The heat gets you.
That seems obvious on the surface. Fire is hot — that is, after all, what makes it dangerous.
But as the doorway at the front of a little old house at 607 Oak St. filled with orange flame, all I could think, from my vantage point on the other side of the street, was “Man, that’s hot.”
I was along with Columbus Fire and Rescue last Thursday morning for a controlled burn of the home, which owner Donald Jennings offered to let the department burn for training. I arrived about 8:15 a.m., when the heat index was a downright crisp 84 degrees and, with the exception of a trip back to the fire station to get a pair of boots to go with the rest of my gear, stayed until about midday.
The department burned the home as part of a program that both provides live situational training for firefighters and demolishes old, abandoned homes.
Duane Hughes, the department’s chief of training, conducts about 12 live burns a year in Columbus. The burns are part of a program where old city-owned or private buildings are given to the department, through Columbus’ Building Inspection Department, for training. The program has been going for roughly 20 years. If CFR did not have the program, Hughes said, the next-closest place they could get similar training would be at the Mississippi Fire Academy in Jackson.
Hughes said a home has to meet strict requirements, both from himself and the state Department of Environmental Quality, before it’s eligible for a burn. The strict guidelines mean few departments in the state do live burn training, but Hughes said it’s worth it.
“Even at the state fire academy, they have fires, but they’re propane and computer controlled,” he said. “They only get up to a certain temperature. Here, they get the real deal.”
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The department has conducted eight live burns so far this year.
Thursday’s was a bit less involved than others have been, Hughes said. The roof was in poor shape. The fire would be hard to control once lit.
Firefighters started the day by running a simulated run to rescue a woman who was trapped in the bathroom and reported smoke in her call to the department.
The woman, of course, was a person-shaped dummy made of hose. The smoke was the result of some paper Hughes lit in a washing machine.
The inside of the house was cramped. The department had torn holes in the ceiling in places and scattered debris — clothes, old electronics, brooms, mops and more — across the floor.
“I didn’t have furniture to put in here,” Hughes told me as we walked through the house. “But let’s be honest, everyone’s hygiene level isn’t always high.
“When you’re in smoke and you can’t see, this right here,” he stepped on a mop handle with some clothes on the floor around it, “feels like somebody’s leg. This is something we do to learn those subtle differences when you feel something like that.”
Two teams of firefighters ran through the exercise, and as far as I could tell, everything went well.
Then we moved on to burning the house down.
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I do not think anyone within a few blocks could’ve missed it when CFR lit the house.
I knew CFR was getting everything set as I began putting on my turnout gear. A bit more smoke was coming out from under the roof than had been from the training exercises. Then, all of a sudden, it came roiling out of the house, rising up, then falling across the street as flames grew in the roof.
Not long after that I finished strapping on my jacket, got my helmet on and went to figure out where the firefighters wanted me to set up.
I was assigned to a line on the side of the house with engineer Eric Grant, a 10-year veteran with the department. For a moment, I watched as he first sprayed side of the blue house next door, then walked along its length, using his hand to feel the surface.
“We spray the walls to keep the radiant heat off of the building,” he explained. “Every so often we’ll touch the wall with a bare hand to make sure it’s not getting to hot.”
I nodded, because this made sense, and after a few moments more, Grant offered the hose to me.
My moment had arrived.
The first thing I noticed when I took the hose is that there’s a lot of power in it, even when the nozzle is closed. It’s hard to describe, but it moved somewhat stiffly. It was a far cry from the garden hoses I’d play on hot summer afternoons in my grandparents’ back yard.
I later learned from Herbet Tedford, who manned the pump on the firetruck, that the hoses were running at about 100 psi. He said they very rarely break 200 psi.
The way to use the hose, Grant explained, is to ease it open and ease it shut. No big swings to open the floodgates or close them shut. He did not say exactly what would happen if I did, but I had a few images in mind and I did not really want to test the accuracy of my suspicions.
I eased the valve open. The water flowed, gently at first, then with more force as I pulled the valve further back. Grant pointed me to a few smoldering spots on the roof. I put them out. I used the hose in bursts — hitting hot spots as they emerged, rather than just continuously spraying water at the side of the house.
All the while, the roof gave in on itself — a process announced by loud cracking as the supports snapped like giant branches. The collapse took, at most, perhaps 10 minutes.
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It’s not just the fire itself that’s a challenge, I learned. The smoke, when the wind blew it our way, can make it next to impossible to see more than a few feet in front of you. The water added to the difficulty. The firefighters set up water curtains to protect the adjacent houses — think of a lawn sprinkler than ramp it up a few orders of magnitude — and the constant haze made sometimes made it hard to see.
You even have to be aware of the ground itself at times, as I nearly tripped once when my boots sank in mud.
The turnout gear adds another layer of challenge. It’s thick to protect firefighters from dangers of a hostile environment, but that same thickness holds in heat. That’s even without having to consider carrying the extra weight of an oxygen tank and mask — a burden I didn’t have to deal with for my stint with the department.
Jennings came back to Columbus from his home in Tennessee and watched the firefighters go through their training all morning. As his old family home burned to the ground, he drifted around, taking pictures.
It was hard to see the old home go, he said. His family moved into it in 1968 and lived there for more than 40 years. He even lived there from when he was 6 years old to when he was 30. But everyone eventually moved on and, as ash from the burning home fell lazily around us, he said it was time to let go.
“It was kind of hard to see it go,” he said. “It was just like having all our memories burned to the ground … we had a lot of barbecues and cookouts and things around this house. It was real good to us.”
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