Exposed a Limit

"Black smoke was pumping heavily from the house when we arrived. The chief looked unhappy; the first arriving crews hadn’t pinpointed the fire yet, and the situation was devolving. My crew was trained for search and rescue, and that was all we were supposed to do, but today the chief growled, “Grab a hose and find the goddamn thing.” My partner for the shift was Victor. He was a baker in his off time and I liked him immensely, but he had a maddening tendency to do everything slowly and very carefully. So I had to wait behind for him, and, much to my dismay, Frank got to the nozzle first. Frank was a third-generation firefighter; he was aggressive, eager, and strong. Still, I wanted to be on the nozzle, the one who faced the fire head-on. Too late. Frank and his partner were charging into the garage, pushing open a side door. I followed, with Victor trailing.

As one of the few females in the San Francisco Fire Department, I had a lot to prove; the men viewed girls as sissies, I thought, and I had been put on God’s dear green earth to show everyone otherwise. To that end, I jostled to grab the Jaws of Life before anyone else, gleefully attended the most gruesome amputations, grinned about the biggest, baddest fires. I once jumped across an alley, from one building to another, five stories up, in full fire gear. I did it because another firefighter had done it, and I figured that if he did, I had better too. No one else would do it. They waited for a ladder to be brought up and thrown across, like smart people.

I was young and arrogant and flippant. God, I was a pain in the ass. And, of course, my comeuppance was nigh. The situation now in the house’s hallway was pretty typical—pitch black from smoke, and hot. Very hot. We were all crawling, dragging hose, bumping into walls and each other. Then—it was this simple—the world exploded. Later it would seem fitting that my turning point arrived the way a revelation should: with a great flash of light. The next second we were in the garage, untangling from each other. I sat up, dazed. Someone said, “Flashover!”

Flashovers are no joke. In technical terms, according to Wikipedia, flashovers happen “when the majority of surfaces in a space are heated to the autoignition temperature of the flammable gases, also known as Flash Point. Flashover normally occurs at 500 degrees Celsius (930 degrees Fahrenheit) or 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit for ordinary combustibles, and an incident heat flux at floor level of 1.8 Btu/ foot.” Put it in plain English: The air somewhere near us had exploded into flame.

Now there were curses from Andy, and Frank was grabbing each of us by the shoulders and shouting, “Are you okay?! Are you okay?!” We were, it seemed. All this took only a few seconds, then Frank said, “Where’s Victor?” Victor? He wasn’t in the garage. Which meant he was still inside. I processed this in what seemed like slow motion. Everything took on a surreal drawn-out quality. Frank, turning back the way we had so unceremoniously come, Andy’s curse words like a long, slow yawn in my ears. Victor was my partner, therefore my responsibility. But suddenly I was frozen, stuck to the floor in some strange, paralyzed state I had never felt before.

And here was the thought, loud in my head and spoken in no uncertain terms: I’m not going back in there. It was only a second. But I heard the voice clearly. I squashed it, just as quickly. Then, as if fighting against a greater force in me, I clumsily followed Frank. We found Victor quickly; he was unhurt, thankfully, and had taken cover in an adjoining room. Later at the station, we joked about the explosion, our burned ears, the expression on the chief’s face as we came somersaulting out of the doorway into the garage.

But that day, for me, was more than just another adventure. It had exposed something that I had not reached before—a limit. The explosion had shaken something loose—a dark and fearful side I had to face. I had been young and arrogant and flippant. Now I was just young.”

~ Caroline Paul (born 1963 in New York City) is an American writer of fiction and non-fiction. She was raised in Connecticut (her father was an investment banker, her mother a social worker), and educated in journalism and documentary film at Stanford University.

She worked as a journalist at Berkeley public radio station KPFA before (in 1988) joining the San Francisco Fire Department, as one of the first women hired by the department. She worked most of her career on Rescue 2, where she and her crew were responsible for search and rescue in fires. Rescue 2 members were also trained and sent on scuba dive searches, rope and rappelling rescues, surf rescues, confined space rescues, all hazardous material calls, and the most severe train and car wrecks.