Burning Down the House Read Online Free PDF Page B

involves mapping out buildings and their hazards on a floor plan. Is there a refrigeration system? Ammonia? Propane forklifts? Sudden drops or chutes that someone could wander into in heavy smoke?
    It’s even more important in town. With a school or plant or hockey rink, it’s best to tour the building and make decisions about how to fight a fire, right down to where you put the trucks in the very beginning and which hydrants are on the largest water mains, so you’ll be able to get the most possible water in the least possible time. The more variables you can deal with ahead of time, the faster you’ll be able to get to the fire when it happens. If it happens.
    Preplanning, though, is a deceptively addictive concept. With me, it also became a semi-functional way to live my life, looking ahead, trying to preplan for any crisis. It started right from the moment I joined. I wanted to catch the trucks for every fire, because it felt as if I would only ever get to go to so many calls. I began to make sure I was always close enough to run to the station. Often, finishing university, I would do school work right in the station, waiting for the pagers to key up.
    Later, the urge to preplan would turn the corner to near-pathological. Sitting at a family dinner, watching people talk and eat, I would try to divine who might suddenly choke. How I’d get to them, whom I’d tell to call the ambulance, where I’d put my hands. Whether it would work at all. Thinking that if I were ready, I’d at least have a chance to do my best.
    I was preparing myself for heart attacks on airplanes. Watching a kid cross the street, I would be deciding what I’d do first if he got hit by a car. Standing on the edge of the Salmonier River in Newfoundland, the only parent overseeing a gaggle of kids throwing rocks at the angled river ice, I’d be thinking about where to run if one of the children fell into the current, and how deep into that current I could reasonably go without getting myself into danger too.
    That way of thinking leaves you outside the normal world all the time, outside a normal life, the only person looking at every step and anticipating how it might unfold towards disaster. Isolating is hardly a good enough word for it, because you’re winding yourself up with all sorts of stress that has no outlet whatsoever. I’d be constantly poised on the balls of my feet, waiting to jump.
    On the fireground it works wonderfully well, because it jerks you right into routine, and firefighting loves routine. Every time you train, you train on routine. Fire departments depend on it so much that they like to train recruits from the ground up, so that everyone is doing exactly the same thing and everyone can be counted on to react in exactly the same way. If you suddenly have to find someone, you know precisely where he’s likely to be.
    That was pounded into me — the necessity of clear dependence on numbers and sequences and the way things are meant to happen in order, as simple as hooking the pumper to a hydrant. You learn it by rote and you do it by rote, and you do it right, every single time. Same thing, every time, exactly in order—and there are hundreds of things in the fire service exactly like that. And every time I would get one of them down pat, I’d feel a little more like I belonged, a little less like I stuck out. There’s the order you put your breathing gear on, and the valves and gauges you check every single time. Even though the tanks are never, ever put into the gear unless they are fully filled, your first step is to turn the gear upside down and check the fill gauge on the cylinder. And when you take that first breath from the mask, you lift up the chest gauge and check it too, before you head for the fire.
    That’s only the breathing gear. There’s where the wind has to be when it’s time to break a window with an axe. Where to stand on a hillside when