[High Praise! to Mental Floss]
13 Behind-the-Scenes Secrets of Firefighters
When I was in the Navy, I had to go to firefighting school. Not because I wanted to, but because it’s NECESSARY for every single sailor on a ship to know how to fight a fire. When you’re 1000 miles from land, you can’t call the fire department. You ARE the fire department.
Anyway, one training exercise was to enter a “burning building” and put out the fire (it had controlled natural gas flames). It’s pitch black in there – because electricity is normally out during a fire. And those flames, surprisingly, only illuminate out to about 10 feet. And you can’t see diddly because of the smoke.
I honestly don’t know how anyone navigates in a burning building. I’m just grateful there are men crazy enough to try.
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When my dad was in the Navy and assigned to submarine duty, he was told he was going to be on “fire control.” “Gee,” he thought, “We’re underwater – how many fires can there be?” He was glad he kept this thought to himself when he realized there could be fires in the engine room or kitchen. He was REALLY glad he kept this thought to himself when he learned that “fire control” meant control of firing the torpedoes and other weapons.
Daddy’s boat: http://www.navsource.org/archives/08/0852403.jpg
Not in Memphis, TN, they don’t. My cat had been missing for three days when a neighbor came by and told me he’d heard meowing from a tree near his fishing spot. My cat had somehow been three stories up a tree for three days. Since there was a storm blowing in that evening, I called for emergency services, who told me that they only help humans. All of the online resources I found while trying to find a tree service that could do an emergency visit said that this was standard in large cities across the country.
Fortunately, that same neighbor had a friend who had a window cleaning service, and was willing to help me that evening. However, I didn’t really trust the rest of the article after that.
So, when I got to item 12 and saw
I wasn’t surprised that Michele Debczak (the author) didn’t see fit to mention
Firefighters still have my respect, but mental_floss doesn’t anymore.
@2 – Don’t write off Mental Floss as a whole, just hate that particular author, Michele Debczak, who let her prejudices show. Most of the staff does decent work. She was just unprofessional.
Oh yes, the fire training. When I was stationed in Mayport, FL we did a main-space fire exercise and it is as you said Harvey. The only light came from the fire and you couldn’t see from all the smoke. Very eerie. One lesson we learned was when we were doing an aircraft fire. Hose team one was supposed to go down the starboard side of the plane and hose team two (my team) went down the port side working fore to aft. Hose team one followed me down the port side of the aircraft and the fire swept around and came up behind us. Lesson learned.
On the Saratoga, I was part of the backup fire party. Thankfully all we ever had to do was training.