History Guy: Remember the fire fighters

 

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at 12 minutes, they talk about the volunteer fire fighters in the USA.

when I lived in rural PA, the fire department was down the street. It was a volunteer company, with a very VERY loud siren. When it went off, you got out of the street so that those speeding there would not have to slow down so they could get there in time.

They even had a large "cherry picker" that would reach to the 4th floor, which made me wonder where they would use it (the highest building in town was 3 stories). But then a neighbor's house was on fire, and it spread up the wall from the kitchen to the attic: The cherry picker extended the firemen over to the second floor to squirt the water directly on the fire (the house had a garden that made it hard to get closer on the ground with a truck, and entering the house to go up to the attic would have been dangerous).

Because every small town had a small company, often a larger fire called in for help from all over. So six companies came to fight the fire when the mini-mall in the next town caught fire (near the huge nursing home complex where I worked).

We had to evacuate the patients, many of whom were bed ridden, from the building closest to the mall, and close the windows to protect them.

The minimall included sports stores (with bullets and black powder for hunters that made it dangerous... luckily they kept the fire from that end of the minimall, but it mean that the offices in the other end of the minimall were all destroyed)... this was an "electrical fire" (not arson, just ignore that the minimall owner had just testified against a crooked judge the week before).

the volunteers did a lot of practice: and yes, some got injured, usually minor, but one of my friends got a minor back fracture when he fell off a roof. No, he wasn't fighting a fire, but they were using the ladders and shovels and picks to remove snowpacks from roofs to prevent the roofs on the old poorly built houses in the area from collapsing.

The fires in California are scary: I lived in New Mexico the year that Los Alamos burnt, and there were half a dozen other fires, including one in our area.

The local Apache had a hotshot team that would fly out to help fight forest fires, and would literally stay in the area for weeks on end.  Often they would see us to fill up their medicine supply: usually just normal over the counter medicine. And some of them were women...LINK

so when I condemn the elite white snowflakes setting fires and destroying lives, you can see why I get annoyed. 

Spoiled rich kids destroying stuff in the name of political correctness get their photos in the newspapers: Fire fighters are lucky to get noticed at all.