On June 12, 2007, I attended a call. That morning I had taken my five-year-old son and dropped him off at day care wearing a tank top, jean shorts, and a pair of sandals. I was a fire chief of a small community with two fire stations, volunteer in nature, and we got a call for a detached garage fire.
I took the fire chief vehicle and arrived on scene. Two of my volunteer firefighters parked the truck. The truck was eight minutes out from getting there. I was the first other vehicle on scene. They had gone in once and covered their faces. They were in their bunker gear but with no air patch yet, because the truck was still seven minutes out. They did an educated risk assessment that if they waited any longer there would be no viable life inside.
They pulled the child outside, and because I was coming there medically prepared, I had my basic trauma life support, and I did chest compressions. The child had already started to go pugilistic. It was a five-year-old playing with a butane lighter inside a garage.
In dealing with that call, the individual who went into that garage had a child the same age. That day, when I worked on that child who ended up passing away, my son was at day care wearing almost the exact same clothes.
After doing all the media associated with that there was an outcry from those I will call “armchair quarterbacks”. “Why did firefighters go in the building without air packs?” “Do you employ cowboys in that municipality?” I said, “They risked a lot to save a lot, given their experience and training. They did what they were supposed to do, and they're not to be criticized. I have children myself. They are heroes.”
What I can tell you is that members on that department that day saw the same thing I did. Although I don't wake up with haunting nightmares, I can tell you everything about that day: touch, sensation, clothing, colours, and smells. I can tell you all those things. Luckily, I can do so without crippling results.
Others couldn't. Others left the department that day, and that's only 2007. They never came back. What were their whereabouts? The tracking and the evidence-based research we talked about was not there. What has happened to them in a volunteer community? They've carried on with their marriages and their jobs. To what effect, I have no idea.
That is one sobering story to provide the human element of what happens, and those stories happen daily.