Little fire, little firefighter

Sometimes fate just works.  Over the weekend, a fire occurred in a two-story garden apartment.  The fire was in the tiny little utility closet located just off the balcony of the 2nd floor apartment.  As luck would have it, a voluntary shift swap of the career staff of the engine company positioned our smallest firefighter in the engine's "thinking seat".  This ended up being a perfect collaberation between the problem (fire) and the solution (firefighter).  You see, this elf-like firefighter is 5-foot- nothing, weighs a hundred and nothing.  Often saved for jobs as a tunnel rat, or to speak eye-to-eye with the children during fire prevention week, this little gnome was the perfect fit for the job. They always say, choose the right tool for the job. Well we did that one better.  No one else could have articulated inside this closet like him.

Additionally, this fire proved the value of fire sprinklers.  Was this complex protected by sprinklers... well, no, not exactly.  The fire in the closet managed to get hot enough to melt the solder of one of the pipe joints of the water heater.  This discharge of water slowed the progress of the fire enough to minimize extension to the attic space, thus saving the building (and a days worth of hard work for the companies on the scene).  This is certainly not the first time I have witnessed "inadvertent fire sprinkler coverage", and like the others, the words, "we were lucky" could be heard repeatedly.  Makes me wonder how we can convince the construction industry how easy it would be to install "LUCK" into everything they build.  Of course, when they rebuild, they get paid a second time.