Episode 18: The Teacher As Firefighter with Lt. Al North

Transcript:

(transcribed by kayla.r.fainer@gmail.com)

Melissa Milner  00:09

Hi, this is Melissa Milner. Welcome to The Teacher As... podcast. The goal of this weekly podcast is to help you explore your passions and learn from others in education and beyond to better your teaching. The Teacher As... will highlight uncommon parallels to teaching, as well as share practical ideas for the classroom. 

In this episode, I interview Al North, a firefighter in Rhode Island. I've known Alan's family for many years now, and they are great people. The Teacher As... Firefighter is an especially interesting parallel. I gathered resources in my blog post this week for the parallels I found in this discussion. I hope you enjoy my interview with Lieutenant Al North. Thanks for joining us, Al.

Al North  00:51

Glad to be here.

Melissa Milner  00:52

Before we get started into the deep talk about firefighters, what would you like The Teacher As... listeners to know about you?

Al North  00:59

Let's see. I am a 19 year veteran with the East Providence Fire Department, currently Lieutenant on our engine four, which is in Kent Heights area of East Providence, father of three. My oldest is in college, and my younger two are a junior and sophomore at high school.

Melissa Milner  01:19

And your wife?

Al North  01:20

And my wife. My wife, she works in the news industry. So we kind of have a busy household, and it runs at funky times.

Melissa Milner  01:29

That's a great place to start. What is either the daily schedule or a typical day for a firefighter?

Al North  01:36

The way that my schedule works, it's a rotating schedule of two 10 hour days then two 14 hour overnights and followed by four days off. We don't have a typical week where Monday through Friday I'm in the office or whatever. It's this week, it's Monday and Tuesday I work during the day. And then Wednesday, I work into Thursday. And then Thursday, I work into Friday, and then I get out Friday morning. And then the following week, it basically shifts a day. 

So there are some weekends where I'm working Friday and Saturday night, and I get out Sunday morning or whatever. Or I'm working Saturday and Sunday during the days. So there's really no typical day. I mean, I always kind of fall into that "what day is it" type situation. Because it's not like Monday I go back to work. Because this week, Tuesday I go back to work. But the typical day is just kind of get up, whether it's a morning shift or a night shift. I go in, and I relieve the person who was in the position before me. Because we kind of run 24/7/365. So there's always somebody there, and you can't leave until you get relieved by the person that's taking your spot. 

So I come in, and I relieve the guy or woman that is in my position and just get the briefing of what's happening, whether there's been anything significant with the truck mechanical wise, personnel issues, anything that's been going on, get the quick rundown from them. And then, because of COVID, I decon the truck, decon my position, and all that other stuff. And then I set up my gear in my position. And then I'll walk around the truck and basically open all the compartments, check all my gear, check all the equipment on the truck, make sure that what I need is still there, nothing's missing, nothing's fallen off, nothing's broken, and just do my once over of the vehicle. 

Then in my position, we have a logbook and stuff. So I'll set the logbook up, look at the day's events and see what we need to do, if there's any specifics pertaining to having to take a vehicle to maintenance or just doing something within the station. Then I just sit down with my crew and go over the day. 

Then at about 9:00 or so, we start to clean the station and everything in the fire department is kind of broken down. Every day, there's a certain regimen of chores, basically house house duties, that we do.

Melissa Milner  04:10

What I'm hearing so far is an intense amount of preparing and planning, being ready, making sure that nothing is messed up from the last guy that was there, making sure your things are in place. And so as Lieutenant, you did mention you talk to your staff about the day. What does that mean?

Al North  04:33

After a certain point, everybody knows what to do. So it's not so much where I'm telling people like, okay, Jim, you have to sweep the floors and clean the bathroom. Basically at 9:00, we all get up from having a cup of coffee or whatever, and we go do our thing. Intermittently, we also do some calls for whatever it is, a vehicle fire, a car accident, somebody's sick or anything like that. 

Your best plans of how the day should go is always kind of different. Where at 9:00, you may be out on the highway with a car accident for an hour or two. So the cleaning that you were supposed to be doing in the morning doesn't get done until 11:00, 12:00 in the afternoon. And then during the days, after lunch usually, we do a training session. 

So it could be something as simple as a district familiarization. If there's a new building in the city and stuff like that, then we want to go and just do a walk around and see where-- on the outside of a lot of buildings, they have something called a Knox Box where all the keys that are primary to that building, indoors, special rooms, all that stuff are kept in this secure box. So you want to know where that is, so that it's not something you're looking for in the middle of the night. 

So you do the walk around. You see where the alarm panel is, look over how it's zoned out, if the first floor is on one, second floor, or the basements or the elevators, how they've kind of marked it out. And they're usually pretty standard.

Melissa Milner  05:56

Do you know all this for every building in your area?

Al North  06:00

I mean, I'd like to say I do, but I know that I don't. But within my gear that I have, I have a book that I've kind of put together. And it has all the boxes that-- the box alarm comes in from the dispatch. And I have listed in there where the Knox Box key is, if it's right of the door, six feet up, or whatever it is. So that'll be in there. It'd also say where the fire alarm panel is. 

We're not always the first due company. So my district is district four. If I'm going into district one, where engine one is the primary truck, we're coming in second due. So our job is to get the water supply for that. So I need to know where the closest hydrant is. We'll grab that hydrant, and then we'll feed the the fire truck that's at the fire scene.

Melissa Milner  06:52

That's a great segue into, okay, there's a house on fire. What goes through your head? Once you're there, what do you do?

Al North  07:01

So on my truck, there's three guys. And if we're the primary truck, if it's the call in our district and we're going to be first on scene, my thought process is, what are we going to? Is it a house fire? 

Through modern technology, the guy who's riding my back step usually will pull up Google Maps or whatever on his phone and say, all right, it's going to be on the right side. And the wires are on that side of the street, or they're not on that side of the street. So that we could position our truck as we come into the scene for the ladder company. Because you always want to leave the front of the building open so that the ladder company can come right in the front of the building and drop their ladder and put it right on the roof. So he's working on that. 

My driver, super fortunate, I have a guy who's been with me for a while. He's been on the department for a while. When we get the call, I don't even worry about whether he knows the best route to get there. He knows his job, he's really good at it. 

What I'm doing is, I'm in the truck. If it's a regular house fire, I don't really have any information on the house in my book or anything like that. I'll look at the dispatch report, where it came from, and stuff like that, and what they're saying about it. Then as we're heading there, I'm looking down the street. Do I see any smoke? If I see the closest hydrant to the house, I'll put that over the radio, and then I'll give a scene size up as we pull up to the fire. Smoke showing, and building looks partially evacuated, residents out on the lawn. Engine four is going to be investigating. 

And that's kind of a standard where you see some smoke and things like that. We'll pull a hose line off of the truck and stick it into the fire, into the house, and try and locate the fire, and put it out. And everything, as I said, is kind of broken up already. 

So when you get to a scene, the front door is always side one. And then you go from left, the left is side two, the back is side three, the right side is side four. That's always the way. So I could come in on scene and say, it's on the corner of Smith and Jones Street. Side one is on Jones Street. Fire looks to be on side four. And giving that description, everybody knows exactly what the scene looks like. 

The building is also divided. Obviously its floors and then it's quadrants. You have your A, which is your front left B, C, D, and then in the middle is E. So you can describe the fire, and everybody uses the same terminology. And they'll know what they're coming into. The battalion chief comes in. He surveys the situation again, gets a report from the first few engines or sees what they're doing. 

Then he'll direct the second due and third due. Because we usually send three engines. So the second engine, while they're getting the water, another engine usually arrives on scene. And they back up the first crew that has gone into the fire.

Melissa Milner  10:06

There's a lot of communication and teamwork. It's blowing my mind actually. It's incredible, yeah.

Al North  10:16

Nothing's ever the same. There's never the situation that's like, oh it's an A situation. Every situation, it's always different, yet everybody knows what to do. It's somewhat of a fluid situation. There's always hiccups, where there's three cars in the driveway and six cars in the street and access to the building is tough.

Melissa Milner  10:37

Right, right. I'm sure that happens a lot, yeah.

Al North  10:40

We're depending upon mechanical things, and sometimes mechanical things break. If you're the first due engine and you have a catastrophic line failure, how do you mitigate that situation and get it remedied within a couple of minutes so that you can continue to address the situation that you're at?

Melissa Milner  10:57

So speaking of addressing the situation, we talked a while ago about doing this interview, and I asked you about backdraft. So could you tell The Teacher As... listeners what backdraft is, and how you can tell if it's safe to go in, and how can you make it safe to go in if there's those conditions?

Al North  11:15

It's basically almost like a thermos, I guess, is one way to look at it. You keep your house insulated, so that the cold air doesn't come in or out, so the warm air doesn't go out inside. So if you have a fire inside your house, obviously you need a couple of things for a fire to exist. You need the fire itself, you need oxygen, and you need the material. If you're missing one of those things, usually a fire will burn out the oxygen in the room before it burns out the materials. 

So what happens with a backdraft is all the room and contents, the walls and things like that, have burned, but there's no more oxygen to sustain the fire. A house is not airtight, but there's not enough oxygen in the room for the fire to continue. So it's in a smoldering state. But what happens is the gases get superheated, and it's a lot of incomplete combustion. So the gas has a lot of particulates in it, and it's getting really high, a high temperature.

You'll come up on the scene, and it's very much like the movie where you see the smoke puffing and things like that. That's what happens, because it's almost like it's suffocating. It's starting to just a little breath, a little breath, it's keeping itself alive. So the room is really hot, the gases are really hot. There's just not enough oxygen for the fire to continue. 

So if you go to that situation, and just like the movie, if you bust open the door, a big rush of oxygen comes in and fills the room full of oxygen. The fire can basically jumpstart itself, and all that content that was really, really hot now just bursts into flames. Even the smoke, which has all the particulates in it, bursts into flames. 

So that's what the backdraft is, where all that air rushes from your backside into the room, because it's almost like you're taking a big breath. When you take a big breath, it's like [GASPS], and everything comes in. How you can mitigate that situation if you see it, basically, you ventilate. Gases and things rise. 

So if you have a room, that's why we have the ladder on scene, they get to the scene and they cut a hole in the roof, so that all those gases, everything's going to rise, and it's going to go straight up. So their job is to find where the seed of the fire is, ventilate the roof basically right over it to create a chimney, so that everything goes out and that you can safely go in. 

The smoke is kind of dissipated a little bit, because it's going up. It's not filling the room. If it doesn't have a vertical way to get out, it's just going to fill the ceiling. Then it's going to go from room to room. Then it's going to start to bank down. 

So once you open that up, it clears what you can see. And then you can go in, and you're not worried about the rush of oxygen feeding a fire and stuff like that. It's already free burning where it has enough oxygen to burn. But it's not gonna light the room and contents and the smoke and everything on fire.

Melissa Milner  14:05

You'd think it's a good thing that there's not enough oxygen, so there's no fire. Yay! But it's actually lethal.

Al North  14:13

Right. So it's like the sleeping giant or whatever.

Melissa Milner  14:16

A few months ago when we talked or a couple months ago when we talked, it was like a three step thing. Vent, something, and something.

Al North  14:25

Vent, enter, and search. So unfortunately, people try to put out the fire or they're not able to get out during the fire. So you want to ventilate the building so that the smoke's out of there. You want to get into the building and search to make sure there's nobody inside that's hurt, burned, trapped or anything like that. 

So you vent. The ladder company comes in, they vent. The first due company comes in, they enter and they search. And then the second due company, basically they're trying to take care of the fire if the situation warrants. If there's a report from somebody there that you know that there's a whole family of four or five people in that house, and we have nobody accounted for. 

There's all sorts of little acronyms, the vent, enter and search, which we talked about. Life safety, scene stabilization, there's all little mantras and stuff like that that we're trying to basically follow. The risk benefit rewards, risk a lot to save a lot, risk a little to save a little.

Melissa Milner  15:23

Everything you're saying is teaching. It's all teaching. That's crazy. I'm not gonna go into it in the interview right now. But I'm gonna write all about it in my blog, because this is all teacher stuff. If you're a teacher listening right now, you're going, oh yeah, that's when we have to assess kids, see if they're ready for what we're going to be teaching them. Meet them where they are, enter, search.

Al North  15:51

Yeah. Listen, a fire takes a lot of different forms, whether it's a student having a difficult time or a legitimate fire. I would imagine it takes a lot of steps for you guys to handle these situations. And you know if this is happening, then you have to do this. It's very, very similar.

Melissa Milner  16:10

And it becomes automatic.

Al North  16:11

Mhm. Yeah, definitely.

Melissa Milner  16:13

Very cool. So what is your proudest moment in your work?

Al North  16:18

Early on in my career, I was actually driving to work one day. And I was heading in, and I saw this woman who was jogging. And I'm like, man, she looks like she's wasted. And basically, I drove by, and I looked in my rearview mirror. And she kind of fell face first into a snowbank. 

So I turned around and basically assessed the situation, called a rescue, I was in this different city. Spoke to them, gave them a report of what was going on with her. She was kind of coming around. She said, I'm not sure, I may just go home and stuff like that. And I convinced her to go to the hospital and say, look, this isn't something that normally should happen. Why don't you just go at least get checked out? 

Later on in that day, at that point in time, I was on the rescue. I was in the hospital bringing another patient in that day. And she kind of yelled out, there he is, there he is. And she was actually headed upstairs to have open heart surgery for a valve replacement. That's one of the things I remember. 

You definitely remember the good days. You definitely remember the bad days, as well. But some of the good days are even just a little old lady who's on the floor. And she's been there, and she has no way of getting up. And you come in, and she's just super, super happy.

Melissa Milner  17:37

Thank God you're here, right?

Al North  17:39

Right, exactly. She's like, oh, thank God. Just to see the appreciation from people, you make a difference, and you know you make a difference, and you feel it, from the small things to the big things.  

Melissa Milner  17:52

That was an amazing answer to that question, Al. That's awesome. What are you zooming in on with your work right now?

[ZOOMING IN SOUNDBITE]

Al North  18:05

Funny you should ask. Starting in September, we have 20 new recruits coming in the department. I actually volunteered to leave the truck for a little while and do a Monday through Friday 9 to 5 type job and be one of the teachers for our academy.

Melissa Milner  18:24

Well, there you go. That's awesome!

Al North  18:27

So what I'm focusing on is just honestly brushing up on my skills. Because a lot of times, and I'm sure you know this, you know something. But to get it from your head to your mouth and explain it to somebody else, you have to review it. And you have to look at it and be like, okay. 

So I've been just focusing literally on basic stuff, how we operate and stuff, how even things like hydraulics and stuff to explain to somebody that  when you have a kink in the hose or even a bend in the hose, how much it reduces the flow of your line. And if you've got a five inch line of water coming from the hydrant into the truck, if it's bent, now you're reducing that. And you've got three to four lines off, just doing the basic math with them.

Melissa Milner  19:12

Right, or taking huge concepts and breaking them down.

Al North  19:15

All that stuff that I know, the mantras and things like that that I know without even breaking a sweat, all these new people have to learn them. They have to know the vent, enter and search, the property life safety, scene safety, property conservation, all those things that we talked about that just roll off my tongue. They have to know those and roll off the tongue as well. So that's what I'm focusing on.

Melissa Milner  19:41

I love that you're gonna be teaching. That's so cool.

Al North  19:44

Thank you.

Melissa Milner  19:45

I'm sure you're gonna be amazing.

Al North  19:48

Well, I know where to go to get some help.

Melissa Milner  19:50

Absolutely, anytime. So here's the last question. And most people that I interview find this to be the hardest one. What is your favorite movie, and why?

Al North  20:00

Oh, my favorite movie? My favorite movie is Fletch. Why is it one of my favorite movies? First of all, I just think it's a great movie. It's a comedy. It's a mystery. It totally pulls me in. But also it definitely brings me back to a certain point in my life, in college and stuff with friends. And we all watched it a bunch of times, and we loved it. So that's my favorite movie.

Melissa Milner  20:27

My husband, seriously, he loves that movie. I mean, Chevy Chase, come on.

Al North  20:32

Yeah.

Melissa Milner  20:32

Thank you so much, Al. I know that you're a very busy person, and I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me.

Al North  20:38

Oh, thank you.

Melissa Milner  20:39

If you enjoyed this episode, and have not done so already, please hit the subscribe button for The Teacher As... podcast so you can get future episodes. I would love for you to leave a review and a rating, as well, if you have time. For my blog, transcripts of this episode and links to any resources mentioned, visit my website at www.theteacheras.com. You can reach me on Twitter and Instagram @melissabmilner. And I hope you check out The Teacher As... Facebook page for episode updates. 

I am sending a special thanks to Linda and Lester Fleishman, my mom and dad, for being so supportive. They are the voices you hear in the Zooming In soundbite. And my dad composed and performed the background music you are listening to right now. My intro music was "Upbeat Party" by Scott Holmes. 

So what are you zooming in on? I would love to hear from you. My hope is that we all share what we are doing in the classroom in order to teach, remind, affirm and inspire each other. Thanks for listening. And that's a wrap!