Waggin' Trail: Fire!

Well just as you think nothing much is happening, stuff happens. About three am I was woken by two large booming sounds and thought, Dammit they're trying to wreck the fence again! But when I looked through the window, there was a huge orange conflagration just up the hill - at first I thought it was the fire station, but it was the house next door to it. These are the people who are constantly leaving rubbish in the driveway and throwing things over the brigade fence & breaking in etc.

I grabbed my camera & ran up to see if I could help, thinking I could perhaps hand out bottles of water or something. "Grab a uniform and go help Ben and Courtney round the back!" So with no real idea of what I was doing, I was suddenly a firefighter, unrolling hoses and turning on the hydrant supply from the side street, pulling crap away from the sides of the house so that Greg & Ben could get in with the hoses, and pointing out spot fires emerging from under the verandah roof. When the breeze turned around & blew the smoke our way we stepped back to let Greg handle it, as he was wearing breathing apparatus. The fire at the front of the house was massive - the place burned down fast, and it burned to the ground.

Once the main blaze was under control, I thought, what the hell, and asked Ben if I could have a go with the hose to keep damping down the spot fires & smouldering areas. Yeah! Then Courtney & I braved the rubbish heap of the back yard to look for the house's mains water switch, which we discovered but only after a repulsive stench-filled encounter in the dark with an extremely dead emu hanging off the back of a trailer. With the main fire out, Brayley and I dragged miles of hoses out of the way so that the Toll Freight truck could get through, and then we set to work emptying & rolling the hoses up.

Here's a fun weight loss simulation thing you can try - put on about ten kilos of thick, heavy clothing and boots over your jeans & t-shirt, and drag some heavy long hoses around in 35 degree night time temperatures, walk around the block lots of times, then after a few hours take all the gear off. You will feel like you are made of angel fluff (smelly, sooty, sweat-stinkin' angel fluff). Then you will feel like drinking 17 gallons of Coke and lying down on the soft, comfortable pavement.

Fortunately - well, as far as we know - no one was hurt or killed. It was grim to see the police scanning the smoking wreckage by torchlight looking for bodies. My first thought when I first got to the fire was a sick feeling, wondering if any little kids had been left inside - because the people who go there are so drunk and out of control that I don't think they would know, notice or even care if any children were missing. So fingers crossed.

Also it was sheer luck that there were no incidents due to the (literally) 7 big gas bottles stacked up in the house, the smouldering gun safe we discovered halfway through putting out the fire at the back, or the half a dozen petrol jerries left lying around the yard.

So apart from all that, it was AWESOME. My only disappointment was that putting on a firefighting uniform did not instantly transform me into the tall, lithe, heroic-looking Sigourney Weaverish steely-eyed amazon of my fantasies, but hey, with no mirrors and plenty of self-delusion anything is possible. Also, when I get my own uniform hopefully it will fit properly and I won't be walking around in giant pants feeling like one of those guys wearing a barrel with suspenders.

The photos aren't great due to it being dark (also I was a bit busy holding my pants up), but here you go: