Everything You Never Knew About Being A Firefighter

Starting in January 2012, I spent two and a half years as a firefighter in the Arlington County Fire Department, in Arlington, VA. I had no childhood dreams of being a firefighter. Growing up, I don't remember much of firefighters or even noticing the big red fire engines as they blared past.

I grew up in Arlington, VA, so I got to experience the county I lived in from two very different perspectives. One perspective as a civilian and member of the community, and one as a civil servant of that community. I thought the two would be fairly similar, but they couldn't have been any more different. Being a firefighter exposes you to many of the seedier, sicklier, poorer, and impoverished neighborhoods and houses. The county is already extremely small - in fact, Arlington is the smallest county in the country, with an area of 26 miles squared - but even within these small confines there are distinctions that remain invisible to those who aren't looking for them.

I applied to the fire department on a whim and just kind of went with the flow until I found myself standing at attention with 14 other recruits at the Fire Academy.

Being a complete stranger to the profession, culture, and lifestyle left me regularly surprised as I assimilated into becoming a professional firefighter. Even in such a short time, I encountered many curiosities while being a firefighter. At times I was in awe and at others completely baffled. I want to share with you everything you never knew about being a firefighter.

Becoming a Firefighter

It is very difficult to become a firefighter. Our fire academy class had 1500 applicants, had a fairly rigorous fitness test, accepted 15 people, and only 11 graduated. Once you graduate, you're a probationary firefighter for one year and must pass a battery of skills and knowledge tests throughout the year to keep your job.
Firefighters aren’t allowed to have beards or any facial hair that would interfere with a tight seal of our facemasks. This is why some firefighters end up being creative with their mustaches.
Once you pass your probationary firefighter exam, it’s tradition to make a nice dinner for your crew and everyone else in the department who had helped you train and learn all of the skills and equipment required. It very much takes a village.

Preparing a steak dinner for 16 after passing my probationary period

My crew and everyone who helped me along the way

Firefighting certificates and training don't carry over from department to department. If you want to change cities or departments, you'll have to go through their fire academy. Some firefighters in our department had been through several academies. Every department has different equipment, different standard operating procedures, and what they expect from you.
Many firefighters I worked with only had a high school education, but everyone was extremely street smart. Almost everyone reacted quickly and effectively to most scenarios, even novel ones.
There's a large gulf between volunteer and professional firefighters. In our county, volunteer firefighters admired professional firefighters, and largely stuck to running their own training and community events. They never ran calls on their own and we would occasionally have volunteers participate in ride alongs for the day.

Firehouse Life

Shift is 24 hours on, off, on, off, on, and then 4 days off. Shift was from 7am to 7am, but you generally showed up at 6am to relieve your person out of courtesy. So if there is a call at 6:15am, you would take the call instead of the person sleeping.
We had an A, B, and C shift. The rotations never changed, so you would know every day you'd work until the day you retired. If your friend was on a different shift than you - an annoying side effect - whenever you hung out, one of you would have to work early the next day. For example, the rotations would look like this: ACABABCBC repeated.
Generally the younger firefighters would exchange shifts with older firefighters with families who had to work on holidays.
We started each shift by cleaning the toilets. We ended each night by sweeping and mopping all of the floors, throwing out all trash, cleaning all dishes pots and pans, and wiping all of the tables and countertops.
You're always in a state of waiting. Even when you're cooking, taking a shower, or taking a shit. When taking a shower I would have all of my clothes laid out ready to go to be quickly put on. When taking a shit I would have a box of wet wipes next to me, in the event there was a call.
Most nights the group turned in to the theater room and watched a movie together.
Even though we sleep, we're still on call. Depending on how busy the area your station is in, we would wake up between 0 and 5 times a night, with each call taking roughly one hour. Firefighting is generally awful for your sleep.
For bedrooms, some stations had private rooms, and some had one giant shared room (not great).
We had fire poles and we used them all the time. It's simply much faster than the stairs. Really helps to wear pants when sliding.
We generally took one hour per shift to go out of service for PT (physical training), so we can workout uninterrupted.
When we went out for lunch, we had to bring the fire engine with us and have our radios on in case there's a call. Finding parking for a fire engine in a fast-food parking lot is always fun.
For dinner we would all pitch in $5 each, go to the grocery store and shop with our radios on. Sometimes we'd have to ditch our groceries mid checkout if we got a call and return later to pick the groceries back up.
We all ate dinner together at the dining/kitchen table. Every station had a unique table custom made, usually by a firefighter in the department. For example, my station was brand new, and the table's wood came from the bay doors of the old firehouse and included ladder struts for the base of the frame underneath the table top.
When strangers dropped off homemade food or baked goods, we were grateful but unable to accept and threw it away. We can't risk someone trying to poison the crew.
We’d often do community events like doing station tours, visiting schools to do demonstrations, and giving fire safety talks.

During a visit to an elementary school - it’s helpful for kids to see and interact with us when we have all of our gear on, just in case they see us in an emergency situation

Firefighters live all over the place, with the majority living outside the city where they work. We had most people commuting at least one hour and some people all the way from Pennsylvania (roughly four hours; this means leaving home by 2am to arrive by 6am).

We respond to all kinds of calls, no matter how seemingly trivial. One call I ran, the person just had a really upsetting nightmare. Another call, a woman was in bed and her leg slipped off the edge and she couldn't get it back up. Another had a water leak in a pipe and her house was flooding. Another locked their kid in the car and we had to jimmy the lock to get access.
Many firefighters are great storytellers. Storytelling was the primary mechanism for how experienced firefighters passed on lessons to new recruits. The nature of the job is extremely unpredictable and while you may run many similar calls, no two calls are exactly alike. Through stories, we shared situations, experiences, outcomes, and regrets that we could mentally pattern match off of when in the heat of the moment.

Training

Everything we did was dictated by Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). If people did it more than once, there's probably an SOP for it. From how to do station chores, to engine checks, to connecting a hydrant, breaking into a door, and using a fire extinguisher.
The most common tools we carried around with us are the flat head axe and the halligan bar. Together they're called the "married pair" or "the irons." They're commonly used together to pry and break through doors. With the halligan bar's unique geometry, it includes a fork, a tapered pick, and a wedge - the use cases are only limited by your creativity, e.g. smashing windows, using the pike end to puncture tires of cars to immobilize them before we start cutting, and leaning it against a wall with the fork end pointing downward to act a stepping stool to access a high window.

Firefighters are jacks of all trades: firefighter, EMT, paramedic, hazmat, technical rescue, swift water rescue, active shooter incident, mass casualty incident, knowing how to deliver a baby, a part of the bomb squad, and vehicle extrication.
We're all trained to do every job on every apparatus. If someone called out sick or if you did overtime or cover someone else's shift, you may have needed to play a role other than your primary one.
We had to practice carrying and throwing ladders. 24' ladders by ourselves and 35' ladders in pairs. In academy, any time we touched a ladder we had to verbally say out loud, "checking for overhead obstructions," since many firefighters die by touching electrical lines overhead with their metal ladders.
You can't be afraid of heights. During training academy we had to each climb a 92 foot ladder into the sky, hook ourselves in, and then lean back with our hands outstretched for 10 seconds.

The ladder we had to climb and hang off of

It is very difficult to lift people, especially other firefighters who have all of their gear on. There's a scenario called the Denver Drill we practiced in academy, where we learn how to lift a firefighter out of a narrow hallway to a high window. This was due to an incident in 1992, where a 16-year veteran collapsed between filing cabinets in a long narrow hallway, one person wide. Due to the tight space, no crews were successful in rescuing him.

Every so often a car manufacturer or a resident donates their car or home to us for training. If a resident plans on tearing down a house, we might be able to sneak a few days with it before it's demolished. This gave us a chance to practice cutting roofs, forcing doors, breaking through walls, and smashing ceilings.

A donated house we just finished training in

Fire Gear

In fire academy we had to practice getting dressed in our fire gear. It generally takes around two minutes, eventually closer to one minute if you're fast. It's a very error prone process that takes a lot of dedicated practice and drilling to get the hang of.

Turnout gear relies on several layers of protective gear, most notably a pocket of air between the outer layer and the second layer. If you were to bump into something like the wall or if someone were to pat you on the shoulder, it's easy to be burned because you're removing the air barrier. We tried to maintain distance and avoid touching or bumping into each other while in a fire.

The structural firefighting gear worn including our SCBA (self-contained breathing apparatus) tank weighs around 60 lbs, we also carried additional tools or equipment with us ranging from 10 lbs to 20 lbs.

Our SCBA tank has compressed air, not oxygen. The standard size tanks are rated for 45 minutes but greatly varies by your breathing efficiency. It may be as low as 15 minutes for some people if they’re undergoing heavy exertion.

Our SCBA tanks have buddy breathers. These are an extra three feet of line that you can connect to one another, allowing you both to share the same air tank. Very useful for rescue operations when the firefighter being rescued is running out of air.
Our face masks began to vibrate and rattle loudly when we got down to 20% of our remaining air left.
It was very difficult to talk through the mask. You can attach a small microphone/speaker to your mask but it hardly helps. We’d generally talk one at a time and by yelling loudly and slowly.
We needed to keep in mind that if we felt really hot with our protective gear on, then the environment was deadly to any civilians.

Fire Engine

We had four main types of apparatus (vehicles): medic unit (ambulance), fire engine (primarily hose lines + water), tower (large remote controllable ladder), and rescue (giant toolbox on wheels). My primary vehicle was the fire engine, and I sat in the right back step.

Fire engines are called "engines" because you can shift the vehicle from drive to pump mode, diverting the power of the engine to the impeller, which would generate water pressure. While in pump mode the vehicle is unable to be driven. The impeller would spin water extremely fast to generate the pressure necessary for the water to traverse the hundreds of feet of hose and provide a powerful stream at the nozzle.

The fire engine is a very large vehicle: 9' wide, 30' in length, and 10' tall.
Our fire engines carried 3,150 feet of hose. Depending on the size, purpose, and storage location, each set of hoseline had a specific purpose and way of folding and packing it away. Folding and packing all 3,150 feet would generally take 20-30 minutes of a crew of four to finish.
- 1,300 feet of 4" hose (used to connect to main hydrant valve)
- 400 feet of 3" (multi-purpose line that can connect to the side hydrant valves)
- 300 feet of 2.5" (large hoseline)
- 1,150 feet of 1.75" (small more maneuverable hoseline)

From left to right: 300’ of 3” hose, 400’ of 1.75” hoseline, 1,250’ of 4” hose (connects to hydrant), and 200’ of 2.5” hoseline.

Closeup of the 400’ 1.75” hoseline and how it’s been carefully packed

The fire engine is a fairly complicated water pump. The driver was responsible for controlling how water came in and how water flowed out.

All firefighters must know the friction loss numbers of our hoselines and nozzles. e.g. 1.75" hose with a fog nozzle requires 30 psi per 100 feet of hose and 75 psi for the fog nozzle; so our typical 200 foot 1.75" line with fog nozzle, would require 135 psi.
This means, depending on what hoselines and nozzles your fellow firefighters grabbed from the fire engine, you would need to open the valve to the right lines, ensure they had the correct pressure, and time it correctly so they got the water when they were prepared for it (the hose will whip around as it goes from being empty and pliable to feeling as hard as concrete).

The pump panel of my fire engine. Operated by the driver

When using your siren, you had to be careful how fast you drove, to ensure it could provide you with safety. At 40 mph, the siren projected a safety radius of 300 feet. At 60 mph, it only projected a safety radius of 12 feet. This means it's possible to outrun your siren protection.

Fire engines have a built-in water tank that holds 750 gallons of water. This gave us roughly five minutes of operating time with our default 150 gpm hoseline. We’d need another fire engine crew to arrive within five minutes and connect the the first engine to the hydrant and open it, otherwise we'd run out of water.

Driving

We all had to take the EVOC, Emergency Vehicle Operator's Course. This includes the driving skills for both a medic unit and fire engine. We had to be able to back into a parking spot, parallel park, and drive backwards in a serpentine pattern through a traffic cone course.
We had our own private gas station, which served all stations and all apparatus.
Depending where you sat on the apparatus, you would have a predetermined role that changed depending on the kind of call. The positions were Driver, Officer, Left back step, and Right back step. They're called back step firefighters, because they used to literally ride outside on the back step of the engine, which was like the rear bumper.
We needed to memorize the running routes (driving directions) to the nearest seven hospitals. Different hospitals had different specialties, i.e. burn unit, trauma unit.
In Arlington, the streets have a logic to their progression from south to north and west to east. From south to north the roads are numbered and generally alternate between "street" and "road", e.g. 1st st, 1st rd, 2nd st, 2nd rd, 3rd st, 3rd rd, etc.
- Instead of using numbers, the roads going west to east were words. They started with one syllable words and progressed in alphabetical order. Once we ran out of one syllable words, it would transition to two syllable words, all the way up to three syllable words:
- One syllable streets: Ball, Clark, Dale, Eads, Fern, Grant, Hayes, etc.
- Two syllable streets: Adams, Barton, Cleveland, Danville, Edgewood, Fillmore, Garfield, Highland, etc.
- Three syllable streets: Abingdon, Buchanon, Columbus, Dinwiddie, Edison, Frederick, Greenbrier, Harrison, etc.
We needed to know how to drive to any address in our first due area by heart, including where the fire hydrants were. We would be constantly tested by others throwing out random addresses and we would have to give turn by turn directions.

Fire Hydrants

Fire hydrant designs aren't standardized across cities, including the valve threading, which would act as the attachment point for our hoselines. This meant in order for us to connect to the hydrant of a neighboring city or government buildings, we would need a specific hydrant adapter, unique to them.
Hydrants have different water flows in gallons per minute. In Arlington, the bonnets (the "head" of the hydrant) are colored to denote how much water they could supply.
Hydrant colors:
- Blue: more than 1,500 gpm
- Green: 1000 - 1499 gpm
- Orange: 500 - 999 gpm
- Red: 0 - 499 gpm

Medical Calls

For my station, about 70% of calls were medical related, 30% fire related. And about 95% of fire related calls were false alarms.
We had to fill out medical reports at the hospital after delivering the patient; there was a little room off to the side filled with firefighters pecking away at keyboards, each report taking roughly 20-30 minutes.
When we end up taking someone to the hospital, we usually have no idea what ends up happening to the person afterwards. On some very eventful calls, we would see the results in the news or media; occasionally we’d find out from nurses working at the hospital if we had a friendly relationship.

Fire Calls

Day 1 of Fire Behavior course we had drilled into our head: "FIRE WILL KILL YOU AND DESTROY EVERYTHING AROUND YOU." Many firefighters are overeager in their desire to fight fire (it’s what many of them signed up for), so a secondary objective of training academy is to put a healthy fear and respect into everyone about the dangers of fire.
There is something called a Knox box for every building. They will usually be located near the front entrance. The officers of each station have the key to access these inconspicuous boxes. Inside are the keys to the building. Then inside the building, if it's an apartment with many locked rooms, there is a key box we can access, which has the keys for every room inside of it. The Keys to the Knox box are literally the keys to the city.

When there's a fire - what we call a Box Alarm - we end up sending 13 apparatus, for a total of 35 people. There are four engines sent, and depending on the order in which you arrive on scene, you will have a different role.
- 4 engines
- 2 trucks
- 1 rescue
- 2 battalion chiefs, command aide, fire marshal
- 1 medic unit, EMS supervisor
Engine 1 lays out at the nearest hydrant (laying out consists of stopping at a hydrant, taking your hose and wrapping it around the hydrant a couple of times, and then proceeding to drive off with hose being dragged off the back of the engine) then goes in through the front of the building. Engine 2 connects engine 1 to the hydrant and pulls more hoselines from engine 1. Engine 3 lays out at a hydrant and goes in with a hoseline through the back of the building. Engine 4 connects engine 3s engine to the hydrant and proceeds to pull additional hoselines from engine 3.

A fire where we rescued a girl trapped in the basement. The fire originated from this deck where a cigarette was thrown away into a trash can

In a fire, most people aren’t killed by the fire itself; they are much more likely to die from smoke inhalation and asphyxiation before the fire reaches them.

The richer the city or county the less fires there are. Many of the buildings built after the mid-1970s benefit from updated fire codes (like including sprinklers).
Only firefighters are allowed to turn off the fire alarm when it goes off. Even if everyone knows it's accidental or safe (sorry).
Fighting fire is all about risk vs reward: we only take risks (especially with our lives) if the reward justifies it (there is life at stake). We would never enter a known empty burning building.
During fire alarms, you're told to not take the elevators. This isn’t necessarily because it's dangerous, it's because firefighters want to use the elevators. We would take the elevator up to two floors below the fire floor, then walk up the stairs the rest of the way. We don’t take the elevator directly to the floor where the fire was reported, because we don't want to take the risk of having the elevator open up to a raging fire.
You may have noticed in most apartment buildings or high rise buildings that near the bank of elevators there are sets of doors held open with magnets and if the fire alarm ever goes off the doors are released and stay in a closed position. This is for the safety of firefighters, where we could operate out of this area as a safe haven.
Elevators have elevator key holes. If you get stuck in an elevator we can use a drop key to engage the manual override for opening the elevator door.

Fire

In a fire, it's impossible to see anything through the smoke. You usually can't even see your hand if you put it right in front of your face. You have to go by gut; if you’re near the fire you may see an orange glow. We’d take a mental picture of the house before entering, which would give us an idea of the internal layout, e.g. ranch, split level, cape cod, and multi-story.
Everything has an ignition point. The ignition point is the temperature at which something will catch fire. A flashover is when the fire becomes so hot, that everything in its vicinity reaches its ignition temperature, including the smoke itself. Everything erupts into flame and causes a ripple effect through the room or corridor. These are extremely dangerous due to their unpredictable nature and how fast it propagates. An open flame can turn into a flashover in as little as 1 1/2 minutes. A flashover is 1100 degrees F.
Our structural firefighter gear is rated to handle different heat levels for certain durations:
- < 131 degrees F: almost indefinite
- 140 - 572 degrees F: 10 - 20 minutes of protection
- > 572 degrees F: 15 - 30 seconds of protection

Extinguishing Fires

There are different hoselines you could pull off the engine to fight the fire. Each hoseline had a different diameter, length, and nozzle with various stream types: smooth bore vs fog.
It generally takes three people to operate a hoseline efficiently (especially if you planned to enter a building, e.g. navigating multiple rooms and doorways).
Hoselines full of water could be very heavy. For example, 100 feet of 1.75" hoseline would weigh 144 lbs, while an equal length 2.5" hoseline would weigh 274 lbs. It's extremely labor intensive to maneuver hoseline, especially through a house. The pushback pressure of a nozzle fully opened is also very strong. This is especially true with the 2.5" diameter hoseline that unloads water at 300 gpm. Three large adult males can generally only operate the hoseline at full bore for around 5 minutes.
There are different types of fire extinguishers for different kinds of fires and they're marked differently:
- Ordinary materials
- Metals or alloys
- Electrical
- Cooking oils
- Flammable liquids or gasses
There were very specific techniques to pull and lay out your empty hoseline before it was pressurized, so you could better manage it once charged. These techniques also helped prevent any kinks from forming. Kinks could drastically reduce our water flow; as little as two kinks could reduce flow by over 35%.

After the fire, there are hoselines everywhere

The fire engine carried 30 gallons of Foam, in case we came across a type of fire that was made worse by water, e.g. oil and electrical fires. This reservoir of foam gave us around five minutes of continuous foam application.

The basic science behind how water extinguishes fire: the primary mechanism is through cooling, and secondarily by denying oxygen. When water comes in contact with the fire, the water absorbs the heat, eventually reaching the boiling temperature of 212 degrees F, which then forces the water to convert to steam. Converting water to steam is a very energy intensive process, which in turn removes this energy from the fire (law of the conservation of energy). Pouring water on the fire is essentially a battle to lower the energy of the fire quicker than the rate at which it's increasing (by consuming more flammable objects).

I hope this gave you a glimpse into the world of firefighting that you never knew.