After the Fire – Oregon Humanities

The first time I entered a burning house, I thought I was a hero. It was a two-story home near our station. I remember getting off the machine, shouldering the hose, kneeling in the front yard, pulling my face mask tight, and letting the hose fill with water. Then I stood at the top of the stairs, the water surging through the insulation, falling on our helmets in a gray cloud of smoke and steam. Under the roar of the water hitting the drywall at 150 gallons per minute, I could hear the deep cracking of the fire eating through the bedroom furniture and the tongue-and-groove ceiling.

An obstacle prevented us from going any further. I reached out with my gloved hands and felt something soft: a hip, a stomach, an elbow, a pair of pajamas. An unconscious man. We quickly dragged him to the landing, where another group met us and pulled him into the courtyard.

After putting out the fire, my partner and I left the house, drenched in soot and covered in soot. Our euphoria quickly faded when we saw the motionless figure on the lawn. We had gone from our dorms in the station to the front door of the house in less than five minutes, and tonight that wasn’t fast enough. Not enough is a feeling you know very well as a firefighter. It’s our deepest collective fear: being inadequate in the moment when someone else needs you to save them.

I first knew I wanted to pursue a career in public service when I imagined myself teaching high school social studies. Later, disillusioned by the echo chamber of my liberal arts college, I looked for something more concrete and stumbled upon a week-long firefighter camp for teenage girls at the Washington State Fire Training Academy. At almost twenty, I barely got in. At that camp, they let us rock out: operate chainsaws, cut open cars, fight live ammunition, crawl through darkened search mazes, climb a hundred-foot aerial ladder. Standing just feet from a blazing fire, protected only by a plastic mask and a curtain of water, I knew this was it: instant gratification. I wouldn’t have to wait five, ten, or twenty years to know if I’d made an impression on young people in the classroom. I’d be working outside, using my hands. The days would be unpredictable and sometimes dangerous. This was the ultimate form of service: giving something to the community and to myself.

When people find out you are a firefighter, they often ask the same question: What was the worst phone call you ever made? Their eyes light up with anticipation of stories of beheadings, jumpers, self-immolations, or the hot tangle of a car crash. For me, this isn’t the most heartbreaking kind of call. Far worse is hearing the howls of a parent who’s lost a child, having to interrupt CPR on someone years younger than you, or hearing someone ask with a world of fear and hope in their eyes if their loved one is going to be OK and having to respect them with an honest answer. Calls like this make you want to break down, like another ghost is inviting itself into the box you’re carrying. You know you’re going to relive that moment, uninvited. And yet even these aren’t the worst things I’ve seen.

The worst deployments I’ve ever been on are the ones where we witnessed the slow misery of poverty, chronic illness, mental illness, unimaginable loneliness, and the chaos of years of drug addiction. The worst deployments are the ones where after a year of intensive training and ten years of deployment experience, I still come away empty-handed and without a solution, knowing we’ll always go back to that person.

Lifting someone off the floor who has been lying there for hours, unable to stand on their own and wet with old urine. Laying them down on their deeply yellowed bedding and then dropping them back down after changing a dry diaper. Smelling the sweet smell of rotting food, the tear-inducing smell of cat urine, the fruity smell of high ketones, or the acrid pain of an undiagnosed urinary tract infection. Following a faint voice into the bedroom or bathroom to help someone suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, type 2 diabetes, and congestive heart failure while their breath rattles shallowly through the oxygen tube. Knowing where to find peanut butter, bread, and knives because you’ve made a sandwich in that kitchen before to raise blood sugar. Watching someone slowly lose parts of their body to the devastating effects of diabetes, which continues to be worn down amputation after amputation. When asked for shelter from 40 degree rain, all they could offer was a crackling metal emergency blanket. And always the slow, assisted dragging out to the ambulance, an endless ritual of hope – the hope that at the end of the transport there might be a solution to decades and generations of poverty, like a pot of gold.

Firefighting can be grueling work. A fire hose can knock you out if you let it. We climb stairs or outdoor vertical ladders with so much gear that some of us little ones carry more than half our body weight in equipment. Most of us suffer from some combination of carpal tunnel syndrome, back pain, and knee and hip pain. We all have nightmares from time to time, and none of us really know the long-term effects of chronic sleep deprivation. We have higher cancer rates than many other professions, which seems obvious given our exposure to toxins. Our protective gear gives off PFAS, aka “forever chemicals,” when heated or knocked around—that is, over the course of regular use. A house fire really opens up our pores and rolls out the red carpet for carcinogens. But these risks are part of the job, and we prepare for them as best we can.

We didn’t know that we had to prepare ourselves for the stress of desperate cries for help when we got up; of requests for assistance in treating chronic illnesses related to housing or health problems; or of dealing with someone suffering from psychosis of an organic or chemical nature. Every shift, the same cries for help come from a different house, a different street corner, a different apartment. Even the truly time-sensitive emergencies – house fires, people hit by cars, cardiac arrests – obviously affect some parts of the city more than others. Over time, seemingly unpredictable emergencies turn out to be preventable and predictable.

I was never satisfied with the frequent thanks we received for our service or the occasional greeting on the side of the road as we drove by. I wondered if people understood that much of our work involved witnessing suffering that we had no real control over. My own desperation to understand the origins of that suffering eventually led me to school for public health.

In school, I learned that the work of emergency responders is deeply intertwined with our country’s history: which communities have been helped to live peaceful, healthy lives and which have not. The fire department exists because, in the old days, a candle in a window setting a few curtains on fire could level entire blocks. It was a selfless response to a very real collective problem. Emergency services owe their existence to Freedom House Ambulance, founded in Pittsburgh in 1967 as a community’s response to the city’s inadequate and often racist first aid care. With all-black teams, Freedom House served its community with devotion and improved street-level medical care across the country and the world, creating the template for the modern emergency medical technician.

The work of a first responder is absolutely essential, and firefighters earn their pay honestly. Houses burn, cars crash, people fall and hurt each other, both intentionally and unintentionally. Firefighters train tirelessly in their first year and regularly throughout their careers to hone the skills they need to be there and provide hope where it is needed. The dedication to responding competently to mechanical crises is the foundation of the fire service. Yet not all of our crises are mechanical in nature.

Combating addiction, poverty, neglect and discrimination is not as simple as putting out a fire with water, or learning how to cut and bend a car to pull a person out without crushing them further; how to get an injured body into an ambulance as quickly and safely as possible; or how to use compressions to create a vacuum in the chest that allows blood to circulate when the heart is not beating. There are known solutions to these problems, but we must also respond to older and deeper problems that we can only reach through emergency services.

I feel sadness the further I move away from my identity as a firefighter—an identity I have spent much of my adult life chasing and of which I am immensely proud. Our identities connect us to one another, telling us who we are and why. The latter shapes the former: I became a firefighter to serve as a small part of the public safety system, making our community safer by being there when I am asked. I still believe that very much. But I have learned to listen better, and not to expect the most oppressed of our communities to rise from the ashes. It became impossible for me to separate public safety from public health. The mark of success in public health is the absence of collective disaster. Prevention is not as sexy as heroism, but being a public servant is not about choosing how, when, or who to serve; it is about facing the crisis at hand.

Health, Identity, Work, Public