Burning Down the House Read Online Free PDF

wiring that would burn clear in an instant and still carry enough amperage to loosen your teeth if you grazed it with your arm. Other times, more difficult electrical fires in the almost surgically clean dairy parlours. The electronics of the milking machines and ranks of bright fluorescent lights rarely caused fires that spread. The dairies themselves were mostly concrete and antiseptic and bright.
    The barns, with their hayracks and stalls, were not. Once, in Waterville, it was a cigarette that two teens had shared and then tossed, still lit, down into the manure chute. That was an expensive cigarette—120 purebred dairy cattle, beautiful animals with big eyes and sleek, shiny ginger coats, all dead in their stalls from the smoke before anyone could get inside to lift the long bar out of its metal brackets and open the doors.
    Barn fires meant lots of trucks fast: we’d empty our station and start calling for help almost immediately. First the close tankers from Port Williams or New Minas and Kentville, sometimes even as far away as Berwick and Waterville. If you were the fireground commander, you had to be thinking about water supply right away, because a pumper can empty the 500- or 800-gallon straddle tank behind its pump in less than a minute if you’ve got two or three hose lines out. Pumpers could churn out 840 gallons a minute—1,050 gallons if they were the newer front-line trucks with the big Hale pumps—so you’d need a parade of the 3,200-gallon tankers shuttling back and forth from wherever you could set up pumps or draw water.
    We would have to move all the hay, and the more water we’d use, the heavier the hay would be. Firefighters sometimes train by wearing breathing gear and shovelling sand or gravel; it helps you learn how much time you’re going to get out of an air cylinder, because everyone’s in different physical shape and it’s important to know that you might be running low before the tank alarm sounds. But shovelling sand has nothing on forking wet hay—you never know how much a forkful of hay is going to weigh, whether it’s going to be wet or dry, whether it’s going to be balanced or unevenly spread across the tines. Your muscles are always compensating for the load—and your back always takes the worst of it. You’d already be wearing forty pounds of firefighting gear, and haylofts are always in the top of the barn because it’s easier to lift hay than to move dairy cattle up a ladder. Oh, and heat rises, too, so it’s always perishingly hot in the loft as you shift ton after ton of hay. Fire gear has a vapour barrier between its inner and outer layers, so you’re wearing something close to a heavyweight garbage bag on top of everything else. The hard work has the sweat streaming out of you in minutes, even if it’s twenty below outside.
    And that was just the cleanup work. Before then, a fire crew would have climbed up and cut a hole high in the wall or roof to let the smoke and fire gases out, and firefighters inside the building would have struggled to get the animals out and bring the fire under control. It’s hard to do in a big, open space like a barn because, with the building full of smoke, you don’t really have a good idea of what’s burning, or where. Firefighters fan out through the building in pairs, dragging the heavy two-and-a-half-inch hoses that can deliver big water with the opening of a nozzle valve, and hope to find the fire without falling through a floor and having it find them by surprise instead.
    It helps with big buildings such as barns or warehouses if you get the chance to preplan, if you keep track of the places in your fire district where your tankers can pick up water, drafting it out of deep ponds or pools on the river. Long before there’s a fire or an accident, you plan how to deal with it, figure out where the fire might be and the best way to fight it. This often