Firefighter Nick Baskerville is eager to prove himself when he arrives on the scene of his first fire.
Nick has had the honor of serving in the United States Air Force for a total of 14 years. He has 19 years of fire service time, with 16 years of that being in a career department in Northern Virginia. Nick is a state certified instructor for the fire service in Virginia where he teaches classes ranging from basic fire fighter skills to Cancer awareness for the Firefighter Cancer Support Network (FCSN). Nick is also a member of Better Said Than Done, a storytelling organization in Northern VA. His stories have been featured there, The Moth, Storyfest Short Slam, Secretly, Ya’ll and Perfect Liars Club. Nick has started a blog, Story Telling On Purpose (www.stop365.blog), as a way to connect the storytelling community with the rest of the DC, MD, VA area.
This story originally aired on March 15, 2019 in an episode titled “Teamwork.”
Story Transcript
“It’s in a basement,” is what he shouts. That’s what this guy says. And that’s when things got real.
That guy, that was my very first fire officer. The Good Captain is what I call him. And he looks every bit the part of a fire officer from his boots to his helmet and is marred in all of the fire and soot and experience that he has. I’m pretty sure he has forgotten more things that I’m ever going to learn.
And then you got me. I’m there wide eyed and bushy haired and my gear is clean, I mean squeaky clean, like I just came off the Clorox Bleach commercial-clean. That’s how clean it looks. And this, this is my very first fire in my career department.
Now, this is 2003, late summer is what I’m thinking. It’s not that I've never been to a fire. It’s just, now, I’m asking myself the question, the same one that probably everybody asked in the fire department when they go to their first fire. Can I do my job? Would I be respected or ridiculed?
Now, I know you guys ask that too when you go to your job, it’s just I’m going into a burning building. This has a bit more meaning for me.
Now, on that particular day there's three of us on the fire engine. I’m sitting in the back, up here to my left is the driver, and over here is the officer. So we pull up to the house and there's this two-story, beautiful mansion of a house. It’s huge. Then on the right-hand side of it is an oversized garage. From there you can see a driveway and it’s, I don't know, maybe like 200 feet or so as it gets to the street.
We pull off the street, into the driveway, but there's no smoke. Well, we still have things to do so the driver gets off and he does driver stuff and I’m not sure what that is yet. And the officer gets off, he does officer stuff which I’m trying to keep up, but I’m not a hundred percent sure about that either.
But I know my job so I grab the fire hose. I got half of it sitting here on my shoulder and the other half I’m dragging along with me. We walk into the garage, the door is already open. I lay stuff out, I’m getting it ready for water and that’s when he comes back out and says, “It’s in the basement.”
By then, two other people have come from the other engine company, another seasoned fire captain and then also another firefighter. She was in my recruit class so I’m happy about that because I know she can do work. So I know I've got a dependable person right here.
We figure out that we can’t go in the way we’re going to so we come out of the garage, we come all the way around to the front of the building. We go into the back, we find the basement door and we get ready to go in.
Basement fires are among the most dangerous in the fire service. There's typically only one way in or out. So when you go in, you get all the heat, all the smoke. Any kind of danger you're going to get it. In the fire service, sometimes we jokingly talk about ‘slaying the dragon’ when we’re putting the fire out, but as I’m going down this cavern I’m thinking this expression is very, very relevant.
So I get to the bottom and I’m on the nozzle. Right behind me is the engine company officer from the other engine. Behind him is the other firefighter. My chief, my fire captain, The Good Captain, he's standing at the top. He's feeding us fire hose. And I get down there and this heat is intense. It’s like this gnawing at my ears. I got everything going but I can still feel it. And it’s like bee stings all over other parts of my body as I’m touching the walls or stairs.
And it’s pitch black, like you have to close your eyes to understand how dark it is in there. This deep, dark, dense smoke. That’s all I see but what I don’t see is fire. Where’s the fire? How do you lose fire? Like fire is in my job title. I can’t lose this. I’m definitely going from respect to ridicule really quick here.
So, to get rid of the heat, I open up the nozzle and I do different patterns and that doesn’t work. So now, I’m just trying to… is there maybe another door? Basements are sometimes finished. Maybe there's another room. So I’m looking for a door knob or door jamb or something. I don't do anything.
While I’m playing hide-and-go-seek with the fire, the two officers are talking and they're starting to feel a little uneasy. So I got a tap on a shoulder and they said, “Look, we’re going to try another way.”
So we back out up the stairs, out the front door. We’re going to go around to the back to see if we can get to the fire there.
As we walk around, we realize that the house is built on a grade. So in the front you could see two stories, but in the rear it’s actually three stories with a walk-out basement. So we’re going to go to the basement part there and that’s how we’re going to get to it. But before we get there, on the left-hand side there's a door and it’s open. And there it is, all the fire. Sneaky, sneaky fire.
So that’s where we go in. We open it up and I open up and I’m doing it. I am putting out fire left and right. I feel good about myself. I feel like the John Shaft of the fire department because I’m a bad mother… some, I don't know.
So the captain, The Good Captain, he's pointing over here and I’m putting out fires. He's pointing over here and I’m putting out fires. I am getting it done. I am definitely on the respect road right here. Then, in the background, I hear air horns.
In the fire service, if you're on the scene and you hear air horns it means get out, something bad is happening. But we are making progress. But I just got this job. I need to keep this so I’m going to listen to the rules that I got to do.
So I walk out but I’m a little bit a kid about it. I’m a little salty. I’m sulking.
“Stupid commanders. What do they know? They're busy being outstanding firefighters. They're out standing in the yard they don’t know what’s going on. If they could see what I could see, they would see there's an… Oh, my God!”
The entire second floor and the roof, the roof, the roof is on fire.
We call for a second alarm. That gives us twice as many firefighters and then, eventually, the fire goes out. I do have burns on my ears but that’s okay because I've earned some respect. And for years I thought that was it. That was the end of the story.
So years later, I went and I got a college degree. I got a college degree in Fire Science. Don’t laugh at my degree, okay. Because I know what you're thinking. You're thinking you're putting wet stuff on red stuff. What’s the science in this?
Well, actually it’s a lot. Fire is really combustion and combustion is part of the fire tetrahedron. So you have oxygen, you have fuel, you have heat and then you have a chemical reaction. So when firefighters put out a fire, what we’re really doing is removing one or more of those parts. That’s how we do it. Water doesn’t work on everything so you have to understand how that process goes.
And even though I’m smart enough to have an associate’s degree, I wouldn’t be smart to figure that out. Researchers and scientists are the ones who figured that out. We are so thankful for them because they find the science behind things and all we do is figure out how do you practically do it. How do you actually make it happen? It’s because of researchers that we know things that we never would have known before.
We know that one in three firefighters is going to get cancer in their lifetime. We know that first responders are five times more likely to have depression and PTSD symptoms than the general public. And what we also know is that smoke can be unburnt fuel. Like if you think back to I was talking about being in the basement and that deep, dark smoke. That means if you get it hot enough, it will burn. So in that basement I had oxygen, we had the fuel, it just never got hot enough because I guess I never got around to finding that door.
If I found the door, all that blackness would have been this bright yellow and orange. It’s called a flashover, and no one ever survives a flashover. But we didn’t have that problem because I never found a door.
One of the things that I tell students when I teach them stuff in the fire service is that fire service is a team sport. It takes many, many things, many people to make it all right. So the science of it that was part of our team. The researchers found out that the different things connected, if you remove parts of it, then you'll be safe. So science was one of the key role players.
Of course you could also say that those two experienced fire captains they were the role players. They knew something was wrong and we had to get out of there. But I’m on this team too. And I’m feeling like John Shaft, you know. I got to talk about what I did. And of all the things that I did, what I brought to the table that day, when I couldn’t find that door when I wanted to, I brought the dumb luck. Thank you.