I’ve had a busy few days.
I worked at my paid department over the weekend. It wasn’t a particularly busy weekend. Not too much of note happened.
My SAR team leader called me about an hour after I got home Sunday night to ask me to attend a search in Franconia Notch ( has posted details here). I was up early to head up there, arriving at 8:00.
I had expected to be working above treeline but as it worked out I did not. I worked with a team going up a drainage to meet another team coming down. My search team bushwhacked up the drainage for three miles until we received word that the person had been located, at which point we turned around and walked out.
It was pretty tiring. I had to go to a rescue squad meeting last night but went to bed earlyish.
This morning I participated in a major fire in a condominium unit at a local ski area. I’m pretty exhausted and am off to bed; a lot of people I worked with today asked me to post my photos so I have… I’ll do a narrative sometime later but here are some photos.
The back of the condo after things had been going for a while. The stream over my head is from a ladder on the road behind me.
The roof is laddered to cut a trench.
The only injury; a cat bite to the hand. This is Lieutenant Mittenclips from my paid department. I was asked by the deputy chief to join their interior crew as soon as he saw me; I arrived and worked with with my volunteer department, though.
Overhaul.
Lt. Mittenclips insisted on taking my picture.
Here’s a link to a slideshow of all of the pictures. There’s a lot.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bxiie/sets/72157594496984312/show/
I’m off to bed.
It's Bxiie Q. with the 411 
January 24, 2007 at 09:14
Glad you are safe and all is well. I guess you are too tired for me to tease you about the way this was worded…
This morning I participated in a major fire in a condominium unit at a local ski area.
Hmmm….
January 24, 2007 at 11:54
Not like THAT!
I was out of town. And, um, I didn’t have a lighter.
January 24, 2007 at 15:03
weird. I’ve never had a problem looking at your pictures before, but this time the wonderful work firewalls thinks that your pages are “personal/chat” and I’m not allowed access and the images aren’t loading. poo-ey. 😦
January 24, 2007 at 16:59
Because what you’re actually missing is the entire fire brigade doing a conga and strip tease. You know how naughty those firemen are.
January 24, 2007 at 22:29
whoa, nasty. I’m hoping to do Search and Rescue training maybe in about a years time (still only just passed my entry, waiting for a pager). Must be exhausting searching in snow; we don’t exactly do much of that here. :-)) With your uniforms, are they sort of grey in color or was that smoke damage? Ours are a BRIGHT fluro yellow that is really rather painful to the eye until you happen to… stumble…. and muck it up a little, we have narrower fluro strips simply because you just can’t miss that hyper-radioactive yellow. Our structure fire jackets are black and goooooorgious, have to earn mine still but get to have one as it gets freezing here on night jobs, just not allowed to go too close to structures yet. Only our OIC is allowed to wear a red helmet, we get, again, yellow.
January 24, 2007 at 23:45
Our SAR team wears whatever we show up in. We have bright orange shirts that are encouraged during warmer months and are a requirement during hunting season. It’s more important that we have the right gear for the terrain. I prefer winter searches; no bugs, for one thing, plus I don’t handle the heat very well.
Our structural gear varies between departments. Most of the local departments have a tan color turnout with hi-viz strips. If we’re out on the road we wear additional flourescent vests to up the candlepower.
There’s a lot of patchwork gear based on the fact that it’s pretty rural out here and the volunteer departments have minimal budgets. At my paid department, as a matter of fact, I had mismatching gear for over a year after I started until someone my size quit the department.
Our chiefs (heads of the departments) wear white helmets, officers usually a different color (red, typically), and us worker bees still a different color (usually black).