 Fire Station 2 in Durham, North Carolina, and we're going to take a look around this fire station today and learn what it's like in the day of a firefighter. This is fire station number two. It was opened in 1950. It's the oldest operating fire station in the city of Durham right now. It houses battalion two, engine two, the technical rescue truck, and a ladder two. This is a 2009 Spartan engine. Has 500 gallons of water on it and a 1500 gallon per minute pump. This truck responds to medical calls, car accidents, fire alarms, and also any type of fire, structure fire, car fire, grass fire. This is ladder two. This is the ladder companies. This is their main truck. This truck responds to structure fires, fire alarms, extrications where there's a car accident where somebody's trapped, and also rescue calls. It's a 95 foot aerial on it, and also they've got close to 100 feet of ground ladders on the truck, and also the jaws of life, the extrication equipment. The ladder company also runs the tactical rescue truck. They're all state certified in tactical rescue, and this is the truck that will go if someone is trapped in a trench that collapsed or they're trapped up high somewhere they can do high angle rescue, water rescue, so that's what these guys are trained for. You see we've got all our, all different tools we have on the truck. These obviously are mostly firefighting tools. Here we've got all our medical equipment. So we carry, this is a EMT intermediate certified truck. We can start IVs, push basic drugs like epinephrine, diphenhydramine, that type of thing, and give breathing treatments, all that kind of stuff. The firefighters sit in the back, and the technician and the captain sit up front, and again here I've got everything laid out the same way all the time. My pants and my boots there, my radio and my hood here, my coats there, my helmets there. Everything's laid out just the way I want it. Whenever we get back I make sure that this is all in the exact same place. Something that is becoming more and more prominent in the fire service is the computer you see there. We can do all of our, all of our communication with dispatch is done through that computer now mostly. If there's specifics we need we'll talk to them on the radio, but any updates they get they send us, send it to us through the radio. We can check on scene and check in route, and also we can see what all the other trucks are doing in the city. This is the SCBA or self-contained breathing apparatus, just like SCUBA, only not underwater. So now I'm just breathing the air right out of the tank. So everything's contained, and it's also, it's positive pressure, so even if I was, if there was a leak, air pushes out, so even if there is a little leak, air won't get in. It's designed to keep a positive pressure in here. The sound you just heard, this here is called, it's called a pass device, it's a personal alert safety system. This is so if a firefighter gets knocked out or is trapped, this will eventually alarm, and if we know if we hear that, we know that someone's in trouble, and that's to help us locate someone who's down. So these are the boots and our pants. Every firefighter in America keeps their boots like this. It's much faster, you just step into them, pull up the suspenders, and you're into them. I'll be able to show you the materials a little better on the coat. The coat and the pants are made out of the same material. This outside is what gives us our protection as far as getting cut and torn. It's a very tough material, it's made with cavlar, and it also won't burn. It's got reflective on it, so it's easier to see each other inside of a house. You're with the flashlights, it's very dark inside of a house if it's on fire, and also if we're out on the highway for a car accident. The next layer that you'd come to is a vapor barrier. It's to keep water off of it, water and steam. That's what causes most firefighters burns is steam. Water expands 1200 times when it converts to vapor, so a little bit of water in a confined space will turn into a lot of steam and can burn you. That's why we've got this vapor barrier in there. This is the thermal lining, and that's what provides the bulk of our thermal protection. It does a very good job of keeping heat out, but it also keeps heat in. So especially in the summer like this, we've got to keep an eye out for heat exhaustion and make sure we stay hydrated. So that's the bulk of our gear, and then this is a Nomex hood that we wear that covers our neck and our ears. The helmet, again, its main purpose is obviously the rigidity of it to protect from falling. Also, the brim, and with it being large on the back, is to keep hot water from running down the back of the collar and burning. Some of us have extra stuff on our helmet, like I've got a couple of door wedges in there, and then I've got a light on mine. And also something nice about these helmets is they have eye protection built in. And the last piece of the ensemble besides the air pack obviously is our gloves. And again, flame retardant, heat resistant. So how long do you have to put on this equipment when you are called out to a fire? For Captain Smith, I've got five seconds less than it takes in. I'd better beat him on the truck. So you have the standing record? About 40 seconds. In the academy, we do it over and over and over. And there is a, you have to do it in one minute, but it's definitely a competition between all of us. This is really heavy. So this is a training maze that some of the firefighters that worked here built on their own. It's to help us get familiar and comfortable with working in confined spaces, low to no visibility, working through obstacles, getting familiar with our air packs, all that kind of stuff. It's not so much a simulation of a building, but it's, it presents a lot of obstacles for us to overcome. And it's to, so that we can build those skills. We've got some, some rope lights in there on so that we can see. But normally they'd be off and we'll have a complete darkness in there. Again, something that, that the firefighters here built to train on. It's to simulate a, working on a roof and up there in the hole, we, it's cut to fit a pallet. So we'll throw a pallet in there and we can practice doing vertical ventilation, cutting a hole in a roof, which is something that, that a ladder company will typically do. But an engine company could be tasked to do it. We all have to know how to do it. What we'll use is either an ax, this would be, this would be your backup, the backup to the saw. The saw is obviously a lot faster and easier. But if the saw won't start, if it's too smoky and it chokes it out, then you've got to do it manually. Again, the purpose of cutting a hole in a roof for, when we're fighting fire is to release heat and smoke from the, from the structure. We do that to improve survivability for the, anybody that's trapped inside. Also, we can then kind of control where the fire goes or at least know where the fire is going to travel. And it also makes it easier for us to work inside. It improves visibility and also it takes heat out of the, out of the structure. It makes it easier to work. Like I said, the, the saw is going to be our primary. We would start it up on the ground and then carry it, and carry it up here. We would start with a cut across the top, a cut down here, and then we, we work, we work towards ourselves. So now we're cutting here and then we'd continue, then we'd finish our cut here and we would have a pike pole up here to then knock that down or we would peel the roof up and then knock down the ceiling underneath us to let all that heat and smoke out. And you saw with the way I cut here, there, down, and then this last one, we're never standing in what we cut. This is a relatively low pitch. If it's a higher pitch, we would have, we would have a roof ladder on this, which is a ladder with hooks at the top. So we'd push it, push the hooks up to over the eaves, that way we would have a ladder to walk on, especially with a, with a steeper roof. And if it's a real steep roof, we might have to get down and, you know, almost use it like that to climb, but something like this, you can just walk around on, especially those of us that are more comfortable on roofs. What I consider a training facility for us is our weight room that we've got down here. We all consider it very important to stay in very good shape. She found out earlier how heavy and hot all that gear is. It's very draining to work in that, and we have to be able to make sure that we're in good shape so that we can do the work we have to. So when the tones go off that we just heard, what happens next? We all head to the trucks. We'll have heard on the radio first the pre-alert, like they'll say, structure fire at the corner of Broad and West Club Boulevard, and we'll hear that. We know that's in our district, so we'll start heading to the trucks. And those tones go off, and then they repeat all the information, and then we head out. But the tones are there so that if it comes in as an obscure street that you don't go to very often, or if it's something outside of your district, but that you're responding to anyways, those tones go off to let you know that your station has a call. You head to your truck, and then by the time you get to the truck, they'll come over the radio again and repeat all the information so you know what you're doing. And when we're on a fire scene, the engine company is responsible for getting water supply and then getting water on the fire. That's what the engine does. The latter company, on a fire scene, they're responsible for ventilation, search and rescue, forcible entry, things like that. So the engine company is doing their stuff, and the latter company is doing all their stuff to support the engine company. We're here for 24 hours. I got here at 7 in the morning, and we'll leave here at 7 next morning. So we need a kitchen. We need a living room. We need beds. And here at station two, that's all up here upstairs. We've got our kitchen, our table. We all eat together, especially lunch and dinner. Everybody eats together. And this is where, if we've got downtime, we'll hang out here. Also here we've got some couches and a TV. If in the evening, we've got all our work done, we want to relax and hang out. If we're not on any calls, we can hang out here. This is my room. It's just a bed and a locker for your stuff and a TV. I share it with the two guys on the two different shifts. We've each got our own locker, and we're all responsible. We're making sure the room is clean. One other thing that I was curious about is if you have to treat any calls differently than others, does your protocol change if there's evidence that a fire may be incendiary or intentionally set? When we come up on a fire, at first, we're probably not going to treat it any differently. If there's things that we see that make us suspicious, we might tread lightly and be a little more careful while we're making our advance into the home, in case it is booby-trapped or anything like that, if it's suspected arson. But mostly when that would come in is after we have the fire out, while we're overhauling the house. If we see suspicious things like a trail of charred wood through the house where it looks like liquid was on the ground burning, we're conscientious of that and we'll make sure to try not to destroy evidence. But that's why we have fire investigators on 24-7 and also we can call in more from off-duty and they're the ones that handle all the investigation and determine cause and origin and all that. One last question. I haven't seen a Dalmatian wandering around anywhere. Is he in a cubby somewhere? What's up with that? No, we don't have a Dalmatian. None of the stations at Durham do. But they actually used to have Dalmatians at fire stations for a purpose. There was the purpose that they serve now as a station mascot, but also they would guard the station while the firefighters were out and they would also, they're kind of a guard and a companion for the horses back in the days when the fire apparatus were drawn by horse. So if a student was interested in becoming a firefighter, what would be your advice? My advice first is to get a degree. It's becoming more and more a profession, the fire services rather than a skilled trade like it used to be. So you'll get points on your application for having a degree and when you go up for promotion, if you want to promote in the fire service, you almost have to have a degree. And especially if you ever want to move up to a chief officer position and move up, or you have to have at least a bachelor's and by the time that anybody that's a student now, by the time they're in a position to promote to a chief, they'll probably need a master's degree. So I would start off with getting an associate's degree. I'd suggest in fire science, emergency medicine, public administration, emergency management, things like that. That would be my first step.