Unexpected Side Effects of New Equipment

Somewhere around 1979, the department bought a telescoping elevated platform truck.  It was a huge truck that the firefighters called a cherry-picker.  The platform was equipped with large caliber turret nozzles.  Three men would ride in the platform and direct large volumes of water into high risk apartment fires.  The platform also had a railing all around the platform and a gate.  A firefighter could open the gate to make rescuing people easier.  I had to learn to operate this rig.  After I became proficient, the cherry-picker and I were sent to the busy side of the city where it was to be used on tenement fires.  I had the job of teaching firefighters how to drive and operate this truck. 

One night shift, a 3-alarm fire was reported.  I responded driving this truck.  I started to set up the rig but something wasn’t right.  It had a tormentor on each side,  back by the rear wheels.  The tormentors were hydraulic jacks that extended out beyond the truck and each had a large 2 foot by 2 foot steel plate on it.  When the arms were extended and the plates depressed onto the road, they lifted the rear of the truck off its tires.  This stabilized the rig so firefighters could extend the platform to the fire.  The controls to operate these stabilizers were on the driver’s side of the rig.  This piece of equipment was wider than a standard fire truck and it had an opening so that the operator could look through to see if the clearance was okay on the other side of the rig.

 I looked through the opening, didn’t see anything in the way, and started putting the

Notice Tormentors

tormentors down.  When I put the tormentors down on the opposite side of the rig, that side of the truck started to lift off the ground.  I retracted the arm and tried again.  The right side of the truck lifted up again.  I looked through the window and still saw nothing in the way.  I tried again - same result.  I finally got out of the truck and walked around – I immediately found the cause.  It was a VW beetle, completely compressed into a block about a foot high.  The equipment definitely had a “blind” spot.   We had 2 of these rigs for a few years.  They were so heavy that they couldn’t cross over some of the bridges in the city – so the city sold them.  

I remember going to see the movie Backdraft.  It was the most authentic picture of the life of a firefighter.  In one scene, there was a car parked illegally in front of a fire hydrant.  The firemen smashed the driver’s and passenger’s windows out and ran the hose through the car and over to the hydrant.  That happened many times during my 20 years on the job.  But we added a slight twist to this problem.  After the fire was out and we were loading the hose back onto the rig, we turned the water on and filled the car up.  The Police also gave the driver a ticket for parking illegally. Talk about having a bad day. 

Another time, I was driving an aerial ladder, it was snowing, and the temperature dropped 

 way down below zero.  A five-story apartment building was completely involved in fire.  I had to go down a steep hill and make a right turn to get to the building.  As I made the

turn, the back end of the rig slid into a car that was parked too close to the corner.  The whole side of the car was smashed in.  Police gave the driver a ticket for destroying city property – our fender was bent – and one for parking too close to the corner.  My roommate Bob and I worked all night on this fire.  It was so cold they told us we couldn’t turn off the water or shut off the water to the nozzles or the water would freeze solid in the fire hose.  At one point, I came down the 100 foot aerial ladder to get a cup of coffee.  Even though I had gloves on, I couldn’t open my fingers to hold the coffee, they were so cold. 

24 hours later, Bob and I and eight cops landed in Mexico for a 2-week vacation.  It was 94 degrees in the airport and we thought we were going to melt.  We soon thawed out and adjusted – but it was quite a shock to the system.