06:50:00
Brad Warr
Captain, Nampa Fire Department
“ARE YOU IN TOWN?”
Calling me ahead of my shift, Battalion Chief Terry Leighton caught me brushing my teeth. It was a legitimate question. For the last couple of years, I was often out of town doing technical rescue trainings throughout the United States. This past week saw me in Bettendorf, Iowa.
“Sure, Chief. Got back last night. What’s up?”
“The Owyhee County Sheriff’s Office called a few minutes ago. There’s a plane down in the mountains, and they have requested technical rescue assistance. Captain Flavel is starting to put together the team. So far he has Hardy, Fuhriman, and himself. He asked that I call you.”
Jerry Flavel. I have known him for 15 years. Flavel is a hundred-miles-per-hour kind of guy, someone who always has a smile on his face. He is the best kind of firefighter and friend. No doubt Flavel was already down the pole, gathering gear with Ted Hardy hot on his heels, saying, “Come on. Let’s go. This is great.”
I distinctly remembered the last time Nampa’s technical rescue team received this type of call. A teenager had rappelled down a 250-foot cliff southwest of Marsing, Idaho. The kid had purchased his gear at a discount sporting goods store, and after going over the side of that huge cliff at Jump Creek, he realized that he didn’t have enough rope to get to the bottom. What a sight. There he was, dangling on the side of the cliff, hoping and praying that someone would bail him out.
When that call came in, I was in Detroit, Michigan, training firefighters at a major refinery. Besides being a captain with Nampa Fire, I am a chief instructor, going around the country, from Alaska to New York City, Las Vegas to Chicago, teaching technical rescue. The refinery in Detroit sponsored the training to equip local firefighters with the skills necessary to perform specific kinds of rescues should some accident, such as a confined space emergency, occur at the plant.
I was up front teaching, getting the class ready to run a scenario, when my phone started vibrating. I ignored it but it went off again. And again. Odd. At first I suspected one of my sons was texting me. Nope. It was Flavel. I continued to ignore it but, okay, Jerry, come on. The phone vibrated again. Then I thought, “It must be an emergency. Something really important.”
“Guys,” I apologized to the class, “something must be going on. Excuse me for a second.” I answered the phone. “Hey, Jerry, I’m teaching. What’s going on?”
Flavel, talking a mile a minute, said, “I’m calling to let you know that we are about to go over a 250-foot cliff to get a guy. See ya.”
Click. That was it. Flavel. I wasn’t there to join in the fun, and he was calling to rub it in. Later that night, Jerry told me how the rescue turned out. That kid could have easily died had rescuers not gotten to him.
Plane crash in the Owyhees? Absolutely. Count me in. My harness, helmet, and equipment were in my gear bag next to the front door, Delta Airlines tags still on.
“I’m on my way, Chief. Would you see if you can catch Captain Cade on his way to the station?” Captain Chris Cade was another member of Nampa Fire’s technical rescue team.
“I will call him right now.”
Great.
It would take me only a few minutes to get to Station #1 down on First Street. Nampa, Idaho, is small town America, wanting to be something more.
Located in Idaho’s Treasure Valley, Nampa is a historically agricultural community that saw a huge boom in the last ten years. When I started with Nampa Fire, we had 30,000 people in the city limits with 10,000 in the outlying rural areas. Now we had 80,000 in the city and more than 100,000 in the fire district. As a department, we averaged over 8000 calls a year.
Some places you visit; others you call “home.” For me, Idaho is home. Always will be. In all of my travels, I have yet to find somewhere better than Idaho. Four seasons of the year. Wide-open country. Mountains. Desert. Rivers. Hardworking people. Grassroots values.
In terms of a career, I hit the job lottery twice.
Born and raised in the southern part of the state, I was your typical Idaho kid. Big family. Heavily into sports and the outdoors. Married young in college. With a degree in journalism, I planned to be a sportswriter, but newly married with children on the way, I ended up at Micron Technology, a semiconductor corporation in Boise, as part of their emergency response team. With 10,000 employees, Micron was equivalent to a small city, and it made sense for them to have their own internal team of emergency responders.
Certainly changed my world. Shortly after starting, I was given the opportunity to get EMT training. After that, I became a HAZMAT (hazardous materials) technician, which was followed by a class that had a big impact on my life, high angle and confined space rescue.
Most of this training was with firefighters. Between those classes and hanging out with career firefighters, I realized how much I enjoyed what I was doing. When they encouraged me to consider the fire service, saying, “You need to test,” I took a hard look at it.
Getting into firefighting is an ultracompetitive process. When I took the written test, the first step in the hiring process, nearly a thousand prospective candidates showed up, 400 alone in the auditorium where I was seated. Everyone that day knew that few of us would move forward to the physical agility test.
Thirty people got through the written test gauntlet. I was one of them.
Next was physical agility. When I saw the guys I was up against, I thought, “They are huge. Linebackers compared to me.” But the one thing I had going for me was that I was a pretty competitive guy.
The physical agility test consisted of seven fire-related physical drills. Pulling hose. Carrying hose. Swinging an axe. Raising a ladder. All done with turnout gear on and wearing an air pack. For the last event, you had to carry a 180-pound dummy up two flights of stairs and then back down in less than three minutes, the kind of challenge that tested who you are as much as your strength.
Eight of the 30 passed. I was one of them.
Last step was the oral review boards conducted by fire chiefs and other city human resources personnel. Besides probing your personality, the questions you are asked are designed to see how you would respond to certain situations.
It was not unusual for guys to test 30 or 40 times and never get hired. I tested with five departments and was fortunate to finish at or near the top of the list with Caldwell, Nampa, and Idaho Falls. All three offered me a job within the same month. I knew I made the right decision in choosing Nampa Fire. Besides having great people, the department is well-trained and aggressive with problems.
Some fire departments get bogged down in form, figuring out who has the right vest on while the fire grows bigger. Not Nampa. The department gives its captains and crews a lot of flexibility to solve problems and get the job done. We don’t end up with too many parking lots. It is a very good fire department.
After getting hired, I was sent to the academy for training. Thanks to Micron, I was already an EMT, a rope and confined space technician, and a HAZMAT technician. Despite that, I knew virtually nothing about the fire side of the job. How a fire behaves. The equipment. Who does what job at a fire. When to attack a fire. I had a lot to learn.
To the general public, what firefighters do sometimes looks like ants on an ant hill. Truth is that our organized chaos is actually very coordinated. On calls, every firefighter has a specific role. Some put out the fire. Others ventilate the building to let the smoke out (giving anyone trapped inside a better chance of surviving), while others search for victims.
After the academy, you are a year on probation. You might have the physical and intellectual skills, passing the evolutions (training scenarios) and understanding how the equipment works, but still not have what it takes to make good decisions, work well with the public, control your emotions, or fit in at the fire station.
Who you are as a person is a big part of whether you make it. The fire service is a tight-knit brotherhood, one forged by living at the same station and working as a team. If you are an individualist, the odds of your having a fulfilling career are not that good because firefighters are rarely alone and always work in teams.
We work and laugh a lot. Live at the station for our shifts. Take turns cooking. If you do something stupid enough early on, it will probably stick with you for the rest of your career. Some guys still get teased about their moms bringing in their dinner on their first night to cook. We have each other’s backs. I could call just about any of them today, saying, “Hey, man. A windstorm blew the roof off my house,” and there would be a crew of guys heading my way. We gain great satisfaction in taking care of brothers in need.
We tend to be competitive by nature, the kind of people who want a challenge, are able to make a lot of decisions fast, and enjoy that feeling in the pit of their stomachs that says the call you are racing toward could get a bit hairy.
As a probationary firefighter, you figure out fast to keep your mouth shut and do whatever you are told. From your first day, you are out on calls and expected to do the job quickly and efficiently. If you have a question, you ask, because the last thing you want is to get caught not knowing what you are doing. Guys will jump all over that. They should.
First few calls, some of it scared me to death—the possibility of a situation where I didn’t perform the skill well enough or made a decision too slowly. In firefighting, everything you do impacts those you are seeking to help and the team. Lives are often at stake.
On my first shift, a canal had broken near the highway, water covering the interstate. A car hydroplaned and flipped, landing upside down in the canal. There I was, four hours into this career, wondering in the pit in my stomach, “Can I do this?”
What you do is take a deep breath and go on, confidence building with each call.
Later that same shift, I ended up doing CPR on a three-month-old baby. When we got to the home, the child was already blue and the family frantic, but there I was, my first day as a firefighter, doing CPR on an infant who wasn’t going to make it.
Now, 15 years later, very little seems to shock me. Every once in a while, you go on a call and end up scratching your head, thinking, “I could have never imagined seeing something like that.” Like the teenager who, wrecking his car, ended up with a chain link fence post impaled in the chest.
He was struggling to breathe. It took us a second to figure out what to do. You couldn’t just pull the post out of him. We ended up grabbing the hydraulic cutters and cutting the pipe. As soon as we made the cut, the kid took a breath, dust blowing out the pipe. Put a rubber glove over the end of the pipe. Cut the fingers off the glove. There you had it. An occlusive dressing.
One for the books.
Problem solving is a given in our line of work. I would like to think that most of the time I am pretty good at it. Some guys are more emotional than me, and their decisions are driven that way, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I tend to be pretty level, not a lot of highs or lows.
I can make a decision rapidly, but if you come up to me and say, “We have to do this,” you are not going to get an answer from me. It might be 5, 10, or 30 seconds because I want to process. Then you will get an answer quickly. Ninety-nine percent of the time, decisions we make will move things forward. We are not real big on backing up.
Because, truth be told, we are having too much fun to go backward.
As the patient, you could be having the worst day in your life. But as the guys coming to your rescue, we are usually having the best. On a big fire or rescue, guys will physically suppress their smiles because they don’t want people seeing how much fun they are having. Believe me. It’s a rare thing to find a firefighter who doesn’t love what he does.
There are tough calls. Most firemen move on quickly from an adult call or when an elderly patient dies. But the “kid calls” are the ones you remember. Especially the unsuccessful ones.
For me, it was the call involving a two-year-old. At a relative’s birthday party, he had fallen into a canal, floating a half mile downstream. My partner and I discovered him and started CPR but were too late. There are no words, really, to describe the emotions. This boy had been born the day after my own two-year-old son.
How do firefighters handle injuries, crisis, and death? After a bad call, we go back to work, returning to the station, getting our gear together to be ready for the next call. Maybe later, when everyone is sitting around the kitchen table, we might talk about the tough call, though the conversation will not be what some would describe as deep or emotional. What you usually hear is “I wish I would have done this,” or “Do you think we could have done that?”
If the call was extremely bad, sometimes a critical incident briefing will be arranged, but it usually doesn’t work to say to firemen, “We are going to do a formal meeting, and you are going to talk about your feelings.” Forget that. Guys just clam up. Most of us prefer talking to someone on our own. Wives. Partners. Counselors. Chaplains.
With kid calls, conversations are always respectful. With adult calls, it can sometimes seem irreverent, but not because we lack compassion. We deal with death on a regular basis, and if we got emotionally snagged on each call, we would be in a funk 100 percent of the time. As long as the call does not involve children, we move on fast to the next and the next.
After probation, you focus on the evolutions and learn how to drive the engine and pump water so that you can step up as a driver. I was a firefighter only a year when I was promoted to driver. Although I loved driving the fire engine, I hated being stuck with the engine and pumping water while everyone else was fighting fire.
I’d always rather be in the middle of it. Like the fire six years ago. A few days before Christmas.
A big snowstorm hit Nampa, leaving us with ice-covered roads and freezing temperatures, conditions keeping us busy with traffic accidents and residential fires. I was a newly promoted captain, still figuring it out, working out of Station #2 south of town. In the late evening, multiple 911 calls came in for a structure fire, and when you hear multiple callers like that over the radio, everything ramps up very fast because you know you are dealing with something real.
Then we heard the words “possible trapped victims.” That sent everyone’s adrenaline off the charts. Slowed by the ice-slick roads, we were taking twice as long to get to the location. When we were about a minute out, dispatch updated us: “Caller reports hearing screaming coming from inside the structure.”
Moments later, we arrived. Saw it. A two-story home in a nice neighborhood, 3500 square feet. Already 50 percent involved. Blowing fire out of the whole first floor.
If we had not gotten the reports of “possible trapped victims,” we would have never gone inside the structure given how much of it was burning. We would have knocked down the fire from outside.
We made decisions based upon the information we had. The sound of screaming. Vehicles parked outside. The time of day you would expect someone to be home.
You could hear the sirens of the rigs from Station #1 and Station #4 as they reached the house. We began pulling lines as the battalion chief arrived and took command.
Bruce Grow and I made an attack into the back of a building and immediately encountered heavy fire, so heavy that it pushed us back a few times. We got inside, Captain Leighton and his crew of two firefighters coming in behind us. The first 15 feet were solid black, so bad that you couldn’t see in front of your face.
Outside, truck crews were throwing ladders and going through the windows to “Vent Enter Search” the bedrooms. Firefighters would pop a window, crawl in, and close the door of the room to protect themselves. They would search the room and, if no one was there, go back out the window. Later I would learn that a couple of our truck guys had almost been trapped upstairs searching for victims and were forced back.
The engine crews on the first floor were attacking the fire, but it was quickly wrapping itself around us. A very bad situation to find yourself in. Suddenly Bruce’s pack alarm went off, telling us that the air bottle on his self-contained BA (breathing apparatus) was dangerously low. He and I started backing out, and after reaching the door, Bruce headed to the engine.
Standing still at the door, I saw Captain Leighton and his crew fighting the fire off to my left. That’s when I saw the orange glow wrapping around the interior crew. The fire had breached the kitchen pantry and was about to cut them.
I yelled but, with the roar of the fire, they didn’t hear me. From the doorway, I opened the nozzle, pushed the fire, and crawled, eventually grabbing one of the firefighters, Dave Jackson, while shouting, “The fire is behind us. We have to back out.”
Moving fast, Leighton’s firefighters backed out the door ahead of him and me. Just as we got to the door, the fire blew up so fast that it literally knocked us flat on our backs. Flames from the living room, hallway, and pantry had come together, doing what is called “flashover,” a situation where everything combustible reaches its ignition temperature at the same time.
Flat on our backs, Leighton and I crawled inch by inch toward the back door, using two lines to push back the fire that was flaming inches above our heads. The first flashover was bad enough, but then it happened again, coming right at us. Incredibly, we got out.
Changing air bottles, we regrouped and went back at it again.
As Firefighter Grow and I got ten feet inside the door, intending to attack the front room, I heard the ceiling break free. A second later, part of the ceiling and a truss fell right down on top of me. Peeling the dry wall and insulation off of me, I went back to work. Hours later at the emergency room, I would learn how badly I was injured. Rotator cuff. Disks in my neck compressed. Happens.
Good news was that no one was inside.
The homeowners had gone to a movie, leaving a candle burning on a table. Apparently the family cat liked getting up on that table and tipped it over, starting the fire. The family told us that whenever the cat howled, it sounded exactly like someone screaming.
That was six years ago, 2006, the year I was promoted to captain, a position where I am content to stay. I want nothing more than to ride an engine, to be the company officer figuring out the plan and crawling into burning buildings. These last 15 years have gone by fast, too fast. Blink and I know I will be staring retirement in the face.
The Owyhees. A snowstorm had come in last night. Cold. Wet. Made you think about anyone surviving up there.
At 7:12 a.m., advising Nampa dispatch that we were en route, Flavel and I headed south in Rescue One toward Murphy, Idaho, while Captain Cade, Ted Hardy, and Jake Fuhriman stowed extra equipment in another truck, soon to be on our heels. Given what we knew, Flavel and I assumed we were probably going on a body recovery. All we knew was that there were three victims. Dead or alive? Didn’t know.
Ted Hardy, a bright, articulate, high-energy firefighter and paramedic was coming off shift, about to leave on vacation when the call came in from the Owyhee County Sheriff. Ted picked up the phone and the dispatcher immediately asked, “Do you guys have a technical rescue team?”
“Yes, we do,” he answered.
“How quickly can you get here?”
“Hang on. You need to talk to our chief.”
Now a battalion chief, Terry Leighton runs B-Shift. A clear-thinking, hardworking, bighearted firefighter, Terry has 31 years under his belt. After getting the request from OCS, Chief Leighton contacted his bosses, Chief Karl Malott and Deputy Chief Doug Strosnider, to get their approval. Responding to this call would cost the department a lot of money in overtime with crews being called in. Our budget was stretched so tight it was not a sure thing that we would be allowed to go.
Malott gave the green light and Leighton, knowing that Ted was leaving on vacation, questioned him about being a part of the team. “Are you sure you’re not supposed to go on vacation?”
Ted, like a kid in a candy store, was unmoved. “Chief, I really want to go on the rescue.”
“Are you sure your wife is going to be okay with you going?”
“Sure. No problem.”
Right.
Story has it that, heading out of Nampa going red lights and sirens, Ted, driving the truck, asked Fuhriman to call his wife to give her the news. Jake willingly obliged, “Amy…”
Amy, hearing Jake’s voice amid sirens, imagined the worst. Her husband must have been in an accident. Later, Ted got an earful. “Whenever you have someone else call me, the first thing they have to say is that everything is okay.” However, Amy understood. Ted was doing what he loved to do. Being away from home was a normal sacrifice for firefighter families. He would catch up with them.
Technical rescue is an umbrella term for specialties within firefighting, specifically high angle rope rescue, confined space, swift water, trench and structure collapse. In Nampa, technical rescue calls are usually industrial. Using specialized gear, we access people who are in a place that can’t be reached through conventional ladders or stairs. The worker whose scaffolding had collapsed. Construction worker trapped in a trench, or someone in a silo having a medical emergency.
For private industry, OSHA requires that if you have employees working in confined spaces or at heights, you have to provide rescue resources, either internally or by contract with agencies having quick response times. Many bigger plants develop their own technical rescue teams, the benefit being that rescuers are on-site with equipment and have the training.
Nampa’s industrial facilities are not big enough to support a technical rescue team, and ten years ago, Nampa Fire agreed to help. Because technical rescue is a low frequency, high-risk specialty that requires continual training in order to keep skills current, most fire departments don’t have a team. Often there will be a regional team that a number of departments utilize because it can take years for a department to see a return on its training investment.
When I worked at Micron, I was trained in rope rescue and confined space. It made sense to me and I loved doing it. Three years later, when Nampa Fire offered to send me to a class put on by a national company, I jumped at the chance. At the end of the class, the chief instructor pulled me to the side and asked if I would be interested in teaching for them.
Now, years later, I am a chief instructor with ROCO Rescue out of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a company that specializes in rescue training for first responders in industrial rescue teams, municipal firefighters, and military special forces, traveling throughout the United States teaching technical rescue to fire departments, industrial rescue teams, and special forces operators.
When I started with Nampa Fire, I had 20-plus hours of training in rope rescue and confined space. I can still remember the day one of our battalion chiefs, a grizzled old Vietnam vet, was watching crews do some technical rescue training. When one of the systems didn’t come together, the chief looked at me and barked, “Warr, didn’t you used to do this?”
Still a probie, I was in a tough spot. “Yes, Chief.”
“Do you know how to do this?”
“Yes, Chief.”
“Well, show us.”
So I did. Fifteen minutes later, another question showed up and I heard, “Warr, do you know how to do this?”
“Yeah, Chief.”
Murphy, Idaho. A 40-minute drive from Nampa, straight down Highway 45. Distinguished with the title of Owyhee County seat, Murphy consists of a dozen or so buildings in the high desert of Southern Idaho. Blink and you will pass the place. Not the place you want to be stuck waiting in this kind of emergency with the crash site another hour to the southwest.
To our chagrin, we had sat at the Owyhee County Sheriff’s Office for almost an hour. Frustrating.
Sheriff Crandall had given Flavel and me the rundown when we walked through the doors. A small, private plane had crashed on Turntable Mountain some time before midnight. Just before dawn, Air St. Luke’s managed to locate the crash site and there found three patients, one male and two females. The injuries included possible pelvic fracture, but the patients had been able to self-extricate from the wreckage. Given the terrain, medical personnel on the ground requested rope rescue assistance to help remove patients from the scene.
We also learned they were trying to put together a hoist operation with the Idaho National Guard. Unfortunately, approval was still pending, and with whiteout conditions and trails deep in snow, there was a good chance responders would still have to carry patients up the mountain to the waiting ASL helicopters.
We were stuck because of the rugged backcountry. Neither Rescue One nor our trucks would be able to get to the crash site, not even close. So we waited, checking weather updates on our phones while Sheriff Crandall tried to secure us a ride by helicopter.
I called Chief Leighton, now having a better idea what we were looking at, to give him a list of what we needed. He put together a team of two more firefighters with gear and sent them out in another truck as those of us in Murphy formulated a plan, checked our equipment, and decided what to take and what to leave behind on Rescue One.
The wait slowed us down, but it also allowed the rest of the Nampa team to catch up to Rescue One.
There was Captain Jerry Flavel, the guy with enough enthusiasm for the entire department. Flavel’s rope skills are very good. Besides being one of the department’s rope rescue instructors, Jerry regularly teaches ropes and confined space around the state.
The second truck was commanded by Captain Chris Cade, the kind of guy who, when he spoke, everyone listened. Chris was the kind of guy who made very good, commonsense decisions during an emergency. Moreover with Chris you didn’t have to worry about details being overlooked. Once he knows the goal, Chris puts a solid plan in place almost immediately. Another of the department’s rope rescue instructors, he is a very good rescue technician. Outside of firefighting, Chris is a very fast, accomplished competitive cyclist, on both road and mountain bikes.
Senior Firefighter Jake Fuhriman is the craftsman of the group. A guy who builds houses and cabinets on the side, Jake has a huge appetite for learning. He is someone who is always asking questions, wanting to know “why” instead of just being given the “how.”
Senior Firefighter Ted Hardy was the only medic responding, which would prove to be very beneficial later in the day. Also qualified as a flight medic, Ted is all-energy, always doing something on his days off—camping, riding, or skiing. Ted is a very talented medic and very good rope technician.
Driver Operator Dale Goodwin is a details guy, someone who is very quiet but very perceptive. If something is changing, Dale is usually the one to pick up on it first. A former football player at Boise State, Dale is incredibly strong, so strong that he once broke the chain on the curl machine during a fitness test.
If something is broken, the person you call is Senior Firefighter Darrel Rosti. Darrel will not only fix the problem but, more likely, make it better than its original design. A week doesn’t go by where someone from the department isn’t at Darrel’s shop getting something welded or repaired by this incredibly talented machinist. Starting with the department in his early forties, Darrel has a wealth of real-world life experience. He is a man who doesn’t seem to get fazed by anything. A pilot himself, his skills with aircraft would be good once we got to the wreckage.
After almost an hour, Crandall had not been able to secure a helicopter. Coming out of his office, he told us, “You have two choices. You can go home, or you can go up to Silver City until we find a way to get you to the crash site.”
Flavel, hearing Crandall, was out the door to Rescue One before the rest of us could respond. Our decision was to go on ahead to the staging area at Silver City, which would get us an hour closer to the crash site. If there was a plan to get us to the crash site by the time we got there, great. If not, we would come up with one. We couldn’t sit any longer while people were up there in the cold and snow waiting for us.
The good news was that this was a real call, not a situation where everyone got tooled up for nothing. Here and now, the only agency having jurisdiction to cancel us was OCS, and they hadn’t. Given that, the seven of us pushed south with Chief Malott and Deputy Chief Strosnider close behind. If nothing else, we would soon be 30 miles closer than we were.
We moved fast. If we ended up having to bring injured, hypothermic patients out by ground, it would take the better part of the day. The sooner we got there, the better.