This from FF close calls - 2 story house fire with the first floor fully involved. During the helmet camera video a mayday was called. Firefighters remove the downed firefighter through a backyard fence, away from the fire.
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from Captain That Was Pulled Out
This fire took place on Oct 7, 2008 in the City of Sacramento.
I arrived on the first due engine, which took us over 6 minutes to arrive on scene, to find a newer 2 story wood frame single family dwelling (stucco extrior, tile roof, 2500 sq feet, 5 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms, very common house on the west coast) with heavy dark smoke showing from the second floor on the B, A and D sides. We pulled a 150' 1 3/4" pre-connect and forced entry through the front door to find the first floor clear of any smoke from the front of the house to the rear of the house. We advanced the hose line upstairs and in zero visibility started our search for any victims and the seat of the fire in the rear master bedroom, very thick smoke, but no heat. After sometime (approx 4-5 min) my nozzle man stated the "line just went flat", I was searching off the houseline and slowly made my way back to the hose just thinking it was a momentary loss of pressure from the engineer going from tank water to hydrant water or charging the back up line. I felt the hose and it was flat so I made my way to the hallway to check conditions and that is where I met the extreme change in conditions of intense heat and turbulent smoke. I made the order to evacuate and got the 3 f/f's in front of me as we crawled down a long hallway to the top of the stairs. This is where we bottlenecked and the first 2 f/f's tumbled down the stairs and safely made it outside with minor burns, the third f/f made it half way down and couldn't stand the heat so he came back up the stairs and bailed out of a window at the top of the stairway. I felt like the skin was melting off my body so I turned back down the hallway and retreated back to the master bedroom and was going to also bail out of a window. I did 2 searches for a window that I previously opened during the original search and couldn't find it. Low on air, I turtled up in a corner of the room and thought "this is it, I'm not going to make it out alive and was in disbelief that I was going to die in a house fire!" I thought of my family and the death process I would go through and decided I had to make another attempt down the stairs knowing I would get burned, but I felt like it was my only option. I made it halfway down the stairs and saw fire all around me and jumped over the banister handrail landing in a small living room at this point I was very disoriented and at a speed crawl in the direction I landed which was towards the rear of the house and out of my left peripheral vision I saw some obscure outside light which was a sliding glass door that led to the outside. Disoriented and in a panic I ran through the backyard fence in immense pain and not having any idea if any of the f/f's with me were out and safe.
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