipped to handle whatever emergency comes along. Question: Why do you cut holes in the roof and tear out the walls? Answer: The objectives and the goals of the Muscatine Fire Department have expanded significantly over the years, but our primary objective is still an unwavering commitment to saving lives and property. There are seldom any questions from the public regarding our efforts in the category of rescue, but when it comes to saving property there are always procedures and practices, which are misunderstood by the citizens in the street. Why do fire fighters break our windows and cut holes in the roof they ask. Why do they pull our ceilings down and tear our walls out when they’re supposed to be saving our property? Perhaps this can provide some insight as to why property is purposely damaged during fire fighting. One of the keys to successfully extinguishing a fire inside a building is to ventilate. Ventilation is the process by which by-products of the fire (heat, smoke, gasses) are removed from the structure so an interior attack can be made. Only fire fighters or those who have experienced a fire first hand can appreciate the untenable conditions inside a burning building. Despite silly, simulated fires seen in the movies or on television, the reality is that fire fighters enter smoked filled structures virtually blind and highly vulnerable to high temperatures, which can soar past 1000 degrees at the ceiling. Even with all our protective gear on and our air packs, fire fighters cannot survive long when exposed to such extreme temperatures. Therefore it is imperative that the worse of the smoke and heat be removed in order for fire fighting operations to be done properly. If we lived in a perfect world opening doors and windows would do all the ventilation. Life is seldom so simple. In many of the burning buildings we fine that the windows are painted shut, or simply do not work. The only way to ventilate is to break the windows. Another problem is that the hot gasses rise to the highest part of the structure. Opening windows provides horizontal ventilation, but vertical ventilation is much more effective. In a perfect world there would be an adequate number of sizable vents in the roof to allow such a procedure to be more easily done. This is rarely the case. In order to accomplish our task we have to cut a hole in the roof. Suck a sight can be very disturbing to a property owner, but it is simply the matter of choosing the lesser of two evils. If a building is not vented the fire fighters may not be able to complete an interior attack and the structure well be lost. The same is true for fires behind walls and in ceilings. There are two alternatives. Leave the structure intact and allow the fire to spread, or tear off the exterior coverings and expose the flames. The correct choice is obvious. Something that is not so obvious is that after the main fire has been knocked down, it is generally necessary to dig into insulation and check behind finished materials to check for hot spots. If this is not done, a tiny smoldering ember can grow into a second fire hours later, and those same property owners who complained when we began pulling down insulation and ceiling tiles would then question our competency because we let the fire start back up again. Every effort is made to keep property damage to a minimum during fire fighting operations. Water is used as sparingly as possible and salvage covers are spread to protect furniture and carpeting from whatever run off occurs. A positive pressure fan is used to force fresh air into the building. The procedure also forces hot smoke and gasses out of the building in a hurry and is much more effective than traditional ventilation methods. Holes are chopped into the roof only when the fire has reached into the attic. Windows are never broken out unless there is no other way to get them open. Still, when property owners see damage being inflicted by fire fighters they often become emotional. They need to remember that breaking out a window can save a room or that opening in the roof can save the entire top story. We get no pleasure out of damaging property, but we all now to well what well happen if we don’t. In a perfect world we would not have to do such things, but in a perfect world there would be no fires in the first place. |